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World of the Body: extrasensory perception

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of parapsychology, which set out to prove the reality of extrasensory perception (ESP). Historically, widespread credence has been given to such phenomena in most if not all cultures, and this holds true today for large sectors of the West. Debates about ESP have been dominated by the question of its existence. Writers about the subject usually take sides, denigrating it as a figment of the imagination, or valorizing it as one of the most fundamental propensities of our being. The history of these debates indicates the changing interconnections between religion, popular belief, conceptions of psychology, and the role of science in demarcating and producing the real.

At the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of investigators, including leading psychologists, physiologists, and philosophers, took up the study of psychical phenomena. Many were attempting to find something with which to refute materialism and provide a basis for religious belief, and so to enable a transformation of society. Thus the very definition of telepathy (previously termed ‘thought-transference’), in 1882, by the English psychical researcher Frederic Myers, as ‘the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense’ presents itself as part of a polemical argument, which has framed how the phenomena have subsequently been approached, or dismissed. The interest was not in the phenomena per se, but in whether their existence could give some evidence of a mechanism which would be able to render intelligible how the dead could communicate with the living, and hence establish the post mortem survival of the soul.

All sorts of invisible forces — either physical or purely psychical — were invoked to explain telepathy, and variations along these lines continue till this day. In 1896 the chemist William Crookes speculated that telepathy was like radiation. By contrast, Myers claimed that the telepathic impression was registered in subconscious or subliminal aspects of one's being. In so doing, telepathy played a crucial role in the creation of the unconscious as a non-material interiority in which past and future, self and other intermingled. Following this, Myers and the French philosopher and psychologist, Henri Bergson, speculated that, beneath the manifest occurrences of telepathy, such processes were taking place all the time. Telepathy thus became the hidden substrate of the social bond, its intimate communion. It was only the restriction characteristic of consciousness that hid this awareness.

Psychical researchers attempted to provide evidence for telepathy by the experimental pursuit of the ‘guessing game’, which was then a popular pastime, and through the collection of first-hand testimonials, presented in Phantasms of the Living (1886). Having convinced themselves of the reality of the phenomena, their subsequent investigations of mediums were dominated by the problem of how to establish that a telepathic message came from a defunct, rather than living source: that phantasms of the dead were not simply phantasms of the living.

It is important to note that concern with such phenomena lay at the forefront of the psychological agenda at the end of the nineteenth century. In commenting on the first congress of physiological psychology in Paris in 1889, William James noted that the most striking feature of the discussions was their ‘tendency to slope off to some one or other of those shady horizons with which the name of “psychic research” is now associated.’ Consequently, a vast census of hallucinations was set up, in which the question of the telepathy was paramount. For James, and for other subliminal psychologists such as Théodore Flournoy, the task confronting psychology was that of providing a differential account of all human phenomena — including supernormal phenomena — and studying their interrelation. It was through a process of limitation and exclusion that the agenda of mainstream psychology was established, and with this, its conceptions of the personality and of sensory perception.

By and large, psychical researchers failed to convince the majority of the scientific and academic worlds of the existence of telepathy. Subsequent investigators attempted to set right this situation; rather than locate themselves in private societies, they attempted to gain a foothold in the universities, usually through large endowments. Taking on the regnant experimental methodology in psychology, they attempted to show that the phenomena could be taken out of the seance and reproduced in laboratory settings. To mark these changes, the field was redubbed ‘parapsychology’, and ‘telepathy’ and ‘clairvoyance’ became ‘extrasensory perception’. It was J. B. Rhine at Duke University who was responsible for the latter term, and he gave such research its modern cast with his Extra-sensory perception (1934). No longer content to posit the existence of yet-unrecognized senses, Rhine reformulated Myers' definition to read: ‘perception in a mode that is just not sensory’. Rhine subjected individuals to rigorously controlled experiments. So-called Zener cards bearing a cross, circle, rectangle, star, or three parallel wavy lines were placed in sealed envelopes, and subjects had to guess their shapes in prolonged trials which were statistically analysed.

For Rhine, no less than his forebears, the prime interest in ESP was its use as an argument against physicalism. He claimed that the proof for the existence of ESP had repudiated the view that the mind was just a physical brain function, and had proved the existence of a ‘minimal concept of the soul’, which he dubbed the ‘psychological soul’. Salvation for religious belief had apparently been found in the shape of undergraduate card guessers in laboratories. Rhine was not markedly more successful in promoting belief in ESP than earlier investigators. As William James had noted, it seems as if there is sufficient evidence to persuade those who have the requisite ‘will to believe’, and insufficient to sway those who do not.

At the same time, theories of perception and extrasensory perception continue to be wedded. Conceptions of extrasensory perception presuppose conceptions of what constitutes perception itself. Perception has generally been linked to particular sense organs. An exception to this was the psychologist J. J. Gibson's ecological theory of perception. According to this, all perception could be said to be ‘extra-sensory’

— Sonu Shamdasani

Bibliography

Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., and Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the living, Vols 1 and 2 Trübner and Co., London.
Rhine, J. B. (1934). Extra-sensory perception. Boston Society for Psychical Research, Boston

Types of ESP

Many different, or seemingly different, types of ESP have been described:

Clairvoyance and remote viewing, the Paranormal perception of people, places or events by means other than the normal senses.
Precognition, or retrocognition, the perception of other times via. This is usually considered to be the same as clairvoyance, except that the perception travels through time.
Abilities such as Aura reading and medical intuition, the perception of aspects of others which most people cannot perceive.
psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairalience and clairgustance, the perception of aspects of things which most people cannot perceive, by means other than the normal senses.
Telepathy, the ability to sense communications from and/or communicate with people by means other than the normal senses.
Out-of-body experiences (also called spirit walking and astral projection), when used to perceive environments by means other than the normal senses.
Mediumship, the ability to communicate with the spirits of persons or animals who have died. Mediumship may also include other paranormal abilities.
Psychokinesis, the ability to move objects with the mind without physically interferring with the object.

The scientific study of paranormal phenomena such as ESP is called parapsychology, and includes other phenomena such as and reincarnation, near-death experiences, and psychokinesis. It is highly controversial whether ESP abilities exists, and if so which abilities are real.

History of ESP

The notion of extra-sensory perception existed in antiquity. In many ancient cultures, such powers were ascribed to people who purported to use them for second sight or communicate with deities, ancestors, spirits, and the like.

Extra-sensory perception and hypnosis

When Franz Anton Mesmer and Grigori Rasputin were first popularizing hypnosis, the legend came about that a person who was hypnotized would be able to demonstrate ESP. Carl Sargent, a psychology major at the University of Cambridge, heard about the early claims of a hypnosis–ESP link and designed an experiment to test whether they had merit. He recruited 40 fellow college students, none of whom identified him- or herself as having ESP, and then divided them into a group that would be hypnotized before being tested with a pack of 25 Zener cards, and a control group that would be tested with the same Zener cards. The control subjects averaged a score of 5 out of 25 right, exactly what chance would indicate. The subjects who were hypnotized did more than twice as well, averaging a score of 11.9 out of 25 right. Sargent's own interpretation of the experiment is that ESP is associated with a relaxed state of mind and a freer, more atavistic level of consciousness. Skeptics believe that Sargent's experiments lacked proper controls.

J.B. Rhine

In the 1930s, at Duke University in North Carolina, J. B. Rhine and his wife Louisa tried to develop psychical research into an experimental science. To avoid the connotations of hauntings and the seance room, they renamed it "parapsychology." While Louisa Rhine concentrated on collecting accounts of spontaneous cases, J. B. Rhine worked largely in the laboratory, carefully defining terms such as ESP and psi and designing experiments to test them. A simple set of cards was developed, originally called Zener cards^[7] (after their designer)—now called ESP cards. They bear the symbols circle, square, wavy lines, cross, and star; there are five cards of each in a pack of 25.

In a telepathy experiment the "sender" looks at a series of cards while the "receiver" guesses the symbols. To try to observe clairvoyance, the pack of cards is hidden from everyone while the receiver guesses. To try to observe precognition, the order of the cards is determined after the guesses are made.

In all such experiments the order of the cards must be random so that hits are not obtained through systematic biases or prior knowledge. At first the cards were shuffled by hand, then by machine. Later, random number tables were used and, nowadays, computers. An advantage of ESP cards is that statistics can easily be applied to determine whether the number of hits obtained is higher than would be expected by chance. Rhine used ordinary people as subjects and claimed that, on average, they did significantly better than chance expectation. Later he used dice to test for psychokinesis and also claimed results that were better than chance.

In 1940, Rhine, J.G. Pratt, and others at Duke authored a review of all card-guessing experiments conducted internationally since 1882. Titled Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years, it has become recognised as the first meta-analysis in science.^[8] It included details of replications of Rhine's studies. Through these years, 50 studies were published, of which 33 were contributed by investigators other than Rhine and the Duke University group; 61% of these independent studies reported significant results suggestive of ESP.^[9] Among these were psychologists at Colorado University and Hunter College, New York, who completed the studies with the largest number of trials and the highest levels of significance.^[10]^[11] Replication failures encouraged Rhine to further research into the conditions necessary to experimentally produce the effect. He maintained, however, that it was not replicability, or even a fundamental theory of ESP that would evolve research, but only a greater interest in unconscious mental processes and a more complete understanding of human personality.^[12]

Early British research

One of the first statistical studies of ESP, using card-guessing, was conducted by Ina Jephson, in the 1920s. She reported mixed findings across two studies. More successful experiments were conducted with procedures other than card-guessing. G.N.M. Tyrrell used automated target-selection and data-recording in guessing the location of a future point of light. Whateley Carington experimented on the paranormal cognition of drawings of randomly selected words, using participants from across the globe. J. Hettinger studied the ability to retrieve information associated with token objects. All reported evidence suggestive of extra-sensory perception.

Less successful was University of London mathematician Samuel Soal in his attempted replications of the card-guessing studies. However, following a hypothesis suggested by Carington on the basis of his own findings, Soal re-analysed his data for evidence of what Carington termed displacement. Soal discovered, to his surprise, that two of his former participants evidenced displacement: i.e., their responses significantly corresponded to targets for trials one removed from which they were assigned. Soal sought to confirm this finding by testing these participants in new experiments. Conducted during the war years, into the 1950s, under tightly controlled conditions, they produced highly significant results suggestive of precognitive telepathy. His findings were especially convincing for many other scientists and philosophers regarding telepathy and the claims of Rhine. Critics offered claims of fraud, the invalidity of probability theory to science, and the possibility of unconscious whispering, as accounting for Soal's results. These charges against Soal, and spirited defenses by his colleagues, continued until after his death in 1975. In 1978, parapsychologists largely abandoned any further defence of the findings when a computer-based analysis identified inexplicable sequences in the target lists used for one of Soal's experiments.

Sequence, position and psychological effects

Rhine and other parapsychologists found that some subjects, or some conditions, produced significant below-chance scoring (psi-missing); or that scores declined during testing (the "decline effect"). Personality measures have also been tested. People who believe in psi ("sheep") tend to score above chance, while those who do not believe in psi ("goats") show null results or psi-missing. This has became known as the "sheep-goat effect".

Prediction of decline and other position effects has proved challenging, although they have been often identified in data gathered for the purpose of observing other effects.^[13] Personality and attitudinal effects have shown greater predictability, with meta-analysis of parapsychological databases showing the sheep-goat effect, and other traits, to have significant and reliable effects over the accumulated data.^[14]^[15]

Cognitive and humanistic research

In the 1960s, in line with the development of cognitive psychology and humanistic psychology, parapsychologists became increasingly interested in the cognitive components of ESP, the subjective experience involved in making ESP responses, and the role of ESP in psychological life. Memory, for instance, was offered as a better model of psi than perception. This called for experimental procedures that were not limited to Rhine's favoured forced-choice methodology. Free-response measures, such as used by Carington in the 1930s, were developed with attempts to raise the sensitivity of participants to their cognitions. These procedures included relaxation, meditation, REM-sleep, and the Ganzfeld (a mild sensory deprivation procedure). These studies have proved to be even more successful than Rhine's forced-choice paradigm, with meta-analyses evidencing reliable effects, and many confirmatory replication studies.^[16]^[17] Methodological hypotheses have still been raised to explain the results, while others have sought to advance theoretical development in parapsychology on their bases. Moving research out of the laboratory and into naturalistic settings, and taking advantage of naturally occurring conditions, has been a related development.

Scientific investigation of ESP

Main articles: Parapsychology, Scientific investigation of telepathy, and Ganzfeld experiment

The scientific field which investigates psi phenomena such as ESP is called parapsychology. The scientific consensus in the field of parapsychology is that certain types of psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis, telepathy, and precognition are well established scientifically.^[18]^[5]^[19]

A great deal of reported Extra Sensory Perception is said to occur spontaneously in conditions which are not scientifically controlled. Such experiences have often been reported to be much stronger and more obvious than those observed in laboratory experiments. These reports, rather than laboratory evidence, have historically been the basis for the extremely widespread belief in the authenticity of these phenomena. However, it has proven extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to replicate such extraordinary experiences under controlled scientific conditions.^[5]

Those who believe that ESP may exist point to numerous scientific studies that appear to offer evidence of the phenomenon's existence: the work of J. B. Rhine, Russell Targ, Harold E. Puthoff and physicists at SRI International in the 1970s, and many others, are often cited in arguments that ESP exists.

The main current debate concerning ESP surrounds whether or not statistically compelling laboratory evidence for it has already been accumulated.^[20]^[5] The most compelling and repeatable results are all small to moderate statistical results. Some dispute the positive interpretation of results obtained in scientific studies of ESP, because they are difficult to reproduce reliably, and are small effects. Parapsychologists have argued that the data from numerous studies show that certain individuals have consistently produced remarkable results while the remaider have constituted a highly significant trend that cannot be dismissed even if the effect is small.^[21]

Skepticism

See also: Parapsychology#Criticism

Among scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, 96% described themselves as "skeptical" of ESP, although 2% believed in psi and 10% felt that parapsychological research should be encouraged.^[22] The National Academy of Sciences had previously sponsored the Enhancing Human Performance report on mental development programs, which was critical of parapsychology.^[23]

A scientific methodology that shows statistically significant evidence for ESP with nearly 100% consistency has not been discovered. The lack of a viable theory of the mechanism behind ESP is also frequently cited as a source of skepticism. Historical cases in which flaws have been discovered in the experimental design of parapsychological studies, and the occasional cases of fraud marred the field.^[24]

Critics of experimental parapsychology hold that there are no consistent and agreed-upon standards by which "ESP powers" may be tested, in the way one might test for, say, electrical current or the chemical composition of a substance. It is argued that when psychics are challenged by skeptics and fail to prove their alleged powers, they assign all sorts of reasons for their failure, such as that the skeptic is affecting the experiment with "negative energy."

References

^ Britannica Online Encyclopedia, Retrieved Oct 7, 2007.
^ Glossary of Key Words Frequently Used in Parapsychology. Parapsychological Association. Retrieved on 2006-12-24.
^ Definition of extrasensory perception. Merriam-Webster OnLine. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
^ Britannica Online Encyclopedia, Retrieved Oct 7, 2007.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by Dean I. Radin Harper Edge, ISBN 0-06-251502-0
^ Robert Todd Carroll. ESP (extrasensory perception). Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved on 2007-06-23.
^ Vernon, David [1989]. in (ed.) Donald Laycock, David Vernon, Colin Groves, Simon Brown: Skeptical - a Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Canberra, Australia: Canberra Skeptics, p28. ISBN 0731657942.
^ Bösch, H. (2004). "Reanalyzing a meta-analysis on extra-sensory perception dating from 1940, the first comprehensive meta-analysis in the history of science" in 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. '.
^ Honorton, C. (1975). "Error some place!". Journal of Communication (25): 103-116.
^ Martin, D.R., & Stribic, F.P. (1938). Studies in extrasensory perception: I. An analysis of 25, 000 trials. Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 23-30.
^ Riess, B.F. (1937). A case of high scores in card guessing at a distance. Journal of Parapsychology, 1, 260-263.
^ Rhine, J.B. (1966). Foreword. In Pratt, J.G., Rhine, J.B., Smith, B.M., Stuart, C.E., & Greenwood, J.A. (eds.). Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, 2nd ed. Boston, US: Humphries.
^ Beloff, J. (1986). Retrodiction. Parapsychology Review, 17 (1), 1-5.
^ Lawrence, T. R. (1993). Gathering in the sheep and goats: A meta-analysis of forced-choice sheep-goat ESP studies, 1947-1993. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association 36th Annual Convention, pp. 75-86
^ http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_3_62/ai_54194994 Honorton, C., Ferrari, D. C., & Bem, D. J. (1998). Extraversion and ESP performance: A meta-analysis and a new confirmation. Journal of Parapsychology, 62 (3), 255-276.
^ Sherwood, S. J. & Roe, C. (2003). A review of dream ESP studies conducted since the Maimonides studies. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 85-109.
^ Bem, D. J. et al.(2001). Updating the Ganzfeld database. Journal of Parapsychology, 65, 207-218.
^ http://www.psy.gu.se/EJP/EJP1984Bauer.pdf Criticism and Controversy in Parapsychology - An Overview By Eberhard Bauer, Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg, in the European Journal of Parapsychology, 1984, 5, 141-166, Retrieved February 9, 2007
^ http://www.parapsych.org/faq_file3.html#20 What is the state-of-the-evidence for psi? Retrieved January 31, 2007
^ Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality by Dean I. Radin, Simon & Schuster, Paraview Pocket Books, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-1416516774
^ Psychological Bulletin 1994, Vol. 115, No. 1, 4-18. Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer By Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton
^ McConnell, R.A., and Clark, T.K. (1991). "National Academy of Sciences' Opinion on Parapsychology" Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 85, 333-365.
^ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_n3_v56/ai_13771782/pg_5 Retrieved February 4, 2007
^ Carroll, Robert Todd (2005). ESP (extrasensory perception). The Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved on 2006-09-13.

Parapsychology
Topics	Remote viewing - Clairvoyance - Cold reading - Extra-sensory perception - Near-death experience - Precognition - Psychic - Psychokinesis - Psychometry - Telepathy - Psiology - Ganzfeld experiment - Apparitional experience
Organizations	Society for Psychical Research - American Society for Psychical Research - Parapsychological Association - Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory - National Laboratory of Psychical Research - IANDS
People	Dean Radin - Susan Blackmore - Alister Hardy - Ray Hyman - William James - Raymond Moody - Andrew Nichols - Tommaso Palamidessi - James Randi - Joseph Banks Rhine - Rupert Sheldrake - Michael Shermer - Russel Targ - Charles Tart - Jessica Utts - Karl Zener
Publications	Journal of Parapsychology - Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research

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