What Spanda is
Can you tell who's calling before anything tells you?
Have you ever thought about someone, and shortly after, they call, they text, or you bump into them? You're not alone. In published surveys, around half to two-thirds of people say they've thought of someone who then phoned that same day. And when audiences are asked in person, 80–95% of hands go up. For roughly one in ten, it happens all the time.
So: is the phenomenon real? And is it a skill you can train? These are the questions Spanda is here to find out. Someone in your circle calls you through the app, and before anything tells you who, you feel into it and guess. Odds on the table, every result recorded.
Circles start at three friends. In the free experiment the circle is five (you plus four), the exact format of Rupert Sheldrake's telephone-telepathy tests. Bigger circles, and more of them, come with the paid tiers.
The word
Why “Spanda”
Spanda is a Sanskrit word often translated as a subtle pulse, vibration, throb, or movement of life.
We chose the name because the app is about tiny felt signals. Not grand claims. Not thunderbolts. The small pulse before the phone lights up. The name that arrives before the notification. The sense that someone is near in attention before they appear on the screen.
Spanda gives that feeling a place to be tested without flattening it. We are not asking anyone to believe in a doctrine. We are asking them to notice, play, guess, record, and see.
The premise
A familiar feeling, tested properly
Most of us know the moment: your phone rings, and before you look, a name comes to mind. Sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes you're so right it feels oddly specific. Spanda is built around that small, familiar question: are some people more “in tune” with each other than chance would predict?
The experience itself is remarkably common. In Sheldrake's published surveys, 45–63% of respondents said they had thought of someone who then telephoned that same day (JSPR, 2000; Journal of Parapsychology, 2001). And when lecture audiences are simply asked, 80–95% of hands go up (The Sense of Being Stared At, 2003).
The design comes from biologist Rupert Sheldrake's telephone-telepathy research: one person chooses a small set of familiar callers, one is selected at random, and the receiver guesses who it is before answering. Sheldrake and Pamela Smart reported above-chance results across hundreds of trials: a commonly cited hit rate of around 40% against a 25% chance baseline.
We don't claim the answer is yes. We don't claim telepathy is proven. Spanda is an invitation to play with the question carefully, and to let the data speak for itself.
How a trial works
One ping, one guess, one reveal
- 01 · THE PING
Your phone pings: someone in your circle is calling. You're not told who. The caller is sealed before the trial starts. - 02 · THE GUESS
You see your circle's faces (everyone but you). Feel into it, and tap who you feel it is. Your guess locks before anything is revealed. - 03 · THE REVEAL
Got it right? Fanfare: the hit lands in gold, and it's recorded. Missed? An honest reveal, recorded just the same. Both count.
It works the other way too: the moment someone's on your mind, start a trial there and then. A circle-mate answers the ping and has to guess who's calling.
In a circle of five the receiver guesses from four faces: a 1-in-4 (25%) chance by pure luck. Spanda calculates and records the exact baseline for every trial, based on how many friends were actually in the circle at the time.
Why nobody can cheat
Built so nobody can cheat, including us
The caller is chosen by cryptographic random draw, then sealed as a commitment before the trial starts. The choice cannot change after the fact. Guesses lock before the reveal, so there's no selective memory and no retroactive adjustment. Every trial is written to a tamper-evident log, and a miss is recorded as publicly as a hit.
What your dashboard shows
Hits, chance, and what it actually means
Your readout tracks hits against trials, what pure guessing would be expected to produce over the same number of trials, and a p-value (in plain words, the probability of scoring this well by guessing alone). Small samples swing a lot; the readout only starts to mean something as the trial count grows.
Even a high score doesn't prove telepathy. It may reflect calling habits, shared routines, selection bias, or lucky streaks. The goal is clean, observable patterns, not a claim of definitive proof. Nulls count, and we publish them.
The free experiment
One circle of five, forever free
The free experiment is one circle of five: you plus four friends, because five is the format of Sheldrake's telephone-telepathy tests. That's the circle that runs the science, for as long as you want, at no cost. Want a bigger circle, or separate circles for friends and family? That's what the paid tiers give you.