Citation

An experiment was conducted for detecting telepathy by classical conditioning. The unconditioned stimulus was a mild electric shock, the conditioned stimulus was a telepathic message, and the conditioned and unconditioned responses were the sudden rise of skin conductance. The first experiment consisted of 50 sessions of about 10 shocks each. The measured data showed a significant excess response rate (p c.01) in the time regions where the conditioned responses were expected. Telepathic reaction times were estimated and compared with reaction times to auditory stimuli. In the second experiment, a comparison was made with a situation in which there was no sender, that is, where nonchance responses could be attributed to precognition instead of telepathy. There were significantly more responses (p <.O5) in the telepathic mode than in the precognitive mode, so the telepathic interpretation seems more likely. The third experiment was an attempted replication of the first experiment, again with 50 sessions. The replication was not successful, since no excess responses were found in the expected time regions. There was a tendency of intrasubject decline, which makes doubtful that the outcome of Experiment 1 can be attributed to classical conditioning.