The inner life
Telepathy
Direct answer
Telepathy is the claimed passing of a thought, image or feeling from one mind to another without sight, hearing or any other known sense. The word was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882.
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At a glance
- Also called
- mind reading, thought transference, telepathic, mind to mind communication
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Extrasensory Perception, Ganzfeld Experiment, Clairvoyance, Society for Psychical Research
Telepathy is the claimed passing of a thought, image or feeling from one mind to another without sight, hearing or any other known sense. The word was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882.
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Is telepathy real?
Telepathy means distant feeling, from the Greek. It names the claim that one person can know what is in another's mind without any ordinary channel: no speech, no gesture, no shared knowledge to reason from. It is the form of extrasensory perception most people feel they have met, in the friend who telephones just as they were thought of.
Researchers have tried to test it since the 1880s, first with guessing games, then with cards, and since the 1970s with the ganzfeld method. Some studies report results above chance and others, as carefully run, find nothing. No experiment yet gives the same result in every competent laboratory, so the claim remains unproved.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The sixth sense.
What sets Telepathy apart
What sets telepathy apart from the other claims is that it needs two people: a sender who knows the target and a receiver who does not. That makes it the easiest to stage and the hardest to keep clean, since anything the sender knows can leak by a look, a sound or the order of a pack. It is also the one claim whose name was made by its investigators, who wanted a neutral word in place of thought reading.
- Coined: Frederic Myers, 1882, from Greek tele, distant, and pathos, feeling
- Earlier name: thought transference
- Needs: a sender who knows the target and a receiver kept from every ordinary cue
- Main modern test: the ganzfeld, from 1974: one target among four pictures
- Standing: not established; results differ between laboratories
Often mistaken for something else: Clairvoyance claims knowledge of a thing no one present knows; telepathy claims knowledge of what is in another person's mind. A test with a sender cannot tell the two apart.
The story behind Telepathy
Frederic Myers, a Cambridge classicist, coined the word in 1882, the year the Society for Psychical Research was founded; it replaced the older phrase thought transference. The Society's first star subjects, the Creery sisters, were caught signalling in 1888. J. B. Rhine brought card tests to Duke University in the 1930s, and Charles Honorton introduced the ganzfeld procedure in 1974. Reviews of the ganzfeld work in 1994 and 1999 reached opposite conclusions.
Why Telepathy matters
Telepathy is the commonest of the claims grouped as the sixth sense, and the one on which most of the laboratory work has been spent.
How to read Telepathy
Researchers test it by having a receiver pick, from several pictures, the one a sender was looking at; readers meet the word for any striking coincidence of thought.
Telepathy in practice: an example
A woman thinks of an old friend and the telephone rings. A tally kept for a month shows how many such thoughts were followed by nothing at all.
Where readings of Telepathy go wrong
A feeling that thoughts are being read, sent or put into the head is not telepathy, and a doctor is the right person to tell.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
The Oracle tells what has been claimed for telepathy and second sight, what was tested, and what held: small effects have been reported and have not been reliably repeated.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- mind reading, thought transference, telepathic, mind to mind communication
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See Telepathy in your personal almanac
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Common questions
Is telepathy real?
It has not been established. Some experiments have reported results a little above chance, and careful repetitions have often found nothing. Most scientists are not persuaded, and no test gives the same result in every laboratory.
Who invented the word telepathy?
Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, coined it in 1882 from the Greek words for distant and feeling. It replaced the earlier term thought transference.
Why do I think of someone just before they call?
People think of friends many times a day and forget the times no call followed. A call that does follow is remembered, and it often comes from someone there was reason to expect. Keeping a tally shows the pattern.
