Is telepathy real? Scientists at the University of Manchester, in England, intend to find out—and they’ve built a virtual-reality device to help them answer the question.
The researchers will place two subjects on different floors of a building and ask each participant to enter a virtual environment by putting on VR-enabled helmets and gloves. One of the subjects will be faced with an image, and the other will be shown four items and asked to pick the one his or her partner sees.
Donald Melanson, of Engadget, doesn’t expect the experiment to be a scientific landmark. "We give this about an 80-percent chance of being inconclusive," he writes, "a 10-percent chance of it proving that telepathy is real, and a 10-percent chance that things go completely haywire, giving everyone involved super telepathic abilities." —Brock Read
