It never ceases to amaze me where I get ideas for a blog from. Take todays offering. There I was at a client’s house and in the bathroom was a book on ghost, poltergeists and ESP. So I came home and started to google ESP.
Now I have always understood that ESP was Extra-Sensory Perception. I remember movies and documentaries from way back using those cards with the circle, cross, wavy lines, square and star.
These were formally called Zener cards (now known just as ESP cards) after Karl Zener a perceptual psychologist in the early 1930’s for experiments conducted with his collegue, parapsychologist J.B. Rhine. The concept was easy to understand, the deck consisted of 25 cards, five of each design. It was shuffled and one card was held up in front of the person being tested for ESP and they had to guess what was on it. The results were recorded until all the 25 cards were used. Of course, many cried foul saying the cards were marked, manipulated etc, etc. Terence Hines a Neurologist at Pace University had this to say about the experiments and the cards.
The methods the Rhines used to prevent subjects from gaining hints and clues as to the design on the cards were far from adequate. In many experiments, the cards were displayed face up, but hidden behind a small wooden shield. Several ways of obtaining information about the design on the card remain even in the presence of the shield. For instance, the subject may be able sometimes to see the design on the face-up card reflected in the agent’s glasses. Even if the agent isn’t wearing glasses it is possible to see the reflection in his cornea.
The use of Zener cards can be seen in many movies and shows to this day including X-Files, The Fury and of course who can forget the scene in the Ghostbusters movie where Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murry) conducts an experiment with the cards, administering and electric shock every time the subject gets an answer wrong.
In the 1960’s Parapsychologists started to look into the cognitive use of ESP and experiments were conducted using other methods including dream-telepathy the supposed ability to communicate with someone else telepathically through dreams and the ganzfield experiments, which use a type of sensory-deprivation methods to remove all other ordinary sensory inputs. Charles Honorton believed that by reducing the ordinary input PSI conductive states may be enhanced and psi-mediated information could be transmitted.
In a typical ganzfeld experiment, a "receiver" is placed in a room relaxing in a comfortable chair with halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, having a red light shone on them. The receiver also wears a set of headphones through which white or pink noise (static) is played. The receiver is in this state of mild sensory deprivation for half an hour. During this time, a "sender" observes a randomly chosen target and tries to mentally send this information to the receiver. The receiver speaks out loud during the thirty minutes, describing what he or she can see. This is recorded by the experimenter (who is blind to the target) either by recording onto tape or by taking notes, and is used to help the receiver during the judging procedure.
In the judging procedure, the receiver is taken out of the Ganzfeld state and given a set of possible targets, from which they select one which most resembled the images they witnessed. Most commonly there are three decoys along with the target, giving an expected rate of 25%, by chance, over several dozens of trials. – wiki-pedia.
There has been a lot of criticism regarding this method as there is in all other pseudoscientific experiments. However, saying that experimentation still goes on and other techniques are being developed all the time. There is a nudge given to the ganzfield experiments in the TV show Stranger Things where El. (eleven) is subjected to sensory deprivation to enhance her psychic ability and again when she voluntarily submerges in a pool of high density salt water to try and find Will and Barb who are trapped in the Upside Down.
So it seems the scientific consensus still does not view ESP as a real phenomenon. The skeptics claim there is a lack of viable theory behind ESP and that the historical cases have been proved to be flawed in the research of parapsychological studies.
What are your thoughts on ESP? Have you attempted any controlled experiments? If so what were your findings?
Kay