Do you know who's calling before you even pick up the telephone? Or maybe you think of someone and minutes later they phone you unexpectedly.
It seems the 1970s pop band The Nolan Sisters do, and it may not be unusual for the rest of us either.
According to a study by British scientist Rupert Sheldrake, telephone telepathy does exist and now he wants to find out if the phenomenon extends to text messaging.
In a controlled telephone trial, participants listed four relatives or friends, who were then called at random and told to ring the test subject. The trial participants had to identify the caller before answering the phone, and the ”hit rate” was 45 per cent, Mr. Sheldrake told the British Association for the Advancement of Science this week.
”The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one,” he said.
The experiment was replicated before the cameras with The Nolan Sisters, a British pop band who had mild international success in the late 1970s. The sisters had a 50-per-cent success rate at guessing who was on the other end of the line.
But Mr. Sheldrake's so-called proof of telephone telepathy was greeted with skepticism by other scientists, who said the small overall test sample (63 people) did not prove a widespread phenomenon. That was compounded by the fact that only four of the subjects were filmed for the research, which was funded by Trinity College, Cambridge.
Mr. Sheldrake, whose published books include Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At, believes the universe has its own inherent memory and that beings can tap into that extended mind.
His next experiments will see if people can predict who has text-messaged them before checking their cell phone.
