Skeptiko Blog

Alex Tsakiris:  Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics.  I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and as many of you know, about six months ago this show shifted its focus when – out of frustration with the nonsense and misinformation being spewed out by skeptics – I decided to hunker down and work on trying to replicate a science experiment that skeptics frequently pick on:  namely, the experiment done by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake to see if some dogs can form a telepathic link with their owners that lets them know when they’re coming home.

 

As you’re probably aware, this experiment has been a real target for skeptics like James Randi, Michael Shermer, Richard Wiseman, and the whole skeptical community.  This onslaught of attacks by organized skeptical groups, along with the unconventionality of the whole idea of telepathy, has pretty much stifled any research into this phenomenon, so it’s where I decided I should dive in and see what I could find, see what I could stimulate, as far as research.

 

I have to admit that, looking back, I really didn’t know what I was getting into.  I thought I could run a couple ads on craigslist, find some dogs, run some trials, and that would basically be it, but I quickly realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. 

 

First, I decided that I really needed to know a lot more about dogs and canine behavior than I did.  I read as much as I could get my hands on.  I interviewed animal experts, folks who have appeared on this show.  You might have heard of Jill Morestad, Stanley Coren, Mark Beckoff, Clive Wynne.  I talked to a lot of these folks.  At the same time, I began my search for dog owners.  For months I ran ads – both on craigslist and in newspapers, everywhere I could think of.  I posted in forums.  I hired animal communication consultants, did radio interviews.  I did everything I could think of.

 

While I kept getting close, I was never able to find the right combination of owner and dog, until I ran into this terrific woman who, for privacy reasons I’m calling Jane, but whose real identity will be know to all the researchers involved.  Jane lives with her family, and three dogs, and one cat, in California, and from the onset, she was sure that she had this very close bond with her dogs.  She thought they were exhibiting some kind of waiting behavior;  she just wasn’t exactly sure what it was, when it was, how it was doing  – exactly how it would fit into the experiment.

 

So, I asked her to do some self-testing.  She used her own video camera to record the dogs while she was out, but she ran into problems with the tape and the time coding.  I sent her a webcam and some software, and this was all over a period of weeks and months.  Then we ran into some computer problems.

 

You know, I had gotten this far with many people already.  I’d come to learn that even people with the best of intentions can just lose interest after a while.  Life gets in the way.  We’re all busy.  We’re all doing too many things.  But Jane persisted.  She really wanted to be a part of this experiment, and she really wanted to know if her dogs did this.

 

Eventually, after months of working through all these technical and logistical problems, Jane was able to record her first series of trials, in mid-March.  You can see the video, if you haven’t already seen it, on our website.  After she recorded the trials, she told me that she wasn’t exactly sure what the video showed.  Now remember, she has three dogs, and each of them has a slightly different waiting behavior and are slightly tuned in differently to the different members of the family.

 

After we began reviewing the videos, we started focusing in on her one dog we’re calling Tommy and his particular waiting behavior.  Now, over the years that they’ve had Tommy in their family, Jane’s observed that Tommy’s favorite place to do – what it seems like – waiting was in the hallway that led to the garage.  But, she wasn’t sure exactly when he did it or how often he would go there, because she was out of the house.  You don’t know what your dogs are doing when you’re out of the house.  The video revealed – and again, you really have to see this video to believe it – that Tommy’s waiting corresponded almost perfectly with Jane’s trip. 

 

Here’s how the trial went.  First, Jane set up the camera and then went about preparing herself to leave, and eventually she leaves the house.  She went on an errand, and she was randomly running errands around town.  No one knew exactly how long she was going to be gone.  It was completely arbitrary.  It didn’t correspond to any regular pattern.  It isn’t something that she does all the time.  The time that she left was non-routine; the time that she came back was non-routine.  In all, she was gone for about an hour and thirteen minutes.

 

At that point, she drove home, and as the video shows, Tommy – almost at the exact time that Jane starts her trip home – moves to the hallway that leads to the garage.  He lays down and doesn’t budge.  If you watch the video, you’ll see in the whole hour and thirteen minutes before that, he never goes there, and from what they’ve observed, the dogs only go there when they’re waiting.  Actually, one of her other dogs goes there when he’s waiting, too.  For these two out of three dogs, this is kind of their waiting spot.

 

So, they never go there on the trip when she’s away, but only when she’s on the way home.  If you just calculate some basic statistics, you’ll see that while Jane was on her way home, Tommy was planted in that hallway 87% of the time.  During the hour and thirteen minutes while she was away and not on the way home, he was there 0% of the time.  Now that’s an amazing result.  It’s actually much more successful than any of the previous trials that have been done by either Rupert Sheldrake or Richard Wiseman.

 

While we can’t be sure that subsequent trials will be equally successful, I can tell you that we’ve already run some more trials that are almost as impressive as the first one.  As I was thinking about this, one thing struck me really as funny.  We’ve already done more trials than Richard Wiseman did in his infamous botched debunking of this experiment.

 

Now, for those of you who aren’t aware, the history of this experiment is pretty amazing.  About ten years ago, this Cambridge professor, Rupert Sheldrake, did this experiment and reported this phenomenon.  Immediately, this skeptic in the UK, named Richard Wiseman, came in and attempted to debunk it.  He ran four trials with the same dog that Sheldrake had used, and even though he achieved similar results as Sheldrake, he reported his findings as proof that there was no telepathic link between the dog and the owner.  Wiseman’s finding, even though it was completely contrary to the data, became an accepted truth among skeptics, and, in turn, among many people in the academic community who would rather not consider the possibility that stuff like telepathy and ESP really happen.

 

Go back and think about that for a minute.  With all the controversy that Wiseman stirred up, he did only four trials, and we’ve already done more than that.  Really, he only did three, because on one of his four trials, the dog got sick and couldn’t continue with the experiment.  But just imagine, for a minute, if I now did what Richard Wiseman did.  Imagine if I just ran these five trials and now closed up shop because I had really good results, off the charts, statistically significant results.  So, why don’t I close up shop and say, “That’s it!  I’ve proven it.  Now I can run around to all these conferences and go get in James Randi’s face and ask for the million dollars?”  I guess I could do that, but that’s just inconceivable.  At least it is for me.  I mean there’s so much more work to be done. 

 

There are so many more questions to be answered, and here’s how we’re going to do it.  We’re going to have two teams of researchers looking into this experiment and working with the dogs that we find.  One of the groups that we’re going to invite is going to have a decidedly skeptical point of view:  within the realm of what’s appropriate, but they’re going to be on the skeptical side.  Then one’s going to be more on the proponent side, more open to this possibility.

 

I think this is very, very important to have these two different teams, because if you look at how skeptics look at this stuff, there’s an almost unavoidable urge to make decisions that undermine the results.  This can be unintentional.  It’s just built into the worldview that these folks have, and it’s very, very difficult to overcome.   Let me give you an example that some of you have heard about if you listened to this show a few episodes back.

 

We talked to a canine researcher and a self-described hardcore skeptic named Clive Wynne, from the University of Florida.  Now, Dr. Wynne is somebody I’ve invited to participate in this experiment.  He runs the Canine Cognition and Behavior group at the University of Florida, and I think he’d be an excellent person.  He has the research background.  He’s very well-spoken; he’s very outspoken.  He’s not afraid to express his skeptical views, and yet, at the same time, he’s willing to at least explore the possibility that some of this stuff might happen.  At least I hope he’s willing to explore it.

 

If you remember, a couple of episodes ago, Dr. Wynne and I were discussing the experiment, and I had sent him a paper from Rupert Sheldrake.  Here was one of the first comments he made about the protocol:

 

What I did was I went to the class I teach on Thursday mornings.  I said to them, “Supposing somebody came to you, and they said that their dog has some kind of way of knowing when they come home.  How would you carry out a test to do that?”  I jotted down on a piece of paper here what they told me they thought was important.  Then I looked at the paper, and we can talk about that. 

 

So, the first thing that the students said to me was, “Well, if you are concerned that the dog has some ability to figure out when a person is coming home – that is special to the dog – the crucial first thing is that the dog must be alone in the house, because if there’s a person in the house, the person might know when this other individual is coming home and might somehow unwittingly communicate that to the dog.”

 

Sounds good, right?  If there’s someone at the house, they could signal the dog that the owner is coming home, and you’d screw up the experiment, right?  It turns out – and I heard this initially from Dr. Sheldrake, and then I found it and confirmed it in the work that we’ve done so far – it turns out dogs are more likely to demonstrate this waiting behavior when someone else is around, either another person, multiple family members, or other dogs.

 

Now, could this be because dogs are pack animals, decedent from wolves, and this telepathic ability evolved as a way for the pack to communicate?  I don’t know about that, but the point is having someone at home is not something that you want to control out of this experiment. 

 

Of course, I understand where Dr. Wynne was coming from.  He was trying to implement a control that would provide greater assurance that there couldn’t be any information leak.  But look – if we go down that path, and we control out this one variable that seems to be very innocuous, doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the experiment, we might control out the very variable that makes this behavior happen.

 

As we’re going forward, I think it’s good to have a skeptical perspective and a proponent perspective so we can be very, very careful about applying good scientific controls without blasting this phenomenon out of existence and not being in too much of a hurry to devise an experiment that debunks this and proves that it isn’t true.  That’s what’s been done in the past, and it really leads to greater confusion and then years of needless back and forth arguing.

 

Going back to our earlier example, hey, it’s fine if there are other people in the house.  We just have to make sure that there’s no way that the information can leak back to those folks and that they could possibly signal the dog.  It turns out that’s not really hard if you want to work around that, and we can do that.  That’s not a hard thing to do. 

 

So, we’re working on lining up those two teams of researchers:  one  skeptical, one open-minded.  We’re also working on getting more dogs involved.  As I mentioned earlier, we’re finding that this behavior is not at all uncommon.  It’s just difficult to find the right situation, the right dog owner with the right level of commitment to really get involved in this project.  We’d like to have several dogs involved without making the experiment unmanageable, and that’s one area where I’d like to ask for your help. 

 

I think this video clearly demonstrates that the telepathic link between dogs and their owners is a phenomenon that deserves our attention.  It deserves serious research.  That’s why I’m asking you to please pass this video along to as many people as you know and as many people as you can reach on the Internet.  We want to find more dog owners, and we want folks to get involved in other ways, too, like making their own videos to demonstrate the amazing powers of their dogs.  I can’t guarantee that in our formal experiment with out researchers we’ll be able to use all the dogs that we find, but I think we’d all like to see more stories confirming the existence of this amazing phenomenon.

 

As you can tell, there’s much, much more work to be done.  I’d better get to it, so I’m going to wrap up this podcast.  Please check back on DogsThatKnow.com for updates on the experiment.  Of course, keep tuning in to Skeptiko, where you’ll find information on what’s going on with this experiment and other work that we’re doing to try and nudge a little bit closer to the truth about who we are and how the world works.

Until next time, bye for now!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Transcripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.