Shared context
People who know each other well think along similar lines, so matching thoughts are more likely than they feel.
Tested, indistinguishable from clairvoyance
Telepathy
Telepathy is the claimed ability of transferring thought directly between minds. Status: tested, indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: medium, clairvoyance, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, empathy, astral projection, healing and aura reading.
What people describe
Telepathy is described as knowing what someone is thinking or feeling without being told: sensing that a particular person is about to call, finishing a partner's thought, or receiving an image that someone far away is concentrating on.
How it entered the record
The novelist Upton Sinclair published "Mental Radio" in 1930, describing drawing experiments with his wife, Mary. From the 1960s the Maimonides Medical Center in New York ran dream-telepathy experiments in which a sender concentrated on a picture while a receiver slept; the ganzfeld experiments that followed in the 1970s used mild sensory deprivation and became the most studied test of the idea.
Free, one email to start
Get the letter
One email to start, then occasional notes when something is worth reading — no daily sends.
The experiment
The same ganzfeld protocol as clairvoyance; the two are not separated experimentally
How it was run
Identical: sender, receiver, four images, one target.
Sample
Shared with the clairvoyance literature
Result
Shares both the positive meta-analysis and the failed replication. No experiment has ever distinguished telepathy from clairvoyance, because in the design there is nothing to distinguish.
Worth noticing: two abilities described as different phenomena are measured by one experiment that cannot tell them apart.
Claim
Transferring thought directly between minds
Word from
Greek tele "distant" + patheia "feeling"
Status
Tested, indistinguishable from clairvoyance
Where the word comes from
Coined in 1882 by Frederic Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research — the same year the Society itself was founded.
What psychology offers instead
Remembering the hits
The call that came when you thought of someone is memorable; the thousands of times you thought of someone and nobody called are not.
Unconscious cues
Facial expressions, timing and tone carry more information than people realise.
How to test it fairly yourself
The sender should be in a different room with a target chosen by a random process, and the receiver should rank four possible targets before anyone who knows the answer is present. Pre-register how many sessions you will run so that you cannot stop on a lucky streak.