The
most common method of testing perceptual-psi (ESP/telepathy) is to isolate a
test subject from a hidden target object or person placed at a distance and see
if the test subject can accurately describe the target or mentally influence
the other person. Hundreds of variations
have been performed on experiments following this basic design:
In
1933, Hubert E. Pearce Jr., a student of J.B. Rhine’s at Duke University
introduced himself saying that he had inherited his mother’s clairvoyant
abilities and would be willing to scientifically test and verify his
skills. For the next seven months, Rhine worked with Pearce devising, performing, and
documenting the now famous Pearce-Pratt distance telepathy tests at his Duke
Parapsychology Lab. The experiment
consisted of 700 runs through 25-card ESP decks with Pearce acting as the
telepathic receiver while another student, Gaither Pratt, was the sender. Pratt simply laid down one card per minute
and concentrated on it, while Pearce, from another building on campus, attempted
to telepathically read and/or clairvoyantly see each card. After 1,850 trials, Pearce guessed the
correct card 558 times (32%), which is 188 times above chance expectation
(20%). Though this 12% difference may
not sound like much, it is associated with odds against chance of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
to 1.
“The
modern ganzfield experiment is as close to the perfect psi experiment as anyone
knows how to conduct. Until recently,
the ganzfield experiments were largely unknown outside of the discipline of
parapsychology. Then, in 1994,
psychologists Daryl Bem from Cornell University and Charles Honorton from the University of Edinburgh published a meta-analysis of
ganzfield studies in Psychological Bulletin, a well-regarded academic
psychology journal. That paper provided
strong evidence for a genuine psi effect.
Bem and Honorton’s review of earlier ganzfield studies estimated an
effect with overall odds against chance of 48 billion to 1.” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (117-8)
“A second example of
picture-drawing experiments is described in the book Mind to Mind, published in
1948, by French researcher Rene Warcollier … Warcollier was already convinced
that telepathy existed through the work of Rhine and others, so his books
primarily explored how it worked … He noted that images were not transmitted
like photographs but were ‘scrambled, broken up into component elements which
are often transmuted into a new pattern.’
What Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern cognitive
neuroscience has learned about how visual images are constructed by the
brain. It implies that telepathic
perceptions bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are probably
processed in the brain in the same way that we generate images in dreams. And thus telepathic ‘images’ are far less
certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion.” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (92-93)
A
third picture-drawing experiment was conducted in 1941 at Cambridge University
by psychologist Whatley Carington. He
recruited 250 students to attempt to replicate sketches in a series of 5
experiments, with 10 drawings each, for a total of 50 targets. By the end of the study Carington had
collected 2,200 student sketches which he then cross-matched with the original
50 possible targets. Amazingly he found
1,209 drawings (55%) were similar to the targets! And this is from 250 different students with
no particular ESP gifts or previous experience.
“British
biologist Rupert Sheldrake has popularized experiments based on this simple
design … and under more controlled conditions, such as those involving use of
blindfolds, no trial-by-trial feedback, and even more secure conditions such as
having [participants] stare through a window from a distance. I found 60 such experiments involving a total
of 33,357 trials from publications cited by Sheldrake and others. The overall success rate in these experiments
was 54.5% where chance expectation is 50%.
The overall odds against chance are a staggering 202 octodecillion
(that’s 20,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)
to 1.” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (127)
“The
design used in these electroencephalograph or ‘EEG correlation’ experiments
asks, in effect, whether poking one person will produce an ouch response in a
distant partner. It’s not recommended to
poke people in the brain, so instead we use a stimulus like a flashing light to
cause one of the brains to jump electrically in a predictable way, and then we
look at the other, distant brain to see if it’s jumping at the same time.” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (136)
“Psychophysiologist
Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum and his colleagues from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico reported a series of studies in which they claimed to
detect simultaneous brain responses in the EEGs of separated pairs of
people. One of their studies was
published in the journal Physics Essays, stimulating another round of
replication attempts. In 2003, a
successful replication was reported in Neuroscience Letters by EEG specialist
Jiri Wackermann and his colleagues … Wackermann’s team concluded that ‘We are
facing a phenomenon which is neither easy to dismiss as a methodological
failure or a technical artifact nor understood as to its nature. No biophysical mechanism is presently known
that could be responsible for the observed correlations between EEGs of two
separated subjects.’ Another successful replication, this time reported by
Leanna Standish of Bastyr University and her colleagues, was recently reported
in the medical journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. They conducted an EEG correlation experiment
with the receiving participant located in a functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) scanner … They found a highly significant increase in brain
activity (odds against chance of 14,000 to 1) in the receiving person’s visual
cortex (in the back of the brain) while the distant partner was viewing a
flickering light. The same group later
successfully replicated this finding.”
-Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (137-8)
“Miraculously,
the driver of the artillery battery managed to stop the horses just in
time. The accident left Hans thoroughly
shaken but without serious injury. At
that very moment, many miles away in his family’s home, Hans’s older sister was
suddenly overwhelmed with an ominous certainty that something bad had happened
to Hans. She anxiously insisted that
their father contact him, and so he did via telegram. That evening, when Hans received the
telegram, he was initially concerned, as he had never before received a
telegram from his father. Then, upon
reading his sister’s urgent concern about his well-being, he knew that his
feelings of intense fear earlier in the day had somehow reached his
sister. Many years later, Hans wrote,
‘This is a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger,
and as I contemplated certain death, I transmitted my thoughts, while my
sister, who was particularly close to me, acted as the receiver.’” -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (22)
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