Extrasensory Perception or ESP Refers

Extrasensory perception or ESP refers to a capability to receive external information through means or pathways not through the five physical senses (Ridgway 2008). The ordinary mind does not accept this concept because the world we live in is a physical world. The physical world is built on and perceived through the receptors within the nervous system. Information can be received and incorporated into experience if it flows through some acknowledged mechanical means. Although scientific literature at present does not support the existence of receptors that can perceive thought patterns beyond the physical senses, the acceptance of other kinds of sensation in human beings is not necessarily impossible in the future. Other forms of communication have been identified and recognized outside the accepted physical realm. These include communication with bats and dolphins. Despite massive resistance, studies on psychic phenomena have persisted among the respected sectors of society. This demonstrates the durability of such phenomena and provides a basis for hope for their recognition in some future time (Ridgway).

Psychology professor David Myers of Hope College in Michigan listed the three most common types of ESP as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition (Ridgway 2008). Telepathy refers to non-physical communication between two or more persons through some thought processes. Clairvoyance refers to the perception of distant events. And precognition refers to the perception of future events. Professor Myers also listed psychokinesis as the mental ability to influence physical movement. He noted the strain between the openness to new beliefs and the strictest scientific scrutiny of those new ideas. Despite the lack of concrete evidence to prove psychic abilities, a small but strongly committed group of persons is convinced that these abilities are real and valid (Ridgway).

Sir Richard Burton first used the term "ESP" in 1870 but a French researcher, Dr. Paul Joire, was the first to use it with clarity in 1892 (Schmeidler 2008). It referred to the ability of someone under hypnotic trance to externally perceive things without using the physical senses. The phenomenon appears to have been observed and used as far back as Biblical times although without strong or clear evidence. The first systematic study of ESP was performed in 1882 by the Society for Psychical Research, which published findings on the phenomenon. These initial studies were mostly personal and spontaneous incidents by individuals who described themselves as "sensitive" and "psychic." Hardly were they scrutinized and scientifically investigated in a laboratory or similar setting. In the 30s, American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine used the term to include psychic phenomena, which resembled sensory functions. He was the first to test these in the laboratory (Ridgway) to provide some credence.

Rhine's Experiments

The first were card-guessing experiments conducted at Duke University in 1930 (Schmeidler 2008). The designs of these cards were a square, a circle, a plus sign, a five-pointed star and three wavy lines. These eventually came to be used and known as ESP symbols. The subject tried to guess the order of the five symbols of a deck of 25 ESP cards, randomly arranged. The probability of correct recall was one in five. If the subject scored high in the recalls, he would demonstrate extra-chance results or ESP (Schmeidler).

Rhine described one of his more successful subjects in Hubert E. Pearce, a graduate divinity student (Mishlove 2003). The observer and Pearce sat opposite each other at a table. On the table were a dozen packs of the Zener cards and a record book. One of the packs was handed to Pearce and he shuffled it. Pearce would later say that shuffling gave him "real" contact with the cards. After this, he picked up the pack, lifted the top card, and kept both the pack and the removed card face down. After calling it, he lay the card on the table. The card remained facing down. The observer recorded each call. After 5 or 25 calls, the called cards were turned up and checked off against the recorded calls. The observer saw and checked them Skeptics and other critics would contend that the experiment seemed to succeed for a number of reasons. One was sensory leakage through which the subject could gain information about the face of the cards. Another was the lack of adequate safeguards against trickery. Examples were small fingernail markings. A third was the lack of sufficient concentration to insure against cheating. And the lack of effort to guard against recording errors was another (Mishlove).

Several criticisms were raised against Rhine's experiments and he quickly dismissed some of these. One was the soundness of his statistics, raised by the president of the American Mathematical Association. The second was the impossibility of ESP. But he accepted some of the other criticisms and used them to improve his experiments. These were the possibility of sensory cues, the experimenter's whispering or giving cues to the subject; and the recording of more hits than what were actually made. Other un-addressed criticisms included the "file drawer" effect, which published only favorable results; inconsistent and unrepeated results; and fraud (Schmeidler).

Rhine held that ESP experiments were revolutionizing people's belief on how the mind perceived and received information (Schmeidler 2008). People are taught that the human mind received information only through the physical senses. The mind then was subject to the mechanical laws of nature. The mind was traditionally viewed as synonymous to the brain. Yet new thinkers perceive them as separate entities and researchers from their group have begun exploring how ESP registers in the brain or the mind. In recent years, there has been increasing evidence of the existence of ESP but this evidence cannot be explained by physical laws. Furthermore, studies in quantum physics suggested the existence of another and non-material universe. These developments indicated that Western scientists would eventually come into grips and contend with this Eastern mystical concept (Schmeidler).

Unlike the physical senses, ESP is not perceived through specific physical senses (Schmeidler 2008). It does neither determined nor influenced by place, time, intelligence, age or education. Louisa E. Rhine, a researcher, theorized that ESP starts in the unconscious, where memories, hopes, and fears are stored. ESP can occur when the outside world comes into contact with these mental responses in the unconscious. The person, however, is not aware of the contact until it creates certain information in the conscious level. Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung made a similar proposition about the conscious mind's subliminal psychic access to the collective unconscious. He suggested that the collective unconscious would be a rich source of wisdom and experience for mankind (Schmeidler).

Other theories tried to explain ESP (Schmeidler 2008). One of these supposed that macrophages, connective tissue cells, lymph nodes and the bone marrow, tied to nerve endings, could be the body's ESP organs. They sent and received impressions below the normal levels. These were said to be more active and sensitive in childhood but improper diet could make it deteriorate. Another theory suggested two kinds of subconscious. The second could be a super-consciousness or soul, subliminal self, transcendent ego, or dream self. This theory proposed the existence of another reality besides the known physical one. ESP evolved from the collision or merger between the two realities. ESP occurred infrequently because of massive barriers to the experience. These barriers stand between for the purpose of sanity. If these barriers did not separate them, unconscious thought would flow without restraint into the conscious mind. The conscious mind would not be able to withstand the pressure. Dreams were an important factor in this proposition of two realities. These dreams were of two categories: the vivid but realistic imagery of the information and intuition. Intuition included "gut feeling," premonitions and irrational dreams or fantasies, elaborate symbols and hallucinations. Rhine suggested that dreams could be the most efficient means for ESP messages because the barriers to the unconscious could be thinnest during sleep (Schmeidler).

Supporters of ESP contended that the inborn capability of an individual could be prevented, marred or concealed by prejudices, opposing or distorting thought patterns and conditioning (Schmeidler 2008). In these cases, the messages received or perceived became inaccurate. In times of crisis like accidents or the death of loved ones, these concealed, suppressed or distorted messages could surface clearly and spontaneously. It was believed that trauma and shock brought more negative information past the subliminal barriers than positive information. Other theories explained how and why ESP passed on to certain individuals. Some of these individuals were seers, prophets and diviners who inherited the gift from predecessors. It could also be a primitive capability, which became sparse as populations increased and cultures changed and advanced. Another theory said that ESP was a kind of super-sense, which lodges or develops in the nervous system. Psychic research stated that every person has inborn ESP, stronger in some and weaker in others. It held that most people experience at least one ESP occurrence in their lives. This was the conclusion of a published survey in the 1987 by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council. The survey found that 67% of all adult Americans believed they had experience some ESP. There was an increase in the number of respondents from 58% in earlier studies, implying increased acceptance of the possibility that ESP existed or was real (Schmeidler).

2005 Gallup poll said that 41% of Americans believed in ESP (Carroll 2006). This represented a decrease from surveys in the last decade at 50%. ESP and other paranormal capabilities, such as telekinesis, have been rejected or disputed. However, systematic research on these phenomena has been going on for more than a century in the field of parapsychology. These phenomena have been collectively known as psi. to-date, most of the evidence presented for ESP has been anecdotal. Skeptics have rejected it as fraud or incompetence by parapsychologists, trickery by mentalists, cold reading, subjective validation, selective thinking and confirmation bias, poor comprehension of probabilities, shoe-horning, retrospective clairvoyance and falsification, gullibility, self-deception and wishful thinking. Most of it drew from apparently unusual and obscure events. Not every event can be explained and not all unexplainable events would be paranormal. However, parapsychologists have claimed that the experiences of Charles Tart and Raymond Moody proved the existence of ESP. They said that the Ganzfeld experiments, CIA's remote viewing experiments and attempts to influence randomizers at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research produced the required evidence of ESP. But psychologists who investigated parapsychological studies on the existence of ESP concluded that these showed only fraud, error, incompetence and statistical guesswork (Carroll).

Part II - Evidence

Psychologist John Palmer was among those who investigated the existence or reality of the phenomena (Mishlove 2003). While he found that the psi still had to be proven, he admitted that the results of some researches deserved closer scrutiny and notice. One of these was the series of studies conducted by E. Douglas Dean. It connected the subjects to a plethysmograph, which linked the workings of the subliminal mind. The intention was to obtain evidence of unconscious ESP. ESP signals appeared to have been caught by, and reflected in, the body's physiological processes even without the subject's awareness. The instrument measured the increases and decreases of the blood and lymph volume in response to the subject's emotions. The test used a telepathic agent who was closely related to the subject. They were placed in different rooms. Changes in the blood volume occurred when the subject was sent emotionally charged target messages. A series of follow-up studies were conducted by Dean and Carroll B. Nash at St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia. In these tests, most of the subjects were unaware of their blood changes while responding to the target messages. A separate but similar study was performed by Charles Tart, using the same instrument. The agent was also subjected to occasional and mild electric shock. The subject was unaware of the test but told to guess on "subliminal stimulus" presented to him. His responses did not match those of the hidden target, but abrupt physiological changes were recorded when the agent in the other room was subject to the mild electric shock (Mishlove).

Another claim was dream telepathy. In the early years of psychical research, Frederick Myers suggested that the operations of the subliminal mind are strongest and most visible in dreams, trance states, hypnosis and creative inspiration (Mishlove 2003). Most of the recorded ESP cases occurred while the persons were in "altered states of consciousness." A noteworthy series of studies on dream telepathy was conducted at the Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. The subjects were placed and asked to sleep in one room where their dreams were monitored. Earlier, the telepathic senders were placed in another room where they concentrated and sent target pictures to the subjects, designed to create or elicit particular impressions in them. The subjects were awakened at the time the observers were able to obtain reports on the contents of their dreams. Independent judges or observers then compared the subjects' responses and the messages of the telepathic senders. The judges found evidence for nocturnal telepathy and precognition (Mishlove). A corollary study was conducted on 2,000 persons attending the Grateful Dead Rock Concert were shown a color slide projection image. They were asked to mentally send that image to the dream laboratory 45 miles away in Brooklyn. Many of those 2,000 spontaneous subjects at the concert were in altered states of consciousness as the effect of the music and from taking psychedelic drugs. It was a successful experiment (Mishlove).

Milan Ryzl, a chemist who defected from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1967, developed a hypnotic technique for facilitating ESP (Mishlove 2003). He claimed success in 50 out of his 500 persons he had trained or worked with for his experiments. Hypnosis has been one of the most replicable psi methods. Another series of experiments was conducted in 1910 by Emille Boirac of the Dijon Academy in France in pursuit of an "externalization of sensitivity." When the hypnotist put something inside his mouth, the subject could describe the object. If the hypnotist pinched or pricked himself, the subject could feel the pain. The most striking part of the experiment was when the subject was asked to project his sensibility into a glass of water. When the water was pricked, the subject winced or visibly jerked a part of his body (Mishlove).

Boirac also successfully demonstrated the "conductibility of psychic force" and the "exteriorization of sensitiveness." In the first demonstration, two glasses were connected by a copper wire. When he pinched the air-zone the glasses nearest him or put his finger or a pencil into it, the subject would feel and react to it. The reaction would stop or disappear when the copper wire was removed. French psychologist Jarl Fahler followed up on Boirac's experiments and performed his own. By pricking a photograph of the subject's hand, blisters would appear on the skin of the subject. A photograph was held by the sensitive person in another experiment for a few minutes. The experimenter scratched the hand of the subject in the negative with a pin. The sensitive subject twitched with pain and a small red spot appeared at the back of her hand. A precognition study was conducted in 1969 by Fashler and Osis with two hypnotized subjects. The subjects were made to make confidence calls. The call hits achieved dramatic results with a probability of 0.0000002 (Mishlove).

Convincing evidence of the existence of ESP comes from exceptional performers themselves, successful experiments, test methods and instruments. Pavel Stepanek was one of Mylan Ryzl's most effective subjects (Mishlove 2003). Stepanek could try to read an ESP target from an enveloped sealed three times. It was uncertain if Stepanek had inborn ESP ability or developed it from Ryzl's training. There were times when Stepanek's scores went down to chance levels. There were other times these scores went up again after a hypnotic session with Ryzl. Another exceptional subject was Bill Delmore. He did confidence calls using a deck of ordinary playing cards as his target. He used the method called "psychic shuffle," wherein the experimenters shuffled the target deck at random. Of the 52 cards in a series, Delmore made 25 confidence calls, all completely correct. The probability of his success was only one in 5250. Other tests conducted on Delmore's ability yielded similarly extraordinary results. He did not seem to need an altered state of consciousness in order to gain psychic information. He only needed a warm and congenial atmosphere for his capability to function well (Mishlove).

Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of the SRI International in Menlo Park, California conducted experiments on the Israeli psychic performer Uri Geller (Mishlove 2003). Geller was asked to reproduce 13 drawings in a week's duration while he was physically separated from the experimenters. The experiments were placed in a shielded room. Geller was not told about the drawings or what he was to do with them. It was only when he was in an isolated double-walled steel room that he was presented the target picture. The picture was also randomly selected and drawn. Furthermore, it was never discussed after being drawn or brought to Geller. Examples of the drawings he was asked to reproduce were a firecracker, a cluster of grapes, a devil, a horse, the solar system, a tree and an envelope. The researchers and Geller did not know one another. They inspected Geller's reproductions on a "blind" basis. In matching the target data with the response data by Geller, the researchers found that the match had no errors. The chance probability was one in a million per judgment. In another experiment, Geller was asked to "guess" the face of a die, which was shaken inside a closed steel box then placed on a table by the experimenter. No one knew the position of the die in the box after being vigorously shaken by one of the experimenters. Geller gave the correct answer eight times, according to the researchers. The experiment was conducted 10 times. In two of these 10, Geller declined to answer because his perception was unclear (Mishlove).

The Ganzfeld Research was conducted to test the methods used at the experiments at the Maimonides Hospital ESP dream research (Mislove 2003). The rationale was that the normal mind is less active during sleep and dream time so that there is less noise coming from the subliminal mind. In this experiment, the eyes of the subject were covered with halved ping pong balls in order to create a solid white visual field. This was complemented by a white noise generator or the sound of the seashore to enhance the subject's reception of sensory input. He was asked to free-associate and to verbally respond to the inputs. In another room, the telepathic sender randomly selected slides and sent the messages of the slides mentally to the subject. The subject was then asked to guess from a selection of messages was the one sent by the telepathic sender. The statistical results of the experiment were startling (Mishlove).

These Ganzfeld studies were subjected to a meta-analysis in 1985 by investigators in 10 different laboratories (Mishlove 2003). They found that the probability was less than one in a billion. Many other critics found flaws in the method used. As a whole, there was at least one criticism for every piece of significant evidence of psi communication obtained. To address the criticisms, Honorton and seven associates conducted a series of 11 new experiments during the 1989 Convention of the Parapsychological Association. These experiments used an automated testing system consisting of target selection, target presentation, a blind-judging method and data recording and storage. The targets were videotaped. A total of 243 volunteer receivers participated in 358 psi Ganzfeld sessions. The result was highly successful and had highly significant implications. Chance probability was less than one in 10,000. The result was also found consistent with the 11 series of 11 different experiments. Furthermore, a comparison made between these 11 automated Ganzfeld studies with a meta-analysis of the original 28 direct-hit Ganzfeld studies showed significant findings. The two were consistent in overall success rate, impact of dynamic and static targets, effect of sender-receiver acquaintance, and impact of previous Ganzfeld experience. It was conducted in a genial atmosphere of humanistic consideration for psi performance (Mishlove).

Safeguards of accuracy were in place. An automated target selection system eliminated virtually all possibility of sensory cueing (Mislove 2003). Sender and receiver were separated..Procedure details addressed every possibility of subliminal sensory leakage. All the data of every test were reported using pre-determined statistical tests. The system and protocol were examined by experts, such as Ford Kross, a professional mentalist for 20 years. He commented that Ganzfeld's system provided excellent security against deception by subjects. Psychology professor Daryl Ben at the Cornell University recognized the significant and non-artifactual effect in the Ganzfeld data as persuasive. For their part, the researchers claimed that their experiments satisfied the required guidelines for such experiments. These automated Ganzfeld results were quite consistent with those of earlier Ganzfeld studies so that the responsibility to disprove their merits shifted to the critics. The overall success rate of the studies was slightly in excess of 34%. University of California statistician Jessica Utts said that producing this substantial size, the investigator could achieve only one chance in three to secure a statistically significant result with 50 trials. Even 100 trials would have only a probability of 5 (Mishlove).