TELEPATHY has been the focus of serious scientific research for well over a century but proof remains elusive.
Despite its detractors telepathy has had several prominent supporters, including Sigmund Freud, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who carried out his own experiment in space.
Interest in the subject boomed in the late 19th century, when all types of psychic phenomenon were being investigated. The Society for Psychical Research was set up in 1882 after an experiment involving five sisters.
Alice, Emily, Kathleen, Mary and Maud Creery, daughters of a clergyman, had performed seemingly telepathic feats that attracted the attention of Professor William Barrett, who reported his observations in the journal Nature in 1881.
It took several illustrious panels of the society six years to establish ? having at first declared the sisters to be 100 per cent genuine ? that, far from having telepathic or paranormal powers, they were hoaxers who had used a verbal code.
Conan Doyle was a fervent believer in spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research and did telepathic experiments with a Mrs Ball.
The scientist Marie Curie also took the possibility of telepathy, as well as levitation, seriously.
Freud damaged his scientific credibility when he offered public support for telepathy, describing it as a primitive faculty largely lost during evolution. When questioned about it he said: ?My acceptance of telepathy is my own affair, like my Judaism and my passion for smoking.?
The word telepathy first appeared in 1882, when Frederic Myers decided to combine the Greek words for ?distant? (tele) and ?feeling? (pathe).
Among the most celebrated experiments were those carried out by J. B. Rhine during the 1930s. He claimed to have proved telepathy after taking cards bearing five simple symbols and getting a psychic to identify a chosen card seen only from the back. Anyone with a success rate above 20 per cent was taken as proof of the powers of telepathy. The experiment was later discredited when it was shown that he had misunderstood the laws of probability.
More recently, the Ganzfeld tests, started in 1974, involved potential telepaths, one a sender and one a receiver, being placed in a soundproof room while wearing earphones and having their eyes covered. The sender is then supposed to choose one of four targets and the receiver to say which was chosen.
Supporters claim a success rate above that likely by chance alone but the tests have been criticised as lacking scientific rigour.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/ ... 24,00.html
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