The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  The laboratory has additional advantages. it gives more reliable evidence than do field studies and collections of anecdotal reports. in laboratory work, phenomena are recorded in progress; whereas anecdotal reports are often obtained days, weeks, or even months after the events. in the lab, standardized forms and machines help register results and minimize unconscious human error. Lab experimenters can implement safeguards against fraud, which is often difficult or impossible in field situations. Laboratory precautions can exclude subtle sensory cues that cannot be eliminated in field settings. Experimenters use mathematical statistics to determine if chance coincidence might account for results; whereas that typically cannot be assessed in field studies. in addition, statistical probabilities can be directly transformed into measures of information, thereby allowing a standard basis to compare various types of phenomena.

  I will discuss some specific examples to illustrate these general points.

  J. B. Rhine and His Legacy

  Serious scientific investigation of psychic phenomena has been ongoing since 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in England. But it wasn’t until the work of J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the early 1930s that a systematic, laboratory approach was effectively institutionalized. The history of parapsychology cannot be understood apart from Rhine, and from the 1930s through at least the 1960s, he was the undisputed leader of the field. Rhine was a dyed-in-the-wool experimentalist who placed a high value on collecting quality data, but he had little interest in theories. He believed that experiments, guided by simple hypotheses, would eventually point the way to a theory.

  Rhine’s work and that of his followers was squarely in the laboratory. The Journal of Parapsychology, which he founded, published little on spontaneous cases, mediumship, or life after death (also termed “survival” research), and that policy continues to this day. Rhine did not disparage such work, but he believed that with limited resources it was best to investigate the psychic capacity of the living. The limits of human abilities needed delineation before survival-related concepts were explored. This was a pragmatic decision on Rhine’s part. With regard to spiritualist ideas, Rhine adopted a psychological perspective. If accurate messages were received from a medium purportedly communicating with deceased persons, ESP of the medium might account for the messages, and the communicating spirits could be construed as unconscious aspects of the medium’s personality. Even if spirits somehow ultimately are found to be the cause of some phenomena, ESP and PK, by definition, subsume them. Many commentators have failed to understand this point. ESP is simply the obtaining of information without the use of the known senses. If spirits provide information, the process is still without the use of the senses, and hence classified as ESP.

  Rhine became internationally known for his ESP card tests with the still-famous symbols: circle, cross, wavy lines, square, and star. Those symbols were designed by Karl Zener, a psychologist at Duke. They were printed on cards and were arranged into decks of 25, with five of each of the five symbols.

  Rhine’s subjects typically did runs of 25 trials. For telepathy experiments, a sender would shuffle a deck of Zener cards, look at them and try to mentally transmit them to a receiver. He or she would then record the order of the cards on a sheet of paper. The receiver, who would be in another room or another building, would mark guesses on a similar sheet. After the experiment, the two sheets would be compared to determine how many guesses were correct. With clairvoyance tests, the procedure was similar, except the person in the role of the sender shuffled the cards but did not look at the faces until after the receiver finished guessing. In precognition experiments, the cards were not shuffled or recorded until the receiver had made the guesses. In a run of 25 trials, five correct guesses (hits) were expected by chance. If a subject was able to consistently score more than five hits per run, it was evidence of ESP, and the overall odds against chance were computed using mathematical statistics.

  Rhine and his colleagues carried out hundreds of thousands of trials, and typically the scores were only slightly above chance. In some series, the average was 5.4 hits (a typical result; though in extremely rare cases people guessed nearly all 25 cards correctly). By chance, 5.0 were expected, but because there were so many trials, the outcome was very significant and the odds were millions to one against chance. The best summary of that early work is found in the book Extra-sensory Perception After Sixty Years (1940) by J. G. Pratt, et al. This classic remains one of the most detailed, technical treatments of the subject in book form. The volume is of added interest because critics’ comments were invited and included in it.

  Rhine also investigated PK after meeting a young gambler who told him that tumbling dice could be influenced mentally. Rhine tried some preliminary experiments, throwing dice by hand, and obtained encouraging results. Eventually machines were built for the research. Sometimes subjects tried for high numbers and sometimes for low ones, or they might try successively for ones through sixes (the target face was varied in order to counter possible bias of the dice). Typically several dice were tumbled simultaneously in order to enhance interest of the subjects.

  Rhine and his colleagues conducted tests with a wide variety of conditions. Several ESP experiments were done over intercontinental distances. Precognition tests were carried out with guesses made days or weeks before targets were selected. Some of these studies were strikingly successful, and the supposed barriers of space and time did not reduce the scores. The findings led many researchers to conclude that psi is space-time independent. The evidence is not completely overwhelming on this, but most parapsychologists consider distance and time not to impose limits on ESP.3 In my opinion, this is at least a good, first-order approximation. Other factors affect ESP far more than distance or time.

  A central feature in Rhine’s work was the use of random sequences (e.g., shuffled cards and falls of dice), and virtually all parapsychologi-cal laboratory work has since relied on some source of randomness. The studies use mathematical statistics for evaluation, and the methods are identical to those found in psychology, biology, and medical research.

  What surprises many people is that psychic research was one of the very first fields to make use of randomization and statistics, and Rhine was by no means the earliest. In fact, Ian Hacking, a philosopher of science and a sneering disbeliever, admitted that in psychical research “we find the first faltering use, by many investigators, of a technique that is now standard in many sciences and mandatory in much sociology and biology.” He pointed out that Charles Richet, a Nobel laureate and SPR president, was an early pioneer in using probability to evaluate experiments as far back as 1884, a half century before Rhine.5

  As in other scientific fields, randomization allows a great variety of procedures, and parapsychology is not restricted to cards and dice. Some experiments have tested psychic healing, psychic influence on mechanical and electrical devices, and on animal behavior. Though Rhine didn’t explore all of these himself, his methodology set a foundation for others; his procedures had a lasting influence, which can still be seen today.

  Like other scientists, parapsychologists are interested in the generality of their findings. As such, most experiments test a number of people rather than a single person. In fact the large bulk of the research published in professional journals involves numbers of subjects, typically ordinary people who claim no special abilities and who volunteer their time. A smaller percentage of studies has focussed on the talents of an individual, often a reputed “star.” Stars have advantages—they are more likely to be successful than ordinary people, and experiments can be designed to maximize their talents. But they are risky because some are tricksters, and these often attract considerable media attention and taint the field.

  For the last several decades, few psi experiments have used cards or dice; many alternatives have been introduced.

  One innovator was Douglas Dean, a British chemist who emigrated to the U.S. He was assistant direct
or of research at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City between 1959 and 1962. Dean later served as president of the Parapsychological Association (PA), and it was largely through his efforts that that the PA became affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969.

  Dean’s telepathy tests were different than Rhine’s. He used a plethysmograph to measure blood volume in the finger of a telepathic receiver. In another room, a sender had cards with peoples’ names on them; some of the people were known to the receiver and some were not. At randomized intervals, the sender looked at a randomly selected card. When the receiver knew the person named on the card, the blood volume changed significantly, but no change was found when the sender looked at names unknown to the receiver. Dean’s work demonstrated that ESP could function at a physiological level, probably below conscious awareness.

  Experiments like those of Rhine and Dean substantially increased our knowledge of psi, but like all scientific approaches, they had limitations. Several researchers recognized that the methods didn’t capture the essence of all psychic phenomena. Other parapsychologists had collected and analyzed thousands of reports of spontaneous experiences. Precognitive dreams were among the most frequently reported, and some were dramatic. In many cases, dream content matched future events so strikingly that the dreamer had no doubt that a psychic event had occurred.

  Many of those experiencers were not intentionally trying to use ESP, had no knowledge of the kind of information about to come to them, and were in an altered state of consciousness when it did. In contrast, in the card experiments participants were awake, concentrating, and knew the possible targets. card experiments are “forced-choice” procedures because the receiver knows the range of possible targets (e.g., the five Zener symbols). A few investigators were dissatisfied with the differences between the laboratory and real-life settings. “Free-response” methods are an alternative; with them the receiver does not know the possible targets.

  The dream studies conducted at Maimonides Medical center in Brooklyn, New York are some of the best known examples of free-response experiments. They were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s and were directed by Stanley Krippner. He has held many leadership positions in the field including the presidency of the Parapsychological Association. Krippner has written and edited important books on parapsychology, probably more than anyone else alive today. currently he is at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco.

  The Maimonides dream experiments were designed to reproduce conditions of real life that facilitate ESP (e.g., the dream state, receiver ignorant of target material). I will briefly describe the method.

  A variety of photographs and art prints were collected and given identification numbers. This established a “target pool” before any tests were run. The receiver came to the laboratory in the evening and was introduced to the other participants. He or she was put to bed and fitted with electrodes to monitor rapid eye movement (REM), which indicates a dream is probably underway. one experimenter used a random process to select a picture from the target pool and then delivered it to the sender, who was in a distant room. During the night, the other experimenter monitored the REM activity, and when a period began, signaled the sender with a buzzer, to alert him that sending should commence. After observing some REM, the experimenter woke the receiver via an intercom, and asked about the dream; this was recorded on tape and later transcribed. The receiver was not aware of the possible targets (unlike the forced-choice experiments), and the primary experimenter, who monitored the receiver, did not know the target being sent. (This is a conceptually simple, idealized description, and there were a number variations in method, e.g., some were pre-cognitive.)

  At the end of several sessions, the dream reports and the targets were given to an outside “judge” who had no previous contact with the experiment. The judge tried to match each report with its target. The judge gave numeric ratings and rankings to the pictures, which permitted statistical evaluation.

  In these experiments, one trial took a full night and required at least four people (two experimenters, a sender, and a receiver). It was time-consuming and expensive. Some experiments had as few as seven trials (though a full week’s work). In contrast, in experiments with forced-choice card guessing, subjects might complete 100 trials in less than an hour, and sometimes in only a few minutes. The scoring rate (percentage of hits) for the dream studies was typically much higher than for the card experiments, but the dream experiments required much more effort per trial.

  The book Dream Telepathy (1973) by Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan describes these experiments. In addition, Irvin Child, former head of the Yale University psychology department, summarized the studies in an article in the November 1985 issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of American Psychological Association. Child pointed out that a number of skeptical psychologists had severely misrepresented that research when they purported to give a scientific assessment of parapsychology.

  The Maimonides studies attracted attention and brought free-response methods to the fore in parapsychology (though they had been used previously), and such methods are now some of the most common in the field. There are variations; for instance in remote viewing, geographical sites are targets, and subjects gain impressions while awake. At Stanford Research Institute, Ingo Swann, Russell Targ, and Harold Puthoff developed remote viewing with funds from the CIA and other government agencies. It became the heart of the U.S. government’s psychic spying program.

  Helmut Schmidt and RNGs

  In the 1960s Helmut Schmidt, a German physicist then at Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories in Seattle, began experimenting with electronic random number generators (RNGs).’ These are essentially electronic coin flippers, and he demonstrated that humans could influence their output by PK. Schmidt eventually left Boeing and moved to Durham, North Carolina to work at Rhine’s Institute for Parapsychology. After a several years in North Carolina, he moved to San Antonio, Texas and joined the Mind Science Foundation; he has since retired.

  In 1974 Schmidt published a paper comparing two different RNGs, one simple and one complex. The simple generator was based on a Geiger counter and a sample of radioactive strontium-90. The complex generator used an electronic noise generator for randomness. The simple generator produced one binary digit (1 or 0) per trial, but the complex generator produced 100 of them, tallying them and using a majority vote to determine the final 1 or 0.8 The generators were connected to circuits that controlled two light bulbs, and each time a button was pressed, one of the two bulbs was lit, depending upon the output of one of the RNGs. A 0 designated one light, and 1 designated the other. Both generators were used in the experiment, but on any trial only one generator operated when the subject pressed the button and wished for one bulb to light. The active generator for each trial was randomly chosen, and during the experiment neither the subject nor the experimenter knew which generator functioned for a trial. Schmidt found no significant difference between the two generators; PK seemed to work equally well on both of them.

  This was just one of many RNG experiments conducted by Schmidt, and because of his work, electronic RNGs have become a basic tool of parapsychologists. Electronic devices allow automatic recording and easy checking and tallying of results. Since they can be automated, human error can be largely excluded. The application of RNGs has led to not only technical advances but also to greater theoretical understanding, as I will describe later.

  RNGs stimulated a variety of tests, and in the 1980s several were built for personal computers. Simple programming languages permitted random numbers to be easily incorporated into experiments. For instance, RNGs were used in video games to control whether “laser cannons” fire. The subjects playing the games were asked to use PK to increase the firing rate. Many other psi tests also used RNGs.

  Now that some experiments have been described, conceptual topics can be discussed. Later a few more studies will be presente
d in order to illustrate additional concepts.

  Classification Issues

  The terms (categories) “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” “precognition,” and “PK” probably do not designate separate underlying processes. They are convenient labels for events, but examination of the supposed distinctions reveals their shortcomings. For instance, in telepathy experiments, does a receiver obtain information from the mind of the

  sender? Or instead, does he or she use clairvoyance to get information directly from the cards or other targets? Perhaps a telepathic receiver really uses precognition. In ESP experiments, receivers often learn of the target material (e.g., order of the cards, picture, geographical location) after the experiment is over. Maybe this information is carried back in time to the receiver, even in an experiment labelled telepathic. The situation grows even more confused, and disconcerting, when PK is considered. Telepathy might act via an “active agent,” in which the sender somehow “implants” thoughts by PK. Douglas Dean’s plethysmograph experiment suggests that a receiver can be influenced unawares.

  Early parapsychologists recognized the ambiguities, but theory building was a low priority for them. They gave conceptual problems only secondary attention, and hence most researchers thought about psi in a way that was not completely explicit. Many assumed it to be a form of communication, with some channel and a signal transmitted along that channel. Parapsychologists usually presumed that psi operated like other physical and biological processes, and this was later labelled the psycho-biological perspective. This seemed a natural way to conceive of the phenomena, and the traditional terminology (e.g., senders, receivers) subtly conspired to maintain those modes of thinking. (I plead guilty to perpetuating those dubious terms. I use them because they help describe experimental procedures.) Nevertheless, a body of experiments indicated that neither did ESP act like some form of “mental radio” nor did PK behave as an energy projected from the body. They acted more like a unitary process, quite different from other physical operations. Active researchers knew that psi did not fit with models from other disciplines. They wrote about it, but even so, most persisted in thinking along traditional lines.