Extra-sensory perception - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Extrasensory perception involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical sense

Sense

Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception...

s but sensed with the mind. The term was coined by Frederic Myers, and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic

Psychic

A psychic is a person who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception , or is said by others to have such abilities. It is also used to describe theatrical performers who use techniques such as prestidigitation, cold reading, and hot...

abilities such as telepathy

Telepathy

Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...

, clairaudience, and clairvoyance

Clairvoyance

The term clairvoyance is used to refer to the ability to gain information about an object, person, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses, a form of extra-sensory perception...

, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition

Precognition

In parapsychology, precognition , also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information or laws of physics...

or retrocognition

Retrocognition

Retrocognition , from the Latin retro meaning "backward, behind" and cognition meaning "knowing", describes "knowledge of a past event which could not have been learned or inferred by normal means". The term was coined by Frederic W. H...

. ESP is also sometimes casually referred to as a sixth sense, gut instinct or hunch, which are historical English idioms. 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

Parapsychology

The term parapsychology was coined in or around 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir, and originates from para meaning "alongside", and psychology. The term was adopted by J.B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research...

is the scientific study of paranormal psychic phenomena, including ESP. Parapsychologists generally regard such tests as the ganzfeld experiment

Ganzfeld experiment

A ganzfeld experiment is a technique used in the field of parapsychology to test individuals for extrasensory perception . It uses homogeneous and unpatterned sensory stimulation to produce an effect similar to sensory deprivation. The deprivation of patterned sensory input is said to be conducive...

as providing compelling evidence for the existence of ESP. The scientific community

Scientific community

The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...

rejects ESP due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain ESP, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.

J.B. Rhine

In the 1930s, at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

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

Séance

A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word "séance" comes from the French word for "seat," "session" or "sitting," from the Old French "seoir," "to sit." In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma"...

room, they renamed it "parapsychology

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

Psi (parapsychology)

Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".-Etymology:...

and designing experiments to test them. A simple set of cards was developed, originally called Zener cards (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 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

Joseph Gaither Pratt

Joseph Gaither Pratt was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of parapsychology. Among his research interests were extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, mediumship, poltergeists and psi....

, and others at Duke authored a review of all card-guessing experiments conducted internationally since 1882. Titled Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, it has become recognized as the first meta-analysis

Meta-analysis

In statistics, a meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses. In its simplest form, this is normally by identification of a common measure of effect size, for which a weighted average might be the output of a meta-analyses. Here the...

in science. 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

Samuel Soal

Samuel George Soal — known as S.G. Soal — was a British mathematician and psychical researcher.Samuel Soal is mostly, today, remembered as the most prominent researcher in academic parapsychology to have been charged with fraudulent production of data...

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

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 (psi-missing

Psi hit

Psi hit and psi miss are terms used in discussion of parapsychological experimentation to describe the success or failure of the subject in achieving the desired result more often than could be expected through chance alone...

); or that scores declined during the testing (the "decline effect"). 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

Pavel Stepanek

Pavel Štěpánek, of Prague, Czechoslovakia, became, during the 1960s, the most tested individual participant in parapsychology experiments, both in terms of number of trials, and number of independent investigators. In 1968, results of these experiments were published in the journal Nature, with J....

.

Personality measures have also been tested. People who believe in psi

Psi (parapsychology)

Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".-Etymology:...

("sheep") tend to score above chance, while those who do not believe in psi ("goats") 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

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

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

and humanistic psychology

Humanistic psychology

Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective which rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, drawing on the work of early pioneers like Carl Rogers and the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology...

, 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. 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.

Parapsychological investigation of ESP

The study of psi

Psi (parapsychology)

Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".-Etymology:...

phenomena such as ESP is called parapsychology

Parapsychology

. The consensus of the Parapsychological Association is that certain types of psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis

Psychokinesis

The term psychokinesis , also referred to as telekinesis with respect to strictly describing movement of matter, sometimes abbreviated PK and TK respectively, is a term...

, telepathy

Telepathy

, and astral projection

Astral projection

Astral projection is an interpretation of out-of-body experience that assumes the existence of an "astral body" separate from the physical body and capable of traveling outside it...

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 (perhaps impossible) 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: the work of J. B. Rhine, Russell Targ

Russell Targ

Russell Targ is an American physicist and author, an ESP researcher, and pioneer in the earliest development of the laser....

, Harold E. Puthoff

Harold E. Puthoff

Harold E. Puthoff is an American physicist who, earlier in his career was involved in research on paranormal topics. In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University...

and physicists at SRI International

SRI International

SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

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. 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.

Extrasensory perception and hypnosis

There is a common belief that a hypnotized person is able to demonstrate ESP. Carl Sargent

Carl Sargent

Carl L. Sargent is a British author of several roleplaying game-based products and novels.-Early career:...

, a psychology major at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, heard about the early claims of a hypnosis

Hypnosis

Hypnosis is "a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination."It is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment . It is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary...

–ESP link and designed an experiment to test whether they had merit. He recruited 40 fellow college students, none of whom identified themselves as having ESP, and then divided them into one group that would be hypnotized before being tested with a pack of 25 Zener card

Zener card

Zener cards are cards used to conduct experiments for extra-sensory perception , most often clairvoyance. Perceptual psychologist Karl Zener designed the cards in the early 1930s for experiments conducted with his colleague, parapsychologist J. B. Rhine....

s and a non-hypnotized control group that would be tested with the same 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 altered consciousness.

Skepticism

Among scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, 96% described themselves as "skeptical

Skepticism

Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...

" of ESP; 4% believed in psi

Psi (parapsychology)

Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".-Etymology:...

and 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.

Critics of experimental parapsychology hold that there are no consistent and agreed-upon standards by which "ESP powers" may be tested. 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"or their cellphone is causing interference. (See: Texas sharpshooter fallacy

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern. This fallacy is the philosophical/rhetorical application of the...

)

External links

Extrasensory Perception at Video HQ

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J.B. Rhine

Early British research

Sequence, position and psychological effects

Cognitive and humanistic research

Parapsychological investigation of ESP

Extrasensory perception and hypnosis

Skepticism

See also

Further reading

External links