Under-Test Modality
A contested claim, turned into a clean forced-choice test. In the Tuned app you and a group of friends play a guessing game — out of your group of three, four, eight or more, one is randomly chosen each round and you guess who. Chance is exactly 1-in-N; the more friends in the group, the more statistical room to detect a real effect; every guess is logged before the reveal; and the full hit-rate distribution — nulls included — is published.
Telephone telepathy is the contested hypothesis — most associated with biologist Rupert Sheldrake — that a person can know who is contacting them before any ordinary signal arrives, at a rate higher than chance. Ashta treats it strictly as a hypothesis under test, not a fact. We turn the claim into the simplest clean experiment we can: a forced-choice guessing game run inside the Tuned app, where the answer is either right or wrong, the chance baseline is exact, and every guess is recorded before the reveal. The app is a measurement instrument and a participation doorway — never presented in Ashta's voice as proof of anything.
You set up a group of friends or family who agree to take part. Each round, the app's server uses a certified random number generator to designate one member of the group as the target, and shows you the others' avatars and names as a forced choice: which one is it? You lock in your guess; only then is the answer revealed and logged. There is no special hardware and no muscle-testing instrument required — just the guess.
Because the target is chosen at random, the chance baseline is exactly 1-in-N: one in four for a group of four (25%), one in eight for a group of eight (12.5%), and so on. This is the key design point — the more people in the group, the lower the chance baseline, and the more statistical room there is to detect a genuine above-chance effect. A group of three sits too close to chance to be informative on its own; four is a sensible starting point; eight (the Ashta cluster size) gives a much sharper test; larger groups sharper still. Over many rounds we analyse whether the aggregate hit rate deviates from 1-in-N under pre-registered, blinded conditions — and we publish the full distribution, including nulls.
A single hit rate is only the start. The more interesting question is whether a group that begins at chance moves above chance as it builds coherence over time — and whether that coherence can be picked up by an independent instrument rather than just felt. So Tuned tracks each group's hit rate as a trajectory, not a one-off number.
One exploratory arm adds lightweight EEG headbands for groups who opt in, to test a specific prediction: if a real effect exists, does a measurable coherence signal across the group track improved guessing — does a group move from roughly chance toward, say, sixty per cent correct as it gels? This is a hypothesis under test, not a claim. The EEG is a measurement only, no mechanism is asserted, and if the signal turns out to be noise we say so. The Ashta experiment page describes the pre-registration and blinding that keep this honest.
Tuned is also a standalone, gamified daily social app, sold separately from the Ashta Project — a daily game that keeps close friends in touch: you guess which friend is the target, then text or quick-call them to say hello. A free starter group of five (you and four friends — each round you guess which of the four is the target, a 1-in-4 chance) is open to anyone; Tuned Plus — $4.99/month or $39.99/year — takes a group up to eight and unlocks multiple groups, full hit-rate history and ad-free play. The eight-person groups double as Ashta study clusters.
Because most people belong to more than one circle, Tuned lets you run different group types — family, close friends, a work team, a book club, a night-out crew — each its own group, each gamified for its own demographic. The eight-person groups do double duty: members who play at the cluster-of-eight size are, with consent, also contributing to the Ashta study — which is how a viral social game quietly becomes the largest honest test of this question we know how to run. Tuned funnels willing players toward Ashta membership and the wider research; playing the game and taking part in the science are the same motion.
Mainstream scientific consensus holds that telepathy is unproven and has no verified physical mechanism. The claim is highly contested and conflicts with standard physical theory, which offers no support for direct mind-to-mind communication. We reject explanations based on microscopic entanglement, mechanical resonance, somatic transmission, or energy-based shortcuts. We remain agnostic on mechanism, treat the protocol strictly as under test, and publish all data, including nulls.
Evidence FOR: Sheldrake's published experiments report hit rates above chance in some series, with high subjective conviction of telepathic knowing in non-blinded settings.
Critique / null AGAINST: Critics identify possible sensory-leakage pathways (ring cadence, call delays, caller-ID metadata, time-of-day habits) and publication-bias risk; independent replications under strict automated blinding tend toward chance.
Ashta's design removes those leakage pathways — the guess is a forced choice locked on the server before any reveal, with nothing to read cues from — so a positive result cannot be explained by cueing, and a null is just as publishable. Return to the modalities hub.
