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Mini 'e-mail telepathy' experiment

Delusions_O_Grandeur

Unwilling Skeptic
Delusions_O_Grandeur
Joined
Jan 1, 2007
Messages
236
I've been hanging around here for quite a while, finding nothing but negative outcomes from scientific studies of the paranormal. Nontheless, all things woo will probably always interest me. I'd like to do a small experiment on e-mail telepathy. Who wants to try?



Sensing the arrival of e-mail

According to popular belief, people can sense when somebody calls or e-mails them. Reproducible scientific evidence of this phenomenon does not exist so skeptics put it down to a combination of predictable calling times and selective memory.

The hypothesis is that a person can sense when another person wants to contact him in order to communicate by normal means.

The experiment is carried out by two people with access to the internet. A simple but addictive computer game that can run in a window is also required. Before starting they have to agree on a time period. Starting at the beginning of the time period person A flips a coin every 2 minutes. If it's heads person A sends an e-mail to person B, if it's tails person A distracts himself from the communication altogether by playing a computer game. Starting at the beginning of the time period person B tries to sense if person A sent an e-mail every 2 minutes. It's recommended to take no more than 5 seconds to 'sense' the incoming communcation. Person B then writes down the guess with a Y for an e-mail and an N for no e-mail. When the time period has ended person B sends his results to person A and both persons check what the chance to score the recorded amount of hits or better.



This setup is very sensitive to cheating. But it's really preliminary anyway. If the result is negative the lack of controls does not invalidate that conclusion.
 
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MMmmpf. You assume that email is delivered immediately, and that your email program will pick it up immediately.

It isn't, you know. It can take anywhere from seconds to hours for a message to maje its way through the net.

Hours is unusual, but it does happen. It can also take days if there's a server problem in the route.
 
MortFurd said:
MMmmpf. You assume that email is delivered immediately, and that your email program will pick it up immediately.

It isn't, you know. It can take anywhere from seconds to hours for a message to maje its way through the net.

Hours is unusual, but it does happen. It can also take days if there's a server problem in the route.
Click to expand...

This is ideal.

If you anticipate the arrival of emails, what you have is precognition, not telepathy.

If you sense when an email is sent even when it takes hours to arrive, you have telepathy, not precognition.

If we design the experiment sufficiently carelessly, we should be able to avoid demonstrating that there is evidence of neither. :wink:

(Can you not get the time of sending out of the header of an email?)
 
Just a thought, but if the non-instant nature of emails is an issue then why not use an instant messenging program like Yahoo messenger?
 
Beau said:
If you sense when an email is sent even when it takes hours to arrive, you have telepathy, not precognition.
Click to expand...
Assuming you never look at the send time. If you do, then you might have been precognizing your look. Also, you might have remote viewed the sender when he sent it. Also, you might have inadvertently affected the time using psychokinesis.

There shall be no distinguishing the various forms of ESP.

~~ Paul
 
It boils down to this: I just test my hypothesis, to keep life simple. The hypothesis says person B can sense when the mail is being sent. Whether it arrives or not is a moot issue because of that. Person B will just have to sense and write down the his observation at the end of each trial without confirmation per trial. There can be a lot of parapsychological debate about that but I think psi research becomes really hopeless once you start drifting away from what is actually claimed based on experience.

Speaking of experience, with 2 minute trials I'm not actually testing normal communication. It would be better to send or not send one mail each day for a week or so. Sounds like a lot of work, but for person B it boils down to a few seconds work at the end of each day.
 
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I am not sure why it has to be playing a game like this. Wouldn't it be easier and less prone to cheating or other problems if a person had simply the task of knowing they would be sent a few emails a day at some random time and they were supposed to guess periodically whether they thought a message had been or to simply to report when they get a feeling that one had been sent?

Then you would be able to see if this matched the time or was very close to it (sa within 5 to 10 minutes).


The problem with these kinds of tests is that they're basically logical, very simple and straight forward and don't involve much in the way of subjective judgment.

Such experiments don't seem to work well with psychics. For some reason the only ones that kinda seem to work are ones where someone transmits an image of flowers or something and another person draws shapes which they can then claim looked kinda like one of the flowers...

Those kind seem to agree more with psychic powers than the simple "yes/no" kind :p
 
Although, when you have to send a random sequence of images and a judge has to determine which sent image corresponds to which received image while he does not know which is actually which.... It also goes awry.

I think that matching times is a good idea if people actually get strong feelings now and then: 'Hey I got mail!'. In my case it's more like this. I log into my mailbox, and before logging in I got the feeling whether or not I got new mail (excluding spam). With my memory being unreliable I need to test this ofcourse. In my case, the mail-or-no-mail per day would be a better idea.

All I need to find is a person who will send or not send a mail randomly once per day. I'll make a separate e-mail adress and at the end of the day just log in. Before logging in I write down whether I feel if there is mail or not. Cheating is easy (just log in, read and lie).. but I'm trying to answer the question for myself. If the result is negative I don't think I need to provide evidence that it is negative anyway. If it's positive I'd do it again with proper controls (password protected inbox, experimenter won't let me log in until I gave my answer). I should get things like these over with quickly before I start dreaming about the MDC again.
 
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Delusions_O_Grandeur said:
Hmm... It seems I need to recruit my sender elsewhere.
Click to expand...

Oh I'll help you out if you want. By no means do I want to imply that I'd in any way try to avoid or discourage any kind of research like this. However, I'm pretty confident that my prediction of what will happen will be accurate. I'd actually be extremely surprised if it turned out to actually prove anything.
 
If you want to try this, I'd suggest the following:
1. Run your test over a period of a week or so.
2. Set up an email account on the web - a free mailer of some sort, with a web interface.
3. You use the aaccount for a while before the test begins. Use it to exchange messages with your test partner.
4. At the beginning of the test week, a third person changes the password to the web mail account so that neither you nor your partner can access that mail box.
5. You partner sends messages at random times on random days, as selected by the third person. That messages were sent appropriately can be verified later.
6. During the week, you take notes of the day and time when you think a message was sent. Just write it down on a sheet of paper that you keep with you. Any time the feeling comes over you that there's a message, write down the day and time.
7. At the end of the week, you send a copy of your list to your partner and the third person. The third person opens the email account and checks to see that your partner sent the messages at the correct times (the send date and time is noted in the email headers.) The third person also makes printout or other permanent copy of the messages in the web mail box.
8. Third person sends the password to both you and your partner. Now all three of you can compare sent messages, received messages, and time of "message signals" to see if you got any hits.

You'll want to check for matches at send times and at receive times. If you get hits on one but not the other, you might have telepathy (send times) or something else (receive times, reading the mind of the mail server?)

That somewhat reduces the risk of cheating, though you and your partner may still work something out - such as partner claims he couldn't send at a particular time (work, etc) and send messages at a pre-agreed time with you. Such cheating would, however show up as consistently wrong send times compared to the times dictated by your third person.

Your sending person could also use bcc to send a copy to a different address that you could read, of course. Not much way to detect that.

But, of course, you want an honest test and wouldn't stoop to cheating. Right?
 
MortFurd said:
But, of course, you want an honest test and wouldn't stoop to cheating. Right?
Click to expand...

Yes, that why I also don't bother with any 3rd party controls for the first attempt. I'm not very confident either.

It's important that the test replicates the conditions for my experience. (To increase chances and reduce excuses) I've never had a feeling 'somebody is sending me an e-mail right now' or 'A mail arrived in my inbox'. Specifically it goes like this:

1) I go to the hotmail front page.
2) I fill out my log-in information.
3) Before actually logging in, I usually think for a second: "Hmm.. do I have mail?" At that moment I get a feeling whether I do or do not have mail.

I would use this test protocol:

Uncontrolled version:

1) At the beginning of his day, the sender tosses a coin. Heads = send mail, tails = do not send mail
2) I log into my mail account after sensing the status of my inbox and try to sense if there's mail.
3) I write down whether I was right or wrong.

Controlled version:

1) The sender creates a mail-account for me.
2) At the beginning of his day, the sender tosses a coin. Heads = send mail, tails = do not send mail
3) I go to the login page for my mailaccount and fill in my name and then try to sense if I got a mail.
4) I send my answer to the sender.
5) The sender sends me the password.
6) I check my answer.
7) The sender changes the password of the mailaccount. (back to 2)
 
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