Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 published in the same journal in which it was first put forward [13]. It should also be noted that parapsychological researchers themselves recently exposed fraud in their own laboratory when they encountered it [14], At the end of the 1940s, Professor S. G. Soal, an English mathemati- cian working with the SPR, had carried out hundreds of card guessing exper- iments involving tens of thousands of calls [15]. Many of these experi- ments were carried out over extended distances. One of the most notable experiments was conducted with Mrs. Gloria Stewart between London and Antwerp. This experiment gave results whose probability of occurring by chance were less than 107°, With the publication of Modern Experiments in Telepathy by Soal and Bateman (both of whom were statisticians), it appeared that card guessing experiments produced significant results, on the average. * The most severe criticism of all this work, a criticism difficult to defend against in principle, is that leveled by the well-known British parapsychological critic C.E.M. Hansel [17], who began his examination of the ESP hypothesis with the stated assumption, "In view of the a priori arguments against it we know in advance that telepathy, etc., cannot oc- cur." Therefore, based on the "a priori unlikelihood" of ESP, Hansel's Recently, some of the early Soal experiments have been criticized [16]. However, his long-distance experiments cited here were judged in a double- blind fashion of the type that escaped the criticism of the early experi- ments. 12 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 examination of the literature centered primarily on the possibility of fraud, by subjects or investigators. He reviewed in depth four experi- ments which he regarded as providing the best evidence of ESP: the Pearce- Pratt distance series [18]; the Pratt-Woodruff [19] series, both conducted at Duke; and Soal's work with Mrs. Stewart and Basil Shackleton [15], as well as a more recent series by Soal and Bowden [20]. Hansel showed, in each case, how fraud could have been committed (by the experimenters in the Pratt-Woodruff and Soal-Bateman series, or by the subjects in the Pearce- Pratt and Soal-Bowden experiments). He gave no direct evidence that fraud was committed in these experiments, but said, "If the result could have arisen through a trick, the experiment must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is finally decided that such a trick was in fact used'' [17, p. 18]. As discussed by Honorton in a review of the field [21], Hansel's conclusion after 241 pages of careful scrutiny there- fore was that these experiments were not "fraud-proof" and therefore in principle could not serve as conclusive proof of ESP. Even among the supporters of ESP research and its results, there re- mained the consistent problem that many successful subjects eventually lost their ability and their scores gradually drifted toward chance results. This decline effect in no way erased their previous astronomical success; but it was a disappointment since if paranormal perception is a natural ability, one would like to see subjects improving with practice rather than getting worse. 13 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
/ Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 One of the first successful attempts to overcome the decline effect was in Czechoslovakia in the work of Dr. Milan Ryzl, a chemist with the Institute of Biology of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science and also an amateur hypnotist [22]. Through the use of hypnosis, together with feedback and reinforcement, he developed several outstanding subjects, one of whom, Pavel Stepanek, has worked with experimenters around the world for more than ten years. Ryzl's pioneering work came as an answer to the questions raised by the 1956 CIBA Foundation conference on extrasensory perception. The CIBA Chemical Company has annual meetings on topics of biological and chemical interest, and that same year they assembled several prominent para-~ psychologists to have a state-of-the-art conference on ESP [23]. The con- ference concluded that little progress would be made in parapsychology re- search until a repeatable experiment could be found; namely, an experiment that different experimenters could repeat at will and that would reliably yield a statistically significant result. Ryzl had by 1962 accomplished that goal. His primary contribution was a decision to interact with the subject as a person, to try to build up his confidence and ability. His protocol depended on "working with" rather than "running" his subjects. Ryzl's star subject, Pavel Stepanek, has produced highly significant results with many contemporary researchers [24]-[29]. In these experiments, he was able to tell with sixty percent reliability whether a hidden card was green side or white side up, yield- ing statistics of a million to one with only a thousand trials. | 14 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 As significant as such results are statistically, the information channel is imperfect, containing noise along with the signal. When con- sidering how best to use such a channel, one is led to the communication theory concept of the introduction of redundancy as a means of coding a message to combat the effects of a noisy channel [30]. A prototype experi- ment by Ryzl using such techniques has proved to be successful. Ryzl had an assistant select randomly five groups of three digits each. These fif- teen digits were then encoded into binary form and translated into a se- quence of green and white cards in sealed envelopes. By means of repeated calling and an elaborate majority vote protocol, Ryzl was able after 19,350 calls by Stepanek (averaging nine seconds per call) to correctly identify all fifteen numbers, a result significant at p = 107}, The hit rate for individual calls was 61.9 percent, 11,978 hits, and 7,372 misses [31].* The characteristics of such a channel can be specified in accordance with the precepts of communication theory. The bit rate associated with the information channel is calculated from [30] R = H(x) - H (x) ; (1) where H(x) is the uncertainty of the source message containing symbols with a priori probability Py ee . ; Note added in proof. It has just come to our attention that a similar procedure was used to transmit without error the word "peace" in Inter- national Morse Code: J.C. Carpenter, "Toward the Effective Utilization of Enhanced Weak-Signal ESP Effects," presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York, N.Y. (January 27, 1975). 15 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 H(x) = - Py log, Py» (2) L 9 a 1= and H (x) is the conditional entropy based on the a posteriori probabil- ‘y ities that a received signal was actually transmitted, 2 H (x) = - » p(i,j) log, p,G)- (3) ” i, j=1 For Stepanek's run, with P, = 1/2, Ps) = 0.619, and an average time of nine seconds per choice, we have a source uncertainty H(x) = 1 bit and a calculated bit rate R x 0.041 bits/symbol or R/T = 0.0046 bits/s [Since the 15-digit number (49.8 bits) actually was transmitted at the rate of 2.9 xX 107" bits/s, an increase in bit rate by a factor of about 20 could be expected on the basis of a coding scheme more optimum than that used in the experiments. (See, for example, Appendix A.)] ‘Dr. Charles Tart at the University of California has written exten- sively on the so-called decline effect. He considers that having subjects attempt to guess cards, or perform any other repetitious task for which they receive no feedback, follows the classical technique for decondition- ing any response. He thus considers card guessing "a technique for extin- guishing psychic functioning in the laboratory" [32]. 16 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 a wide variety of ordinary people to demonstrate significant functioning in the laboratory, without being bored into a decline effect. This survey would be incomplete if we did not indicate certain aspects of the current state of research in the USSR. It is clear from trans- lated documents and other sources that many laboratories in the USSR are engaged in paranormal research [35]. 3 Since the 1930s in the laboratory of L. Vasiliev (Leningrad Insti- tute for Brain Research), there has been an interest in the use of tel- epathy as a method of influencing the behavior of a person at a distance. In Vasiliev's book Experiments in Mental Suggestion, he makes is very clear that the bulk of his laboratory's experiments were aimed at long- distance communication combined with a form of behavior modification; for example, putting people at a distance to sleep through hypnosis [36]. Similar behavior modification types of experiments have been carried out in recent times by I.M. Kogan, Chairman of the Bioinformation Section of the Moscow Board of the Popov Society. He is a Soviet engineer who un- til 1969 published extensively on the theory of telepathic communication [36]-[40]. He was concerned with three principal kinds of experiments: mental suggestion, without hypnosis over short distances, in which the per- cipient attempts to identify an object; mental awakening over short distances, in which a subject is awakened from a hypnotic sleep at the “beamed" sug- gestion from the hypnotist; and long-range (intercity) telepathic communica- tion. Kogan's main interest has been to quantify the channel capacity of 18 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 the paranormal channel. He finds that the bit rate decreases from 0.1 bits/s for laboratory experiments to 0:005 bits/s for his 1000-km inter- city experiments. In the USSR, serious consideration is given to the hypothesis that telepathy is mediated by extremely low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic propagation. (The pros and cons of this hypothesis are discussed in Section V of this paper.) In general, the entire field of paranormal research in the USSR is part of a larger one concerned with the interac- tion between electromagnetic fields and living organisms [41],[42]. At the First International Congress on Parapsychology and Psychotronics in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1973, for example, Kholodov spoke at length about the susceptibility of living systems to extremely low-level ac anddc fields. He described conditioning effects on the behavior of fish resulting from the application of 10 to 100 WW of RF to their tank [43]. The USSR take these data seriously in that the Soviet safety requirements for steady- state microwave exposure set limits at 10 uW/om@ » whereas the United States has set a steady-state limit of 10 mW/cm2 [44]. Kholodov spoke also about the nonthermal effects of microwaves on animals' central nervous systems. His experiments were very carefully carried out and are characteristic of a new dimension in paranormal research. The increasing importance of this area in Soviet research was indi- cated recently when the Soviet Psychological Association issued an unprece- dented position paper calling on the Soviet Academy of Sciences to step up 19 s Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 efforts in this area [45]. They recommended that the newly formed Psycho- logical Institute within the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Psycholog- ical Institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences review the area and consider the creation of a new laboratory within one of the institutes to study persons with unusual abilities. They also recommended a comprehen- sive evaluation of experiments and theory by the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics and Institute for the Problems of Information Transmission. The Soviet research, along with other behavioristically oriented work, suggests that in addition to obtaining overt responses such as verbalizations or key presses from a subject, it should be possible to obtain objective evidence of information transfer by direct measurement of physiological parameters of a subject. Kamiya, Lindsley, Pribram, Silverman, Walter, and others brought together to discuss physiological methods to detect ESP functioning, have suggested that a whole range of ele¢troencephalogram (EEG) responses such as evoked potentials (EPs), spontaneous EEG, and the contingent negative variation (CNV) might be sensitive indicators of the detection of remote stimuli not mediated by usual sensory processes [46]. Early experimentation of this type was carried out by Douglas Dean at the Newark College of Engineering. In his search for physiological correlates of information transfer, he used the plethysmograph to measure changes in the blood volume in a finger, a sensitive indicator of autonomic 20 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 nervous system functioning [47]. A plethysmographic measurement was made on the finger of a subject during telepathy experiments. A sender looked at randomly selected target cards consisting of names known to the subject, together with names unknown to him (selected at random from a telephone book). The names of the known people were contributed by the subject and were to be of emotional significance to him. Dean found significant changes in the chart recording of finger blood volume when the remote sender was looking at those names known to the subject as compared with those names randomly chosen. Three other experiments using the physiological approach have now been published. The first work by Tart [48], a later work by Lloyd [49], and most recently the work by the authors [4] all follow a similar procedure. Basically, a subject is closeted in an electrically shielded room while his EEG is recorded. Meanwhile, in another laboratory, a second person is stimulated from time to time, and the time of that stimulus is marked on the magnetic tape recording of the subject's EEG. The subject does not know when the remote stimulus periods are as compared with the non- stimulus periods. With regard to choice of stimulus for our own experimentation, we noted that in previous work others had attempted, without success, to detect evoked potential changes in a subject's EEG in response to a single stroboscopic flash stimulus observed by another subject [50]. Ina discus- sion of that experiment, Kamiya suggested that because of the unknown 21 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 temporal characteristics of the information channel, it might be more appropriate to use repetitive bursts of light to increase the probability of detecting information transfer [51]. Therefore, in our study we chose to use a stroboscopic flash train of 10-s duration as the remote stimulus. In the design of the study, we assumed that the application of the remoite stimulus would result in responses similar to those obtained under conditions of direct stimulation. For example, when an individual is stim- ulated with a low-frequency (<30 Hz) flashing light, the EEG typically shows a decrease in the amplitude of the resting rhythm and a driving of the brain waves at the frequency of the flashes [52]. We hypothesized that if we stimulated one subject in this manner (a putative sender), the EEG of another subject in a remote room with no flash present (a receiver) might show changes in alpha (9-11 Hz) activity and possibly an EEG driving similar to that of the sender, or other coupling to the sender's EEG [53]. The receiver was seated in a visually opaque, acoustically and electrically shielded, double-walled steel room about 7 m from the sender. The details of the experiment, consisting of seven runs of thirty-six, 10-s trials each (twelve periods each for O-Hz, 6-Hz, and 16-Hz stimuli, randomly intermixed) are presented in [4]. This experiment proved to be successful: The receiv- er's alpha activity (9-11 Hz) showed a significant reduction in average power (-24%, p < 0.04) and peak power (-28%, p < 0.03) during 16-Hz flash stimuli as compared with periods of no-flash stimulus. [A similar response was observed for 6-Hz stimuli (-12% in average power, -21% in peak power), 22 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6