Last week I posted an article on Reality Sandwich about an experiment by Richard Wiseman that tested Twitter out as a tool for remote viewing. I’m excited by new avenues of research such as this that examine the potential of open social media platforms for being possible tools for non-causal, ESP-like communication.  Wiseman wrote an article for New Scientist magazine about the results of a four day trial in which he asked participants to pick the secret location that he spent 30 minutes at out of several randomly chosen alternatives:

In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group’s decision.

If the group were psychic, the majority would vote for the correct target. In the first trial I was looking up at a striking, modern-looking building. Unfortunately, the group voted for some woods.

On trial two I was sitting in the middle of a playground, but the group thought I was standing at the foot of a long stairway. The third trial found me under an unusual-looking canopy; the group voted for a graveyard.

On the final trial I stared intently at a red postbox. The group believed that I was standing at the side of a canal. In short, all four trials were misses.

When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups.

So what did we learn? Well, the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing and suggests that those who believe in the paranormal are simply good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target – which is, maybe, why they believe in the first place. No surprises there. So perhaps the most important outcome was to demonstrate that thousands of people are happy to take part in an instant Twitter study. Now it is up to scientists to find other interesting ways of harnessing this new research tool.

My own take on these results is that the participants were too random and unconnected to make the chances for Twitter telepathy likely.  As I’ve written here on this blog, Twitter telepathy is more likely between people who are a part of the same stream, which is to say, people who found and followed each other through their mutual following of someone else and don’t know each other in real life or through other Twitter connections.  It’s not magic but the adaptation of parallel association processes between these ostensible strangers (who have in common their shared following of someone else) that allows for uncanny occurrences such as tweeting the same thing at the same time, or reading a tweet that was nearly exactly the same to one you were about to write—or how it more than occasionally is the case that someone in one of your streams will tweet a link to an article or blog post that is exactly what you were looking for at that exact moment—moreover, the answer comes before you can even fully formulate the question or the search term to Google.

Whether these “coincidences” supply practical information or spiritual salvation, the connections that create them are so interwoven and invisible so as to make it seem like magic—or like the group think of a flock of birds, or the way it will happen that people from different parts of the world come up with the same idea at the same time—or how once one person breaks a world record in sports there are suddenly many people who are able to do it, one after another.

I think it would be interesting to do another version of this same remote viewing experiment within streams—for example, all of those who are members of the Scoblelizer stream, or the #P2 peeps.  I predict that the results would be an above average number of correct responses in picking out the correct location.