Extra Sensory Perseption

8/13/2019 Extra Sensory Perseption

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Extrasensory Perception

(ESP)

Lecture 7

Parapsychology

Paul Staples


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Overview

What is ESP?

Telepathy

Clairvoyance

Precognition and Retrocognition

Experimental evidence

Restricted-choice experiments

Free-response experiments

The process approach

Summary


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Learning Objectives

This session will enable you to

Give a reasonable definition of ESP

Categorise the various types of ESP

Understand the nature of the experimental evidenceavailable

Appreciate the criticisms and counter-criticisms ofsome of the findings

Appreciate the difference between resticted-choice

and free-response scenarios Recognise that there are other considerations, such as

those suggested by the process approach


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What is ESP?

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is perceptionthat occurs independently of the main physicalsenses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smellor, indeed, perceptual processes such asproprioception)

In some ways the term is vague but it isgenerally used to imply a source of informationthat is unknown to modern science

ESP can be divided into a number of sub-categories


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Telepathy

For telepathy the source of information isanother persons mind

The principle requirement of telepathictransmission is that the information transfer

cannot be explained by any known physicalprocess

Often the demonstration involves informationtransfer over large distances

Unlike physical information transfer, telepathyis not subject to the weakening of the signalthe further you move away from the source


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Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is similar to telepathy except thatthe source of the information is an object orevent rather than another mind

As well as clairvoyance, we can proposeclairaudience where the source of informationis auditory rather than visual

Clairaudience is an alleged psychic ability to

hear things that are beyond the range of theordinary power of hearing, such as voices ormessages from the dead


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Precognition and retrocognition

If the clairvoyance or clairaudience concerns things inthe future or the past the these are referred to asprecognition and retrocognition respectively

Dreams have sometimes been related to precognition

and characters like Nostradamus are famous for theirprecognitive visions

Retrocognitions can be about recent events (e.g. theperpetrator of a recent murder) or distant events (e.g.historic events)

Retrocognition is different from past life regression


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Experimental evidence

ESP experiments fall into two broad categories

Restricted-choice experiments The receiver must make a decision about what is being

transmitted from a small set of known possibilities

Zener cards are an example of restricted choice stimuli Free-response experiments

Here the sender will choose an item from a large but finite setof possible stimuli

The receiver is not told anything about the nature of the

chosen stimulus The remote viewing you participated in was a free-response

set up.


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In the 1930s one of the most prominent placesfor ESP research was the Rhine laboratory in

America established by J B Rhine

A typical study from that era is the Pearce-

Pratt experiment Typical card-guessing experimentusing

zener decks (25 cards, 5 target alternatives,MCE = 5)

74 runs conducted over 37 sessions Sender and receiver (Pratt and Pearce) in

separate buildings (100 or 250 yards apart)


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Watches synchronised so that when Pratt

turned over a card, Pearce made a guess

Both recorded their sequences

Hits counted independently by Rhine

Rhine present with Pratt during last few

sessions

Mean hits per run was significant at p < 10-22 No likelihood that resultswere due to chance


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Hansel (1961) criticised the study bysuggesting that as no-one was with Pearceduring the sessions, he could have gone out ofhis room and looked through a window at

Pratts cards. This could not be shown to be wrong until

1967 when Stevenson was able to locate theoriginal blueprints

However, on scrutinising the official andunofficial reports of the experiments there areinconsistencies in the number of hits recorded


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Pratt-Woodruff experiment (1939) 2,400 runs across 32 volunteers

Mean hit rate was 5.21, p < 0.00001

However, the result attributable to only 5 of the 32

volunteers Pavel Stepanek

Library clerk from Czechoslovakia

Took part in 27 studies across 18 investigators

Was discovered through his ability to state whetherthe white or dark side of a thin piece of cardboardwas face up inside an opaque envelope

Performance level at around 57% correct, p


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Bill Delmore Yale law student in the early 1970s

Unusual in that he had vivid visual imagery, frequent luciddreams (knowing you are dreaming) and a high degree ofconfidence in his psi abilities

520 playing cards mixed and placed in desk drawers

Experimenter picked a card and without looking at it placed itin an opaque folder

46 runs of 52 trials each (2392 trials)

Delmore had an excessof exact hits! For exact hits p < 10-30

Delmore was also successful on other tasks


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Remote viewing (RV) experiments Puthoff and Targ were the first to do this in the late 1970s

They worked with Uri Geller whom most parapsychologistsquickly became suspicious of

Their first work was with Pat Price, a Californian policecommissioner

Target location chosen from a pool of 100

Target observed for 30 minutes

Price asked to verbally describe and to draw the location

Nine trials Independent judge taken to each site and then asked to rank

the drawings from 1 to 9 according to their similarity to the site

Seven were ranked first at the correct site (p < 10-4)


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Critics of these experiments are Marks and Kammann(1980)

They suggested that there were biasing clues in thetranscripts of the verbal descriptions

Now some of the judges failed to correctly identifymatches

Also, only the most successful trials were chosen forpublication and this falsely increased the statisticalresult

However, there have been a number of successful RVexperiments reported in the literature


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Ganzfeld Experiments

We have already talked about the Ganzfeld

procedure

It has become a popular method of testing ESP Honorton (1978) claimed that 23 out of 42 ganzfeld

experiments had yielded statistically significant

results

Successful results came from 9 independent labs Taken as a collection of results the evidence seems

quite impressive


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Honorton countered these criticisms byrecalculating the results in line with thecriticisms

The level of success was notcompromised even though the successrates reported had been too high

Other criticisms, such as one concerningthe quality of the randomisation process,were conceded by Honorton


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Overall, it would seem that the studies have

been fairly rigorous even though

improvements could have been made

However, this is no more true here than it is inall other areas of human research

Whilst the apparent ESP demonstrated so far

may not compel one to accept ESP, the

evidence does point to there being something

worth further investigation


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All of the research considered so far is

concerned with trying to establish proof

of the existence of ESP

Other research tries to increase our

understanding of psi anomalies

Some may consider this approach

premature until the proof has been

verified


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The process approach looks at the following aspectsthat need to be considered Cognitive processesright hemisphere, cognitive capacity.

Belief in ESPsheep and goats

Personality traitsextraversion/ESP correlation The experimenter effectexperimenters get significant

results in psi experiments because ofexperimenter error,psychology and psi hypotheses.

It attempts to explore the degree to which these

factors interact with ESP There is not time to explore these aspects further here


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Summary

We have seen that there is some

convincing data concerning the possible

existence of ESP

The data are not yet at the stage where

they provide unequivocal proof of the

existence of ESP

Extra Sensory Perseption

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