Telephone Telepathy

You think of someone you have not heard from in months — and a moment later the phone rings, and it is them. Most people have a story like this, and most put it down to coincidence. Rupert Sheldrake set out to test whether, at least sometimes, it is something more.

A clean test

The design is simple enough that anyone can run it. A subject names four familiar people who might call them. At each trial the experimenter picks one of the four at random and has that person ring; before lifting the receiver — and with no caller ID — the subject says who is calling. With four possible callers, blind guessing should be right one time in four, 25%.

The results

In Sheldrake's main series — 571 trials across 63 subjects — the hit rate was 40%, with odds against chance of many millions to one. The signal lay where a real effect should: familiar callers were identified about 54% of the time, while callers the subject did not know well were guessed at chance. The decisive answer to the obvious worry — that subjects were somehow cheating — came from a filmed series in which the participants were videotaped continuously. Far from lowering the score, the tighter conditions raised it, to 45%, with familiar callers reaching 61%. Cheating should make a filmed score worse, not better.

Closeness, not distance

A striking pattern emerged when callers were far away. Subjects identified callers thousands of miles overseas more often (around 65%) than callers only a few miles down the road (around 35%). The effect tracks emotional closeness rather than physical distance — what you would expect if telepathy runs along the bonds within a social group, and not at all what you would expect of a signal that fades with range.

Beyond the telephone

To make the experiments easy for anyone — including skeptics — to repeat, Sheldrake moved them onto automated platforms. Email telepathy tests gave hit rates of 43–47%; text-message tests, around 38% where chance is 33%. A 2025 meta-analysis pooled fifteen papers and twenty-six experiments across telephone, email and text, found the combined effect very highly significant, and — the point that matters most for reproducibility — found no difference between Sheldrake's own studies and independent replications, including work at the universities of Amsterdam and Freiburg.

Why it might happen

For Sheldrake, telepathy is the social face of the extended mind: "telepathy can be understood as an interaction between members of social groups within the morphic field of the group as a whole, which interconnects the individual" members. The bond is the channel, which is why familiarity and emotional closeness — not distance — predict who comes through. The full theory is set out in The Extended Mind, and the same bonds may underlie the most charming evidence of all, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

Sources & talks

The famous filmed demonstration with the Nolan Sisters:

Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Rupert SheldrakeYouTube

A full lecture on the experimental evidence for telepathy:

The Evolution of Telepathy — Rupert Sheldrake (Trinity College, Cambridge)YouTube

Take part: the telephone-telepathy test at sheldrake.org. Primary sources: Sheldrake & Smart, "Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy," JSPR 67 (2003) and "Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy," Journal of Parapsychology 67 (2003) · and the 2025 meta-analysis, "Telecommunication Telepathy," Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition 5 (2025).