extra sensory perseption
TRANSCRIPT
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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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Restricted-choice experiments
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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Restricted-choice experiments
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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Restricted-choice experiments
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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Restricted-choice experiments
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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Restricted-choice experiments
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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Free-response experiments
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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Free-response experiments
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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Free-response experiments
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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Free-response experiments
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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Free-response experiments
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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The process approach
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
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