Manchester Uni to test virtual telepathy machine

[tkingdoll]

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/...ses/telepathy/

Project researcher David Wilde, of the School of Psychological Sciences, said: "By using this technology we aim to provide the most objective study of telepathy to date. Our aim is not to prove or disprove its existence but to create an experimental method which stands up to scientific scrutiny."

Comments? Anyone see any flaws in the proposal?

[Admin]

I think the idea looks sound in principle - it's like a variation on the auto ganzfield set up.

Is there not an inherent problem with using objects that might have emotional preferences attached to them that would make the receiver choose them more often? Of course if the sender is presented them at randon it may negate that problem. I'd prefer a virtual dice operated by a true random number generator.

Still, it does seem to be a method that offers the potential for complete blinding and randomisation. We'd need to see more details of the set up though.

Now someone will tell me why I'm wrong.....

[Mojo]

For some reason I read the title as Manchester United to test...

As if Ronaldo needs to be able to read Rooney's mind.

[huw-l]

Is there not an inherent problem with using objects that might have emotional preferences attached to them that would make the receiver choose them more often? Of course if the sender is presented them at randon it may negate that problem. I'd prefer a virtual dice operated by a true random number generator.

It's only a press release so it's a bit short on details. But I read it as the objects being randomly presented (presumably from a larger pool of pre-rendered objects). The problem of emotional preference should be easy to remove with decent control runs and a large enough sample.

Of course whether they are going to put in decent controls is another matter entirely.

[huw-l]

so a quick scurry round the manchester university website brings up the following useful bits of info.

The principle investigator Dr Craig Murray
http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk/staff/CraigMurray
His Publications:
http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.u...aspx?ID=121371

also his funding comes from the Bial Foundation who appear to have been spun out of the phramaceutical company of the same name. http://www.bial.com/gca/?id=15

so he seems like a real scientist (at least from the titles of the papers, I haven't had time to look through the abstracts yet) and his funding body don't appear to be especially woo.

I wonder if we should let the good Doctor know how interested we are in his research? If his experiment is well designed the results will probably end up in the Mongolian Journal of Negative Results, an august journal to which I have sadly let my subscription lapse.

[wollery]

a true random number generator.

A what?

Is there any such thing?

[huw-l]

geiger counter as a seed to a random number generating algorithm.

the machines they use on the national lottery aren't bad.

I suspect you are thinking that any purely mathematical (e.g computer code) scheme cannot generate real random numbers and you'd be right.

Most systems use some physical device to provide the randomness and an algorithm to get the answers in the range you are looking for.

For example a computer stocks up on randomness by harvesting the least significant bit of timing events like keystrokes, real-time clock ticks, and network packet timestamps.

[Admin]

Yes, computers generate pseudo-random numbers but there are machines that truly do give random sequences.