This new Findings talk summarises what we now know about telephone telepathy, the familiar experience of thinking of someone just before they ring, or knowing who is calling before you pick up. It is one of the commonest kinds of telepathy in the modern world, and over the past twenty-five years my colleagues and I, along with researchers in universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the US, have tested it experimentally. The results have been remarkably consistent: most people have experienced it, it works best between people who are emotionally close, and it does not fall off with distance. I think the evidence now shows that telephone telepathy is real.
Below you will find a full, human-friendly transcript of the talk, along with a list of references linking to the peer-reviewed papers, all of which are freely available.
This video and essay are part of my Findings series, designed to take you deeper into the actual science behind my worldview. Whether discussing the biochemistry of auxin or the evolution of consciousness, my goal is to share the rigorous research—both past and present—that often goes unseen. While I continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals (sheldrake.org/research), this platform allows me to connect specific discoveries to the bigger picture.
Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for this kind of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. Thank you!
Transcript
Telephone Telepathy
I’m talking about telephone telepathy, by which I mean the phenomenon whereby you think of someone for no apparent reason, and then they ring, and you may say, “That’s funny. I was just thinking about you.” Or you just know who it is when the phone rings, before you look at the caller ID or answer the phone.
Is it really telepathic? Is it just a coincidence? Do you just know people’s habits unconsciously and know when to expect a ring? Well, these are questions I’ve been looking into for 25 years, and there’s now been a great deal of research on this by myself and by a lot of people, which I’m going to summarize now.
How it began: cats that knew
My interest in this started, funnily enough, with cats, when I was doing research for my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I was doing a lot of research on unexplained abilities of animals, and people wrote in with their stories. I have a collection of about 6,000 stories of dogs, cats, and people with unexplained abilities. And many of these stories were, of course, about dogs and cats that knew when their owners were coming home. But to my surprise, some of them were about telephone calls.
One of them, for example, was about a cat called Godzilla. And the owner of Godzilla, David Waite, wrote to me saying that he used to go away several times a year and his parents would come and watch the house, looking after the cat and answering the many telephone calls. He would call home from North Africa, the Middle East, and continental Europe to check that all was well and pick up any messages. He said:
Whenever I called, my cat would run and sit beside the telephone as it was ringing, whereas she ignored the other calls my parents took on my behalf. And the calls were made at random times.
Godzilla responded this way before the telephone had been answered, so he couldn’t have been reacting to David’s voice.
Well, I heard quite a few other stories, and one of them, one of the most impressive, was about a telephone-answering cat that belonged to a professor at the University of California and his wife. She told me that she always knew when her husband was calling, because Whiskins, a silver tabby, would rush to the telephone and pull at the receiver. She said:
