The Eye of the Soul

The soul perceives with eyes of it's own. After all, the definition of soul is "consciousness" or "awareness", so it's very nature is to perceive.

Over the last 100 years, researchers in the field of parapsychology have carried out thousands of experiments on the existence of perception independent of the body - known as ESP or PSI.

These experiments consistently show that ESP increases that accuracy of perception of remote targets by 10-20% above what we would expect by chance. This effect is significant.

What's more, a number of variables have been identified that either increase or decrease ESP perception. These include -

• Mental state, eg dreaming, hypnosis, meditation

• Physical state, eg relaxation, sensory isolation

• Cognitive state, eg expectation, the belief or disbelief of the subjects

• Social state, eg the emotional closeness between sender and receiver

• Personality type, eg creativity and artistic ability

• Message type, eg if the message is emotionally significant, interesting, dynamic, positive

• Feedback

None of these variables should have any effect at all on perception, if ESP is non-existent.

Summary of the research.

J. B. Rhine's Early Research at Duke University

Perhaps the most publicized early experiments were those published by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine in 1934 in a monograph entitled Extra-Sensory Perception, which summarized results from his experiments at Duke University beginning in 1927. 

 
Louisa and Joseph Banks Rhine

Although this work was published by the relatively obscure Boston Society for Psychic Research, it was picked up in the popular press and had a large impact throughout the world.

These experiments used shuffled decks of ESP cards with five sets of five different symbols on them -- a cross, a circle, a wavy line, a square and a star. This method reduced the problem of chance-expectation to a matter of exact calculations.

Between 1880 and 1940, 145 empirical ESP studies were published using 77,796 subjects who made 4,918,186 single trial guesses. In 106 such studies, the authors arrived at results exceeding chance expectations.

One such study was the Pearce-Pratt series, carried out in 1933 with Dr. J. Gaither Pratt as agent and Hubert Pearce as subject. In these experiments, the agent and his subject were separated in different buildings over 100 yards apart. Pratt displaced the cards one by one from an ESP pack at an agreed time without turning them over. After going through the pack, Pratt then turned the cards over and recorded them. The guesses were recorded independently by Pearce. In order to eliminate the possibility of cheating, both placed their records in a sealed package handed to Rhine before the two lists were compared. Copies of these original records are still available for inspection. The total number of guesses was 1,850 of which one would expect one-fifth, or 370, to be correct by chance. The actual number of hits was 558. The probability these results could have occurred by chance is much less than one in a hundred million.

Unconscious ESP

One of the first theories about the nature of ESP was put forward by Frederick Myers, author of the 1903 classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, when he associated psychic phenomena with the workings of the subliminal mind, below the limits of consciousness. Studies in which ESP signals are registered by the body's physiological processes even when the subject is unaware of the message support the concept of unconscious ESP. For example, in a series of studies conducted by E. Douglas Dean, subjects were hooked up to a plethysmograph. Increases or decreases in blood and lymph volume, resulting from emotional responses, are measured by this instrument. 

E. Douglas Dean conducting a plethysmograph study

A telepathic agent in another room then concentrated on different names, some of which were known to be emotionally significant to the subjects. The results indicated changes in the blood volume which significantly correlated with the emotionally laden target messages. This finding was confirmed in a second series of studies conducted by Dean and Carroll B. Nash at St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia. Most of the subjects were totally unaware of the changes in their blood supply which were responding to the target material.

A similar study was conducted by Charles Tart in which subjects were hooked up to a plethysmograph, an electroencephalograph, and a device for measuring galvanic skin response. The agent in this experiment was periodically given a mild electric shock. The subjects did not know they were being tested for ESP, but rather were told to guess when a "subliminal stimulus" (sensory stimulation below the threshold of conscious awareness) was being directed to them. The subjects' hunches failed to correlate to this disguised target. However, their physiological measurements showed abrupt changes when the shocks were administered to the agent in another room.
 

Dream Telepathy

Frederick Myers noted in the early years of psychical research that the workings of the subliminal mind were most visible in such phenomena as dreams, trance states, hypnosis, and states of creative inspiration. In fact, a large proportion of the reported cases of ESP occurred while the percipient was in such altered states of consciousness.

An important series of studies on the nature of ESP in dreams was carried out by a team of researchers at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Using equipment which monitored brain waves and eye movements, the investigators could determine accurately when subjects were having dreams. By waking the subjects at these times they were then able to obtain immediate reports of the dream contents. Earlier in the day, in another room, the telepathic senders had concentrated on target pictures designed to create a particular impression.

Independent judges compared the similarity subject's responses displayed to all of the actual targets in each series and found evidence for nocturnal telepathy and precognition (when targets were not chosen until the following day) of the actual targets used.,

Hypnosis and ESP

Studies have shown heightened ESP in states of physical relaxation or in trance and hypnotic states.   In fact, the use of hypnosis to produce high ESP scores is one of the more replicable procedures in psi research. 

A particularly notable series of experiments were described in 1910 by EmilIe Boirac, rector of the Dijon Academy in France, which produced what he described as an "externalization of sensitivity." When the hypnotist placed something in his mouth, the subject could describe it. If he pricked himself with a pin, the subject would feel the pain. The most striking experiments were those in which the subject was told to project his sensibility into a glass of water. If the water was pricked, the subject would react by a visible jerk or exclamation.

In 1969, Charles Honorton and Stanley Krippner reviewed the experimental literature of studies designed to use hypnosis to induce ESP. Of nineteen experiments reported, only seven failed to produce significant results. Many of the studies produced astounding success. In a particularly interesting precognition study, conducted by Fahler and Osis with two hypnotized subjects, the task also included making confidence calls -- predicting which guesses would be most accurate. The correlation of confidence call hits produced impressive results with a probability of 0.0000002. 

In 1984, Ephriam Schechter reported an analysis of studies comparing the effect of hypnotic induction and nonhypnosis control procedures on performance in ESP card-guessing tasks. There were 25 experiments by investigators in ten different laboratories. Consistently superior ESP performance was found to occur in the hypnotic induction conditions compared to the control conditions of these experiments. 

Exceptional ESP Laboratory Performers

Pavel Stepanek

Western researchers who travelled to Prague to personally investigate Milan Ryzl's hypnotic training program were able to test one of his better subjects, Pavel Stepanek. During a long period of experimental investigations, Stepanek proved to be one of the most successful subjects ever tested. More than twenty studies with him have now been published.

Pavel Stepanek attempting to read an ESP target 
inside a triple-sealed envelope

The results were obtained for over a decade by several independent experimental teams. 

Bill Delmore 

In a study with an exceptional subject, Bill Delmore, confidence calls were made using a deck of ordinary playing cards as the target. The technique used was a "psychic shuffle" in which the experimenters randomly select a predetermined order which the subject must match by shuffling the target deck. In each of two shuffle series, with fifty-two cards in a series, Delmore made twenty-five confidence calls -- all of which were completely correct. The probability of such success is only one in 5250. Other studies with Delmore have also produced extraordinary results.

Uri Geller

In 1974, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, reported on experiments conducted with the Israeli psychic performer Uri Geller. Their results, covered studies taking place over an eighteen month period:

In the experiments with [Uri] Geller, he was asked to reproduce 13 drawings over a week-long period while physically separated from his experimenters in a shielded room. Geller was not told who made any drawing, who selected it for him to reproduce or about its method of selection.

The researchers said that only after Geller's isolation -- in a double-walled steel room that was acoustically, visually and electrically shielded from them -- was a target picture randomly chosen and drawn. It was never discussed by the experimenters after being drawn or brought near Geller.

All but two of the experiments conducted with Geller were in the shielded room, with the drawings in adjacent rooms ranging from four meters to 475 meters from him. In other experiments, the drawings were made inside the shielded room with Geller in adjacent locations. Examples of drawings Geller was asked to reproduce included a firecracker, a cluster of grapes, a devil, a horse, the solar system, a tree and an envelope. 

Two researchers -- not otherwise associated with this research -- were given Geller's reproductions for judging on a "blind" basis. They matched the target data to the response data with no errors, a chance probability of better than one in a million per judgment....

In another experiment with Geller, he was asked to "guess" the face of a die shaken in a closed steel box. The box was vigorously shaken by one of the experimenters and placed on a table. The position of the die was not known to the researchers.

Geller provided the correct answer eight times, the researchers said. The experiment was performed ten times but Geller declined to respond two times, saying his perception was not clear.

Ganzfeld Research

A very thoughtful approach toward investigating ESP was reported in 1974 simultaneously by investigators in New York and Texas., These researchers hypothesized that the reasons why high scoring occurred in altered states (e.g., the Maimonides Hospital ESP dream research) was that the normal, waking mind was less active at these times; thus there was less mental "noise" covering up the signals coming through the subliminal mind. To test this theory, they utilized a ganzfeld technique of covering the eyes of their subjects with halved ping pong balls so that the visual field was seen as solid white. A constant auditory environment was provided by either a white noise generator or a tape of the seashore. Under these conditions, with a constant sensory input, psi signals were expected to be easier to perceive. Subjects were put into this condition and asked to free-associate out loud while their responses were put on to magnetic tape. In another room, the telepathic sender chose, at random, a set of slides to look at and try to send to the subject. After the experiment, the subject was asked to guess which of the view-master reels, of a group of four, had been the target. The subject's taped responses were also independently judged. The qualitative results of this procedure were often striking and statistical results also proved impressive. 

In 1985, a meta-analysis of 28 psi Ganzfeld studies by investigators in ten different laboratories found a combined z score of 6.6, a result associated with a probability of less than one part in a billion.

Honorton and seven associates reported on a series of eleven new experiments at the 1989 convention of the Parapsychological Association. These studies were conducted using an automated testing system which controled random target selection, target presentation, the blind-judging procedure, and data recording and storage. Targets were recorded on videotape and included both video segments (dynamic targets) and single images (static targets). In all, 243 volunteer receivers completed 358 psi ganzfeld sessions. The success rate for correct identification of remotely viewed targets was statistically highly significant. The likelihood that these results could have been obtained by chance was less than one in ten thousand. The results were consistent across the eleven series with eight different experimenters. 

A number of other interesting correlations were noted. The success rate for sessions using dynamic targets was significantly greater than those with static targets and accounted for most of the successful scoring. Significantly stronger performance occurred with sender/receiver pairs who were acquainted than with unacquainted sender/receiver pairs. Furthermore, comparison of the outcomes of these eleven automated ganzfeld studies with a meta-analysis of the original 28 direct hits ganzfeld studies indicated that the two sets were consistent on four dimensions: (1) overall success rate, (2) impact of dynamic and static targets, (3) effect of sender/receiver acquaintance, and (4) impact of prior ganzfeld experience. 

The Experimenter Effect

For example, one project compared the effects of a warm and cold social climate on ESP scores. All of the subjects had the same instructions and the same long ESP task. For half, there was a friendly, informal conversation with the experimenter for a quarter of an hour before the orientation began, and the experimenter made encouraging remarks during the breaks. The other half were treated formally and rather abruptly. The experimenter began the orientation immediately and also made discouraging remarks during the breaks. Results clearly confirmed the hypothesis. ESP scores of subjects treated warmly were significantly higher than mean chance expectation; scores of subjects treated coldly were significantly below mean chance expectation.

Judith Taddonio followed Rosenthal's classic expectancy effects design in an experiment with two series. Her experimenters were six undergraduates with previous practice in conducting psychological experiments. All felt neutral toward ESP but agreed to help her when she told them that a particular ESP method needed checking out. Three were told that prior findings with this method could not fail. The other three were told that Taddonio's colleagues were worried because the method seemed to elicit only psi-missing. All experimenters used the same materials and method.

Both in the first series and in the second, subjects of experimenters with high expectations made ESP scores above chance and subjects of experimenters with low expectations made ESP scores below chance. In each series, the difference was significant.

In 1988, psychologist Gertrude R. Schmeidler conducted an analysis of psi research studies testing for expectancy effects. Her conclusions were:

Psychological research on the experimenter effect has shown higher scores with a warm than with a cold experimenter climate and with an experimenter who expects high rather than low scores. Eight experiments, comprising 12 series, tested for the experimenter effect in psi. Nine of the 12 series had significant results, all in the predicted direction. Six other experiments tested a related hypothesis: that psi experimenters would be self-consistent in obtaining results like their prior ones. Four of these had significant results, all in the predicted direction. 

The Sheep-Goat Effect

The hypothesis that the attitude the experimenter takes can effect ESP scores also applies to ESP subject attitudes. Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, working at Harvard University and at the City College of New York, divided her subjects into "sheep" who believed that ESP might occur in their experiment and "goats" who did not.

Gertrude Schmeidler

Her studies, which were conducted over a nine year period and have since been replicated, showed an unquestionable difference between the "sheep" whose scores fell above chance expectation and "goats" who scored below chance levels. The phenomenon of psi-missing is thought to be a psychological effect in which psychic material is repressed from consciousness.

In a review of 17 experiments testing the hypothesis that subjects who believed in ESP would show superior ESP performance compared to subjects who did not believe in ESP, psychologist John Palmer found that the predicted pattern occurred in 76% of the experiments, and all six of the experiments with individually significant outcomes were in the predicted direction. These findings suggest an overall statistical significance for this effect.

It is important to realize, however, that the sheep-goat studies do not necessarily distinguish those who believe in ESP from those who do not. In most studies, the "sheep" were not "true believers"; they merely accepted the possibility that ESP could occur in the test situation. On the other hand, many of the "goats" were willing to accept that ESP could occur between people who loved each other, or in certain times of crisis; but they rejected all possibility that ESP would manifest for them in their particular test situation.
 

ESP and Personality Traits

Beginning in the early 1940s numerous attempts have been made to correlate experimental ESP performance with individual differences in subjects' personality and attitudinal characteristics. A series of studies with high school students in India by B. K. Kanthamani and K. Ramakrishna Rao has given further insight into the personality traits associated with psi-hitters and psi-missers. 

K. Ramakrishna Rao

The following adjectives summarize the results of their work.
 

Extraversion/Introversion

Extraversion is a personality type in which one's interests are directed outward to the world and to other people. This is contrasted with introversion in which one's interests are more withdrawn and directed toward the inner world of thoughts and feelings.

Gertrude Schmeidler, building on earlier studies by John Palmer and Carl Sargent, reviewed 38 experiments involving the relationship between ESP performance and standard psychometric measures of introversion/extroversion, found that extraverts scored higher than introverts in 77% of these experiments. In twelve of these studies, the difference between introverts and extraverts was statistically significant.,
 

Effects of Different ESP Targets

Robert L. Morris who holds the Arthur Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has proposed that each target be viewed as having both physical and psychological characteristics.

Robert L. Morris

The psychological characteristics seem to be more salient for psi research subjects than the physical. Morris has also suggested that researchers consider not only the targets themselves, but also the systems to determining and displaying the targets.

The nature of the test situation and the target material itself is likely to affect ESP scores. Some people prefer material which involves other human beings on a feeling level. Other subjects who do well with ESP cards show little psychic skill outside of the laboratory. The technical name for scoring well on some kind of targets and not on others is the differential effect and seems to follow a trend relating to emotional preferences, attitudes, and needs.

For example, in a test conducted by Jim Carpenter at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with male college students unknown to the subjects, some of the ESP cards had sexually arousing pictures drawn on them. The subjects showed a greater ability at guessing the ESP symbols on these cards than on the regular cards. In another study with a female patient in psychotherapy, an ESP test was given using words which were emotionally potent for her. Half of them were of a traumatic nature and half of them were of a pleasant nature. In this test, she showed psi-missing for the traumatic words and psi-hitting on the emotionally-positive targets. This test was conducted by Martin Johnson at Lund University in Sweden.
 

Precognition

ESP is generally divided into telepathy, i.e., extrasensory communication between two minds; clairvoyance, i.e., extrasensory perception at a distance, without the mediation of another mind; and precognition, which is ESP across time into the future. There is still some controversy as to whether telepathy actually exists, or whether it is simply another form of clairvoyance. However, precognition, a most unusual ability in terms of our conventional notions of time and free will, is a rather well-established ESP phenomenon. In fact precognition tests afford some of the best evidence for ESP, since sensory leakage from a target which has not yet been determined is impossible. For example, in early studies with Hubert Pearce, the subject was able to guess what the order of cards in a pack would be after it was shuffled at the same high rate of scoring (up to 50% above chance levels) as in clairvoyance tests.

Among the most sophisticated tests for precognition were those designed by Dr. Helmut Schmidt, a physicist now associated with the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas.

Helmut Schmidt

Subjects in his experiments were asked to predict the lighting of one of four lamps which was determined by theoretically unpredictable, radioactive decay.

A subject presses a button recording a guess on one of the automated  testing devices developed by Helmut Schmidt. There is a probability of  1 in 4 that the subject will score correctly by chance alone. 
 

In precognition experiments, the subject makes her guess before the apparatus makes its random selection of a target. The results of these experiments were automatically recorded and the device was frequently subjected to tests of its true randomness. Significant results have consistently been obtained.  Many other studies also show precognition.

In 1989, Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari reported a meta-analysis of forced-choice precognition experiments published in the English language between 1935 and 1987. "Forced choice" experiments are those, such as Schmidt's, in which the ESP percipient is asked to select among a limited number of choices -- as opposed to "free-response" experiments in which the percipients' responses are not limited. These studies involve attempts by subjects to predict the identity of target stimuli selected randomly over intervals ranging from several hundred milliseconds following the subject's responses to one year in the future. 309 studies reported by 62 investigators were analyzed. Nearly 2 million individual trials were contributed by more than 50,000 subjects. Study outcomes were assessed in terms of overall level of statistical significance and effect size. There was a reliable overall effect.

Four moderating variables were significantly associated with study outcome: (1) Studies using subjects selected on the basis of prior testing performance show significantly larger effects than studies involving unselected subjects. (2) Subjects tested individually by an experimenter show significantly larger effects than those tested in groups. (3) Studies in which subjects are given trial-by-trial or run-score feedback have significantly larger effects than those with delayed or no subject feedback. (4) Studies with brief intervals between subjects' responses and target generation show significantly stronger effects than studies involving longer intervals. The combined impact of these moderating variables appears to be very strong. A nearly perfect replication rate is observed in the subset of studies using selected subjects, who are tested individually and receive trial-by-trial feedback.

One of the most rigorous and successful series of precognitive studies has been conducted by Brenda Dunne and colleagues at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program. The Princeton group used a free-response, remote-viewing procedure.  336 experimental trials have been conducted in which randomly selected targets are not chosen or visited until the percipient's responses have been recorded. 

Overall results are unlikely by chance to the order of 10-¹⁰.
 

. A survey published in New Scientist, on January 25, 1973, indicate that 25% of scientists polled considered extrasensorimotor phenomena "an established fact." Another 42% opted for "a likely possibility." 

. Harry Price, Fifty Years of Psychical Research. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939, pp. 73-74. Price, who founded the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in London, was involved in exposing many fraudulent "psychics."

. Joseph Banks Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception. Boston: Society for Psychical Research, 1933, pp. 73-74.

. B. H. Camp, [Statement in notes.] Journal of Parapsychology, 1, 1937, 305.

. J. Gaither Pratt, James Banks Rhine, et al., Extra Sensory Perception After Sixty Years. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1940. This book was a bible, in its day, for card-guessing researchers.

. Rhine and his associates borrowed a German term and designated their experimental work parapsychology. This was done both to distinguish it from t`! earlier term psychical research which was generally a non-experimental field, and to denote an inquiry which was closely related to psychology.

. Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception.

. George R. Price, "Science and the Supernatural," Science, 122, 359-367.

. C. E. M. Hansel, ESP: A Scientific Evaluation. New York: Scribner's, 1966.

. Ian Stevenson, "An Antagonist's View of Parapsychology. A Review of Professor Hansel's ESP: A Scientific Evaluation," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 61, July 1967, 254-267. Stevenson points out that Hansel based his conclusions on an inaccurate diagram of Pratt's office.

. Betty Marwick, "The Soal-Goldney Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Manipulation," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 56, 211.

. In the absence of experimental consistency and theoretical underpinnings, some psychic investigators feel it is premature to claim that even the best experiments support a psi hypothesis. Perhaps, in the future, researchers and critics working together will uncover conventional explanations for the existing data. Therefore they prefer to refer to the existing data of psi research as anomalies. See John Palmer, "Have We Established Psi?" Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 81, 1987, 111-123; K. Ramakrishna Rao & John Palmer, "The Anomaly Called Psi: Recent Research and Criticism," Behaviorial and Brain Sciences, 10, 1987, 539-551.

. E. Douglas Dean, "The Plethysmograph as an Indicator of ESP," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 41, 1962, 351-353.

. E. Douglas Dean & Carroll B. Nash, "Plethysmograph Results Under Strict Conditions," Sixth Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, New York, 1963.

. Charles T. Tart, "Possible Physiological Correlates of Psi Cognition," International Journal of Parapsychology, 5, 1963, 375-386.

. Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, & Alan Vaughan, Dream Telepathy. New York: Macmillan, 1973. A valuable feature of this book is that, as in ESP After Sixty Years, the authors invited contributions from known critics of their work.

. Naturally these findings caused some scientists to echo the thought of Shakespeare that "we are the stuff that dreams are made of." This notion may eventually take on some rather precise physical and mathematical coloring, as the Pythagorean tradition finds renewal mathematical theorists (see Appendix).

. Stanley Krippner, Charles Honorton & Montague Ullman, "An Experiment in Dream Telepathy with The Grateful Dead," Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, 20(1), 1973.

. John Palmer, An Evaluative Report on the Current Status of Parapsychology. Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1985.

. Irvin L. Child, "Psychology and Anomalous Observations: The Question of ESP in Dreams," American Psychologist, 40(11), November 1985, 1219-1229. 

. Milan Ryzl, "A Method of Training in ESP," International Journal of Parapsychology, 8(4), Autumn 1966.

. Charles Honorton, Significant Factors in Hypnotically-Induced Clairvoyant Dreams," Journal of The American Society for Psychical Research, 66(1), January 1972, 86-102.

. Edward A. Charlesworth, "Psi and the Imaginary Dream," Seventeenth Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, New York, 1974.

. Gertrude R. Schmeidler, "High ESP Scores After a Swami's Brief Instruction in Meditation and Breathing," Journal of The American Society for Psychical Research, 64(1), January 1970, 101-103.

. Karlis Osis & Edwin Bokert, "ESP and Changed States of Consciousness Induced by Meditation," Journal of The American Society for Psychical Research, 65(1), January 1971, 17-65.

. Emille Boirac, Our Hidden Forces, London: Rider, 1918.

. D. Scott Rogo, Parapsychology: A Century of lnquiry. New York: Taplinger, 1975, p. 238.

. Boirac, op. cit.

. Ibid.

. Shiela Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall, 1970. pp. 37-40.

. Charles Honorton & Stanley Krippner, "Hypnosis and ESP: A Review of the Experimental Literature," Journal of The American Society for Psychical Research, 63, 1969, 214-252.

. Ephriam Schechter, "Hypnotic Induction vs. Control Conditions: Illustrating an Approach to the Evaluation of Replicability in Parapsychological Data," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 78, 1984, pp. 1-27.

. Ephriam I. Schechter, personal communication, September 12, 1989.

. Rex G. Stanford, "Altered Internal States and Parapsychological Research: Retrospect and Prospect," in D. H. Weiner & D. I. Radin (eds.), Research in Parapsychology 1985. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986, pp. 128-131.