 I've got two experiments online on my website, Sheldrake.org at the moment. One of them is a joint attention test. And here I'm exploring something that I don't think anyone else has ever explored. The question is if you have two people concentrating on the same thing at the same time, or nowadays with mass media, we can have millions of people concentrating, watching the same TV show, for example, watching the same football match, millions at the same time. Is there a kind of resonance between minds when people you're watching the same thing as someone else? This hasn't got a standard scientific word. I call it joint attention. We know that joint attention, actually joint attention is established because when babies reach the age of about one, they become capable of joint attention. And it's been a very important part of normal development. That's why with people with babies and toddlers, they go around and they'd say, doggy. And they say, oh, yes, doggy. And it's joint attention on the same thing is essential for human development. Proper, if people who don't have this turn out to be autistic very often. So it's part of our shared world. Anyway, in my joint attention test, you log on online and with another person. In a separate place. And then there's a series of trials where in each trial you're sharing a picture. You're just watching the screen, a picture appears. And at random, your partner may be sharing the same picture or a different picture. There's a different pair of pictures for each test. Each trial lasts only 10 seconds. The whole test lasts three minutes. So then what you're asked after 10 seconds, one of the people is asked, was your partner looking at the same picture? And you click saying different. You're right or you're wrong. By chance, you'd be right 50% of the time. In these experiments, it's coming out significantly above chance. It's not a very big effect, but it's very significant. Are we talking 55, 60? What are we talking? We're talking in this case, only about 53, 54. With thousands of trials, it's very significant. Yeah. And anyway, I'm doing a new test at the moment comparing different kinds of pictures. It seems to be working better when you're looking at pictures of faces than landscapes, for example. Or perhaps because it's boring. Interesting. So that's one of my experiments, looking at a new phenomenon. And then of course, I want to scale it up. What happens if you've got 10 people looking at the same thing, 10, 50 or 100? And of course, you could do this live on TV as well, where you could do it with millions. Yes, yes. This would have an enormous effect in interpreting what's happening in modern culture, which involves huge amounts of joint attention. Yet this is completely unexplored because the standard materialist assumption in science is that minds are nothing but brains and they're insulated inside heads. So what you're thinking and looking at has no effect on me at a distance because that's impossible. Your mind's nothing but the physical activity of your brain. The second experiment that I'm running, which I invite people to take part in, is an experimental test of telephone telepathy. More than 80% of the population say that they've had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings. And they say, that's funny, I was just thinking about you. Or they just know who it is when the phone rings before they've looked at the corner ID or answered it with the phone. It's very, very common experience. It works especially well with people who know each other well. Telepathy is about people who are bonded socially. Now, for a hundred years or more since the invention of the telephone, people have observed this. But the so-called skeptics, the dogmatic skeptics, have said, oh, well, it's impossible that it's really telepathy. That can't happen because minds are just inside brains. It's impossible for them to have an influence at a distance. It's nothing but coincidence and selective memory. You remember when you're right, you forget when you're wrong, and so on. Anyway, I've developed a test to test that. And how the test works is you register on my website, showgrade.org. You put in the names of two friends or family members, people you know well and their telephone numbers. The computer then, at a randomized time, picks one of these two people at random, calls them up. So say I was doing the test and you were one of my callers. So my wife, Jill, was the other one. You get a call saying, this is Rupert's telepathy telepathy test. Please think about Rupert. When you're ready, press one. You press one. My phone then rings. The corner ID says telepathy telepathy test. It says, one of your two callers is on the line right now waiting to speak to you. Press one for Alan, press two for Jill. So I then say who I think it is out of these two people. And as soon as I guess, that's recorded on a database. The line opens up and I get instant feedback as to whether I'm right or wrong. And then I can talk for up to a minute. It cuts off after a minute because I'm paying for the call. And... And this test is giving very significant positive results. In my earlier versions of the test, I had four callers. And there the chance rate is 95%. And we were getting rates, average rates of about 45% with hundreds of massively significant statistically. Yeah. And so this, what I'm trying to do at the moment is to find out if people can get better at this by practice. And if they can get better at it, they can get better at it. And I think that's a good thing to do. They can get better at this by practice. And if so, how they practice, how they can develop their intuition. So what I'd like to say to anyone listening to this is that if you're in the US, Canada or UK or Italy, the test doesn't work anywhere else at the moment. Then check it out. Try it with your friends. It doesn't take very long. About 10 minutes for your time to do one of these tests. Spray it spaced over an hour in the mouth or a couple of hours. And this, if I'm inviting people to try and find how to train their intuition. I don't know how to train. They are not that good at these things. I score above chance because I'm not brilliantly intuitive. So I'm asking other people to help with this. And in fact, it could turn into a competition who's got the best intuition. Yeah. Yeah. A global competition. Well, it could even end up, if people find they can practice and get better at it, it could even end up with a telepathy Olympics. Olympics. Who's the most retell person in the world? Yeah. And then I think when we get to that stage, all these boring old skeptics who just know it's possible the evidence isn't there. It doesn't exist. I mean, they'd still exist, but they'd become like the Flat Earth Society. Yeah. Fringe group. They are a fringe group anyway, but they pretend they speak for the science establishment. They don't really, but they pretend to. Anyway, here's a way. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That you're what you just summarized there with the joint attention, the study on the telephone telepathy study was basically the essence of what I was getting at with actually when you plant a flag beyond the edge, and then further as you actually you yourself create the tests to further approve the hypothesis and then try and inspire other people around the world to not only create, not only participate in your test, but also create their own tests to try and prove these hypotheses and also. I actually really appreciated the, I think the structure of the two that you spoke about. It's very important. First of all, the joint attention study. I really like how for both of them that you can crowdsource people from around the world. Well, U.S. UK and Australia and Italy. Italy. That's the telephone one. The joint attention test works everywhere. So this is, but there's a big deal because if you can get people from India and Brazil and Russia and all these other countries around the world that are that can, that can do the joint attention one and beyond, let's see if we can get people around the world doing these. I appreciate how I think the structure Rupert that you were describing as somebody that is also a fellow science, scientist, science advocate, science communicator. It's just for me to, for me to view the, the style of your experiments. It sounds quite robust. And in the sense of. Even getting, even getting small incremental differences of training intuition, you can't, you can't pick up a basketball and just walk on to a court and start shooting three pointers. You can't pick up a violin and just start playing Mozart. You, you, you have to train your intuition. You have to train these telepathic abilities in order for you to bump up, like in that example where there's, you know, four in telephone telepathy, if there's four options of my four friends, and if on my rate is only supposed to be 25, but if I'm hitting 45, that's significant. And that's also a big deal. If I'm slowly trying to compete, if I'm becoming the United States is best, a most intuitive telephone telepathist, and then I'm competing against the United Kingdoms in Germany's and, and China's, and I think that's a very interesting style of, of trying to, you know, if, if Rupert, if we can take that flag beyond the edge of what's known, and if we can incentivize people to partake through a sports style, Olympic style process, like what you're teaching. I think that's also very fun and it's engaging. And also the joint attention thing has a lot to do with the modern day. We're approaching all eight billion people soon to be connected on the planet. And if you can release a piece of content and then watch how people watch the content and if they can tell if they're, if other people that they're engaging with, if this person, if, if Rupert is also watching the advancement that's been made in biotech or if Rupert's watching the advancement that's being made in blockchain and cryptocurrency, and then I pick which one Rupert's, you know, watching. And I think that's very interesting given the fact that all eight billion people are now we can, there's a collective zeitgeist that's happening all the time with this pacer of the cycle of media. Absolutely. Well I think this is, that's why I think it's so topical at the moment, the whole question of joint attention. There's never been a capacity for so many people to have so much joint attention. And now everyone agrees, of course, that we're interlinked through the internet and through news media and through radio and television and so forth. But the big blockage to these inquiries within institutional science is this materialist assumption, the mind's nothing but the brain. And that's why no one's doing research on this. It's also one reason why I've, I like doing research in the public domain, and I like doing it outside universities and where anyone can take part. But it's also that I'm forced to work that way because these subjects are so taboo. There's almost no university where you could actually do this research and hold down a job. And you know, because the opposition to these things is very, very strong from dogmatic materialists. I mean, most ordinary people are not opposed. Most ordinary people are interested in these phenomena. But within the academic world, there is this problem of dogmatic materialism. Anyway, I tried just to get a go, go on doing research and get on with these experiments. There's enough people who participate for the results to come in.