Research on Telepathy
Many hundreds of scientific studies of telepathy have been conducted in the past 50 years. Because the findings do not fit the conventional, materialist/reductionist worldview held by orthodox science, the findings are generally dismissed. However, an unbiased assessment of the studies reveals substantial scientific evidence for telepathic phenomena.
"Psychic phenomena ("psi" for short) are controversial from a scientific perspective because they imply a perceptual capacity that transcends the five known senses. This "sixth sense" seems to manifest differently according to need and context, leading to descriptive labels for a range of phenomena that may be, at root, the same. The labels encompass the whole panoply of psychic phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, distant healing, and, perhaps, mediumship.
"The composite scientific evidence from ... studies, involving dozens of laboratories worldwide, hundreds of experiments, and thousands of pairs of participants, confirms to a high degree of certainty that the sixth sense is not nonsense, nor is it one of the ordinary five senses." More...
In an analyses of hundreds of studies of a particular type of telepathy research (the Ganzfeld condition), James Carpenter of the Rhine Research Center found that the overall success rate to be about 34 per cent, astronomically beyond chance (25 per cent is the chance level). The analyses also revealed
that successful sessions were associated with experiences of positive imagery, a fluid progression of imagery over time, images with a sense of shape and luminosity that carried a sense of persistence and autonomy, as well as images that exhibited a sense of harmony. Failed sessions were associated with complex images, a sense of anxiety, and over-intellectualization. Telepathy: Inside & Out
In a Washington study, 16 experienced meditators were paired and practiced meditating together 30 minutes for 30 days before the experiment. In the experiment, in separate rooms 10 meters apart, one member of each pair was present with 150 flashing checkerboard patterns--which produces a well-known evoked potential in the brain--and 150 periods of equivalent length of a static checkerboard pattern. An EEG monitor recorded the evoked potentials in the brains of both members of the pair. If telepathic connections are real, then the hypothesis was that the evoked potential should appear in both brains. Upon analysis of the data, the null hypothesis was rejected at a highly significant level (p = 0.0001). The study was replicated with similar findings in three other labs, in Scotland, Germany and at IONS.
Try Telepathy Experiments Online
Rubpert Sheldrake has a number of online experiments in which you can participate.
Online Staring Experiment - Results
Altogether 343 pairs of people took part, giving a total of 6,860 trials from October 14th, 2003 to January 12th, 2005.
By chance people would be right 50% of the time. In fact the overall score is 60.6% correct.
The statistical significance of this result is astronomical, with odds against chance of quadrillions to one.