Tell me more ×
Skeptics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for scientific skepticism. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 18 down vote favorite
4

I remember reading not too long ago about a study in which experimenters performed a number of standard psychological tests with a twist; it was something about they ran a number of tests from standard psychiatric batteries but they ran them backwards, and so were able to measure a small but positive 'esp' effect in which the participants were able to remember slightly better words from a larger group of words that they would be told only later.

I am not sure if the study was peer reviewed or published in a serious journal or what. My question is whether there is any serious scientific support at all for any kind of telepathy (or clairvoyance, cryptomnesia, etc)?

share|improve this question
10  
I knew you would ask that question! :) – user unknown Mar 5 '11 at 4:09
@user And I knew you would say that. ... Mostly because I programmed you, but oh well. – muntoo Mar 7 '11 at 2:56
BTW, it's actually called magic. – muntoo Mar 7 '11 at 2:57
1  
Perhaps its worth mentioning Niven's fifth law in this context. Other effects (including some that were initially barely detectable) have been turning into technology. – dmckee Mar 26 '11 at 3:11

4 Answers

up vote 18 down vote accepted

No, there is no serious scientific support for any of these. Some studies, even well designed, do sometimes see some sort of statistically significant effect, but the majority of studies do not (ref various meta studies). And if these phenomena were real, you would expect some people to be better at it than others, and no such people have been found.

This all illustrates the scientific importance of results being reproducible, and should teach journalists to stop basing scary claims about this and that on a single study.

share|improve this answer
that's only because Runciter’s inertials were around. ;-) – vartec Jul 18 '11 at 22:09
2  
@len I know this answer is very old, but can you consider fixing it? It's a broken window now... – Sklivvz♦ Jul 23 '11 at 10:10
I don't consider it broken. Neither does the voters. – Lennart Regebro Jul 23 '11 at 11:38
Do you have a reference that conducts a review of the relevant literature and finds, as you claim, that the "vast majority of studies do not (see a statistically significant effect)."? – Jase Nov 30 '12 at 10:19
1  
I agree with this; it should've occurred to me when I was writing the post. Apologies. – Jase Nov 30 '12 at 11:10
show 6 more comments
up vote 11 down vote

The big problem with telepathy, and with parapsychology as a field in general, is that science is all of a piece. Thus, physics is consistent with chemistry, biology and so on. So the question is not "what knowledge can we derive on the assumption that we know nothing?" - but "what knowledge can we derive given what we know already?"

Basic physics - extremely well-understood and well-tested physics - leaves it not looking good for parapsychology as a field in any way. Sean M. Carroll points out ("Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory." Discover Blogs: Cosmic Variance 2008-02-18.) that both human brains and the spoons they try to bend are made, like all matter, of quarks and leptons; everything else they do is emergent properties of the behaviour of quarks and leptons. And the quarks and leptons interact through the four forces: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational. Thus either it's one of the four known forces or it's a new force, and any new force with range over 1 millimetre must be at most a billionth the strength of gravity, or it will have been captured in experiments already done. (Sean M. Carroll. "Life and the forces of nature." Preposterous Universe, 2004-05-03.) So either it's electromagnetism, gravity or something weaker than gravity.

This leaves no force that could possibly account for telekinesis, for example. Telepathy would require a new force much weaker than gravity and a detector in the brain evolved to use it for signaling. Precognition, the receipt of information transmitted back in time, would violate quantum field theory.

What this means is that the ideas parapsychology purports to investigate have pretty much no chance of being right even before we test them directly.

share|improve this answer
5  
That depends on the assumption that we now understand everything, which is not the case. This reasoning also implies that we're very unlikely to be surprised by new developments in physics, which strikes me as unlikely. – David Thornley Mar 6 '11 at 21:39
3  
@David That’s not true. Rather, it depends on the specific assumption that our current models, in particular the Dirac equation, capture reality accurately. And all experiments until now show that they do, with an extremely high degree of precision. Telekinesis necessarily postulates that Dirac’s equation is wrong. And not just a bit wrong but completely wrong. Essentially it’s missing a very important term that should have been noticeable in other experiments. It hasn’t, and this is very strong evidence that Dirac’s equation is an accurate model. – Konrad Rudolph♦ Jul 17 '11 at 10:24
1  
@David See also Sean Carroll: Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, which uses an analogous argument for the existence of a soul. In particular, he stresses that, surprising discoveries notwithstanding, “the laws underlying the physics of everyday life really are completely understood” – whatever future physics has in store for us, it won’t overturn our everyday understanding of physics, just like Einstein hasn’t overturned Newton on a normal scale. – Konrad Rudolph♦ Jul 17 '11 at 10:29
2  
@Konrad: No, I'm not postulating a new weak force. I'm just refusing to say there's no such thing. It is reasonable to say that there is no scientific basis for telepathy, and that if there was one we'd very likely have some idea of it. I don't think it's as reasonable to claim that we know science well enough to completely rule things out on the basis that we have no idea why it could possibly work, given laws that appear fairly complete. – David Thornley Jul 19 '11 at 1:45
4  
@David It’s not that those laws don’t require telepathy. It’s that they positively don’t allow for it to exist. Postulating that telepathy exists is therefore equivalent to postulating that these laws are wrong. This is of course still possible, but it makes the burden of proof much more evident. – Konrad Rudolph♦ Jul 19 '11 at 7:09
show 8 more comments
up vote 10 down vote

The study you are thinking of was conducted by Cornell Professor Emeritus Daryl Bem, and concerns "erotic stimuli" and response. You can read his paper directly here. It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is apparently a real peer-reviewed journal. In the study, over 100 sessions, students successfully identified that they would be shown a pornographic picture 53.1 percent of time, rather than the expected 50%.

According to the journal, the study was well designed and the paper was well reviewed. But it hasn't been reproduced.

share|improve this answer
3  
That study was about precognition. It has nothing to do with telepathy. – Christian Mar 5 '11 at 19:04
2  
True. It still might be what the questioner was thinking of, since it was making the rounds in the news. – mattdm Mar 5 '11 at 20:54
Just to clarify, attempts have been made to reproduce the results but so far they have all (some failed, and at least one successful). There's been some controversy recently about the journal not publishing these replication attempts: psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/… – Wilka Jul 19 '11 at 10:14
up vote 3 down vote

There are dozens of studies in which the Ganzfeld protocol produced statistically significant results. The protocol got reproduced multiple times and the studies found that some groups like twins perform better.

There are however also studies that found no effects. That doesn't the protocol doesn't work. In university we collectively failed to replicate PCR without the postdoc who lead the process understanding the problem. PCR is a well understood process and it's still possible to mess it up. It's typical in science that people get protocols wrong. As possible principles of telepathy are unknown it's not that surprising that half of the studies don't produce results.

There's however a meta study that concluded that the findings aren't enough to justify a belief in telepathy. If you want to believe in telepathy than you can justify that belief with dozens of studies. If you don't want to believe in telepathy than you can go to the meta study with finds that the evidence isn't conclusive.

share|improve this answer
2  
Or maybe if you're doing the experiment often enough, you will sometimes get statistically significant results purely by chance? Especially if your experimental procedures are not perfect. – Fabian♦ Mar 6 '11 at 15:35
1  
Maybe people who drink a coffee before participating in the experiment can't develop telepathic communication. As a result half of the studies fail because the participants drunk coffee before the experiment. It's typical in science that stuff that you don't hold constant messes up your experiment. Issues whether the person drunk coffee before the experiment however shouldn't be able to make the experiment a success. As far as getting statistically significant results purely by chance, more than 1/20 of the studies show effects. – Christian Mar 6 '11 at 16:09
4  
"Or maybe if you're doing the experiment often enough, you will sometimes get statistically significant results purely by chance?" - This is what Bem did. He ran the experiment year after year, and this was the year he got significance. – David Gerard Mar 6 '11 at 20:31
2  
For all I know, it's really hard to get ESP to work in a skeptical environment or in a controlled experience. It's really, really hard to prove a negative. – David Thornley Mar 6 '11 at 21:40
Pinging you, please reference. – Sklivvz♦ Dec 1 '12 at 4:13

This post does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.