Extrasensory perception, or ESP, refers
to the apparent ability of a human being to "acquire information
without using the [five] ordinary senses of the body and without
depending on logical inference." 2
are all subdivisions of the broader ESP category. The term was made
popular by J.B. Rhine in an attempt to separate the phenomena it
describes from the mysticism of spiritualism and instead link it
with current scientific concepts.
In regards to mysticism, ESP is commonly
referred to as the sixth sense,and can provide an individual
with information about the past, present, and future. To some, such
information is regarded as having originated in a second, or alternate,
In the laboratory,
many parapsychologists prefer to use the term general ESP
(or GESP) to avoid having to label a particular experimental result
as being caused by telepathy or clairvoyance, since it cannot be
stated for certain which of the two caused the result. For example,
in many remote-viewing
experiments designed to test clairvoyance, it may be that the subject
is obtaining the information from the mind of the traveler (telepathically).
Or in other tests, such as the ganzfeld,
in which a person tries to send an image to another person, it may
be that the receiver is using clairvoyance to view the image.
In general, the reported spontaneous
cases of ESP amongst the public typically consist of information
related through dreams (the most common), waking impressions, or
sensory hallucinations (the least common).
typically come in two forms: realistic and unrealistic. The most
common type of psychic dream is the realistic dream, in which one
dreams of something that is currently happening or about to happen.
These dreams are often extremely detailed and appear as if the dreamer
were watching the events unfold from a particular vantage point.
The unrealistic, or symbolic, dream
conveys information in symbolic terms or in outright fantasy. While
the occurrences in the dream may bear little resemblance to an actual
event, the message is conveyed nonetheless. Since ordinary dreams
are often unrealistic, it is not surprising that psychic dreams
will also appear as such. Psychic symbolic dreams are typically
set apart from common dreams by the fact that they often carry a
certain sense of importance to the dreamer.
In many cases observed by Dr. Louisa
E. Rhine, it was found that realistic and unrealistic elements were
rarely mixed in a psychic dream. However, the reason for this, or
why some people have realistic dreams and others symbolic, is not
known. Part of the answer may be found in the individual's "psychological
makeup and predispositions to certain types of dreaming." 2
can be defined as intuitions or sudden hunches, ideas, or insights
that seem to arrive without any deliberate effort or forethought.
"Like dreams, the bulk of waking impressions are the result
of ordinary psychological processes at the unconscious level...the
unconscious fitting together of little bits of information from
many sources, resulting in a sudden click and a leap into
consciousness of the insight or intuition." 2
For example, say one day person A is going about his business and
briefly thinks that person B will call him today. Low and behold,
the phone rings and person B identifies himself. While at a glance
it seems that person A had some type of premonition, it may be that
person B is overdue for a phone call, and both person A and person
B unconsciously recognized this fact, resulting in person A thinking
of person B and person B calling.
However, there are also types of apparent
psychic experiences that resemble intuition but are very hard to
explain on the basis of unconscious processes. By nature, intuitions
involve little or no imagery, so they cannot be classified as realistic
or unrealistic. The experient just knows something, and often
that knowledge comes with an unexpected degree of conviction.
Take for example the situation described
in one of the many letters detailing cases of spontaneous ESP written
to the Institute for Parapsychology and examined by Louisa Rhine.
In this letter, a man wrote about his divorced parents. He stated
that would keep in touch with both of them through detailed letters,
but they never kept in touch with each other. Then one day, while
sitting and talking with his mother in Iowa, he noticed that her
face took on a sudden expression of "astonishment--possibly
agony." She proclaimed that his father was getting married.
At first, he thought it was impossible because he had just gotten
a letter from his father a few days ago, and the letter mentioned
nothing of a marriage. However, soon after his meeting with his
mother, he received a letter from his father telling him that he
got married in New York, and to the son's astonishment, on the same
day he had visited his mother. 2
Hallucinations, which are the least
common type of spontaneous ESP, may or may not be realistic. Basically,
hallucinations fall between the direct knowledge of intuitions and
the pictorial knowledge in dreams. Like intuitions, they occur when
one is awake, but like dreams, the information is inferred from
sensory input. Hallucinations of a psychic nature can occur in circumstances
that might trigger ordinary hallucinations, such as extreme stress
or fatigue, but can also occur when there seems to be no particular
cause. The distinguishing feature of psychic hallucination is that
the information conveyed could not have come from "past memories
or present inferences" (as it is believed that typical hallucinations
are based on memories and other unconscious material). 2
The most common
type of a hallucinated psychic experience is the crisis apparition,
which includes seeing a person who is at that time experiencing
a crisis or some type of trauma or injury, or is near death or at
the moment of death. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which
has conducted several field investigations of psychic phenomena
since its founding in the late 1800's, proposed the theory that
crisis apparitions are hallucinations by the percipient brought
on by some sort of telepathic message from the person in the crisis.
Other types of psychic hallucinations
include auditory hallucinations, such as hearing one's name being
called, and hallucinated pain, such as sensing the pain of a loved
one at the moment of crisis.
While many reported cases of spontaneous
ESP do convey important information, such as that presented during
crisis apparitions, many psychic experiences reveal only trivial
information, for example, dreaming of viewing a certain location
and traveling there the next morning
Another interesting fact arose from
of reported spontaneous ESP cases conducted by psi researcher Robert
Van de Castle. This analysis revealed that in nearly half of the
cases, "telepathic dreams involved family members, death was
the predominant theme...and women were receivers twice as often
as men, whereas [men were senders] in 60% of the cases." 6
Other meta-analyses also confirm that
the majority of psychic experiences come in the form of dreams,
and the majority of these dreams are precognitive, meaning that
they convey information about an event not yet taken place. (Many
parapsychologists have conjectured that ESP is facilitated in the
dream state, possibly because the barriers surrounding the conscious
mind appear to be thinnest during such altered states of consciousness.)
Such experiences, however, raise some
difficult questions for parapsychologists, for example, "Can
we use the information acquired through psychic experiences to change
the future...or prevent a foreseen tragedy?" Other questions
ask, "If the experience in [genuinely] paranormal, is it revealing
what will inevitably happen, or is it warning what might happen
if steps are not taken to avoid it?" 2
There are no answers to these questions.
In some cases people have tried and failed to prevent some kind
of tragedy, and in others, they have succeeded. The majority, however,
do not try at all for fear of ridicule.
away from the subject of spontaneous ESP, let us now briefly examine
some attempts to bring ESP into the laboratory.
The foundations for parapsychology
as an experimental science were established in the 1930's by Dr.
J.B. Rhine at the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham,
North Carolina. Beginning with his famous deck of ESP
cards, Rhine attempted to observe and measure ESP in the laboratory.
variations of Rhine's original ESP-card guessing experiment have
been created and tested throughout the years, but perhaps one of
the most significant results came from a series of experiments known
as the Pearce-Pratt experiments.
This series of experiments took place
on Duke University's West Campus under the direction of J.B. Rhine.
J. Gaither Pratt, the agent, was located in what was then the Physics
Building. Once a minute he picked up a card from a well shuffled
deck and, without looking at it, moved the card face-down onto a
book. At that very minute, Hubert Pearce, who was located in a library
one hundred yards away and who had a synchronized watch, tried to
perceive the card on the book. Without
meeting, both men deposited sealed records with Rhine--Pratt of
the targets (which he recorded after the run) and Pearce of his
calls--and then met to check the results.
Ultimately, four separate experiments
were done with a total of 558 hits out of 1,850 trials (where 370
would be expected by chance). The odds
against chance for these results were astounding: 22 billion-to-one.
One implication of this experiment is that psychic ability is not
limited by distance.
(Other experimental results also seem to suggest that ESP is independent
of such factors as geography, time, intelligence, age, or education.)
Early experiments such as these contributed
greatly to establishing the existence of psi phenomena, however,
such card guessing (and other forced-choice methods) have generally
gone out-of-use in parapsychology experiments. (More recently, free-response
type experiments, such as the ganzfeld, have become more common.)
the remaining forced-choice style experiments, the vast majority
involve the use of technology, ensuring such controls as randomness
and the elimination of human recording errors.
One popular use of technology is in
the form of computer games, which help in keeping a subject's interest.
Indeed, it has been shown in several experiments that an integral
part of achieving successful results rests on the interest and morale
of the subject.
One of the most important tasks facing
a parapsychologist in the laboratory is determining how to facilitate
the production of psychic phenomena in a controlled laboratory setting.
While such phenomena often appear sporadically in daily life, parapsychologists
cannot sit around waiting for a sudden, spontaneous burst of ESP
ability. They must ensure that such abilities are present during
the entire experimental procedure.
What some parapsychologists have discovered
is necessary to facilitate the production of ESP in the laboratory
is: a positive and warm subject-experimenter relationship, a sense
of enthusiasm and confidence, feedback about one's psi performance,
a non-analytic, intuitive, right-brain mode of functioning (i.e.
trying to pay attention to images, feelings, and emotions), a feeling
of relatedness with the world, a good dose of relaxation, a reduction
of sensory input, and a shifting of awareness toward internal processes.
Yet another discovery
that researchers have found (though this has always been known by
mystics and yogis) is that in an altered state of consciousness,
such as during REM sleep, a trance state, or in meditation, ESP
abilities seem to be enhanced.
What many Eastern religions such as
Hinduism have often taught is that meditation frees a person from
outside distractions, allowing him to focus inwardly. What many
ancient yogis discovered while meditating, though, is that this
state is accompanied by the emergence of various paranormal powers.
Once the consciousness has been freed from the signals of the external
world, feelings of "clairvoyant omniscience" 2
arise and may be accompanied by such physical effects as those experienced
later by the Catholic
saints: levitation and object movements.
theory regarding the apparent facilitation of ESP during times of
altered states of consciousness is that during these times, the
mind is unable to filter out information that it thinks is irrelevant
into the subconscious, thereby allowing for the full perception
of all surrounding information.
This coincides with the possibility
that there is a large difference "between the reception of
psi information [and] its conscious detection -- its manifestation
in the person's conscious mind." 6
It may be that psi information is continually received at an unconscious
level, but only surfaces into the conscious mind during an altered
state of consciousness.
many findings that seem to facilitate ESP in the laboratory, there
occurs a curious phenomena termed missing-ESP (also called
reverse-ESP). Basically, it occurs among subjects who dislike
ESP. Even though they are consciously trying to achieve good scores,
they typically score lower than chance would predict. It is almost
as if, as a result of their disbelief in ESP, they are "unconsciously
sabotaging their own results." 6
A 1942 investigation run by Gertrude
Schmeidler, a professor of psychology at City University of New
York, tested the theory that those who did not believe in ESP scored
below-chance results. In this investigation, Schmeidler created
a questionnaire to explore students' beliefs about psi.
"She used the term sheep
to refer to those who were confident about the reality of psi and
goats for those who doubted its existence or its pertinence
in the context of the test." After filling out the questionnaire,
Schmeidler "gave the students a classic psi test with ESP cards
in which they tried to guess sequences of target-cards. [She then]
compared the results of the psi test [to] those of the questionnaire.
The remarkable conclusion was that the 'sheep' had a significant
deviation above chance, while 'goats' were significantly below it."
This effect, which has been termed
the sheep-goat effect and has been confirmed by many independent
researchers, demonstrates that "one's attitudes toward psi
affects the likelihood that such phenomena will occur in the first
place. The more an individual harbors a reductionistic view of the
world, the less chance such phenomena will emerge (let alone be
witnessed by them); the more one is interested in interconnectedness,
and open to psi experiences, the more likely the world will respond
by creating such experiences." 6
This now leads us to the question of
how such experiences are created in the first place. Many theories
regarding ESP have been formulated over the years, and while the
majority have been dismissed by serious researchers (such as the
idea that ESP is communicated through a form of radio
waves), a few continue to be entertained.
One theory was presented
by the famous novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair, who reportedly
had several psychic experiences of his own. Indeed, his wife, Mary
Craig Sinclair, was reputed to be a rather talented clairvoyant.
When asked what such abilities mean to them, the Sinclairs replied
that, "It seems to indicate a common substratum of mind, underlying
our individual minds, and which we can learn to tap. We are apparently
getting hints of a cosmic consciousness, or cosmic unconsciousness:
some kind of mind stuff which is common to us all, and which we
can bring into our individual consciousness. Why is it not sensible
to think that there may be a universal mind-stuff, just as there
is a universal body-stuff, of which we are made, and to which we
This statement closely resembles psychologist
Carl Jung's theory of a collective unconscious into which the conscious
mind has subliminal psychic access. During his studies, Jung noticed
that certain symbols (such as age for wisdom or serpents for evil)
were interpreted similarly by people of different backgrounds, and
were included in the myths and legends of various different cultures.
"The universality of [such] symbols led Jung to hypothesize
a reservoir of mind matter...that exists...in some sort of continuum
beyond the confines of time and space--[into] which the unconscious
mind is able to tap." 5
This "collective racial unconscious" has also been interpreted
as being something along the lines of an "inherited memory"
of our sepcies' past, 3
or a vast repository of the accumulated wisdom and experiences of
the human race.
Even Lousia Rhine once proposed the
theory that ESP starts in the unconscious, which is a storehouse
of memories, hopes and fears. At some point, contact is made between
the objective world and the subconscious mind. However, an individual
will remain unaware of this contact until the information is brought
to the conscious level.
A physics twist to this theory of a
collective unconscious involves the supposed existence of a dimension
which contains information perceivable through psi. Many physicists
and mathematicians already claim that a fourth dimension (aside
from width, height, and depth) exists, though it is not visible
to the human eye. Many also speculate that as many as eleven to
twenty-six other dimensions exist, and that at least one of these
is somehow related to the mind, allowing the mind to tap into it
and retrieve information. However, there is no definite evidence
to support these theories. 5
Another theory attempting to explain
ESP involves macrophages, which are cells present in connective
tissue, lymph nodes, and bone marrow, and which are tied to nerve
endings. It is thought these might be the body's ESP organs, sending
and receiving impressions below the normal perceptive level.
Other theories involve the possibility
of the existence of two realities: a physical and an astral. It
is believed that ESP occurs when there is an integration between
both realities, perhaps caused by a leak in the barriers separating
both realities. However, this would occur infrequently, else all
unconscious thought flood and overflow the conscious mind, a condition
which the mind could not withstand.
Some theories do not concern how ESP
is caused, but rather which
individuals possess ESP and how they acquired this ability.
One theory holds that some people such
as seers, prophets and diviners were born with the gift, and that
such talents are inherited. Another theory holds that it is a primordial
sense which has decreased in populations as cultures have advanced.
Still another theory claims ESP is a supersense which evolves in
the nervous system.
Again, it must be reiterated that there
remains to be seen any concrete proof that any one theory is more
likely than another. It may be that none of the preceding theories
are correct. Only time, and the continuation of research into such
areas, will tell.