Telephone Telepathy Study

Here's an open letter from Professor Christopher French:

Hi All,

In a spirit of open-minded scepticism, I am currently involved in a collaborative project with Rupert Sheldrake investigating the possibility of telephone telepathy. This refers to the common experience of either feeling that you know who is calling before you pick up the phone (even for unexpected calls) or getting an unexpected call from someone you were just thinking about. Needless to say, sceptics have plausible explanations for why people might ~think~ something psychic is going on here even if it isn't. But Rupert claims to have produced evidence in controlled studies suggesting that the phenomenon may genuinely be paranormal - hence the collaborative study.

If you think you have had this experience frequently, are not convinced it's just a psychological illusion, and might be interested in taking part in our study, please get in touch with either me (c.french@gold.ac.uk) or Rupert (rsheldrake@clara.co.uk). I'm afraid we're not interested in testing participants who don't think telephone telepathy is possible (so that rules me out!). We want the test to be such that if the phenomenon is genuine, we have tested it under optimal conditions - so that rules sceptics out (for this study at least). If you are potentially interested in taking part, we would also need you to get the co-operation of four other people (friends or relations) with whom you think you could demonstrate this skill most effectively (and who could also be flexible enough in terms of availability for all 5 of you to be tested in the same session). We would make a small payment (£10) per session (about 1 to 1.5 hours) to all 5 participants (one reciever, four senders) as a token of our gratitude and cover any reasonable travel costs (this would tend to rule out people beyond the South East of England).

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone else you know that might be interested. Many thanks.

Happy Xmas!

Chris