How To Test Someone Who Claims To Be Telepathic

How do you test someone who claims to be telepathic?

If someone claims that they can read someone else's mind then that is fairly straight forward to test. We put one person in one room, the sender; we put the receiver in the other room, a good distance away. We do our best to rule out any possibility of what we call sensory cueing, i.e. the person who is supposed to be doing the guessing picking up the information in some other way than via telepathy. We try to rule out any possibility of cheating and we give them a number of trials where one person is trying to send a randomly selected target to the receiver, we work out how many they get right, and we see whether that is a statistically significant figure in terms of what we would expect to get just by guess work. So it's fairly easy to describe, in practice it can be quite difficult to do it because you have to know all the possible things that you need to control for and of course some of the claims are not as straight forward as that. But the important thing is that you find out what the claim is, you design your test around it, and you make sure that the person you're testing agrees that it's a fair test in advance.