Mass telepathy: What's on your minds?

Wiseman brings the paranormal to the masses

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Richard Wiseman has spent most of his career probing the paranormal for mass audiences on British radio and television.

But earlier this week, as he prepared to conduct what he called "the world's largest telepathy experiment," the former magician sought to play down expectations by conceding that brain waves may be bunkum.

GALLERY What were they thinking?

"I am pretty sceptical, the results from the lab are pretty ambiguous," said Wiseman, a parapsychologist at the University of Hertfordshire whose research interests run the gamut from lying and deception to intuition and false memory syndrome.

Wiseman's latest foray into psychic phenomena has taken him, aptly, to London's Museum of the Unknown on the south bank of the River Thames.

The museum served as a venue on Thursday for a day-long series of trials -- 10 in all, each lasting half an hour -- in which members of the public were asked to psychically transmit a series of images on a projection screen to someone sitting in sensory isolation 19 stories above the riverbank in a neighbouring building.

In ESP terms, Wiseman was leading a sort of brain-wave blitzkrieg, encouraging crowds of "senders" to band together in mental synchronicity on the premise that multiple minds are better than one when it comes to zapping thoughts across space.

Wiseman is hoping to shed new light on the question of whether using large numbers of people -- all concentrating on a single image at the same time -- boosts the chance of successful transmission.

The last time an experiment of this type was attempted, Wiseman said, was in 1971 at a Grateful Dead concert, when an image was projected on a screen above the frenetic crowd and two professional psychics tried to receive it. "One did well and guessed it," Wiseman said, "the other didn't."

As in similar experiments, the "receivers" in Wiseman's experiment were lulled beforehand into a relaxed, meditative frame of mind known as the Ganzfeld state (after the German word for "full field"); their faces were bathed in red light; and their eyes were covered with halved ping-pong balls to create a whitewashed backdrop for optimal viewing.

Each "receiver" then talked for about 15 minutes about what, if anything, they were seeing, their voices fed into loudspeakers into the senders' room.

In the second half of the trial, the receiver was shown four images -- the target image and three decoys -- and asked to guess the correct one.

Two or three of the receivers in Thursday's experiment could be expected to guess correctly by sheer chance, Wiseman said. That's why he was looking for at least six "hits" before suggesting that mass telepathy makes a difference.

"Senders" concentrate on a projected screen image

For his receivers, Wiseman eschewed real psychics in favour of people in creative professions -- artists, advertisers, production designers -- whom he believed might be extra sensitive to telepathic imagery.

But judging from early trials Thursday, he may have been better off sticking with the pros. Only one of the first six receivers chose the correct image.

James Brown, an arts administrator who served as Thursday's second receiver, audibly struggled as he sought to intuit the thoughts on the senders' minds 100 metres below him.

Among the images that Brown "saw" were shadows, blobs, pine trees, boats, a river and "an object in my mind's eye that is white."

As the trial progressed, however, he began seeing things more concretely -- or so he thought. "Now I have the image of a head -- the head of the Queen on a stamp," he said, drawing a chorus of chuckles from the group of about a dozen receivers listening to his description. After a pause, the Queen vanished: "Now," he said, "I have the image of art -- abstract art -- something by Miro or Kandinsky."

The correct image, it turned out, was of an airplane with a shark's face painted on its nose.

The previous receiver, Annette Telesford, an office manager at a production company, assessed her performance as "a bit flaky" after she chose an image of a gorilla rather than the intended one of desert rock formations.

"Visions were coming, but they were also fading out as quickly as they were coming in. If you blinked you missed it," said Telesford, who professed to having had psychic visions in the past.

Once, she said, she pictured a man having an accident involving his legs, after seeing him standing awkwardly in a kitchen. The man ended up falling from a staircase and having both legs amputated.

"People say it's a coincidence. But what is coincidence? I want them to tell me what that means," she said.

Wiseman, who is also the brainchild behind "The Mind Machine," a kisoque-sized contraption in shopping centres and airports that measures a person's ability to "psychically" influence a computer, says his experiment Thursday was not designed to be the final word on ESP.

"This is not a test of the ESP hypothesis," he says. "If it fails, it doesn't mean ESP doesn't exist. It's a way of seeing (that) if ESP exists, can we enhance it?"

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Society for Psychical Research
Richard Wiseman Biography
International Society For Paranormal Research

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