September 5, 2006 8:05 AM PDT
Telephone telepathy? Researcher says it rings true
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British scientist says he's conducted experiments proving that precognition exists for phone calls, e-mails.
The story "Telephone telepathy? Researcher says it rings true" published September 5, 2006 at 8:05 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
Content from Reuters expires after 30 days.
I'm very sad to see this kind of pseudoscience on C-NET, which is otherwise a reliable information source.
There is, however, a very plausible cognitive science explanation for the phenomenon. There are two parts to the explanation. The first part is that the people we think about frequently are generally people we are likely to hear from. The second part is that our brains are wired to notice coincidences and not wired to pay much attention to non-coincidences. In other words, I will notice the handful of times I'm thinking of Fred and the phone rings and it's him, but I will not notice the hundreds and hundreds of times I'm thinking about Fred and Fred DOESN'T call.
What's next,divining rods? Perpetual, net positive motion?
Still unclaimed, the $1M prize...
So to me, this proves nothing. The test should be more random or a wider number of people... especially people you do not converse with frequently.
Wonder why Jessica Alba never calls me? I think about her A LOT and she has yet to ring me to say hello.
There are any number of possible explanations, but it is
impossible to determine what is going on since the people at
Reuters did not seem to se fit to publish the methods section of
any paper, assuming it was even published by a peer review
journal.
If they received more than one call with the experimental
population reduced by one each time, this result is not at a ll
surprising. It may also be that even if the people to call were
chosen at random, only certain people actually received the
request, due to any number of reasons (not being home, being
busy, not having a phone on, etc..) Thus time of day or even the
fact that a call occurred at all contains substantial information
about caller ID. The fact that this is considered informative at all
shows how little paranormal "researchers" understand the
scientific method, and why they have no business calling
themselves scientists.
If you toss a four-sided cube an infinite number of times, then each side of the cube will appear 25% of the time. However, if you toss the cube 63 times, you may get one side appearing 28 times (45% of the total) rather than 16 times (25% of the total). This is the nature of randomness. It does not mean that there is some inherent tendency of that side of the cube to appear more often because of unseen forces.
Simpler example is a coin flip, where there is a 50% chance of heads appearing. But you can toss the coin 100 times and see heads 75 times. Do you then conclude that you have some psychic ability to flip heads? Hardly. It is just the nature of randomness.
This is pretty basic stuff. I can't believe that any serious consideration is being given to this "study."
Bruce