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title: Telephone Telepathy
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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. 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 , and the same bonds may underlie the most charming evidence of all, .
## Sources & talks
The famous filmed demonstration with the Nolan Sisters:
A full lecture on the experimental evidence for telepathy:
**Take part:** the [telephone-telepathy test at sheldrake.org](https://www.sheldrake.org/participate/). **Primary sources:** Sheldrake & Smart, ["Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy," ](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/experimental-tests-for-telephone-telepathy)[*JSPR*](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/experimental-tests-for-telephone-telepathy)[ 67 (2003)](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/experimental-tests-for-telephone-telepathy) and ["Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy," ](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/videotaped-experiments-on-telephone-telepathy)[*Journal of Parapsychology*](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/videotaped-experiments-on-telephone-telepathy)[ 67 (2003)](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy/videotaped-experiments-on-telephone-telepathy) · and the 2025 meta-analysis, "Telecommunication Telepathy," *Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition* 5 (2025).