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Telepathy

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Telepathy is the direct passing of thought from one person, the sender or agent, to another, the receiver or percipient, without using the usual senses. It is counted as a form of extrasensory perception (ESP).[1] It is also called thought transference.[2] For Spiritualists the idea matters in two ways: critics have offered it as an explanation of mediums' messages that needs no spirits, and Spiritualists themselves use it to mark the line between psychic work and mediumship.[3][4]

Description

Telepathy and other forms of ESP

The term "extrasensory perception" was coined by J. B. Rhine of Duke University, who led the effort in the twentieth century to give psychic experience a working vocabulary. In that scheme telepathy is communication from one mind to another. It is set apart from clairvoyance, which is perceiving something beyond the senses without help from any other mind, and from precognition, which is perceiving future events.[5] The distinction is worth learning: telepathy always needs a second living mind as the source of the information.

Early psychical researchers also separated spontaneous telepathy, reported in everyday life, from experimental telepathy, studied in tests.[6]

Testing telepathy

A classic test uses a special pack of 25 cards made up of five sets of five symbols. The sender concentrates on one card at a time, or on a random order of the five symbols, while the receiver, kept apart by a screen or a greater distance, tries to name the symbol.[1]

Later research has used the ganzfeld, which its practitioners describe as a technique for enhancing an anomalous form of communication they call "psi".[7]

Scope

What it includes

  • Spontaneous experiences of apparently shared thoughts[6]
  • Experimental tests with a sender and a receiver[1][6]

What it is not

  • It is not clairvoyance or precognition, which in Rhine's terms do not depend on another person's mind.[5]
  • In Spiritualist teaching it is not mediumship: telepathy links living minds, while mediumship needs contact with the spirit world.[4]
  • It is not proven. Some parapsychology studies have produced favourable results, but scores well above chance are extremely rare, especially as testing methods have become more rigorous.[1]

Research

Research findings on telepathy and related "psi" effects remain disputed, and published reviews have reached opposite conclusions, as the studies below show.

  • Ganzfeld studies. A 1999 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 30 ganzfeld ESP studies from seven independent laboratories and found no effect above chance; its authors concluded that the ganzfeld did not then offer a replicable way of producing ESP in the laboratory.[8] In reply, Lance Storm of the University of Adelaide and S. Ertel combined a larger set of 79 studies and reported a significant overall effect, concluding that the ganzfeld appears to be a replicable technique.[9]
  • A 2010 meta-analysis led by Storm reported a significant effect across 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008, and found that selected participants, such as believers in the paranormal and meditators, did better than unselected participants, but only in the ganzfeld.[7] The psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon criticised the analysis, arguing that it created an appearance of consistency by removing outliers and combining databases, and that parapsychology will be scientifically accepted only when it offers a positive theory supported by independently replicable evidence.[10]
  • Brain imaging. A 2008 Harvard study used fMRI in an experiment designed to give positive results if telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition existed. To give favourable conditions it included twins and other closely related pairs, and used emotional images. The brain responded in the same way to "psi" and "non-psi" images, and the authors described this as the strongest evidence yet against such phenomena.[11]

Traditions and lineage

The term telepathy was coined in 1882 by the British psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers, after his work with Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick and William F. Barrett on the possibility of thought transference. They defined it as the passing of thought independently of the recognised channels of sense.[6] The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in the same year, and similar societies followed in the United States and most European countries.[12] From 1889 to 1891 Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick ran thought-transference experiments at Brighton with hypnotised subjects; critics in Copenhagen later suggested that unconscious whispering, combined with heightened senses, could explain the results.[6]

From the 1930s to the 1960s, J. B. Rhine's parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in the United States attracted considerable interest.[12] Sigmund Freud took a long personal interest in telepathy and wrote on it in the 1920s, but kept it outside psychoanalysis, which he wanted to be seen as scientific rather than mystical.[13]

Context

Within Spiritualism

Telepathy has played three different parts in Spiritualist thought, and a student needs to keep them apart.[3][14][4]

A rival explanation. Most scientists treated Spiritualism as delusion, fraud or mental disorder, but some offered a more natural-sounding account: that séance messages came from the medium reading the thoughts of people in the circle, not from spirits.[3] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took this view for a time. After joining the Society for Psychical Research he became convinced that telepathy was real, and wondered whether mediums were picking up the thoughts of grieving sitters about their dead. Reading Myers's work on survival helped move him on, and in 1916 he accepted spirit communication as genuine.[15]

An analogy for spirit influence. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC) in the United States turns the idea round. It describes a spirit's influence on a medium as impressions or ideas passed directly to the medium's brain, and points out that scientists accept that "thought transference" can happen and call it telepathy. The same source says that no one, in the body or in spirit, can influence another person by telepathy unless that person in some way invites or permits it.[14]

A boundary marker. Today Spiritualists use telepathy to mark the edge of mediumship: psychic work is seen as telepathy between living minds, while mediumship needs contact with the spirit world.[4] This matters because the Spiritualists' National Union in Britain says the purpose of mediumship is to offer proof of survival.[16] See Psychic reading.

In Australian Spiritualism

In Sydney in the late 1970s, Paul Gillen recorded that some Spiritualists saw a large element of telepathy in psychometry.[17] In Canberra, a medium told Matt Tomlinson she had been troubled to find that most local mediums were working psychically, reaching the minds of living people telepathically rather than contacting the spirit world.[18]

A Spiritualist perspective

For Spiritualists, telepathy matters mostly as a boundary marker. If a medium tells a sitter only what is already in the sitter's mind, that may be the meeting of two living minds rather than contact with someone who has passed. Early sceptics raised exactly this question, and it is a fair one; Conan Doyle wrestled with it for years before accepting spirit communication. The most convincing evidence, from this point of view, is information the sitter did not know and could later check.

Spiritualism has no quarrel with telepathy as such. If it exists, it is simply another of the mind's capacities, and the NSAC's comparison shows how naturally Spiritualists have reached for it to explain how spirit impressions arrive. But a thoughtful teacher would not let students blur the two. Good mediums keep the question in front of them and test their own work against it. Honest practice means saying plainly when you believe you are working psychically and when you believe spirit is present, and never claiming either with more confidence than the evidence allows.

Telepathy in Australia

Research

Australian researcher Lance Storm, of the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide, has been an author of several of the meta-analyses described above.[9][7]

The law

Section 40 of South Australia's Summary Offences Act 1953 makes it an offence for a person, intending to defraud, to claim to act as a spiritualist or medium, or to claim to use telepathy, clairvoyance or similar powers. The maximum penalty is a $10,000 fine or two years' imprisonment. The offence requires an intent to defraud.[19]

Safety and good practice

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Britannica Editors. "Telepathy". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Read from the Internet Archive copy of 2 January 2026 (accessed 11 October 2026).
  2. ↑ Britannica Editors. "Extrasensory perception". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Read from the Internet Archive copy of 27 December 2025 (accessed 11 October 2026).
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Buescher, John B. "Spiritualism". Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Gale, 2005), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Tomlinson, Matt. Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience. Earth: punctum books, 2024, p. 40. Open access under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (accessed 12 October 2026).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Melton, J. Gordon. "Western Esoteric Family II: Spiritualism & New Age". Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 "Telepathy". Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 11 October 2026).
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Storm, Lance, P. E. Tressoldi and L. Di Risio. "Meta-analysis of free-response studies, 1992–2008: assessing the noise reduction model in parapsychology". Psychological Bulletin 136, no. 4 (2010): 471–485. doi:10.1037/a0019457. Abstract read via Europe PMC (accessed 11 October 2026).
  8. ↑ Milton, J. and R. Wiseman. "Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer". Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 4 (1999): 387–391. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.125.4.387. Abstract read via Europe PMC (accessed 11 October 2026).
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Storm, Lance and S. Ertel. "Does psi exist? Comments on Milton and Wiseman's (1999) meta-analysis of ganzfeld research". Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 3 (2001): 424–433. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.127.3.424. Abstract read via Europe PMC (accessed 11 October 2026).
  10. ↑ Hyman, Ray. "Meta-analysis that conceals more than it reveals: comment on Storm et al. (2010)". Psychological Bulletin 136, no. 4 (2010): 486–490. doi:10.1037/a0019676. Abstract read via Europe PMC (accessed 11 October 2026).
  11. ↑ Moulton, S. T. and S. M. Kosslyn. "Using neuroimaging to resolve the psi debate". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20, no. 1 (2008): 182–192. doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.20.1.182. Abstract read via Europe PMC (accessed 11 October 2026).
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Britannica Editors. "Parapsychological phenomenon". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Most recently revised and updated by Amy McKenna. Read from the Internet Archive copy of 18 January 2026 (accessed 11 October 2026).
  13. ↑ de Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie. "Telepathy". International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 11 October 2026).
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 National Spiritualist Association of Churches. "Frequently Asked Questions". NSAC (no date shown; accessed 12 October 2026).
  15. ↑ "Spiritualism" (section on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained (Gale, 2003), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
  16. ↑ Spiritualists' National Union. "Mediumship". SNU (no date shown; accessed 12 October 2026).
  17. ↑ Gillen, Paul. The Spiritualists: Gnosis and Ideology. PhD thesis, School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, 1981, PDF p. 146 (accessed 12 October 2026).
  18. ↑ Tomlinson, Matt. Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience. Earth: punctum books, 2024, p. 157. Open access under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (accessed 12 October 2026).
  19. ↑ Summary Offences Act 1953 (SA), section 40, "Acting as a spiritualist, medium etc with intent to defraud". Authorised version current from 1 July 2026. South Australian Legislation (accessed 11 October 2026).

Further reading

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