I came across this rather interesting item today:
The Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit APRU at Goldsmiths, University of London is currently engaged in a collaborative research project with Dr Rupert Sheldrake investigating the phenomenon of “telephone telepathy”. This is the fairly common experience of feeling that you know who is calling you on the telephone before you answer it – even on occasions when you had no particular reason to expect a call from that person. Obviously, skeptics and believers in the paranormal have different explanations for what is going on in such situations, but Rupert Sheldrake claims to have demonstrated that a genuinely paranormal phenomenon may be in operation here. The only way to find out is to carry out well controlled empirical studies and that is what researchers at the APRU are doing.
Read the full article at Public Parapsychology (and if you live in the U.K., you may want to volunteer).
The reason I found this interesting is that although I am normally oblivious to anything “paranormal”, I think I may have had a peculiar form of this when I was a kid. Bear in mind that back in those days we were on a four-party line, with a manual switchboard (they didn’t get dial where I lived until 1960), but it was a Michigan Bell exchange and all the ring current came from the same local ringing generators. Our signal on the party line was two short rings, and it was the same for any incoming call, local or long distance, and we rarely got long distance calls. Nevertheless, it seemed that whenever one of my aunts or anyone else was calling long distance, I’d hear the first double ring and immediately say “that’s a long distance call.” My folks would ask how I knew and I’d just say that the ring somehow sounded different, although it really didn’t – on an objective level I knew it was exactly the same ring, yet somehow it “sounded different” to me (and not to anyone else) when it was an incoming long distance call.
I think I had pretty much outgrown this by the time the new crossbar exchange replaced the old manual switchboard, and as I say, I am normally a person who couldn’t see anything supernatural in a haunted graveyard on Halloween (I could probably walk through the most haunted place on the planet and not see or feel a thing, although I’m not in any great rush to test that theory). But when I was a small child, and a long distance call came in, somehow I just knew. So, I will be very interested to see how these experiments turn out.
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