Telepathy: Is It For Real?
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Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against feeling like you can read someone's thoughts. Today we are talking about telepathy. And here with me is Science Versus senior producer, Rose Rimler. Hi, Rose. Hi, Wendy. Hi, Wendy.

So by telepathy, we mean the concept of beaming thoughts directly into someone else's brain or being able to read other people's thoughts. Yes. That's an idea that's been around for centuries, but it's having a bit of a moment right now, probably because of this very popular podcast called The Telepathy Dispatch.

Yes, I am hearing a lot about this podcast. Yes, yes, yes. And telepathy with it. Yes, it was the top podcast on Spotify earlier this year. It actually knocked Joe Rogan off the number one spot briefly.

And it's all about how telepathy is real. You know, a very clever friend of mine texted me about this show and she thinks telepathy is real now. Exactly. It's very convincing. Yeah. If you look at the comments, you'll see people saying, this is revolutionary. This has moved me to tears. I'm a believer. My life has changed because of this podcast.

And so, you know, I was very curious. And so I listened to it. I listened to the whole thing. Wendy, I know that you haven't listened to it. No, that's right. We decided I wouldn't listen. So hopefully I can stand in for those people

of you who also haven't listened. Okay, so let me tell you the premise. This show is about a very specific group of people. This is people with autism who are very limited in how they communicate and who require a lot of support. Right, right. And the show says that people in this group are able to communicate telepathically with their family and with teachers and other people. And in fact, here is the show's tagline. They play this at the beginning of every episode.

For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do. Okay, that's a podcast hook. It really is. So Kai Dickens, that's the host. That's who we just heard from. She is typically a documentary filmmaker, but she heard about this phenomenon and she wanted to study it, document it.

And so she ends up visiting a lot of people who have had this experience with autistic people in their lives. Here she is again on the podcast. And what touched me the most is these parents were grappling with something that they believed to be absolutely impossible. But here they were. They were watching something unfold that had no rational explanation. And so Rose, as you were listening to this podcast, what were you thinking? Well, the stories were interesting.

interesting and honestly really intriguing.

Obviously, there's been skeptics here saying that something else is going on to explain this. So I wanted to find out what exactly was happening. And I got especially curious when I heard a scientist interviewed on the show say this. Over the last 50 years, there's been a huge amount of research on telepathy published in peer-reviewed journals, which has proved to be repeatable and seems to me irrefutable in that it's showing that

telepathy really happens. The problem is that the critics simply aren't interested in the evidence because their belief system is that this is impossible. And I was like, wait, what?

50 years of research in peer-reviewed journals, repeatable, irrefutable. I was like, I got to look into that. Like, that's what I want to pull up, that 50 years of research in peer-reviewed journals. A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. And that's what I've been doing. So the last, you know, month or so. And it's, you know, it turns out scientists have been studying this for some time. And I learned a lot of really interesting

interesting stuff, Wendy. Like, this has just been so fascinating to work on. It's been surprising. It's been infuriating. Sometimes it's fun. So there's like a lot to unpack here. And I'm just like excited to tell you about it. Great. It's all coming up after the break.

This episode of Science Versus is presented by Amazon. The last thing you want to do when you're sick is go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription because then you're standing in a long line with a whole bunch of sick people and everyone is sick of being sick around other people who are sick. Amazon Pharmacy will deliver right to you, fast, so you can get meds without congregating amongst the contagious. Healthcare just got less painful. Amazon Pharmacy.

Welcome back. Rose is here to talk about telepathy, inspired by this hugely popular podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which has really brought this topic back into the zeitgeist. So, Rose, where do we begin? Okay, so first we're going to talk about some of the specific claims made in the show, The Telepathy Tapes.

Then we're going to zoom out and talk about the body of research that scientists have done on telepathy. Great. Let's do it.

So the show is about people with autism who are nonverbal or who speak very little. And what you hear over and over again on this podcast is that their family can never speak to them or really communicate with them until they learn this method of communicating where the nonverbal person points at letters on a board or picks at keys on a keyboard. And essentially they learn to painstakingly spell out words and communicate that way. Okay. And then...

All of a sudden, this is where the telepathy comes in. They start spelling out things that they shouldn't know. So they'll like tell their parent, oh, I know that you went to Target today. But the parents like, I never told them that I was at Target today. Or they might say, I know that you brought me cookies for a snack, but you left them in the car. And that person's like, I never told you I was going to bring you cookies. I didn't tell you I left them in the car. How?

How do they know these things? And they start thinking, this person can read my mind. So if that was all the podcast offered, these like little anecdotes, or there could be a million little explanations or coincidence or luck, you know, that wouldn't be that interesting. Okay. But where it gets really interesting is that the host of the show doesn't just take people at their word for this. She goes and she specifically...

does tests to test that they are in fact telepathic. What kind of tests? Well, so for example, in the first episode...

She goes to visit a young woman from Mexico who is supposedly telepathic with her mom. And so like I described, this is a nonverbal autistic person who communicates by pointing at a board with letters and numbers on it. Right, right, right. And so this is the kind of test that Kai sets up. So she'll show something only to the mom, make sure the daughter can't see it. And then she asks... Okay, something like a cat, a picture of a cat. Yeah, or like in this example, a picture of a pirate. Okay. And...

you know, the daughter can't see it. Sometimes she's blindfolded or they'll put a partition between the mom and the daughter. So the daughter can't see the picture, but then the mom says, okay, what am I looking at? Read my mind. What am I looking at? And we hear, and I'll play a little bit for you. The daughter, even though she can't see the picture, she starts pointing at letters and she slowly spells out, remember this is a picture of a pirate or pirata in Spanish. P-I-R-A-T-A.

- Rrr.

She clearly types P-I-R-A-T-A, which spells pirate in Spanish. I love this moment because the crowd just goes wild. At this point, everyone in the room had had their mind blown. I mean, I wouldn't do it as a skeptic. I'm generally a skeptic in my life. Who's this talking? This is the cameraman. Just seeing this, I can't...

It's hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I'm looking at everything. I'm watching her. I'm watching the mom. I'm watching everything. And for me, my perspective, it's real. Uh-huh. That is impressive. Yeah, hearing the cameraman's reaction is pretty compelling. Because you're like, wow, he was actually in the room and looking carefully, right? And he said it seemed real. But the thing is...

When autism experts hear about this, they immediately see a problem. Okay. And it goes back to how people are communicating and the history of people trying to communicate with those who can't speak. I talked about this with Catherine Beals. She's an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And I talked to her specifically about this case. So...

So does this impress you? No. It's just, I find it extraordinary that anybody thinks it's a compelling instance of telepathy. She's kind of the perfect person to talk to about this. I started out as a linguist. That was my PhD. And then I had a child with autism. The particular situation I'm in is actually kind of the perfect storm. The perfect storm to see what's actually going on here. And Catherine says, we got to go back a few decades.

Actually, the story starts in Australia, Wendy. You'll be happy to know. I feel right at home. Someone there had invented a special way for people who can't speak to communicate.

And in the 90s, this technique spread from Australia to the U.S. And it really took off here. It's a bit different from the way people are communicating in the telepathy tapes. With the letterboard. The letterboard. This is called facilitated communication. Here's how it works. The non-speaking person sits in front of, you know, some kind of keyboard. Right. Next to them is a facilitator who gently holds their arm or their wrist down.

and helps them select the letters on the keyboard that they want to select. So it's a bit faster than them having to do it all by themselves. Is that the idea? Not exactly. For some of these folks, they actually need someone to help guide their hands to the letters to use the keyboard, or they don't do it at all. Oh, okay. And so once this method started being used more and more, these incredible things started happening.

The claims were pretty extraordinary because these individuals who appeared to be completely nonverbal and maybe not attending to people speaking and language in general were suddenly able to produce grammatically well-formed sentences, perfectly spelled in many cases, and quite sophisticated in many cases, in some cases poetry-based.

sophisticated vocabulary. So it appeared to unlock what people were thinking was an intact or fully developed intellect in terms of having learned somehow to read, having mastered language, and so on. This idea that they can't speak beautifully, but locked inside their brain is...

this huge mastery over the English language that until now they were not able to express. Exactly. It's sort of this idea. Yeah. And this, as you can imagine, that's a huge breakthrough, right? And it got a lot of attention. It was all over the news. It was on TV. There was a primetime live episode. It eventually won an Emmy. Diane Sawyer reported on this as like this breakthrough. And you can hear how powerful this is.

this seemed. And now a story about hope. For decades, autism has been a dark mystery, a disorder that seems to turn children in on themselves against the world. Tonight, however, you are going to see something that has changed that. Call it a miracle. Call it an awakening.

I mean, so hopeful if you're a parent to be looking at your child and thinking, wow, there's so much in there. If only I could find a way to communicate. Yeah, your child has never spoken to you, has never said I love you. And now there's this thing that says there's a lot going on in their head and they can tell you about it. I do have to say as...

Uh, hopeful as this is, I am getting a Ouija board vibe here. Yeah, that is a concern that people were actually people from the beginning. Some people did have that concern because you're holding someone's arm and

potentially moving it for them, even if you don't think you are. So it could be that the facilitator is controlling what this person is typing. Yeah, not meaning to necessarily, just wanting to move through it faster. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. D-O, you probably mean dog. Exactly, that kind of thing. And there's always some skeptics out there. But for a while, because this is just so cool to people, they just kept chugging along. But

But then the cracks started to show in these very dramatic ways because in some cases, people were spelling out very disturbing messages. Some of their stories were told in a frontline documentary. It was called Prisoners of Silence. It came out in 1993. And here they are talking about a teenage girl with autism named Betsy. One day, using a letter board, Betsy and her facilitator wrote that everybody in her family, her father,

Mother, grandparents, and brother were sexually abusing her. Social services were called. Betsy was taken out of her home, put in foster care. An investigation was started. But the people working this case were like, can we really trust these allegations? They came from this unusual technique. Someone else is holding Betsy's hand and helping her point out letters, type. So what they wanted to know was,

who is writing the messages? Is it the autistic person or is it the facilitator? So they set up tests for Betsy and Katherine described the kind of tests that they did. You might have a divider between the facilitator and the person they're facilitating and the person they're facilitating sees a picture of a hat

And the facilitator sees a picture of a shoe. This is the telepathy type test. Kind of, with a key difference. They're showing two different pictures. They're showing one picture to the facilitator, so in this example, a picture of a shoe, and one picture to the person with autism, in this example, a hat. And then you ask the person with autism, what do you see here? What you would want them to write would be hat. Yes. And if they type shoe, then...

Where did that come from? Very fishy. Because that's what the facilitator saw, not what they saw. Yes. Yes. In the telepathy tapes, the person with autism is being asked to spell out what someone else sees. And here they're being asked to spell out what they themselves see. Right, right, right, right. The Frontline documentary is really useful because it actually shows what these tests were like. And they talk about what happened when they ran tests like this with Betsy.

When Betsy was shown a picture of a dog, she didn't type dog, but sneakers, what the facilitator saw. When Betsy was shown a boat, she didn't type boat, but sandwich, what the facilitator saw. And that happened in every test they tried. Every single test. Of Betsy or in studies as well? In studies as well.

Every single test? Yes, there was an autistic program in New York that had been using facilitated communication with 12 of their autistic students. Getting good results, they thought, but they said, oh, maybe we should test this, make sure.

They tested each student in the same way. I asked Catherine what happened. And they didn't get a single correct response. Not one. Yeah. And this has been repeated many times. There were a whole bunch of studies that came out in the 90s that just one after another after another were showing failure. How often do they find it was, in fact, the person with autism who was doing the communicating? In well-designed studies, not at all. Never. Never? Right. Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Yeah, so in the case with Betsy, the investigators concluded that the sex abuse allegations were totally unfounded. And so do we know...

why the facilitator was doing that. Yeah. In the Betsy case, we do know what's going on here because the facilitator like came out and talked about it, wrote a paper about it. And she explained that, you know, she'd had some doubts in the beginning, like, oh, am I really, am I moving Betsy's hand or is it really Betsy? It's kind of hard to tell. But there was so much momentum and it was so exciting to think that she was making breakthroughs with her student that she kind of let herself believe in it. Oh.

Oh, okay. So it's almost like this subconscious response? The facilitators. I mean, if they're not actually doing it on purpose, I would have thought it was just really just trying to help, trying to communicate. Yeah, I think that's usually what people think is going on. It's actually called the ideomotor effect, the Ouija board. You don't, everyone thinks they're not, well, I don't know. I would sometimes move the planchette on purpose, but many of us...

Just think we're not moving it, but then it does move and especially might move to a letter that makes a lot of sense after the previous letter. And how does that happen? There's also something called the Chevrolet pendulum illusion where you think you're holding the pendulum steady in the air, but when you think about moving it to the right or to the left or up or down, suddenly it starts moving that way. And you're like, I'm not even doing that. But it's just like your brain is sending these very tiny signals to your hand and

And that is enough to make very small movements that can have very big consequences, you know? Aha. So can we go back to the telepathy tapes now? Yeah, because just to be clear, these abuse allegations we're talking about, that's part of the Frontline documentary, not the telepathy tapes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then to go back to that pirata example, the pirate. Exactly. Yeah. So that's the question, right? Is that what they're doing? Yeah.

Did the kid have a facilitator on hand? Yes. In all of these cases, the person with autism is speaking via a facilitator. It varies in exactly what the facilitator is doing and how they're communicating, but there's always somebody else there that has to be there. It's not fully independent. And it's typically the parent who's the facilitator. Oh. Yeah. So the... The one who's supposed... Mine is being read. Okay.

The mom is looking at the pirate and also holding her kid's hand. Well, yes and no. So what they're doing in the telepathy tapes is not technically facilitated communication in the classic sense because they're not literally holding the person's hand and hovering it over a board. What they're typically doing in the telepathy tapes, they hold up a letter board and then the person with autism points up

And then they then they call out P.I.R. And in fact, the host of the podcast, she she said she just say at one point, like, oh, there was this controversy with facilitated communication. But this is different. This is different.

And the big thing that they point out is we're not really touching the kid in the same way that they were touching them before. This method is often called spelling to communicate or just spelling. So what does Catherine say about that? Well, she points out that, you know, it's problematic that the facilitator is also the transcriber of the message. Like if you're holding a letter board, A,

A, you can move it around slightly, and B, you can say, "Oh, you've selected the letter P. Oh, now you've selected the letter I." That gives you a lot of latitude in deciding where exactly the person's finger went. So they will decide when a letter was selected, and they'll decide in an ambiguous case which letter was selected.

Because someone could be pointing in between the letters. In between. F and G. And in some cases, believe it or not, nowhere near. And so there are videos where you can actually, the person is using a transparent letter board. So from watching from the other side, you can see letters sometimes being called out that we're not pointing to at all.

And also they are often touching. So like there's a hand on the back or in the case of the mom and the daughter from Mexico, the mom is often touching the daughter's forehead or holding her chin. In the telepathy tapes, did you watch the videos? I did. So there are videos available for some of the tests. You have to pay a small fee and become a member, but it's on their website.

And I did watch them. In fact, I watched some of them with Catherine. I didn't see any obvious examples where you see someone pointing at a T and the facilitator calls out P or something like that. But it's clear from these videos that typically the facilitator is really involved in one way or another. So we watched one where the daughter is...

sitting next to the mom, but they have a partition between them. The mom is shown a random number generator on someone's iPad, and this random number, 978, is generated. Here I am watching it with Catherine. The mom sees that the number is 978. They take away the partition.

She's kind of gently touching her on her forehead. Yeah. And here she's got the letterboard up. Yeah. So what you could clearly see was that the mother was touching the girl, just didn't happen to be her finger, and that there were changes in how hard she was, in her pressure, the pressure that she was exerting on the daughter's temple and cheek. And so that might have been all that was needed to...

Cue the girl about when to actually make a selection. And this, I mean, it doesn't need to be intentional, right? I mean, you could be doing this without even realizing it. Easily. We know that's true. And actually, the fact that this could be subconscious really explains a lot, I think. If the person facilitating is spelling out their own thoughts but doesn't realize they're spelling out their own thoughts...

That explains why they might genuinely think, "Oh my God, this person is reading my mind." Of course. But there was one case that didn't really make sense and I couldn't figure out how it was possible. This is a young autistic man and his mom.

he seems to be able to read his mother's thoughts by typing them out independently on a keyboard. So in this case, no one's holding up a letter board for him. Kai describes them as not touching. And I watched the videos online, and that's true. There's nobody. They aren't touching.

So their telepathy really does look pretty convincing. So for this, I called up Jim Todd. He's a professor of psychology at Eastern Michigan University. And I teach conditioning and learning in general. The basics of behavior, the kind of basics of behavior that you kind of need to know to parse some of this stuff out. Like with Catherine, I watched one of these videos with him. Can you see my screen? I can see your screen, yes. So in this video, the son is sitting next to the mom.

And he has like an iPad sort of device that when he touches the letter, the device says the letter out loud in like this robot voice. Uh-huh. So in this test, the mom is shown an image. The son can't see it. It's a picture of a crocodile. Okay. And the son is asked to spell out what his mom can see. And we can see him pick out letters on this device. And the computer starts spelling out crocodile. Ha ha.

Well, mom is moving her hand and her body in sequence with the letters. It's just signaling. Do you want to see the tape, Wendy? Yeah, I want to watch it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so Kai shows the mom a picture of a crocodile. Did you see it? Did you see what Jim saw?

From the mom. Uh-huh. She played again. Okay. And look at the mom, not the son. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. She's moving her hand. Every time he moves a... Oh, my gosh. He selects a letter just before that she has moved. She's moving her hand and in a very deliberate way. Whether she is conscious of that deliberateness...

But it's just not, it's not, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Did you ask Kai why didn't she move them away from each other, knowing what she clearly knew about facilitated communication? I did reach out to Kai to ask specific questions like that. But her team said that she was too busy working on season two of the celebrity tapes and making a documentary about it as well. So she couldn't get back to us. Well, that's very funny.

frustrating. Yeah. I also reached out to the mom in the crocodile video and I didn't hear back from her either. Okay. So I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I will say in the episode, they say a lot of stuff about how, oh, we can do this across the room. And then they start to do that. But then the son becomes uncomfortable and doesn't cooperate. And so they say, well, he needs to sit next to his mom for the emotional support.

So stuff like that happens. I mean, what's sort of, I guess, interesting is there is some lovely communication happening between the parent and the child. It's not telepathy, but clearly they have learned a language with each other that when...

the parent touches the kid or makes this signal with their hand, they point to a letter. I mean, they have a language together. And that there is sort of something lovely about that, I guess. You can make that argument. I mean, in that video we just saw, it does seem like the young man is having a good time, like enjoying being with his mother.

But I've seen plenty of other videos from other sources that show this technique where it doesn't really go that way. And Catherine has too. A lot of the time, the child doesn't look like they really want to be doing this. You know, I have noticed that, but I don't really understand necessarily what I'm seeing. I don't know much about people with severe autism. So when you see someone like kind of trying to get away or calling out or saying, I'm sad, there was a video of a girl who was doing this and she went, I'm sad. I've seen it. Is that what they're like?

That seems like she's saying she's sad. She doesn't want to be doing that. Yeah, it certainly does. And in fact, a professional organization called the American Speech Language Hearing Association has explicitly said, don't use...

These methods of communicating, this facilitated communication, the newer ones that are sometimes called like spelling to communicate a rapid prompting method, don't use them. This stuff happening on the telepathy tapes. Yes. And one reason why is that they say these methods strip people of their human right to independent communication. So does this put a cap on the telepathy tapes then? Well, yeah. As far as the whole people with autism are telepathic thing,

Because, you know, the show goes on to say a lot of other stuff, extraordinary stuff. But all these extraordinary claims, they're all hinging on this supposition that the folks with autism can send messages to their parents or their teachers. But we know now that the way they are doing this is with these like letterboard methods or similar methods that are totally bunk.

And we can't trust that it's the kids' message coming through. In fact, we shouldn't expect that to be the case based on all we know about how unlikely this is to work. Yeah. It's like the fruit. The podcast keeps creating more fruit, but the tree is rotten. Yeah, exactly. Uh-huh. Well, I can't wait for season two then.

I don't know if I'll be listening. But, you know, this doesn't put a cap on our episode because there is a lot more to talk about when it comes to the science of telepathy. There's a lot to tell you. I did promise you that, right? That's right. All of these repeatable studies over decades of research. Yeah. And I looked into that. So after the break, I'm going to tell you about the process.

The pretty, like, bonkers way that scientists have tried to test for telepathy and the results that are actually quite surprising. Coming up. Today's Ask Wendy Anything, Ask Me Anything, is brought to you by Amazon. Whether it's delivering medication to your door with Amazon Pharmacy or 24-7 virtual care with Amazon One Medical. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. ♪

So for our...

Little ask me anything. Senior producer Rose Rimler has come to me with some listener questions that have been gathered through social media. Hey, Rose. Hey, Wendy. Our first question comes from Kelsey on Instagram, and she asks, how do you wade through all the misinformation and inaccurate information to get to the truth? Ooh, love this question. Because I feel like we do so much homework on this show that no one gets to see. So when someone asks this kind of question, I'm like, yes!

For me, when I'm making an episode, my first step is to go online and try and understand what is the misinformation or at least what people are saying about a particular topic. A diet, for example. You'll start to see people are saying that it

makes them smarter and gives them all this energy and makes their body look a certain way. And so I'll start to turn that into scientific questions. Does this diet affect your brain? How does it affect your body? And then I'll just dive into the scientific research and start chatting to scientists. And I won't stop until I feel like the answers have really started to coalesce where

where I feel like I've got the scientific consensus or as close to it as possible. And now I can start to build an episode.

Sounds good. Someone named Nishala, also on Instagram, she asked, have you ever considered doing stand-up? There is talent here. Oh, thank you. So I actually did stand up a couple of times. Whoa. Yeah, when I was doing a job I didn't really like and I wanted to put some fire up my a**.

Yeah, just... Here is why I do not do stand-up comedy anymore, because, Rose, would you like to hear the one joke that I remember? From your routine? Yeah. Yes, I do. Something like this. Something like this. Okay, so... Tuna are so amazing. Aren't they these amazing creatures? They're just so majestic in the ocean. Just so beautiful. And it's amazing that...

evolution created this creature that swims in a little capsule with lemon and pepper all in there. So it's so convenient that we could just eat it all up. That's five out of ten, I'd say, maybe. We'll let Nishala be the judge of that one. All right, let me know. Did I make the right call sticking with science journalism? Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy.

Today's Ask Wendy, Me Anything was brought to you by Amazon. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. Welcome back. Rose just told us why...

We really can't believe the telepathy you might hear about on the telepathy tapes. But now we're going to broaden out to the land of how science has tested telepathy. Rose? Yeah. I talked about this with Emeritus Professor of Psychology Chris French. Until recently, he was the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths University of London. Okay. Anomalistic.

Anomalistic psychology means stuff outside the norm, maybe even the paranormal. Right, right, right. I accept that there are some really interesting and challenging aspects

ideas out there for skeptics. I mean, some of the evidence isn't easy to dismiss. And certainly when you get skeptics who say there is no evidence for the existence of telepathy or precognition and so on, that's just nonsense. Chris has spent much of his career looking at paranormal stuff in kind of a rigorous way. So he tries to figure out if it's real or if there's a more mundane explanation.

So you're a professional party pooper? I am indeed, yeah. I don't get invited to parties at all because of my overwhelmingly negative personality. Okay, so one common way to test for telepathy involves something called the Gansfeld Protocol. It's based on the idea that if there is such a thing as telepathy, it may well be that it's a very, very faint signal in comparison to all the background noise.

So the Gansfeld Protocol, and by the way, Gansfeld is German for whole field. Okay. So the experimenters set someone up in a very controlled, very subdued environment so that the telepathic signal has as much of a chance as possible to come through. Uh-huh. So the people in the experiment will wear headphones with white or pink noise playing. They

They make sure there's nothing for them to see by putting on these goggles on their eyes. They look like... Half ping pong balls, one over each eye. And you, obviously, light could still get in there through the gaps. So you use cotton wool just to plug that up. And then you tape over the eyes. And then you have a red light bulb. So if they open their eyes, all they'll see is red. So it's not that you've got no sensory input, but you've just got a uniform sensory input. Right.

And basically, it's a very, very nice, comfortable, relaxing situation to be in. And people typically report that after a while, they relax and their head begins to fill with imagery, you know? Mm-hmm. And at this point, someone sends... An image of a pirate crocodile. Yeah, exactly. So someone's in another room. In another room. In another room, and they're looking at an image or maybe a video clip.

and they're really focusing on it, and they're really trying to send it to the other person. And the sender would try to concentrate on that target image and send the information to the receiver. Just by thinking about it really hard. Just by thinking about it real hard, exactly. So then after some time, the person takes off their silly ping-pong goggles, comes out of the room, they're shown four images or four video clips, and they say, which is the one that was being beamed to you? Hmm.

So they pick one. And so if you were just picking by chance, you would get this right 25% of the time. Right. But lots of these studies find that people pick the right image or the right video clip more than 25% of the time. How much more? 32% of the time. Okay. Okay.

That number comes from a meta-analysis that came out just last year. They looked at over 100 experiments done in the Gansfeld condition over the last 50 years. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It includes some studies on clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena tested using the Gansfeld protocol, but it's mostly tests of telepathy. And the authors concluded that there was a small but statistically significant effect here.

That is intriguing. That's not all. You can find something similar with other tests that have been done. Yeah.

like these telephone telepathy tests. You tell people that they're going to get a phone call from one of four specific people, and they have to guess as the phone is ringing which of these four people is the one calling them. By chance, they should get the right person 25% of the time. A lot of studies find they get it right more often than that, 30 or 40% of the time. So what does Chris make of this?

Well, so this meta-analysis, this Gansfeld one, it made a big splash among the telepathy crowd. No doubt. It was definitely referenced on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. And so I asked Chris about it. Did it rock your world? No, because I've had my fingers burnt with meta-analyses before. I mean, meta-analysis, I think is, you know...

It's a very useful tool, and I think we should take this latest meta-analysis seriously. But whether I'm going to say, yes, okay, I'm convinced now, I'm going to hold back a little bit because there have been so many twists and turns in this tale. Yeah, this isn't Chris's first radio, and it's not his first Gansfeld meta-analysis claiming a 30% hit rate. Okay. He said that there was actually something very similar back in the 90s. He was younger and more naive then, right?

And I read that and thought, oh my God, wow, this really looks like very powerful evidence. So what are these analyses doing wrong? Well, there's a few funny things that are going on here. So we know that in studies about paranormal stuff, if the test is done by a believer, they tend to find an effect.

Well, if it's done by a skeptic, they tend not to find an effect. Like, imagine that you're more of a skeptic, like Chris, and you run one of these telepathy experiments, and you find that people guess right 25% of the time. As a skeptic, when you get a result like that, you might say, oh, okay, all right, no effect here. Done, right? If you're a believer, you might look at that and say, hmm.

I'm going to go look through the data again. I would have expected something else to happen. So I'm going to go and I'm going to look through the raw data. Maybe I'll get rid of some outliers. Maybe I'll find a piece of the data and I'll just look at this subgroup. Bob wasn't really concentrating during the experiment. Yeah, I'm going to throw out his data. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And vice versa. You know, if you're a skeptic and you get a result that says telepathy is real, you might start combing through that data very carefully. You know? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So to avoid this, there has been a movement, and this is especially true in psychology research, to pre-register your study. So you basically publish a protocol ahead of time saying, this is how I'm going to do the study. This is how I'm going to analyze my data. And then that can't happen, right?

This like tweaking and nudging after the fact. Well, less so. Less so. Yeah. And when you look at that meta-analysis, they're not looking specifically at studies that were pre-registered. So it's really hard to know if we can trust them. Oh, this makes me so sad. I'm like, scientists, do your job properly. I know. Well, funny you should mention that because not long ago, there was a very concerted effort to do a proper study

study on psychic phenomena. Okay. So specifically, they were trying to replicate a study from 2011 on precognition. So like predicting the future, basically. Yes, yes, yes. The way this study worked, they had a computer program they were showing to people with a picture of two curtains. And they asked people, of these two curtains, which one has an erotic image hiding behind it? Oh.

So the people would guess and then, only then, would the computer program assign the erotic image randomly to one or the other slot. Oh, so this was... You would try to predict what the computer would do. Yeah. An unknown, an unknown basically. Yes. Okay. Wow. In the original study...

People got this right more than 50% of the time. Mm-hmm. Which the authors suggested could mean they were actually predicting the future. Sure. Okay. There was a lot of attention on this study at the time. No doubt. Yeah, and skeptics said...

Can I just ask, if you got it right, did the curtains open and then you got to see the willy? I believe so, yes. They actually controlled for people's sexual preferences. So if you wanted to see a willy, you might get to see a willy. If you wanted to see a boobie, you might get to see a boobie.

Okay, so they replicate the study. Yeah, so because a lot of skeptics said, like, we don't like this part of your methodology or this thing you did about your stats, what basically happened is that the skeptics and the believers got together, designed a new research protocol, designed a new study they both agreed on. They pre-registered it. They said, this is the protocol we're going to use. Great. And this is how we're going to do it and how we're going to analyze it. Yes. It took five years. It took 10 labs participating. Yes.

30-ish authors, skeptics and believers working together to look to see, is there an effect here? Wow, a new future is possible. And what did they find? When all this was said and done...

It produced absolutely no effects whatsoever to support the existence of precognition. Okay, that's the suggestion being if we were to rigorously test telepathy, putting the skeptics and believers all together, perhaps we would see the same effect. But I guess we don't. We don't have the same exact thing for telepathy, but a lot of the...

issues that this precognition study we're confronting are very similar to issues that people have with telepathy research. So I don't know. I think it's pretty damning to telepathy as well, but would love to see a similar group effort doing one of these, some of these studies.

What is the mechanism, the purported mechanism of telepathy? Like how? I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that. Yeah. Are they reaching for quantum physics here? Yes, they are. Quantum entanglement specifically, which is about like this weird connection between subatomic particles where they seem to influence each other. And it doesn't matter how far apart they are. Mm-hmm. And...

I did actually I did talk to a physicist who I was referred to by someone who's who's sort of telepathy friendly as a physicist who's also telepathy friendly. He's open minded about it. And I asked him, does quantum entanglement, could that explain how telepathy works? And he said, no.

And I said, do we have any known physical explanation for how telepathy could work? And he said, no. And he's like, look, maybe it happens. But if it's happening, it's happening outside of physics as we understand it. And I'm open to that. That's what I'm open to. Like, there's stuff about the spirituality we don't understand. So where does this leave you, Rose? All right. So...

Especially considering that there's no known mechanism that this could work. Looking at the research, the Gansfeld, the telephone telepathy stuff, you've got to believe one of two things. One is that the telepathy vibes are there. They're just very weak and very fickle. Or you can believe that there are no vibes. What do you think, Wendy? Weak, fickle vibes or no vibes? I mean...

think that the vibes when people say they're experiencing something like telepathy are...

are like intuition and other human vibes that are not paranormal is what I would... Whether it is a parent who loves their child, their nonverbal child so much, and there is some communication there and there's something nice being shared, it's just not paranormal. And when two friends, you know, one calls the other and one says, "'Oh, my God, I knew you were going to call!'

They probably haven't spoken in a long time and they love each other and there's some intuition there, which is beautiful. And we don't need to reach for quantum physics or telepathy. We could just reach for our common humanity to explain this. Yeah, which I think we underestimate when we come up with a paranormal theory.

explanation, the human mind, the human body, common shared humanity, you know, whatever that is, like that is impressive enough to produce a lot of these incredible things that happen between people. And that's good enough for me personally. Do you want to try? All right. We've been working together for a long time. Do you want to try send me a think of an image? Think of an image. Okay. I'm looking. How about this? I'll look at a painting on my wall.

Okay. I'm looking at it really hard. Wendy, I want to send this image to Wendy. Okay. Okay. So the first thing going through my head is what image would Rose have on her wall? But that's not... That's cheating. Because then I immediately think, that! Okay, okay. Jellyfish, bird. Okay, but... All right, what image is... All right, I'm going to close my eyes. I don't have ping pong balls, but I'll close my eyes. Okay, what...

Are you thinking about it really hard? I don't think you're thinking about hot enough, Rose. You're thinking about other things. I'm furring my brow. Okay. Is it an ocean view? No, no, no, no, no. A cat. A cat. No, but you know what's so funny? It's an ocean? No. You mentioned a jellyfish. You mentioned a cat. I do have pictures of both those things in my apartment. I just am not half and that's not the one I'm looking at. I'm looking at a painting of flowers, poppies.

The cat picture's right here. So if I'd happened to look this way, he would have gotten it right. And we would have been like, well, holy sh**. All right. How many citations in this week's episode? This week we have 51 citations. 51. And if people want to see them in all of their glory, read more about telepathy, where should they go? They can click on the link to our transcript. That's where all the citations are. And that link is in the show notes. Excellent. And if anyone wants to...

Send us any curtains and let us try and guess what kind of erotic image is behind them. Did you just ask people to send us dirty pictures? Curtains. Rose, I've asked them to send us pictures of curtains. Pictures of curtains. You can find us on Instagram at science underscore VS. You can say hello to me on TikTok. I'm at Wendy Zuckerman. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy.

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This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Akedi Foster-Keys, Meryl Horne and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr Zoltan Kekec, Professor Stefan Schmidt and Janice Boynton.

Special thanks to Enrique Perez, Isabel Lura, Lindsay Cherner, Lily Kim and Lauren Silverman. So,

Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. But if you are listening on Spotify, you can follow us and tap the bell icon so you get episode notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like what you're listening to, please give us a five-star review because it helps people find the show, which is awesome. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. ♪