Rupert Sheldrake and telephone telepathy

[vbloke]

confirmation bias and small sample size anyone?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/05/telephone_telepathy/

[Admin]

It could be genuine telepathy. Then again, it could be a flawed experiment.

Is there an online article with his test protocol on it? I think there is - I'll have a look.

The test should be quite easy, and cheap, to replicate. Perhaps we should do it.

[Admin]

http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/telephone_experiment.html

His protocol is simple and his figures look correct. I'd like to see a good 40-50 trials for more statistical power. The required number of trials needed for a meaningful result can be worked out so I'll do that later. O0

Should be an easy experiment to do though.

[Jocky]

Yay! Let's do it :) I hereby volunteer to join in.

There's no substitute for actually trying to replicate a piece of research. If the conclusions are valid, then the results should be reproducible. If not ... ;)

I can't get the link to the protocol to work :( , but judging by what I've read on the JREF and here it sounds like it should be doable.

[Admin]

That link should work, I've just checked it. ???

I've calculated that we'll need to do a good 80 to 100 attempts for the test to be valid if we're looking for a medium size effect.

According to Sheldrake's figures it's a HUGE size effect but I have a suspicion that we won't be able to replicate that outcome.

If half a dozen of us can give an hour or two of our time then we will quickly reach the needed figures. If we do get an effect then we can do it formally and film it.

[Jocky]

Link works now. Gremlins >:(

Looks like the protocol requires fifteen minutes for the subject (presumably to to chill out and tune into the vibes) between each call. This means 80 attempts would take 20 'subject hours'.


, the subject nominates four people to whom a telepathic response seems likely.

I wonder what the criteria for choosing people likely to stimulate telepathic responses are? :-\ Would this mean that we couldn't do this test using each other as the callers, because we don't have strong enough 'telepathic links' to each other?

Shame, as probably the most ergonomic way to do it would be to organise a rota: each participant takes turns being the subject, one of four possible callers and 'resting' ready to be the next subject. For example, seven people could fit in eighty attempts in less than seven hours of time.

Come to think of it, If we had nineteen people we could rattle through a trail a minute on that basis :D


Fifteen minutes before the time chosen for a trial, the subject sits quietly reading, or engaged in some other relaxing activity (but not watching TV or a video, which can be too distracting).

Why is reading by definition less distracting than watching TV? :-\ :-\

[kath23]

I am up for it :) If you have any use for a newcomer.
Love
Kath

[median]

How many participants did he actually use in this study?

[Mongrel]

A similar test involving email yielded the same result, although the researchers' limited pool of testees - 63 for the phone and 50 for the email - coupled to the fact that only nine subjects were filmed across the two tests, prompted "some scepticism". (my bold)

Re-reading the article and it's associated press release as reported by The Register, how accurate is the "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."? That seems an awfully large extropolation from 63 people who each gave the numbers of 4 friends\relatives. And was the fact that they volunteered these numbers taken into account?

<Having trouble accessing the paper at the moment, apologies if these questions are answered in it>

[boffin]

Just turned on Breakfast and caught the end of Rupert Sheldrake talkling about telepathy and mobile phones and how he conducting a new experiment (see his website for details - www.sheldrake.org.) Did anyone see the full interview?

[vbloke]

He's running an online version of the test using email.

Might be an interesting thing to register for.

There's a link under "Experiments" on his homepage (I'm not going to link there again)

[boffin]

OK. Thanks. He's a bloody fool anyway but I hate it when they get time on television.
Who was the bloke next to him? I never saw him talk because I caught the end.

[Mojo]

Who was the bloke next to him? I never saw him talk because I caught the end.

Well hopefully it was someone with some sort of sceptical viewpoint. I didn't see the item, but it was advertised earlier as "telephone telepathy - scientists say it's real".

By the way, does Sheldrake always announce his results during August/September?

[Mojo]

http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/telephone_experiment.html


Good grief! At the bottom of that page he's asking people to do the experiment and send him the results.

No chance of reporting bias there then. ::)

[kath23]

Good grief! At the bottom of that page he's asking people to do the experiment and send him the results.

No chance of reporting bias there then. ::)


Sounds more like a Uri Geller experiment- try this at home and ring in if it works ;D

[kath23]

By the way, does Sheldrake always announce his results during August/September?


Silly season ;D

[tkingdoll]

Extremely interesting article here about the scientific community's backlash against the study:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2344196_1,00.html

[Admin]

There's a replication of his study here: http://www.sheldrake.org/articlesnew/pdf/Lobach.pdf

It gives a reasonable idea of a test protocol but they use one-tailed t-tests to analyse the results whereas I'd have used a binomial test.

The results are reasonably good but nothing like Sheldrake's.

I think we could do this as a pilot study in a similar way to the replication study.

We as volunteers could each run our own experiment and then pool the results.

We'd all need:


A person to receive the calls and make the predictions;
4 other people to make those calls;
1 person to randomise the caller sequence (the die thrower);
1 person (which could be ourselves) to monitor the receiver of the call.


If we allow 90 minutes per test and leave 10 minutes between calls we could all log 9 calls per session. If several of us can run 2-4 such experiments then we'll gather enough data to be meaningful.

Such an experiment would never make a scientific journal (the controls are not rigorous for a start), but it would be enough to warrant further investigation should we get any significant results.

So for volunteers we need people who can run a test like this. i.e. ourselves + 6 people to run the test.

I'll write some guidelines for it and run it by Jocky and Dr.B. I'll publish it for all to see then people can decide whether they'll be able to carry out the experiment.

It should be very simple to perform. O0

[Jocky]

I'm there, John O0

To come back to my earlier post, to what extent does limited aquaintance between the subject and the callers "invalidate" the trial? How could I psychically predict a call from (say) kath, whom I've never met and know nothing about? Would the potential for prediction increase if the caller is (say) teek, who I have met in RL a couple of times and know more about, but who is still a stranger to me compared to my wife, or my work colleagues?

Yes, I know that there's no falsifiable hypothesis for the mechanism and therefore this is a bit of a moot point ... but it strikes me as the obvious first criticism which could be levelled by a woo-inclined critic :-\ :D

To put this question in Sheldrake's terms (http://www.sheldrake.org/glossary/): Do we in this forum constitute a "morphic group"? (and, yes, I know that by this definition a morphic group could be pretty much anything you like, but YSWIM)

OTOH, maybe there is a virtue in carrying out a trial which is conducted between total strangers by design - by way of a kind of 'control group' ...

[chillzero]

I have a phone, and email, if yuo need another bod. I might even be able to find a die!
:D

[Dr B]

I predict a failure to replicate....does that mean I'm psychic ;D :D

[Jocky]

I predict a failure to replicate....does that mean I'm psychic ;D :D


For a psychic of your stature, Doc, it's not good enough just to know who's calling - I'll be expecting inside leg measurements and mother's maiden name ;D

nice avatar, BTW (if a little presumptuous :) )

[median]

Presumptuous...but only relatively so. :D

[Oleron]

I posted this at the JREF but will repeat it here because, well, just because!

This was discussed yesterday on the Material World programme on Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml


The upshot of the discussion, as I saw it, was that Sheldrake was advancing the view that if a skeptic like Chris French repeated the experiment with tighter controls it would fail.

However if Sheldrake repeated the experiment it would succeed.

No, don't laugh, he has highlighted something that skeptics have overlooked to an extent - observer influence and expectation.

Don't get me wrong, I think the experiment got results solely because of really poor procedures. It's another thing to actually proove that.

Truth is that this isn't the first experiment to get good results, many similar experiments have in the past. But they have all been performed by 'believing' scientists like Sheldrake. Whenever the repetition by a 'skeptic' fails, the believers say that the results were due to the skeptic's expectation of failure. I think this is hogwash but we need to design an experiment to actually rule this possibility out.

Chris French suggested a good idea - why couldn't he work with Sheldrake on a set of similar experiments? That way they could run a range of experiments that would be designed to eliminate the possibility of problems with a skeptical experimenter, yet still have the controls necessary for scientific rigour.

I would encourage Professor French to follow this up. We need to put this issue to bed or risk having our bottoms handed to us in future debates.

[tkingdoll]

Well Sheldrake has himself a foolproof get-out-of-jail free card there, doesn't he.

However, I see no reason why Sheldrake can't repeat the experiment himself, but with tighter controls.

Someone is going have to, because this is making the sort of stir that has always been predicted to happen if a scientist claims to have proof that the physical world doesn't work how we think it does. So Sheldrake is going to have to either repeat his experiment with tighter controls, or admit it was meaningless, eventually. Otherwise this'll just fade into the PEAR school of forgotten BS.