Love Telepathy: Is It Real?

Feb 12, 2013 06:00 PM ET // by Sheila M. Eldred

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Take the experiment that started Beischel and Boccuzzi’s relationship, which is typical of the type of research parapsychologists conduct: Beischel was in a room by herself, unable to see Boccuzzi. Boccuzzi was instructed to gaze at her intently on a closed circuit screen that showed her image intermittently.
The data showed Beischel’s physiological responses increasing when Boccuzzi could see her, and spiking the second he couldn’t -- as if her body was saying, “Oh, where did he go?” she said.
And subjects who are emotionally close usually show a greater effect than strangers.
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Radin’s Love Study, published in 2008, showed that directing intention toward a loved one (in this case, cancer patients) can activate the recipient’s nervous system.
In British expert Rupert Sheldrake’s studies of telephone telepathy, emotional closeness was shown to be a stronger predictor of success than physical closeness. Participants were given a pool of four friends who may place a phone call; when the phone rings, the recipient guessed which one it is. Because those experiments are done at a distance between the subjects, it eliminates forces that could be involved like electromagnetism or gravity.
In the late 1980’s, a debate raged over the results of an technique used to test for telepathy called the Ganzfeld.
“[Pyschologist Ray] Hyman and the other skeptics simply lost the Ganzfeld debate,” said Chris Carter, author of Science and Psychic Phenomena: the Fall of the House of Skeptics.  “Telepathy is a fact, regardless of what the deniers will tell you. A central point of my book is that the controversy is not really about evidence.  The ‘skeptics’ simply ignore the evidence; when they can't ignore it, they deny it, and when they can't deny it, they try to suppress it.”
Meanwhile, with the rise of quantum biology, Radin can start to tug at the beginning of an explanation for the correlation that rises between people who are physically separated. Telepathy, he says, looks something like quantum entanglement: When things are correlated at a distance without energy transferred between the two points.
“We don’t have an explanation, but you can almost see a road map for how an explanation could come about,” Radin said. “At least it’s no longer seen as impossible.”