Does telepathy exist?

Question

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)?

Answer 1

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 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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Because it was making the rounds online shortly before this question was published, I'm confidant that 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: Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. 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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Since this question is about telepathy, I'll focus on just that and also use the definition that it is,

... the transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction.

First, the major scientific criticisms generally boil down issues with the following points:

• Experimental design
• Lack of a model of how it works, or would work

To address the first point, experimental design is a major concern when any tests for telepathy are examined since they must be controlled in such a way that the observer-expectancy effect is controlled for. Any tests also need to be conducted in such a way that subconscious cues to the subject are controlled for to prevent the "Clever Hans effect" or cold reading.

Lack of a model as to how telepathy would work is actually a major problem for any proper study for telepathy since it exposes the experimenter to criticism if you try to explain null results as being due to the subject being in the wrong state of mind or out growing their abilities (Horn, 2009). This exposes testing to major issues with reproducibility and lack of reproducibility previously positive results can easily be explained as problems with the experimenter or attempts to defraud the experiment as opposed a potential explanation for why telepathy might not present on a consistent basis in laboratory conditions.

Ultimately, Joseph Banks Rhine is likely one of the few scientists to have studied telepathy in controlled environments that might have presented some evidence of an effect (Rhine, 1964); however, even his work has been subject to major criticism and generally his work is dismissed by most skeptics. The extent of his research does raise an interesting point though that relates back to the lack of a working model: namely, is it even possible to dismiss unreproducible experiments on the basis of a single experiment or are multiples needed before results can safely be dismissed? This does raise the issue of publication basis though since a researcher can be accused to not publishing null results while someone that is seeking to reproduce the results could be accused of the same by not publishing positive results.

In conclusion the best we can really say is that there is weak evidence that there might be telepathy; however, there is a lack of explanation of how it could occur or that Littlewood's law¹ isn't at play during experiments and lack of reproducibility ensures that the current scientific consensus is that telepathy likely does not exist. However, this is not to say that "synthetic telepathy" is not possible since brain-computer interfaces are in development that mimic what people generally think of when they define telepathy.

That said, one of the statistical meta studies linked in the accepted "No" answer had the following to say:

The recent focus on meta-studies in parapsychology has revealed that there are small but constantly non-zero effects around studies, experimenters and laboratories. The sizes of the effects in forced-choice studies appear to be comparable to those reported in some medical studies that had been herald as breakthroughs.

Which can be taken to imply many different things; however, their conclusion also serves as a good one for this answer as well,

If ESP does not exist, there is little to be lost by erring in the direction of further research, which may in fact uncover other anomalies. If ESP does exist, there is much to be lost by not doing process-oriented research and much to be gained by discovering how to enhance and apply these abilities to important world problems.

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Horn, Stacy (2009). Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. New York, NY: HaperCollins Publishers.

Rhine, J.B. (1964). Extra Sensory Perception. Boston, MA: Branden Publishing Company.

Rhine, J.B., Pratt, J.G., Stuart, C.E., Smith, B.M., Greenwood, J.A. (2011). Extra Sensory Perception After Sixty Years: A Critical Appraisal Of The Research In Extra Sensory Perception. New York, NY: Henry Holt.

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1. Littlewood's law, or adage, states that an individual can expect to experience "miracles" at the rate of about one per month.