Soccer Dad

Telephone telepathy

I once had a roommate - in the days before caller ID was ubiquitous - who told me that if the phone rings, if you answer "Hello so and so ..." it was a no lose situation. If you're right, the person is impressed that you were correct. If not he or she will probably forget the mistake. So it's really a no lose situation.

Now there's a researcher who claims that people do have an intuitive feel for who's calling, even blindly. This researcher believes that Telephone Telepathy is a real phenomenon.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College in Cambridge, England, said on Tuesday he has conducted experiments that proved such precognition exists 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."

The article goes on to say that his sample sizes were small but that he believes that studies with more participants would prove his thesis.

Frankly this is a bunch of malarkey. Usually, what happens when you think that you anticipated someone's call is that you had confusion. When that person calls it gives you a feeling that you were thinking of him/her and you then confuse when you started to thing of that person and convince yourself that you were thinking of him/her prior to receiving the phone call.

Technorati tag: Telephone Telepathy.