Telepathy

Educated people have been brought up to believe that telepathy does not exist. Like other so-called psychic phenomena, it is dismissed as an illusion. Most people who espouse these negative opinions, as I used to myself, do not do so on the basis of a close examination of the evidence. They do so because there is a taboo against taking psychic powers seriously. This taboo dates back at least as far as the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. But this is not the place to examine its history. Rather I want to summarise some recent experiments which suggest that telepathy not only exists, but is a normal part of animal communication.

I first became interested in the subject of telepathy some fifteen years ago, and started looking at evidence for telepathy in the animals we know best, namely pets. I soon came across numerous stories from owners of dogs, cats, parrots, horses and other animals which suggested that these animals seemed able to read their minds and intentions.

Through public appeals I have built up a large database of such stories, currently containing more than 3,500 case histories. These stories fall into several categories. For example, many cat owners say that their animals seem to sense when they are planning to take them to the vet, even before they have taken out the carrying basket or given any apparent clue as to their intention. Some people say their dogs know when they are going to be taken for a walk, even when they are in a different room, out of sight or hearing, and when the person is merely thinking about taking them for a walk. Of course, no one finds this behaviour surprising if it happens at a routine time, or if the dogs see the person getting ready to go out, or hear the word “walk”. They believe it is telepathic, because it seems to happen in the absence of such clues.

One of the commonest and most testable claims about dogs and cats is that they know when their owners are coming home, in some cases anticipating their arrival by ten minutes or more. In random household surveys in Britain and America, my colleagues and I have found that approximately 50% of dog owners and 30% of cat owners believe that their animals anticipate the arrival of a member of the household. Through hundreds of videotaped experiments, we have shown that dogs react to their owners’ intentions to come home even when they are many miles away, even when they return at randomly chosen times, and even when they travel in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. Telepathy seems to be the only hypothesis that can account for the facts. (For more details, see my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.)

Knowing who’s calling

In the course of my research on unexplained powers of animals, I heard of dozens of dogs and cats that seemed to anticipate telephone calls from their owners. For example, when the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line because Whiskins, their silver tabby cat, rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. “Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative miaows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end,” she says. “If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice.” The cat responds even when the professor telephones home from field trips in Africa or South America.

I soon realised that I myself had had seemingly telepathic experiences with telephone calls. I had thought for no apparent reason of people who then called shortly afterwards. Almost everyone I talked to about it said they had had experiences like this. Through extensive surveys in several countries we have found that such experiences with telephone calls are the most common kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world.

Is this all a matter of coincidence, and selective memory, whereby people only remember when someone they were thinking about rang, and forget all the times they were wrong? Most sceptics assume that this is the case, but until recently there had never been any scientific research on the subject at all.

I have developed a simple experiment to test for telephone telepathy. Participants receive a call from one of four different callers at a prearranged time, and they themselves select the callers, usually close friends or family members. For each test, the caller is picked at random by the experimenter by throwing a dice. The participant has to say who the caller is before the caller says anything. If people were just guessing, they would be right about one time in four, or 25% of the time.

We have so far conducted more than 800 such trials, and the average success rate is 42%, very significantly above the chance level of 25%, with astronomical odds against this being a chance effect.

We have also carried out a series of trials in which two of the four callers were familiar and the other two were strangers whose names the participants knew, but whom they had not met. With familiar callers, the success rate was 56%, highly significant statistically. With strangers, it was at the chance level, in agreement with the observation that telepathy typically takes place between people who share emotional or social bonds.

In addition, we have found that these effects do not fall off with distance. Some of our participants were from Australia or New Zealand, yet they did just as well when people called them from the other side of the world as with people in the same city.