[ExI] Psi (no need to read this post you already knowwhatitsays )

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/7/2010 3:22 PM, spike wrote:

>> >	...Also, with the phone calls, I would regularly yell to my mom to
>> >answer the phone, and yell who it was calling, and*then*  the phone would
>> > ring. This really freaked my mom out and she finally asked me to stop doing
>> > it. This was in the last 70's and early 80's...

> Perhaps your young ears were able to detect the ultra high frequency sound
> that the 70s era telephone electromechanical devices would make a couple of
> seconds before the phone rang.  Recall those things had a capacitor in them,
> which had to charge, and the discharge cycle would cause the ring to be the
> usual intermittent signal.

Yes, this sort of explanation is just the kind of thing real 
parapsychologists immediately look for when examining "natural 
experiments." And such explanations can sometimes be overlooked and only 
discovered later. But tell me, Spike, how does this account for 
controlled double blinded tests where you wait by the phone for a call 
from one of several randomized callers at a certain time, hear the ring, 
name the caller, then answer--all of this under observation. Pure chance 
result, right? What else can it be? But wait--Does the magic capacitor 
sound different when it's Aunt Jane or Uncle Bill? Maybe so--do tell. 
See the following, and deconstruct away:

<http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Telepathy/Nolan_abs.html>

quote:

< Abstract - Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 68, 168-172 (2004)
A FILMED EXPERIMENT ON TELEPHONE TELEPATHY WITH THE NOLAN SISTERS
by RUPERT SHELDRAKE, HUGO GODWIN AND SIMON ROCKELL

ABSTRACT:

The ability of people to guess who is calling on the telephone has 
recently been tested experimentally in more than 850 trials. The results 
were positive and hugely significant statistically. Participants had 
four potential callers in distant locations. At the beginning of each 
trial, remote from the participant, the experimenter randomly selected 
one of the callers by the throw of a die, and asked the chosen caller to 
ring the participant. When the phone rang, the participant guessed who 
the caller was before picking up the receiver.

By chance, about 25% of the guesses would have been correct. In fact, on 
average 42% were correct. The present experiment was an attempt to 
replicate previous tests, and was filmed for television. The participant 
and her callers were all sisters, formerly members of the Nolan Sisters 
band, popular in Britain in the 1980s. We conducted 12 trials in which 
the participant and her callers were 1 km apart. Six out of 12 guesses 
(50%) were correct. The results were significant at the p=0.05 level.


For full text in html or pdf formats linked at site>

Spike's expected response: well, hmmm, there's got to be a technical 
reason for this, but I've got to feed the kid now so I'll think about it 
next week if I can remember. My good pal John Clark's response: That 
Sheldrake idiot is a fool and made it all up and anyway they cheated and 
it's all BULLSHIT, I'm not wasting any time reading this crap. My 
response: Hmm, potentially interesting but the numbers are too small to 
be anything but extremely provisional, let's see some more replications 
by other people.

Damien Broderick