Parapsychology

Research on Exceptional Experiences

Jane Henry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415213608
• eBook ISBN: 9781134613168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychic and other exceptional experiences are surprisingly common but opinions as to their causes vary widely. Can tricks of the mind such as hallucinations, mistaken perception and errors of judgement explain such phenomena or does some yet to be understood non-sensory means of communication come into play? In Parapsychology, leading researchers from both the UK and the USA combine their expertise to form a lucid account of research into the science of psychic experience. Beginning with an introduction to the methodology, Parapsychology addresses topics including coincidence, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, healing, apparitions, reincarnation and out-of-body experiences. Each chapter describes the phenomenon, outlines the main lines of research and discusses the merits of possible explanations for such anomalies of cognitive function. Extensive suggestions for relevant further reading on each individual subject are provided, along with a detailed glossary of terms. Parapsychology provides an accessible and succinct overview of the research and current thinking on the subject of psychic and allied experiences. This balanced account of work in this fascinating area will be of great interest to students and researchers in psychology as well as anyone with an interest in the field.

Parapsychology

Chapter 1

Parapsychology

Jane Henry

Parapsychology is the study of psychic phenomena, i.e. the exchange of information or some other interaction between an organism and its environment, without the mediation of the senses. This includes mind to mind communication (paranormal cognition) such as telepathy and movement of (or influence on) matter by mind (paranormal action) which is referred to by parapsychologists as psychokinesis.

Psi phenomena

Psi phenomena have been reported since the earliest times, from biblical miracles and the Delphic oracle, through medieval witches, to nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century spoonbending. Psychic powers are claimed in every culture whether by shaman, rain maker, voodoo practitioner or faith healer. Along with religious belief and drug taking, psychic experiences seem to be universal.

The field of parapsychology takes four main groups of phenomena as its subject matter: extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, anomalous experience and apparitional phenomena. Examples of each follow:

Extrasensory perception (ESP)	Telepathy Clairvoyance Precognition Retrocognition
Psychokinesis (PK)	Macro-PK (visible effects), e.g. metal bending, apports
	Micro-PK (statistically measurable non-visible effects), e.g. random number generator (RNG) effects
	Direct mental interaction with living systems (DMILS), e.g. on electrodermal activity
	Recurrent spontaneous PK (RSPK), e.g. poltergeists
Anomalous experience	Out-of-body experiences Near-death experiences Past-life experiences Coincidence experiences
Apparitional phenomena	Ghosts Aliens Spirits Visions

The two classes of psi phenomena which get most attention from parapsychologists are extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Extrasensory perception (ESP) covers both telepathy, where someone perceives information directly from another mind, and clairvoyance, where information is sensed directly from the environment. ESP appears to occur in real time or apparently precognitively, as in the premonition of a future disaster. There are also cases of retrocognition where unknown information from the past is apparently picked up psychically.

Psychokinesis (PK) may be split into macro-PK, where solid objects are affected and the result can be seen by the naked eye, such as bending a spoon or moving an object purely via intention, and micro-PK, where ultrasensitive instruments such as strain gauges and random number generators are apparently affected by intention and the significance of the results is assessed statistically. Naturally occurring psychokinesis, known as recurrent spontaneous PK (RSPK) in the field, is associated with phenomena such as poltergeists. Direct mental interaction with a living system (DMILS) refers to PK on a live organism where physiology, such as electrodermal (skin conductance) activity or blood pressure, is altered purely by intention. Distant and non-contact healing offers another example.

Apparitions are experienced as outside the person and perceived as external to the self, the classic example being a ghost. Sometimes the ‘apparition’ appears pretty solid and at other times it is less obviously person-like. In previous centuries reports of demon visitations were quite common. In the latter half of the twentieth century, in keeping with the technological age, similar experiences appear to have been interpreted as visits by aliens. In non-western cultures experiences of spirits of one kind or another are often accepted as part of life. In the west reports of exceptional visions are now rare, though there are some well-known cases featuring visions of the Virgin Mary.

In contrast to apparitions, the anomalous experiences listed above – out-of-body, near-death, past-life and synchronicity experiences – are felt as happening to the individual him- or herself. There are other anomalous phenomena, such as UFOs, and other exceptional experiences, such as altered states of consciousness, mystical experience and Kundalini experiences, that are traditionally studied by groups other than parapsychologists. There is a case for bringing together work on the different types of anomalous phenomena and exceptional experience, and several recent texts have done this (e.g. Cardena et al. 2000).

Exceptional experience

Anticipating the trend, White (1993) offered a classification of exceptional experiences which aims to embrace phenomena traditionally studied by parapsychologists and others interested in anomalous and exceptional experiences. These are:

• mystical experiences (including peak experience, stigmata, transformational experience)

• psychic experiences (including apports, synchronicity, telepathy, PK and out-of-body experiences)

• encounter-type experiences (including apparitions, angels, ufo encounters, sense of presence)

• death-related experiences (e.g. near-death and past-life)

• exceptional normal experiences (e.g. déjà vu, hynagogia)

Inglis (1986) and Cardena et al. (2000) offer extended discussions of ostensibly paranormal anomalous phenomena and exceptional experiences.

Despite their name, anomalous psi experiences appear to be quite common. Around six in ten people in Europe and the USA claim to have had a psychic experience (Haraldsson 1985). At least a third claim to have experienced telepathy and about a fifth clairvoyance, but under a tenth psychokinesis (Haraldsson and Houtkooper 1991). Something like three-quarters of the population in Europe and the USA believe psi exists, which is more than double the number who claim to believe in God or ‘some power or presence beyond themselves’, found in similar surveys (Hay and Morisy 1977), though this figure may be an underestimate as qualitative interviews produce a considerably higher percentage of believers (Hay 1987).¹ In addition one-quarter of Americans believe in ghosts and a tenth claim to have seen or sensed one (Gallup and Newport 1991). Psi experiences also often have a profound effect on people. The frequency and impact of psi experiences is reason enough for psychologists to study such experiences. Some people have taken this further and have tried to apply psi in police work, war, business, mining and archaeology.

Different sorts of scientists are engaged in investigating psi experiences. Parapsychology is an interdisciplinary field and has attracted physicists and engineers as well as psychologists. Those interested in the psychology of anomalous experience often have as their primary focus possible normal explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences. Those describing themselves as parapsychologists are more likely to be involved in investigations that try to rule out normal explanations for ESP and PK experiments, find correlates of positive psi performance and test theoretical models of psi experimentally as well as surveying the beliefs of those experiencing such phenomena spontaneously. Psychical researchers are more likely to be engaged in fieldwork investigating spontaneous psi events such as apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists. It was to these areas that early researchers turned their attention.

Early research

Mediumship

Spiritualism was a widespread and a popular movement in the nineteenth century and serious scientific study of paranormal phenomena began in the latter part of the century. The eminent psychologists W. Myers, William James, Jung and Freud were all early members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London.

The SPR investigated both physical mediums who appeared to cause the movement of objects, materialisations, levitation and so on and mental mediums who, in trance, seemed to have access to information that they would not normally know. The controls used to stop mediums cheating included physical restraint – for instance, holding the medium’s hands and feet throughout the experiment – and insisting the experiment take place in a room supplied by the researchers. Many of the mediums proved to be nothing more than frauds but a few stand out. Daniel Dunglas Home apparently produced a range of phenomena including table raps, levitation, elongating his neck and handling burning coals over a period of twenty years, sometimes in well-lit conditions. Other physical mediums include Eusapia Palladino and the Austrian Rudi Schneider (see Braude 1986 for a discussion). Among the mental mediums some of the most impressive are Mrs Leonard and Leonora Piper, both of whom submitted to numerous tests over a sixty-year period (see Chapter 18 and Gauld 1982 for more on mental mediums).

Spontaneous cases

A parallel series of investigations concerned the collection and scrutiny of spontaneously occurring psychic phenomena, such as dreams coinciding with events elsewhere or apparitions of the dead. A mammoth collection of such experiences can be found in Gurney et al.’s Phantasms of the Living (1886). To be accepted each anecdote had to be witnessed and satisfy certain other criteria.

The trouble with field investigations of this kind is that the nature of the phenomena is so extraordinary that many people will not believe it unless they have seen it with their own eyes. Others dismiss mediumistic claims as fraud and anecdotal evidence as misperceived, misremembered or just coincidence. Modern parapsychologists have devoted their efforts to experimental research in the hope that their findings cannot be dismissed so readily.

Forced-choice experiments

By the 1930s parapsychologists had turned their attention to the laboratory and the control offered by experiments. J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa followed McDougall from Harvard to Duke University to set up the first parapsychological laboratory. McDougall saw psychical research as an ally in his campaign against the behaviourism and materialism that dominated psychology at the time. Ironically Rhine carried out numerous standardised experiments which are behaviourist in character! The subject had to guess which one of a limited number of targets had been chosen for that trial.

The card-guessing deck he used for many experiments was a pack of twenty-five Zener cards. This consists of five symbols: a star, square, wavy lines, plus sign and circle. The mean chance expectation for twenty-five guesses in a trial using a pack of twenty-five Zener cards is five. Rhine was looking for people who could score significantly better than that. He conducted many tests with students. Initially the experimenter took the shuffled deck of cards and looked at each card in turn in an attempt to ‘send’ the appropriate image to the subject telepathically.

Other experiments required the sender or agent to merely turn over each card in turn without looking at it. This was used to test the possibility of clairvoyance, that the subject’s mind was taking information directly from the cards, but, as the experimenter subsequently learned the card order, precognitive telepathy is an alternative explanation. Later on, experimenters got subjects to guess at targets selected randomly by machine and input their guesses. The machine then matched the guesses against the target and calculated the results, but never printed out what the targets were. This procedure appears to rule out a precognitive telepathy explanation and confirm the possibility of clairvoyance. Devising procedures which rule out clairvoyance in favour of telepathy is harder and many researchers refer to the more general term, extrasensory perception, or ESP, acknowledging the difficulty of distinguishing between the two.

Rhine and others found above-chance scores in telepathy and clairvoyant experiments. One interpretation of the results is that, despite the precautions Rhine took to control for sensory cueing and for artefacts – for example by using randomised target selection and mechanical dice – the methods were in some way deficient. Modern experiments of this type are better controlled; for instance the number of trials is preset so that experimenters cannot stop when things are going well, the randomising procedures tend to be superior, and the target order is determined by machine so that neither the person recording the subject’s response nor the experimenter, or anyone else in contact with the subject, knows the target order, and they cannot give inadvertent clues.

Psi-stars

Most of the positive results obtained with unselected subjects show a small positive effect, but a few individuals, the so-called psi-stars, seem to have a particular facility for this kind of work and have scored well above chance in a number of well-controlled experiments. Pavel Stepanek, a Czech bank clerk, was one such star. His speciality was guessing the colour of an upturned card, typically whether it was either black or white or green or white. The card was initially covered in an envelope, which in later experiments was in turn placed in a cover which was placed in a padded jacket, thus weight, possible card or envelope warping and other visual cues were controlled. He conducted a large number of these experiments over a period of ten years in the 1960s with scientists from various parts of the world. In one series he got 1,140 right out of 2,000 guesses or about 57 per cent. This is statistically highly significant but the effect itself is quite weak and typical of success in forced-choice experiments of this kind.

Milan Ryzl, the Czech experimenter who worked with Stepanek, had the idea of what has subsequently come to be known as the majority vote technique. Essentially this involves representing the same targets to the subject on a number of occasions, in this case presenting 100 targets ten times each, and counting the majority as the call – for instance seven blacks and three whites would count as black. In this particular experiment Stepanek achieved a remarkable 71 per cent success rate (Pratt 1973).

Another psi-star, Bill Delmore, took part in some well-controlled experiments where he had to guess which card had been drawn from 10 packs of 52 ordinary playing cards. In 42 runs of 52 trials Delmore got the suit and number correct in 6 per cent of cases, compared to the 2 per cent you would expect by chance. Delmore was particularly accurate on the rare occasions when he stated in advance of his call that he thought he was right. He made twenty such confidence calls in one run of 364 guesses and in fourteen he was right about both suit and number; he got the number right in five others and the suit in the one remaining, a truly remarkable feat (Kelly and Kanthamani 1972). However, some commentators have criticised the experiments with Delmore (e.g. Hansen 1992). Individuals who can score well above chance consistently in parapsychology experiments seem to be rare.

The mood and state in which the stars produce their best work seems to be as variable as they are. Stepanek was comfortable with routine, and happy to make a thousand calls a day, whereas Delmore was lively, worked fast but with a low number of trials per day and rest periods. Ted Serios, whose speciality was producing images on film, liked to drink large quantities of beer! Ingo Swann was relaxed, still, preferred quick feedback on his success or failure and varied tasks (Schmeidler 1982).

Like many a standard psychology experiment there is a tendency for subjects doing forced-choice tasks to exhibit a decline effect over time or within sessions. Some argue that the trivial and tedious nature of the task in this kind of experiment is not likely to bring out the best in potential psychics and that the use of free-response images, where the target might be any kind of image, is likely to be more interesting and therefore m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Parapsychology
• Paranormal cognition
• Paranormal action
• Anomalous experience
• After-life associations
• Appendices
• Index