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I probably don't have to tell you what this episode is about. If I could transmit my thoughts into your head or if I could read your thoughts and know what you're thinking about, that would be telepathy. Chris French is an emeritus professor of psychology who has spent his career investigating and debunking paranormal claims.
He's also the author of the book The Science of Weird Shit, which I spoke to him about last year on the podcast when he tested our own telepathic abilities. I'm going to see if I can transmit a message from my mind into your minds. It's a number between 1 and 10, not 3 because that's too obvious, and I'm going to transmit the number to you now. How many people out there thought of the number 7?
Now, science still has plenty to explain about the universe, but the fact is there's no decent evidence for telepathy. And were it true, it would bust a lot of the laws of nature as we know them. Skeptics sometimes assert that there is no evidence for telepathy. There is evidence. It's the quality of the evidence where the controversy lies.
The history of parapsychology is a history of false dawns. It's always just around the corner. It never quite seems to arrive. But that hasn't stopped a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes from storming the charts and briefly knocking Joe Rogan off the top spot earlier this month.
In it, a documentary maker explores and gives credence to claims that non-verbal autistic children can read minds. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do.
So I called on Chris French to ask, how has telepathy been scientifically tested? What could be behind the apparent ability for people to read minds? And why is this idea still popular? I'm The Guardian's Science Editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.
Chris, it's great to have you back on the podcast. When I say telepathy, to me that means reading minds, but how would you define it? And give me maybe a better understanding of where telepathy stands in the realm of the paranormal. Well, telepathy is one of the three
varieties of extrasensory perception or ESP. One of them is precognition, the idea that some people have the ability to know about future events before they happen. Clairvoyance
which refers to the alleged ability to pick up information from remote locations. So things like so-called psychic detectives who say they know where a body will be found or they know who did the murder, even though obviously they have no way of knowing that through their normal senses. And telepathy itself is the alleged ability for direct mind-to-mind contact.
What is the evidence that the believers would point to? I mean, what does that look like? Are there any sort of examples that you might be able to give that people put forward for this being real? So we know, for example, that people can be fooled into thinking they've experienced or witnessed telepathy. There's a branch of conjuring called mentalism, which is all about
these kinds of demonstrations of apparently amazing powers, but it's all being achieved by trickery and deception. So yeah, that's very useful for con artists and it's very useful for entertainment. But when it comes to what might be perceived by some as being genuine telepathy, there's lots of anecdotal evidence. For example, lots of people talk about twin telepathy, the idea that particularly identical twins have some kind of special psychic link
So, for example, twins may be separated geographically. One twin has no idea what the other twin is doing, but suddenly they'll maybe feel some sort of pain. Then it turns out that at that precise moment, their twin was involved in an accident. It might be very, very impressive to the people who experience it, and it might have a profound impact on them, but it doesn't actually prove anything scientifically. Sticking with the believers for a minute, though,
they presumably have to come forward with
ideas, theories of what they think is happening? What sort of things do they say? To be honest, there hasn't really been any plausible mechanism that has been put forward. We know that the brain basically works in terms of electrochemistry. We know that there are electrical impulses in the brain between neurons, and we know that we can actually record EEG from the surface of the scalp and so on and so forth.
But the kind of physics of the situation means that you would not be able to pick up on that information from any kind of distance. I'm sure there'll be people out there now listening and saying, oh, quantum physics, quantum entanglement.
It's just hand-wringing. It's trying to explain one mysterious phenomenon in terms of another mysterious phenomenon, but it doesn't give you a well-articulated theory that leads to predictions to actually put to the test. This is something, though, that scientists have looked at. I mean, take me through some of these studies and how telepathy has been tested in the past. Back in the 1930s, I would say, is when it first really...
took off in terms of large-scale systematic studies. This was Joseph Banks-Rhyne, J.B. Rhyne at Duke University. He believed that everybody had psychic ability, but that you might need a kind of large sample to actually demonstrate that this ability was there. And so he would do experiments. He's the person who first started using what we call Xena cards.
It's a deck of 25 cards. It's got five different symbols on them. There's a circle, a square, three wavy lines, et cetera, et cetera. And there's five of each within the deck. So if I was doing a telepathy experiment with you now, Ian, I'd pick up one card at a time and try and transmit that information telepathically to you. And you write down your guess. We go through the full deck and then we see how many you got right. By chance, you should get five.
around five, okay? If you get a lot more than five, that suggests that maybe there is something going on over and above, just sheer guesswork.
One of the problems here is that it's impossible to distinguish with that kind of study between telepathy, as in direct mind-to-mind contact, or maybe it was just clairvoyance, or it may have even been precognition. Ryan claimed to have got amazingly significant results, but other people were often not able to replicate them.
So that's how it used to be done, but Chris says research has since become more sophisticated. Fast forward to more recent studies, I would say that amongst the biggest challenges to sceptics, including myself, would be to conclusively disprove some of the results that have come from the so-called Gansfeld studies.
The idea is that if ESP exists, it's probably a very weak signal compared to a lot of the competing background information that's all around us all the time. So maybe if we could dampen down that background, the ESP signal might come through. And the way you do this is by getting someone to lie on a comfortable couch...
the room at body temperature with half ping pong balls over their eyes with cotton wool around them and just have a say a red light bulb in the room so that if you open your eyes all you'll see is a field of red headphones on with white noise and it's very pleasant you're going to a very relaxed state and your mind tends to fill with imagery
That's how the receiver is prepared. The person who is the sender is in a distant room. In the initial studies, they would, say, take a stack of four pictures and one would be randomly selected. The sender would try to concentrate on it and send the information telepathically to the receiver who would just describe whatever was coming through in their imagery.
Now, you'd expect to get a hit rate of 25%, but it was claimed that they would get a hit rate of around 1 in 3. Not a massive effect, but if it's real, then it's something there that needs to be explained.
I haven't got time to go into the full kind of debate, the controversy about some of the flaws that were found with the Gansfeld technique, some of the improvements. Suffice it to say that it's still not a technique that can generate sufficiently robust results that it's convinced the wider scientific community that there really is something psychic happening there.
Coming back to sort of what might really be happening in these situations, it's clear that consciously and unconsciously, we might prime people to, in inverted commas, read our minds in different ways. Can you explain how that could work? I mean, how can we give out subtle signals that might give away what we're thinking? Well, again,
Well, again, there's a phenomenon called cold reading. It's a set of techniques, really, that can be used to convince complete strangers that you know all about them. But some of the mythology around cold reading is that it's all about reading subtle nonverbal cues. You know, the way that you just raised your left eyebrow, that gives me all kinds of information. Well, you can tell something from nonverbal cues, but you really can't tell anything very specific like that. It's down to trickery.
I mean, having just said that, there is some evidence to suggest that sometimes people
People may make decisions and judgments on the basis of information that they were not consciously aware of receiving. I mean, just to give one example from a study that we published, what we did was to get our participants to take part in what we said was a computerized ESP task. We sat them in front of the computer and they had to guess what
which of the Xena card symbols, the cross, the three wavy lines, et cetera, et cetera, the computer was going to choose. And what they saw coming up on the screen then would be what looked like the kind of back of a playing card. On half of the trials, we were subliminally priming them with the right answer. So before that patent mask came up,
we would flash up the right answer so briefly that they couldn't actually consciously perceive it. What we found was that some people did actually score higher than you would expect by chance, but only on the prime trials. But to those people, if you'd have said, well, how are you doing that? They wouldn't know. So it might not be totally irrational for them to say, well, I don't know, maybe I'm psychic.
That's super interesting. So people have knowledge that they may not be consciously aware of because they've taken it in subliminally. Yeah. A lot of people have probably had a moment where they feel they've read the mind of someone around them. I mean, how should we think of day-to-day instances like that? I mean, are those just...
coincidences or evidence that we're perhaps spending too much time with those people. Now, the thing is, we tend to be attracted to and spend more time with people who think along similar lines to ourselves. There's a very nice study going back to the twin telepathy example that Susan Blackmore carried out many years ago, where she was looking at this possibility of twin telepathy. But she carried out a study in two ways,
First of all, you'd have the twins, one twin in one room, one twin in another room, and the first twin could select a target stimulus and concentrate on it, and the second twin would guess and see whether they could get it right or not.
The first way she did it, which she knew was wrong methodologically, but she was interested in how the results would come out, she got statistically significant results. Now, what was wrong with the way she was doing it was that she was allowing the first twin to actually choose the stimulus from an array of possibilities. Under those circumstances where it's not random selection, you are allowing the first person to choose the target,
then it might look like telepathy is happening. When she did the same study properly, i.e. the target was selected randomly, no significant results. But I think that's a kind of nice demonstration of the fact that we often, with people we know very well and people that we get on with very well, we think along similar lines, you know, and that will often account for these apparent instances of telepathy. ♪
Chris, finally, we come from scientific backgrounds, but we want to keep an open mind. What is the evidence that you want to see that convinces you that this stuff, that telepathy really is a thing? Or put another way is, what is the evidence you see already that really condemns it?
One of the big challenges for skeptics is that you cannot prove that telepathy does not exist. It's always going to be the case that, okay, we might not have proven it so far, but the proof is just around the next corner. And maybe it really is. But there is the possibility if telepathy really does exist...
of being able to prove that it exists in a positive way. And that would basically be coming up with methodologies that produce large, robust, reliable effects that would convince the wider scientific community. Or better still, come up with a piece of technology that actually relies on these paranormal forces for its operation. How could sceptics argue with that?
I think one of the things that's worth emphasizing here is that for a long time now, there have been offers available from various skeptical groups for big cash payments for anybody who can demonstrate confidence
under properly controlled conditions, any kind of psychic ability. So at the moment, for example, there is a half a million dollars on offer and yet nobody has ever claimed the money. And I think that speaks volumes. A lot of the time, the people who are making the claims will say, oh, but we're not interested in money.
Well, fine, just get the money anyway and give it to a charity. Just do it. And also, it'd be an amazing scientific breakthrough. So just prove to the world that it's real if you can do that. I've spent a lot of my time actually directly testing paranormal claims. And guess what? The evidence never supports the claims, at least under the conditions of our test. And...
I'm afraid I'm not going to believe it until I can see that robust, replicable demonstration. Chris, thanks so much. Thank you. My thanks again to Chris French. And if you're looking for something to listen to next, I'd like to recommend Monday's edition of the audio long read, where Sophie McBain explores the ethical and medical questions around care for the world's most premature babies.
Just search Audio Long Read wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by Madeleine Finlay and Tom Glasser. It was sound designed by Jill Cox and the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then. Hi there, Jonathan Friedland here, columnist at The Guardian and host of our Politics Weekly America podcast.
I want to ask for your help. Guardian podcasts depend on the support of you, our listeners, to help fund coverage, especially in years like this one. We don't have a billionaire owner or shareholders holding the purse strings, which is how we stay independent. To support The Guardian, just click the link in the episode description. And once again, thank you. This is The Guardian. The Guardian.
Do you feel overwhelmed when it comes to makeup? Charlotte Tilbury has bottled 30 years of artistry into easy-to-choose, easy-to-use beauty products. You can't go wrong. They are flattering for everyone, everywhere. That's the reason why she is the queen of glow. Take her iconic Hollywood Flawless Filter. With one product, you can blur, smooth, and illuminate the look of skin. Plus, it's skincare-infused for clinically proven hydration for up to 24 hours. It's like nothing else.
Charlotte's products are magic confidence bottled. You can use code CT podcast 15 for 15% off on charlottetilbury.com. Plus new account holders get free delivery. This ad is brought to you by Charlotte Tilbury, USA customers only and valid until March 2nd, 2025. For full terms, conditions, and exclusions, see the Charlotte Tilbury website.