Telepathy
Mind to mind without the senses: the claim, the tests since 1882, and what they showed.
What is telepathy, and what did the experiments on it truly find?
Mind
The sixth sense
The sixth sense is the old name for knowing without the known senses: telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition. A century and a half of tests has reported small effects that others could not reliably repeat. The house tells what was claimed, what was tested and what held, and it tells nobody that they are psychic.
What is claimed, what was tested, and what held
Ask the OracleWhat is truly known about telepathy, clairvoyance and the sixth sense?
The art, in brief
The belief that some people know things without the use of the known senses is as old as writing: the seer, second sight, the foreboding that came true. In 1882 a group of Cambridge scholars founded the Society for Psychical Research in London to put such claims to the test, and one of them, Frederic Myers, coined the word telepathy that year. Since then the question has been asked in laboratories with cards, sealed rooms, dice and machines, under the name parapsychology.
After a century and a half the record can be stated plainly. Some experiments have reported small effects above chance. Independent attempts to repeat them have not agreed, and most scientists are not persuaded. What is well established is more ordinary: people read faces, voices and small signs faster than they can explain, coincidences are commoner than they feel, and a practised talker can seem to know a stranger. The house tells what was claimed, what was tested and what held. It tells no one that they are psychic, and it confirms no premonition.
The teaching
As psychical research, from Myers and Gurney to Rhine and the ganzfeld teaches it.
The claim at the centre
The art studies one claim in many forms: that a mind can sometimes know what no sense has told it, or act on matter without any known force. The friend who rang just as they came to mind, the dream that seemed to come true, the sudden certainty that something was wrong far away: each is a case the claim is made for. The field calls the whole of it psi, after a Greek letter, chosen because it assumes no theory of how any of it might work.
Its first lesson is to keep three things apart. The experience is one thing, and it is real: people truly have these moments, and they can be striking. The claim made for it is another: that it came by no known route. The test is the third, the way of finding out whether the claim holds. The art's discipline is never to let the first stand in for the third.
The kinds of psi
The knowing kinds go together under the name extrasensory perception, ESP. Telepathy is an impression passing from one mind to another; in the founders' terms the agent is the person it comes from and the percipient the one who receives it. Clairvoyance is perceiving an object, a place or an event that no one knows, and remote viewing is its laboratory form. Precognition is knowing an event before it happens when it could not have been inferred. A premonition is its felt form, a foreboding without a reason, and the second sight of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is the best known of its older forms in Britain.
The acting kind is psychokinesis, mind on matter, which the field divides in two: the large effect seen with the eye, a table moved or a spoon bent, and the small effect claimed only from totals, a faint bias in thousands of dice or in a machine's random events. In a test the kinds are told apart by who knows the target, and when. If someone looks at it, telepathy and clairvoyance cannot be separated; if no one has seen it, only clairvoyance would explain a hit; if it has not yet been chosen, only precognition.
How impressions come
The founders of psychical research sorted the cases sent to them by the form the impression took. Some come as dreams, and some in the borderland between waking and sleep, as a figure seen at the foot of the bed. Some come fully awake, as a voice calling one's name or a touch, and others as a sudden feeling, a certainty, or an impulse to go home or turn back. Most of their cases were crisis cases: someone far away dying or in danger, and a person close to them seeing, hearing or simply knowing at about that moment.
Edmund Gurney taught that the figure seen at such a moment is a hallucination made by the percipient's own mind in answer to an impulse received below awareness, false as an appearance and true as a message, which he called a veridical hallucination. Frederic Myers placed the receiving below the threshold of waking awareness, in what he called the subliminal self, and so, in his teaching, impressions come most often in sleep, in reverie and in the borderland, where the threshold is low. The branch on telepathy teaches the cases and the rules they had to meet.
The case and the experiment
The art weighs two kinds of evidence. The spontaneous case comes from life, and it counts only under strict rules: the account first-hand, the experience written down or told to someone before any news arrived, the time of the event fixed independently, the match close in time, and no reason beforehand to fear it. The experiment is made to order: a target chosen by chance, a percipient with no route to it through any sense, a record made before any feedback, and a judge who does not know the answer. The Zener cards of Rhine's laboratory and the ganzfeld, where a receiver in mild sensory quiet describes a picture that a sender elsewhere is watching, are its two great designs.
What chance looks like
Every judgement in the art rests on knowing what chance looks like. With five designs in a pack of twenty-five cards, chance gives five right in a run; with four pictures to choose from, it gives one hit in four. Single runs scatter widely, from two or three to eight or nine, with no power at work, so a striking run proves nothing, and only totals over many runs, set against the spread that chance would give, can show anything. The same holds in life. A foreboding vague about what, where and when fits a great many events, and among millions of people thinking of one another every day, some calls are bound to follow the thought.
So the misses belong in the count with the hits. Memory keeps the forebodings that came true and drops the many that did not, the habit psychology calls confirmation bias, and a printed record can lean the same way when studies that found nothing stay in the file drawer. The art's method is therefore always the same: write it down before the outcome, count everything, and say beforehand what result would count against the claim.
What can pass for psi
A student must know the ordinary things that can look like knowing without the senses, since each has to be ruled out before anything else is weighed. The senses leak: a face, a pause, a reflection or the tiny unconscious movements of a hand can carry an answer, which is why a sound test keeps the percipient out of sight and hearing. The ideomotor effect, the small movements the body makes in answer to an idea without the mind's knowing, turns the séance table, the pointer of the talking board and the swinging pendulum. And a practised reader can seem to know a stranger by the craft called cold reading: statements true of most people, which each sitter takes as made for them alone, the Barnum effect; close watching of how each one lands; and details the sitter supplies and later remembers as the reader's.
Beneath much of what is called a sixth sense lies intuition: fast knowing by the ordinary senses and memory, built from long experience, as a nurse sees that a baby is unwell before any reading shows it. It is real, and it deserves trust where a field has patterns and a person has had long practice with honest feedback; elsewhere it is a feeling to be checked. The branches What intuition is and Cold reading teach both crafts in full.
How a student begins
The student's first practices are all ways of checking, and none of them trains a power. Keep a dated notebook of impressions before their outcome is known: each time someone comes strongly to mind, and each foreboding, spelled out plainly with a time by which it should happen. After a month, count the hits and the misses together. Learn what chance looks like by guessing a well shuffled pack of five designs, five cards of each, at the kitchen table, twenty runs in all. Have a friend seal a picture postcard in an envelope, write down an impression before it is opened, and then lay the description beside five other postcards to see which it fits best. And after any reading, set it down sentence by sentence and ask which statements were exact enough to be wrong.
Three cautions
Two experiences are not psi and should never be taken for it. A feeling that others can hear or read one's thoughts, or that thoughts are being put into the mind or taken out of it, is not a gift; it can be a sign of illness, and help is there for it. If you feel your thoughts are being read, please see a doctor. A fear that one's own thoughts can cause harm, so that a thought of an accident must be undone, is a recognised pattern of anxiety, and a doctor can help with that too. And no foreboding is ever a reason to call off what matters or to frighten another person with a warning.
Where the branches lead
Three branches take the knowing kinds one by one: Telepathy, with the founders' cases and the ganzfeld; Clairvoyance and remote viewing, with the viewers' method and the judging that tests it; and Premonitions, with the second sight and the dream record of J. W. Dunne. From Rhine to the ganzfeld teaches the laboratory's method, which every claim must pass, and is the place to begin for anyone who wants the method first. Psychokinesis takes the acting kind, from dice to machines. What intuition is and Cold reading teach the real crafts that most often pass for a sixth sense.
Before you practise
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. It will not tell you that you are psychic, or that a premonition is true. If you feel your thoughts are being read, please see a doctor.
Its branches
Each one is a question you can ask.
Clairvoyance and remote viewing
Seeing what is hidden or far off, from the parlour to a government programme closed in 1995.
What are clairvoyance and remote viewing, and what came of the programme that tested them?
Premonitions
The feeling that something is coming: why it is so common, and why it shows so little.
What is a premonition, and why do premonitions seem to come true?
What intuition is
Fast knowing from practised eyes and ears: what psychology has learned about the hunch.
What is intuition, and when can a hunch be trusted?
From Rhine to the ganzfeld
A century of laboratory work: cards, sealed rooms, small effects and failed repetitions.
What did parapsychology find, from the Zener cards to the ganzfeld experiments?
Cold reading
How a stranger seems to know all about you: the craft laid open, so that it can be recognised.
What is cold reading, and how do I recognise it?
Psychokinesis
Moving things by thought: dice, random numbers and bent spoons, and what the checks found.
What is psychokinesis, and has moving things by thought ever been shown?
Its words
Each opens its page in the dictionary.
Telepathy- The passing of a thought or feeling from one mind to another without the known senses. Frederic Myers coined the word in 1882 from the Greek for distant feeling.
Clairvoyance- French for clear seeing: the claim to perceive hidden or distant things without the eyes. The word spread with the mesmerists of the nineteenth century.
Precognition- Knowledge of an event before it happens that could not have been inferred. A premonition is the felt form of it, a foreboding without a reason.
Remote Viewing- A method of the 1970s in which a person sits in a room and describes a distant place they have not seen. The phrase came into use at the Stanford Research Institute.
Psychokinesis- The claimed power of the mind to move or change matter without touching it. The word dates from 1914; the older telekinesis from 1890.
Extrasensory Perception- ESP for short: J. B. Rhine's name, from 1934, for telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition together, as knowing that does not come through the senses.
Parapsychology- The experimental study of claims such as telepathy and psychokinesis. Rhine took the name from the German and gave it to his laboratory at Duke University.
Zener Cards- A pack of twenty-five cards bearing five plain designs, five of each, made in the early 1930s for Rhine's guessing tests. Chance gives five right in twenty-five.
More of its words 17
Ganzfeld Experiment- A telepathy test in which a receiver, with eyes covered and steady noise in the ears, describes a picture that a sender in another room is looking at.
Stargate Project- The last code name of the remote viewing programme paid for by the United States government from the 1970s. It was reviewed and closed in 1995.
Society for Psychical Research- The learned society founded in London in 1882 to examine telepathy, apparitions and mediums by the methods of science. It still exists and still publishes.
Cold Reading- The techniques by which a reader with no prior knowledge appears to know a stranger: likely guesses, flattering generalities and close watching of the reply.
Barnum Effect- The readiness to take a vague description that fits nearly everyone as a true account of oneself. Shown by Bertram Forer in 1948 and named by Paul Meehl in 1956.
File-Drawer Problem- The bias that arises when studies that find nothing stay unpublished, so that the printed record looks stronger than the whole. Named by Robert Rosenthal in 1979.
Confirmation Bias- The habit of noticing and remembering what agrees with a belief and passing over what does not: the hits of a hunch are kept and the misses forgotten.
- Hot Reading
- Giving a reading from facts gathered about the sitter beforehand, by research, an accomplice or listening in, and presenting them as psychic knowledge.
- Premonition
- A strong feeling, with no reason that can be given, that a particular thing is about to happen. It names the experience, not proof of foresight.
- Premonitions Bureau
- The London project of 1967 in which a psychiatrist and a newspaper logged the public's forebodings in advance and checked them against events.
- Second Sight
- The Scottish Highland tradition of unsought visions of distant or coming events, most often a death, recorded by named witnesses from the 1690s.
- Sixth Sense
- The popular name for knowing without the five senses, used both for claimed psychic perception and for ordinary quick intuition.
- J. B. Rhine
- The American researcher (1895 to 1980) who took psychic claims into the laboratory at Duke University from 1927 and made the term ESP familiar.
- Spoon Bending
- The apparent bending of cutlery or keys by the mind alone, famous on television in the 1970s and a standard effect of stage conjuring.
- Frederic Myers
- The Cambridge classical scholar (1843 to 1901) who helped found the Society for Psychical Research, coined the word telepathy and proposed a subliminal self.
- Sensory Leakage
- Information reaching the subject of a psychic test through the ordinary senses, by sight, sound or touch, without anyone meaning to pass it.
- Ingo Swann
- The New York artist (1933 to 2013) who helped devise remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute and wrote the staged method taught to army viewers.
Its history, in dates
- The Society for Psychical Research is founded in London, and Frederic Myers coins the word telepathy.
- Gurney, Myers and Podmore publish Phantasms of the Living, some seven hundred reported cases of impressions at a distance.
- J. B. Rhine at Duke University publishes Extra-Sensory Perception, reporting card-guessing scores above chance.
- The Journal of Parapsychology begins at Duke, while critics press for tighter controls on the card tests.
- Remote viewing research begins at the Stanford Research Institute with money from United States intelligence agencies.
- Charles Honorton and colleagues report the first ganzfeld experiments on telepathy.
- The critic Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton publish a joint statement on the controls future ganzfeld studies need.
- A review with reports by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman ends in the closing of the government programme on remote viewing.
- Daryl Bem publishes nine experiments said to show precognition; repetitions fail, and the dispute feeds psychology's replication debate.
Books to read
- Phantasms of the LivingEdmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore, 1886The first great collection of reported cases, gathered and sifted by the founders of psychical research.
- Extra-Sensory PerceptionJ. B. Rhine, 1934The monograph that gave the field its vocabulary and its card tests, and drew the criticisms of method that shaped later work.
- An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and ApplicationsAmerican Institutes for Research, 1995The review, with reports by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, on which the government programme was closed.
- The Full Facts Book of Cold ReadingIan Rowland, 1998A working performer sets out how a reader appears to know a stranger. The plainest guide to the craft.
- Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st CenturyEtzel Cardeña, John Palmer and David Marcusson-Clavertz, editors, 2015The field's own survey of its methods and findings, by researchers who think the question still open.
- Thinking, Fast and SlowDaniel Kahneman, 2011A psychologist on quick judgement: when a practised hunch can be trusted, and how the mind mistakes chance for pattern.
Its roots: the lives to read with it
- Edgar Cayce1877 to 1945
American known as “the sleeping prophet”, who gave thousands of readings while in trance on health, past lives and the future; about fourteen thousand were written down. He founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment at Virginia Beach in 1931.
- Carl Jung1875 to 1961
Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology. He studied alchemy, Gnosticism, astrology and the I Ching as pictures of the psyche: Psychology and Alchemy (1944), the idea of synchronicity, and The Red Book, written from 1914 to 1930 and published in 2009. He wrote that he sometimes cast a patient’s horoscope to understand them, and his own statistical test of astrology and marriage proved nothing either way.
- Nostradamus1503 to 1566
French apothecary and astrologer, Michel de Nostredame. His Prophéties, first printed in 1555, are rhymed quatrains, nearly all without dates, written in a deliberately dark style. Catherine de’ Medici favoured him at the French court.
Shares roots with
Tarot, runes, I ChingPast lives and karmaAlchemyDreamsPhysics and the mysticsDeath and what followsLost worlds
