Physiological Correlates of ESP: Heart Rate Differences between Targets and Nontargets

Can ESP information be detected physiologically? This is a plausible question assuming that ESP information differs from non-ESP information only in how it is obtained and not how it is processed. Different authors have demonstrated that information not detected at an overt conscious level produces physiologically specific modification (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997; Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1996; Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000; Kubota, Sato, Murai, Toichi, Ikeda, & Sengoku, 2000; Mayer, Merckelbach, deJong, & Leeuw, 1999). The Search for a Physiological Index In the field of ESP research the search for a physiological index is not a new interest. Beloff (1974) more than 25 years ago reviewed the studies related to this topic and Palmer (1978) reviewed all the studies using autonomic responses like blood flood by the use of the plethysmograph or skin resistance in a different version of an agent-recipient design. Two recent meta-analyses (Schmidt, Schneider, Utts, & Walach, 2004), on the "Direct Mental Interaction in Living Systems" and on "Remote Staring" phenomena, respectively, found a small but significant effect sufficient to continue to explore these lines of investigation. Another line of investigation has explored if and how the nervous system reacts before the appearance of future emotional stimuli. Recently, Bierman and Radin (2000) and Radin (2004) reported a replication of their finding that blood volume, heart rate, and in particular, skin conductance level change according to the emotional category of future pictures. This so-called presentiment effect has also been replicated by Bierman and Scholte (2002) using fMRI data. Moreover, further evidence supports the possibility that similar physiological effects may be observed in tasks without emotional content. McDonough, Don, and Warren (2002) detected EEG activity in the gamma band correlated to a forced-choice guessing task, confirming previous findings of the same authors (Don, McDonough, & Warren, 1998) regarding event-related brain potentials. In this study we used a task very similar to that used by McDonough et al. (2002) but by recording heart rate instead of EEG activity. EXPERIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS The purpose was to investigate whether this procedure produced different results between a clairvoyance or a precognitive condition, and we devised two identical experiments except for changing the moment of the target choice. In the clairvoyance experiment the target was chosen before presentation of the first picture, whereas in the precognitive experiment it was selected after the participant's choice of the target. Our hypothesis was that heart rate could change according to the categories of pictures, targets versus nontargets. The direction of this difference was not predictable in advance because, to our knowledge, there are no comparable studies in the literature. METHOD Twelve volunteers, 8 females and 4 males, were tested. They were recruited from the undergraduate students attending Padova University by an informal request to participate in an experiment on the physiological correlates of intuition. Mean age was 26.5 years (range 2445). They were paid 3 [euro]. Stimuli were 80 pictures representing real-life, low emotional, coloured images, such as landscapes, plants, flowers, and portraits. Participants were seated one by one in a comfortable chair in a soundproof laboratory facing a monitor. They were instructed not to move their left index finger, which was connected to the apparatus detecting their heart rate. They were also instructed to relax when an acoustic signal was heard and to concentrate on the picture that would be shown for 10 s on the monitor (depending on the time necessary to collect 10 heart rate data points based on interbeat intervals) until it disappeared. This sequence was repeated 4 times with different pictures that were subsequently presented simultaneously on the monitor for the guess of the target picture. …