Telepathy: “The supposed communication of thoughts or ideas between minds by means other than the known senses.” (Stevenson, A. & Lindberg, C.A. (Eds.), (2010). New Oxford American Dictionary, 3^rd Edition). New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, Inc.)

Almost all dog owners believe that dogs have minds, and are not just machines  driven by instinct. During the last century, academic psychologists have caught up with that conventional wisdom. The strict behaviorist theories of the 1920s-1960s ignored the mental determinants of animal behavior, but have been supplanted by cognitive theories. These cognitive theories include mental constructs such as expectancies, values, intentions and the like to best explain why animals do what they do. (Zentall, T.R. (2002). A Cognitive Behaviorist Approach to the Study of Animal Behavior. Journal of General Psychology 129 (4), 328-363. Complete article at www.uky.edu/~zentall/pdfs/1.pdf )

But telepathy? Even if dogs do have minds remotely like our own, could we “read” Pepper’s mind, or “send” our thoughts to Toby? Some answer “yes!” Rupert Sheldrake, noted biologist and author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (Sheldrake, R. (1999). New York: Three Rivers Press.), is especially sympathetic to the idea of animals sensing human thoughts, and presents compelling testimonials from dog owners. But he rightly cautions that subtle sensory cues—cues of which humans are often blithely unaware—can create the appearance of telepathy. For example, you decide to take Mocha for a walk. Seemingly at the moment of your decision, she leaps to her feet and trots to where her leash hangs on a peg.

Did Mocha sense your intention? Of course! But most likely she watched you shut down your computer, glance outside the window to check for rain, and observed your big smile directed at her. These are all cues that have heralded walks in the past, so Mocha drew the sensible conclusion.

Sheldrake offers a series of thoughtful scientific experiments studying the ability of dogs to sense their owners’ intentions. One such study, “A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations,” presents compelling evidence for this type of telepathy, at least for one dog-owner pair. Visit Sheldrake’s website and look under the “research” button for this study and others. (www.sheldrake.org)

Sheldrake’s work has been resoundingly dismissed by skeptics, some of whom are even scientists. I will address these criticisms in a later blog, but for now, I believe his experiments seem to control for important extraneous variables and are carefully executed. His results, at the very least, support efforts to continue research into the area of dogs sensing the human mind.

But what about the reverse? Can humans telepathically sense a dog’s mind?

In my book, A Second Chance Life, Sara the skeptic dismisses her apparent ability to telepathically feel a dog’s distress as her own. For example, she could notice pain in her hand when she’s with a dog who has a thorn in its paw. But, she explains away her experience as paying close attention to canine behavior:

Sara stared at Jude. “Well, believe it or not, it’s like I can feel what the dog is feeling. No, that’s not exactly right. It’s more like I have a sense of what the dog is experiencing, like sensory images, like I’m in the dog’s head.”

“Sara, that’s remarkable. Just to have those feelings is remarkable, even if your diagnoses are just guesses.”

“Yes, but I don’t get something from every dog. Whatever it is I’m feeling, it’s not dependable, so I don’t want to make a big deal about it. The vet might find my opinions useful, but I don’t see myself as one of those animal communicators. I’m skeptical of those people anyway.”

“Amazing, Sara.” Jude’s tone carried more than a whiff of irony. “You’re the trained scientist. You’re the one who wanted to study ESP back when you were a grad student and now you’re refusing to take a hard look at what could be your own telepathic talent.”

Sara snorted. “Don’t even go there. First of all, ESP means extra-sensory perception: Knowledge without input from the senses. In my case, I think I’m getting subtle visual and auditory cues from the dogs. I’m not even aware I’m picking up on them.”

Jude raised his voice. “Yes, but you feel what the dog feels.” He wanted her to admit how amazing her experiences were.

“Okay, for some screwy reason, my unconscious turns the cues into personal feelings.” Sara waved a hand dismissively. “But it doesn’t happen all that often and not with every dog. And besides, I don’t even know how often I’m right.”

Sara points to her keen awareness of dog behaviors as the reason for her unusual experiences, but telepathy could be explained in other ways, as well. My short story, The Mission, explores the boundary of telepathic experiences and psychosis. Keep in mind that two possible symptoms of psychosis, such as schizophrenia, are thought insertion and thought broadcasting. Thought insertion is “the delusion that certain of one’s thoughts are not one’s own, but rather inserted into one’s mind.” This could be just a short hop to the belief that one is receiving another’s thoughts. Thought broadcasting is “the delusion that one’s thoughts are being broadcast out loud so that they can be perceived by others.” Perhaps not that far from a belief that one is sending thoughts to another? (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th Edition, Text Revision (2000). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.)

In my story The Mission, Joseph Mallory is a skilled dog trainer for the Army. He struggles to understand his vivid dreams of being dog-like and his compelling hunches about his dogs having ESP. But does he truly have a telepathic communication with his animals, or is he over the edge into crazy delusions?

(Photograph from www.humanK9bond.com)

In my novel, A Second Chance Life, Sara is telling Jude about a dream she’d recently had:

“I dreamt about the summer I drove across the desert from California to Utah, to my first job. In my dream I was me, now—well, maybe (in my forties), because Casey was with me. We were driving on a two-lane highway across the Nevada desert when we saw a young woman walking on the shoulder. We stopped to see if we could help her and it was me. Me, as a young woman, walking on the road.”

Jude nodded, looking thoughtful.

“But Jude, the really weird part is that the whole thing really happened twenty-seven years ago. As I remember it, a couple picked me up when I ran out of gas on my way to Salt Lake. The woman had on a big sunhat tied with a scarf under her chin, but I remember she was just my height and had green eyes and a gap between her front teeth like mine. After they’d taken me to get gas and I was driving off, she took her hat off and her hair was like mine is now.” Sara shook her head in wonderment, the image of Madge on that hot desert highway branded on her memory.

“You think your dream-self went back in time to see your younger self?” There was no hint of mockery in Jude’s tone.

Sara raised her eyebrows and pressed her lips together, the weight of doubt tugging at her hopes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing, “she said, “if a dream-self could travel along the skein of time? If a dream-self, free of physical constraints, could somehow manifest in a different place and time?”

“Is that what you think happened?”

Sara slipped into her default position of rational skepticism. “No, I think the more likely explanation is that, for whatever reason, I simply had a dream about meeting up with my younger self.” But as she spoke, she felt as if a fragile rainbow bubble popped, leaving a dull residue of fact and reality.

“Was there a message in the dream?”

“That I gave my younger self?”

Jude smiled. “That’s usually the direction advice flows.”

“In my dream, as in the reality of twenty-seven years ago, the older woman gave the younger woman a book about experiments in telepathy and encouraged her interest in paranormal experiences.”

Sara looked away, across the Sound to the clouds shrouding the Olympic range. “My memory isn’t real clear, but wasn’t that the summer of 1973? You moved out to Colorado that year.”

“Yes,” Jude said. “That was in 1973.”

“Well, this morning I dug through some cartons to find that book. You know what? I couldn’t believe it, but it was first published in 1974.”

“1974? How do you explain that?” Jude sounded baffled.

“I’m not sure.”

They ambled up the beach in silence, Sara taking long, slow strides. It could be evidence for time travel, she thought, if a book had been given to me before it had actually been published. But my memory could be faulty, no matter how real it seems.

“I could have been given that book by someone else later on. Maybe an older woman, maybe Mom? And confused the memories.”

Although I know of no scientific evidence for people traveling backward through time, there is plenty of evidence (anecdotal and scientific) for false and/or confused memories. An example from my own life is embedded in my creative nonfiction piece, Going Down Slow. In that story I tell about how my sister, brother, and I leave our critically ill Dad alone in his hospital room to go with our Mom to check out a Hospice. When my sister read the story, she exclaimed, “No, don’t you remember? I stayed back at the hospital so Dad wouldn’t be alone.” My memory of the three of us standing with Mom while talking to the Hospice nurse, although vivid and detailed, was simply wrong. Fabricated. (Interestingly, since being corrected by my sister, that memory has actually faded.)

Another example, in the recent news, concerned NBC Anchor Brian Williams. According to USA Today (2/6/2015), Williams claimed he’d been under fire in Iraq, but after challenges to his story, said he’d “misremembered” being hit by enemy fire in Iraq in a helicopter, when in fact, the helicopter had not been hit. His false memory created a stir in the media and cast doubt on his credibility.

No doubt you, too, have an anecdote about a false memory in your own life, though perhaps not as public as Williams’! But what about scientific evidence?

Arguably, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus is the most prolific and well-known researcher in the area of false memories. (Go to You Tube to watch Loftus’ TED talk–a must-view! https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elizabeth+loftus+ted+talk ) The scientific evidence she presents strongly supports the idea that misinformation (and the world is full of it), can cause memory distortion, and that false memories can actually be intentionally implanted into one’s mind. Loftus warns us that just because a person believes their own memory and relates it in detail with confidence and emotion doesn’t mean it really happened.

Considering the recent stir about Brian Williams, Loftus, whose research has apparently made her more forgiving about memory lapses, is quoted by USA Today: “Let’s give Williams a break.” (USA Today, 2/6/2015)

Photo from www.public-republic.net

I had to put Hank down today. He was a rescued German shepherd. When I got him, the shelter said he was probably about 10 years old. I’d had him for two years.

This morning, he couldn’t walk at all, not even drag himself with his front legs, the culmination of a slow loss of function in his hind end. He also refused to eat or drink, which was the sign for me to call the vet.

The vet showed up at 1:00 this afternoon. She was sympathetic and efficient. I wore my Alpha Bitch tee shirt to call up the courage to be the one who makes these decisions. The whole thing took about 20 minutes, which I appreciated. I had already done much of my grieving for this uncomplaining, easy-going old dog and didn’t want something drawn-out.

I clipped a bit of Hank’s fur. Spoke to him, and let him go.

Right now, I can’t believe he’s gone. One of my two remaining dogs searched for him in the back yard, even though those two had watched the whole procedure, including deceased Hank being taken out on a stretcher.

Is he really gone? I think Hank’s spirit, the Life Force, has returned to the universe. What will happen to him next? Dog Heaven? Reincarnation? Joining me on my spaceship adventures when I die? Hard to tell.

I am no stranger to dogs dying. My story “That Nice Girl with the Dogs,” posted on this site, is a creative nonfiction piece which describes some of these experiences.

The story is also about the death of my mother, lost to dementia.

Some deaths are quick, some slow. Sometimes love is straightforward, sometimes intensely complicated. Whatever the circumstances, we still grieve.

I’ve decided to describe Daryl Bem’s Experiment 2 from his (2011) publication, Feeling the Future (see reference below). Dr. Bem, a respected research psychologist, magician, and debunker of ESP (psi) demonstrations, seems to me an ideal person to conduct research on hunches. Also, the procedure of the experiment is relatively simple, and the results are statistically quite unlikely to be due to chance.

PARTICIPANTS: 150 Cornell undergraduates. 107 women, 43 men.

METHOD:

Procedure:

There were three steps in this experiment, all fully automated on a computer in order to reduce unintended influence by human experimenters.

1. The participant saw two side-by-side neutral pictures on a computer screen and indicated which picture he/she preferred. (The pictures are described in the Materials section below.)

2. AFTER the participant indicated which picture was preferred, the computer randomly selected one of those two pictures as the “target.”

3a. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the target picture as preferred, the computer flashed a positive picture three times for 33 milliseconds each time.

3b. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the nontarget picture as preferred, the computer flashed a negative picture three times for 33 ms each time.

(When pictures or other stimuli are presented for such tiny time periods, the stimuli are called subliminal. The participant is generally not consciously aware of subliminal stimuli.)

Materials: All of the pictures used in this experiment were taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). (See reference below.)These pictures have been rated by various groups of people as to their emotional “pull.”

Some pictures are rated as neutral, for example, a chair against a blank wall. Some are rated as negative, for example, a spider or an angry human face. Some are positive, for example, children laughing or puppies snuggling.

In summary, participants indicated a preference for one of two pictures. If the preferred picture was then randomly selected as “target,” participants were subliminally rewarded with a positive picture. But if that preferred picture was the (randomly selected) “nontarget,” participants were subliminally punished with a negative picture.

HYPOTHESIS:

The idea is that if participants can somehow “feel” the future, can somehow access the emotional pull of the future subliminal picture, then, over many trials, they will tend to prefer the positive target picture and avoid choosing the negative nontarget picture.

If participants cannot feel the future, then, over many trials, they will indicate a preference for the target picture 50% of the time.

RESULTS:

If you’re not familiar with parapsychological (psi) research, you may be disappointed by the results of this study.

As with many psi experiments of this type, the results support psi, but the effects are very small. In this study, participants showed a “hit rate” (preferring target pictures) of 51.7%, not much above the chance rate of 50%. This might suggest that feelings about the future are rather weak and somewhat hit-or-miss. Certainly, for an individual person, these “hunches” are only occasionally better than chance. Nevertheless, these results are statistically significant. In other words, the feelings about the future are weak, but very likely “real” – not due to chance.

But wait. Are you feeling doubts rise up like a wall? Wondering about the experimental design- was it truly solid? Wondering if the particular statistical analyses used were appropriate? Wondering if these results can be reproduced in other laboratories by other experimenters?

You’re not alone. If you google criticisms about Bem’s Feeling the Future, you’ll see many people have weighed in with critiques, and supportive comments as well.

My personal position, after reading Bem’s paper and several of the critical articles, is that the experiments are solid designs with careful controls for extraneous variables. But yes, it would be useful to use a variety of statistical approaches with the data.  And the most crucial question remains: can these results be replicated?

Experiments have been, and are being, conducted all over the world in attempts to replicate Bem’s findings. We’ll take up these results in a future blog. Any hunches about the outcomes?

(Featured image from designstacks.net)

REFERENCES

Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100: 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

Lang, P.J., Bradley, M.M., & Cuthbert, B.N. (2008) International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual. Technical Report A-8 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

But Dr. Bem was not only a professional magician. He also debunked demonstrations of ESP (ExtraSensory Perception- today called “psi.”) For example, he appeared in an Introductory Psychology video series in which he revealed how a magician “sets up” card and mind-reading tricks. (See the Annenberg Learning website for the series produced by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo called “Discovering Psychology, updated edition, Unit Two).

During my career as a psychologist, I didn’t bother following psi research. Like many of my colleagues, I assumed the scientific “evidence” demonstrating the existence of psi was probably flawed, marred by inadequate design and over-enthusiastic interpretation of data. Not that I had actually seen any of the studies. After all, they were generally not published in the mainstream psychology journals I read.

But in 2011, a headline in the New York Times grabbed my attention: “Top Journal Plans to Publish a Paper on ESP . . .” The journal was the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), perhaps the most respected journal in its field regarding rigor of peer review and importance of research topics.

The author of the paper was Daryl Bem, and his laboratory studies to be published in JPSP claimed to support the idea that future events could causally influence current emotions and behaviors even when these future events were random and unknown to anyone. In other words, the studies were touted to support presentiment (emotions based on the future) and precognition (cognition based on the future).

In the NYT article, some critics of Bem’s work thought his paper might be “an elaborate joke,” or “an embarrassment to the field,” or “should undergo special scrutiny,” or that the study used improper statistics. (The New York Times, 1/6/2011)

But to my mind, this was Professor Bem, a renowned and respected scientist who had, in the latter part of his career, turned his attention to psi research. And who better to conduct these studies than the great debunker himself? Who better to know how to design an experiment that controlled for (eliminated) extraneous factors—factors that could offer an alternative explanation for apparent psi results?

I’m going to offer a somewhat simplified description of one of Bem’s studies in my next blog. But for now, if you wish, you can read his entire article at JPSP’s online publication of “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” 100, 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

(Featured image from amazingkidsparties.com.au)