Telephone Telepathy: I was just thinking about you

Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call
from someone shortly after thinking about them-now a scientist says he has
proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College,
Cambridge, has said he had conducted experiments that proved that such
precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails. Each person in the
trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives
or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who
had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

“The hit rate was 45%, well above the 25% you would have expected,” he
told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science. “The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 bn to one.”
He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four
people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials-just 63 people for the
controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the e-mail-and only four subjects
were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some
skepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake-who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds
within a social grouping-said that he was extending his experiments to see if
the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

Reuters