Virtual Telepathy

I tend to be a cynic when it comes to psychic experiences. Of course, it has happened that I'll be thinking of an old friend and strangely enough I'll get an email from them that day, but I tend to put it down to coincidence rather than some type of connection between our minds.

Courtesy of Simon Hunter, The University of Manchester A snapshot of the virtual reality environment that will be used for a telepathy experiment at The University of Manchester.

There seem to be a lot of sceptics around, especially among scientists. Although telepathy has been investigated in a scientific way for over 100 years, it still remains on the fringe of science and is surrounded by controversy. One of the reasons is that there is not much statistical evidence for it - the results of many studies are not very different from what one would expect due to chance. Also, even if telepathy is real, we have no way of explaining scientifically how it works.

But another problem is that it is something quite hard to test experimentally since it deals with personal experiences. Often, experimental set-ups are considered to be flawed and it's hard to tell if the participants have manipulated the experiment or not. So scientists at The University of Manchester have come up with a new environment to test telepathy: virtual reality.