The Telepathy Tapes

[FatPhil]

The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.

That said, what I would want to see is a control experiment with a non-telepath in the sender position, and the same receiver.

Nah, I want to be the reciever, and I want my share of the $500000!

EDIT: Also, I don't think a tester should be the receiver - because that invites claims of deliberate bias.

 

[JMartJr]

The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.

Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.


Also, more generally and not in response to Mendel's post, it is worth keeping in mind that there is deliberate cheating, and there is also not knowing that you are getting the information through other channels, such as hearing what the sound of the numeral being drown is and inferring the number subconsciously. Not all ways to get a false positive result involve deliberate falsification.

 

[Ann K]

I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.

 

[Giddierone]

I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.

I agree. But, how does she explain the rounds where she did write a number then? Did she "get" something? If so how?

The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.

 

[Ann K]

The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.

This was designed by students, remember? I hope later class discussions made them think about what they should have done.

 

[Giddierone]

Oh, the test subject's name is Mr. Deviner - like Diviner....

 

[Mendel]

Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.

Mentalism acts—stage telepathy—work by setting up a system in advance where a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code. This obviously requires that the receiver knows about the code, so they're not going to be fooled into thinking it's telepathy. So then the test team knows it's fake.

If the receiver isn't a stooge, then they have to cheat some other way, e.g. through stochastic prediction or by controlling which number the sender reveals after the recipient has committed.

 

[Giddierone]

a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code.

Like the Zancigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Agnes_Zancig

They used a secret code to perform demonstrations of telepathy. Mrs Zancig, with her back turned, 10ft away, or even in another room, could divine letters, calculate numbers, or describe images from Mr Zancig, writing them on a slate tablet.

 

[Ann K]

Skeptical Inquirer's Stuart Vyse writes about "Upward Bound", supposedly written by autistic Woody Brown using the point-to-the-letter method.

Now, Woody has produced his first novel, which was published by a division of Penguin Random House, one of the legendary "big five" publishing companies.

This is a truly remarkable achievement, but not for the reasons most people think. Rather, it is remarkable that this mother-son pair has been able to mislead so many people and get this far. I realize that sounds harsh, but this view is based in evidence provided by the Today Show videographers. Often the video footage of nonspeaking individuals being subjected to RPM or other spelling methods does not give a clear view of the letter board held by the communication partner, and in other cases, the autistic individual genuinely appears to be tapping out recognizable words and sentences. In contrast, the Today Show staff gave us an unusually clear view of Woody's typing, and the results were devastating. The full six-minute Today Show segment on Upward Bound is shown in the YouTube video below, and the clearest examples of his typing begin approximately at the 3:00 minute mark.


Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tLz-5ZEOT80&time_continue=1&source_ve_path=NzY3NTg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fskepticalinquirer.org%2F


Shockingly, for anyone who pays even the slightest attention, it is obvious there is a problem. Woody's taps on the letter board bear no relation to the words attributed to him. U.K. YouTuber Jill Bearup did a detailed analysis of an earlier video of Woody and his mother, and she pointed out that (a) the number of taps Woody makes for a word rarely match the number of letters in the word attributed to him by his mother, and (b) the actual letters tapped are gibberish. A screenshot from Bearup's video is shown in the banner of this article, with the words attributed to Woody at the bottom and Bearup's best determination of the letters typed at the top. Bearup also points out two common flaws of the spelling methods: Mary Brown does not hold the board steady, and, even more troubling, Woody is often not looking at the letter board.

 

[Ann K]

Note FYI: I get error messages for Jill Bearup's video on the above topic from Safari, but it works just fine on Chrome.

 

[Giddierone]

Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?

There's a good estimate the characters he types here:
Source: https://youtu.be/wwofBlN9PDs?si=BvSmSqzcTEriIksy&t=433