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NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.


Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.


Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.


"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."


He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.


However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism.


Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

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To date, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests.

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the rules regarding the Challenge have gotten more and more official and legal. It is vital that you understand this fact before you apply. The contract signifies your willingness to adhere to the Challenge rules.

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Diploid said:

I could tell my parents when a friend was going to turn up and who it was before they came round.

You should apply to win the JREF Million Dollar Prize.

What do you have to lose?

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Why losing time applying to such dogmatic researchers ? They will never handle such prize to anyone, not because telepathy doesn't exist, but because their premise when analyzing such theories readily outlaws such phenomenon. There is evidence, there is scientific analysis and there are scientific conclusions. Only dogmatic skeptics keep saying "no" to such facts, just like yourself 

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Dogmatic scepticism by Rupert Sheldrake

Last week I took part in a public debate on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in London. My opponent was Professor Lewis Wolpert, a pillar of the science establishment.

Prof Wolpert claimed that telepathy did not exist. He provided no evidence for this opinion. He just kept repeating it, implying that those who disagreed with him must have something wrong with them. When I summarized evidence for telepathy from thousands of scientific tests and showed a video of recent experiments he looked away from the screen. He did not want to know.

Over 80 per cent of the audience disagreed with him. The great majority had experienced telepathy themselves, particularly in relation to phone calls, thinking of someone who then rang. There is a similar situation in the country as a whole. Most people believe in psychic powers because they have experienced them personally, or seen them in their pets. Yet a minority claim these abilities are impossible, and dismiss them as superstition. Usually they have never taken the trouble to look at the facts. Like Prof Wolpert, they believe they know the truth already. But science is not about dogma, but about evidence. As I have discussed in this column over the last two months, the facts strongly support the existence of psychic abilities. It is scientific to accept these abilities on the basis of evidence, and unscientific to deny them on the basis of ignorance. Of course scepticism is necessary and healthy, and we would be foolish to believe everything we are told. But genuine scepticism is about open-minded inquiry, not denial (see the excellent website www.skepticalinvestigations.org ).

Why are some people so afraid of telepathy? Perhaps because they fear that others will invade their mental privacy, or know what they are thinking. Some people also reject telepathy because it goes against their belief that the mind is confined to the inside of the head, and is nothing but the activity of the brain. Telepathy implies that we are interconnected with the people and animals we feel close to. For most people this is reassuring, not frightening.

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That guy said:

Why are some people so afraid of telepathy? Perhaps because they fear that others will invade their mental privacy, or know what they are thinking. Some people also reject telepathy because it goes against their belief that the mind is confined to the inside of the head, and is nothing but the activity of the brain. Telepathy implies that we are interconnected with the people and animals we feel close to. For most people this is reassuring, not frightening.

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Well said except for one argument against it I would make. My daughter often seems to have what I am thinking "privately" drop into her thoughts. She experiences them as her own though. This concerns me because she should be having the thoughts of a 9 year old in her mind, not a 38 year old if you know what I mean. 

On the one hand, its a good thing as when i realized this of her from an early age, its forced me to be mindful of my thoughts, which has been good overall for my state of consciousness, yet, sometimes, I need or want to think things that I have the maturity and experience to handle or understand where as she doesn't and I can see it effect her negatively. 

Maybe it is still a good thing overall that it keeps me on my conscious toes. If the whole world knew we were reading each others thoughts imagine how things would change for the better. There would be no more plotting to take advantage of people behind their backs, thinking il of others, or misunderstandings of just exactly what others are thinking based on speculation and assumptions. It would force a purity of consciousness, intention and better understandings between people.

I would like to see everyone awaken the ability better for that reason.

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It would force a purity of consciousness

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