Sheldrake tests telephone telepathy

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:

It's time for some theories!
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I have some underlying reservations about asking people for theories before they've shown that any effect occurs, but in this case, I think we definitely need something to help the design of the experiment.

The more I think about the observation by Hans about precognition vs telepathy, the more problematic it becomes.

It seems to me that even removing feedback wouldn't be enough. You can sometimes have the results of experiments you've participated in sent to you, can't you? I'm expecting a brain scan to be sent to me, for this very reason. What if this was done in this case and the results are quite detailed? It might tell the recipient who was the caller for each trial. If this is the case, then it could also be used for precognition, so it would have to be arranged that the recipients never get to see the results (unless precognition still works when you're a ghost, in which case it seems pretty hopeless).

Even if that didn't happen, at some point, Sheldrake and Smart totted up the results, didn't they? So they would have known who was calling and when. So it's possible that the recipient used precognitive telepathy to read the mind of either Sheldrake or Smart at some point in the future.

In method 3 of the videotaped experiment, the results were evaluated blind by Dr Amanda Jacks, who didn't know who the callers were or when they were calling, which I suppose would help rule out this explanation, although only if the results were pre-compiled before Sheldrake and Smart were allowed to see them or the recipient and callers were recoded, so they weren't aware of the identities, which seems unlikely. Also Jacks could have got a clue as to whether the guess was right or not by the response of the recipient on being given the feedback, so she could have been a target for precognitive telepathy.

Furthermore, what if at some point in the future, one of us asks to see the original data of callers and guesses and either Sheldrake or Smart send them to us? Then we know all the results, and it could be that the recipient was using precognitive telepathy to read our minds!

I realise this is getting progressively more convoluted and ludicrous, but perhaps not a lot more than the idea of either telepathy or precognition.
 
And don't forget that the callee could use micro-PK to influence the die. And lest we ignore another possibility, the callee could be remote viewing the die.

~~ Paul
 
Bill and Paul,

I am talking about Sheldrakes hypothesis of formative causation and morphic fields not the telephone experiments
 
I've not spent much time looking into morphic fields, but it seems to me they provide a convenient ad hoc explanation for anything you care to apply them to. Is it falsifiable? Has he used it to make predictions and test them yet?

"I can't figure out how that butterfly could possibly get from Mexico to Maine, so it must be a morphic field."

~~ Paul
 
I mentioned to Pam Smart the idea that the callee might be picking up clues about the callers by means of unsychronized clocks. She responded:
This issue came up a few weeks ago and Rupert is looking into it. I agree that it would be a good idea to deprive the subject of a clock.
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~~ Paul
 
Stat analysis of Sheldrake 2004

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but I just went through Sheldrake's "A Filmed Experiment On Telephone Telepathy With The Nolan Sisters", from Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 68, 168-172 (2004). I read through the comments on this paper in this thread and many were good criticisms. Here is my $0.02.

Sheldrake used a 1-tailed binomial test (he didn't say 1-tailed, but his number is consistent with my calculation for 1-tailed test). That is to say, what are the chances are scoring 6 or more successes out of 12 with an expected result of 3? That comes out to 0.054.

But what about the other end of the distribution? In other words, if scoring a +3 deviation or better is a sign of psi (6 successes vs the 3 expected successes), why isn't scoring a -3 deviation or less also a sign of psi? Perhaps the participants had their psi in reverse? Perhaps they don't know how to control it? There is no mechanism or theory or test which can eliminate this possibility. It must therefore be included, so you would need a 2-tailed test. This would mean you need to also include the possibility of scoring zero (3 expected - 3). If you do that, the binomial test gives you a 0.09 probability, or 1 out of 11 chance that the results are due to chance when you're that far away from the expected result in either direction. So that's much better odds than the 1 in 20 that Sheldrake reported.

There's more. In that same paper Sheldrake reported that the answerer accidentally picked up the phone twice before giving the answer, providing an opportunity for sensory leakage. Sheldrake reported that eliminating those two trials results still results in a 50% success rate (5 out of 10), but failed to give the binomial test results for that. The 1-tailed result is 0.08, no longer significant at the 95% confidence level. The 2-tailed result is 0.134. That's 1 in 7. That's certainly much better odds!

Finally, Sheldrake just reports his experiences with the Nolan sisters. Did Sheldrake also test other groups that weren't so psychic, but only reported the Nolan sisters since the results seemed positive? How do we know? I don't think we do. If I do repeated coin-flipping experiments of 12 trials, eventually I'm going to get 9 heads and 3 tails, which is P=0.07 by the 1-tailed binomial test. That might be the only experiment I tell you about. This doesn't seem impressive. Sheldrake's tiny sample size is his undoing here.

Thanks and I welcome your comments.
 
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