tom says:

Wierdly, I had just posted this question to the blog when I decided to get a drink from the departmental coffee room. I was walking through the department thinking about the crossword experiment and I as I entered the coffee room our coffee lady, June, was sitting with a group of the secretaries and she said "Speak of the devil! Hello Tom, we were just talking about you - can you help us with this crossword?"

I swear I'm not making this up!

Yoz says:

I definitely remember an experiment on Tomorrow's World to test this over a decade ago, in which one of those spot patterns which are actually a picture was revealed to the audience, and then it was shown what the picture really was. The picture puzzle would then be given to a set of students in another country (I seem to remember Denmark for some reason, but I'm probably wrong) a week later. I have no idea how it turned out, though.

lanier says:

Here's some info, though I can't attest to its authority.

http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/6425.html

John says:

A little research drug-up reference to Rupert Sheldrake's claims about "morphic resonance", but no reference to published results were evident. These ideas are akin to the old hundredth monkey canard, Sheldrake is also fond of trotting-out. You may be interested in Discover's profile of Sheldrake:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_8_21/ai_63583788/print

I wonder how they explain the great difficulty English speakers have in learning Chinese-- after all, there are 1.3 billion Chinese speakers, shouldn't that give us a boost if just a few hundred crossword players can?

In short, these claims are a load of bullflop.

John says:

Should you be able to stomach it, Sheldrake's claims are enumerated in "Nature As Alive: Morphic Resonance and Collective Memory":

http://www.primalspirit.com/pr1_1sheldrake_nature_as_alive.htm

The font bespeaks much.

John says:

I was unable to find independent reference to any experiment performed by Monica England of the University of Nottingham (as referred to in Sheldrake's writings), however, I did find reference to an experiment failing to find an effect in Shermer's SciAm fisking of Sheldrake:

"...in 2000 John Colwell of Middlesex University in London conducted a formal test using Sheldrake's experimental protocol. Twelve volunteers participated in 12 sequences of 20 stare or no-stare trials each and received accuracy feedback for the final nine sessions. Results: subjects could detect being stared at only when accuracy feedback was provided, which Colwell attributed to the subjects learning what was, in fact, a nonrandom presentation of the trials. When University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman also attempted to replicate Sheldrake's research, he found that subjects detected stares at rates no better than chance."

tom says:

Also, there is no thesis by Monica England logged by the University of Nottingham library (http://aleph.nottingham.ac.uk/ALEPH), by Nottingham Trent Library (https://opac.ntu.ac.uk) and none by The British Library (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/listings.html), which should have a record of all PhD theses completed in the UK (it shows up my thesis, for example. I didn't really believe that they get sent a copy until just now...)

tom says:

Reader Alex Robinson wrote to me to say:

On reading your latest entry I immediately thought "That has to have something to do with Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Resonance". Actually the exact thought was "That has to have something to do with that charlatan Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Resonance".

And lo, a quick google later

http://www.primalspirit.com/pr1_1sheldrake_nature_as_alive.htm

"Space does not allow summarizing all the work that is happening at present. I will just mention one experiment done recently. It is not, in fact, the best experiment, but it is the easiest to explain. This was done with crossword puzzles in the psychology department at Nottingham University. The young woman who did it, Monica England, reasoned as follows: If morphic resonance is happening, it should be easier to do today's newspaper crossword puzzle tomorrow than it would have been yesterday.

So we managed to persuade a London newspaper, The Evening Standard, to supply its crossword puzzle in advance for the purpose of this experiment. Students were tested in Nottingham the day before and the day after the crossword was published in London. They were also tested with a control crossword which was not published during that period. This of course involved testing different groups of students before and after. The control crossword gave a measure of each individual's ability to do crossword puzzles of that kind.

It turned out that students' performances on the test crossword did indeed improve by about 25 percent after it had been published, compared with the control crossword. This result is statistically significant and is, of course, very interesting."

but it was apparently never published in a journal...

http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/6425.html

I count myself coloured several shades of surprised.