Extrasensory perception or ESP includes reception of information not gained through the recognized
physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist
J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and clairvoyance,
and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition. ESP is also sometimes referred
to as a sixth sense. The term implies acquisition of information by means external to the basic
limiting assumptions of science, such as that organisms can only receive information from
the past to the present. Parapsychology is the study of paranormal
psychic phenomena, including ESP. Parapsychologists generally regard such tests as the ganzfeld
experiment as providing compelling evidence for the existence of ESP. The scientific community
rejects ESP due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain
ESP, the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results, and
considers ESP a pseudoscience.
History 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 - 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 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, 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 Extra-Sensory Perception After
Sixty Years. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 four of his former participants, Randolph Tucker Pendleton IV, Amanda Bailey, Ling Dao
and Rachel Brown, 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. The findings were convincing for many other
scientists and philosophers regarding telepathy and the claims of Rhine, but were also prominently
critiqued as fraudulent, until, following Soal's death in 1975, support for them was
largely abandoned. Sequence, position and psychological effects
Rhine and other parapsychologists found that some subjects, or some conditions, produced
significant below-chance scoring; or that scores declined during the testing. Some such
"internal effects" in ESP scores have also appeared to be idiosyncratic to particular
participants or research methods. Most notable is the focusing effect identified in the decade-long
research with Pavel Stepanek. Personality measures have also been tested.
People who believe in psi tend to score above chance, while those who do not believe in
psi show null results or psi-missing. This has become 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. 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. 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. 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.
Parapsychological investigation of ESP
The study of psi phenomena such as ESP is called parapsychology. The consensus of the
Parapsychological Association is that certain types of psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis,
telepathy, and astral projection are well established.
A great deal of reported extrasensory 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 widespread
belief in the authenticity of these phenomena. However, it has proven extremely difficult
to replicate such extraordinary experiences under controlled scientific conditions.
Proponents of the ESP phenomena point to numerous studies that cite evidence of the phenomenon's
existence: Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, who were physicists at SRI International in
the 1970s, as well as J. B. Rhine at Duke University 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.
The most accepted results are all small to moderate statistically significant results.
Critics may dispute the positive interpretation of results obtained in scientific studies
of ESP, as they claim they are difficult to reproduce reliably, and are small in effect.
Parapsychologists have argued that the data from numerous studies show that certain individuals
have consistently produced remarkable results while the remainder have constituted a highly
significant trend that cannot be dismissed even if the effect is small.
Skepticism
Among scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, 96% described themselves as "skeptical"
of ESP; 4% believed in psi. Among all scientists surveyed, 10% felt that parapsychological
research should be encouraged. The National Academy of Sciences had previously sponsored
the Enhancing Human Performance report on mental development programs, which was critical
of parapsychology. Skeptics claim that there is a lack of a viable
theory of the mechanism behind ESP, and that there are historical cases in which flaws
have been discovered in the experimental design of parapsychological studies.
See also
References
Further reading The Conscious Universe, by Dean Radin, Harper
Collins, 1997, ISBN 0-06-251502-0. Entangled Minds by Dean Radin, Pocket Books,
2006 Milbourne Christopher, ESP, Seers & Psychics:
What the Occult Really Is, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1970, ISBN 0-690-26815-7
Milbourne Christopher, Mediums, Mystics & the Occult by Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1975
Milbourne Christopher, Search for the Soul, Thomas Y. Crowell Publishers, 1979
Georges Charpak, Henri Broch, and Bart K. Holland, Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other
Pseudoscience,. 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7867-5 Hoyt L. Edge, Robert L. Morris, Joseph H.
Rush, John Palmer, Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capability,
Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986, ISBN 0-7102-0226-1 Paul Kurtz, A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology,
Prometheus Books, 1985, ISBN 0-87975-300-5 Jeffrey Mishlove, Roots of Consciousness:
Psychic Liberation Through History Science and Experience. 1st edition, 1975, ISBN 0-394-73115-8,
2nd edition, Marlowe & Co., July 1997, ISBN 1-56924-747-1 There are two very different
editions. online Schmeidler, G. R.. Separating the sheep from
the goats. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 39, 47–49.
John White, ed. Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, published by Edgar D. Mitchell
and G. P. Putman, 1974, ISBN 0-399-11342-8 Richard Wiseman, Deception and self-deception:
Investigating Psychics. Amherst, USA: Prometheus Press. 1997
Benjamin B. Wolman, ed, Handbook of Parapsychology, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977, ISBN 0-442-29576-6
Wilde, Stuart, Sixth Sense: Including the Secrets of the Etheric Subtle Body, Hay House,
2000. ISBN 978-1-56170-501-6, ISBN 978-1-56170-410-1 Sixth sense - a spiritual perspective by SSRF
http:www.spiritualresearchfoundation.orgidspiritualscience/sixthsense External links
Extrasensory perception at DMOZ Extrasensory Perception at Video HQ