PROCEEDINGS OF
MWJ™
: CIA-RDP96-00787R000700070001-9
r
A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer
over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective
and Recent Research
HAROLD E. PUTHOFF, member, ieee, and RUSSELL TARG, senior member, ieee
Abstract -Tot more
than
100 years,
scientists have attempted
to
determine the truth or falsity of claims for the existence of a perceptual
channel whereby
certain individuals are able to perceive and describe
remote data not presented to any known sense. This paper presents an
outline of the history of scientific inquiry into such so-called paranor-
mal perception and surveys the current state of the art in parapsycho-
logical research in the United States and abroad.
The nature of this
perceptual channel
is examined in a series of experiments carried out
in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory of Stanford Research
Institute.
The perceptual modality most extensively investigated is the
ability of both experienced subjects and inexperienced volunteers to
view, by
innate mental
processes, remote geographical or
technical
targets including buildings, roads, and laboratory apparatus.
The ac-
cumulated data indicate that the phenomenon
is not a sensitive func-
tion of distance, and Faraday cage shielding does not in any apparent
way degrade the quality and accuracy of perception. On die basis of
this research, some areas of physics are suggested from which a descrip-
tion or explanation of the phenomenon could be forthcoming.
I. Introduction
“-TTT
IS THE PROVINCE of natural science to investigate
I nature, impartially and without prejudice” [1
]
. Nowhere
-U-in
scientific inquiry has this dictum met as great a chal-
lenge as in the area of so-called extrasensory perception (ESP),
the
detection
of remote
stimuli not mediated by the usual
sensory processes.
Such phenomena, although under scientific
consideration for over a century, have historically been fraught
with unreliability and controversy, and validation of the phe-
nomena by accepted scientific methodology has been slow in
coming.
Even
so,
a recent survey conducted by the
British
publication New Scientist revealed that 67 percent of nearly
1500 responding readers (the majority of whom are working
scientists and
technologists) considered ESP to be an estab-
lished
fact
or
a
likely
possibility, and 88
percent held the
investigation of ESP to be a legitimate scientific undertaking
[ 2 ].
A review of the literature reveals that although experiments
by reputable researchers yielding positive results were begun
over a century ago
(e.g., Sir William Crookes’ study of D. D.
Home,
1860’s)
[3], many consider
the study of these phe-
nomena
as only recently emerging from the realm of quasi-
science.
One
reason
for
this
is
that,
despite experimental
results, no satisfactory theoretical construct had been advanced
to
correlate data or to predict new experimental outcomes.
Consequently, the area
in question remained for a long time
in the recipe stage reminiscent of electrodynamics before the
unification brought about by the work of Ampere, Faraday,
and Maxwell.
Since the early work, however, we have seen the
development
of
information
theory, quantum
theory, and
neurophysiological
research,
and
these
disciplines
provide
powerful conceptual tools that appear to bear directly on the
issue.
In
fact, several physicists (Section V) are now of the
opinion that these phenomena are not at
all inconsistent with
the framework of modern physics: the often-held view that
observations of this type are a priori incompatible with known
laws is erroneous in that such a concept
is based on the naive
' realism prevalent before the development of quantum theory.
In the emerging view,
it
is accepted that research in this area
can be conducted so as to uncover not just a catalog of inter-
esting events, but rather patterns of cause-effect relationships
of the type that lend themselves to analysis and hypothesis
in
the
forms
with
which
we
are
familiar
in
the
physical
sciences.
One hypothesis
is that information transfer under
conditions
of
sensory
shielding
is
mediated
by
extremely
low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves, a proposal that
does not seem
to
be
ruled out by any obvious physical or
“biological
facts.
Further,
the development of information
theory
makes
it
possible
to
characterize and
quantify
the
performance
of
a
communications
channel
regardless
of
the underlying mechanism.
For
the
past
three
years, we have had
a program in the
Electronics
and
Bioengineering
Laboratory
of
the
Stan-
ford
Research
Institute (SRI)
to
investigate those facets of
human perception that appear to fall outside the range of well-
understood
perceptual/processing
capabilities.
Of particular
interest
is a human information-accessing capability that we
call
“remote
viewing.”
This phenomenon
pertains to the
ability of certain individuals to access and describe, by means
of mental processes, information sources blocked from ordi-
nary perception, and generally accepted as secure against such
access.
In
particular, the phenomenon we have investigated most
extensively
is the ability of a subject to view remote geograph-
ical locations up to
several thousand kilometers distant from
his physical location (given only a known person on whom to
target).
We have
carried out more than fifty experiments
under controlled laboratory conditions with several individuals
whose remote
perceptual
abilities have been developed
suf-
ficiently to allow them at times to describe correctly—often in
great detail—geographical or technical material such as build-
..
.
,
_.
ings, roads, laboratory apparatus, and the like.
Manuscript received July 25, 1975; revised November 7, 1975.
The
“
,
submission
of this paper was encouraged
after review of an advance
As observed in the laboratory, the basic phenomenon appears
proposal. ThB work was supported by the Foundation for Parasensory
to cover a range of subjective experiences variously referred to
Investigation and the Parapsychology Foundation, New York, NY; the
Institute of Noetic
Sciences, Palo Alto, CA; and the National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration, under Contract NAS 7-100.
The authors are with the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory,
'Our
initial work
in
this area was reported
in Nature
f4 1 , and
re-
Stanford Research InsA)ppr»we€|P|n®fCR9l»ase 2003/09/10
:
13, Jan. 1975.
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Fig.
1.
Airport in San Andres, Colombia, used as remote-viewing target, along with sketch produced by subject
in California.
in the literature as autoscopy (in the medical literature); exteri-
orization
or
disassociation
(psychological
literature); simple
clairvoyance, traveling clairvoyance, or out-of-body experience
(parapsychological literature); or astral projection (occult liter-
ature).
We
choose
the term “remote viewing” as
a
neutral
descriptive term
free from
prior associations and bias as
to
mechanisms.
The development
at SRI of a successful experimental pro-
cedure to elicit this capability has evolved to the point where
persons
such
as
visiting government
scientists and
contract
monitors, with no previous exposure to such concepts, have
learned to perform well; and subjects who have trained over a
one-year period have performed excellently under a variety of
experimental conditions.
Our accumulated data thus indicate
that
both
specially
selected and
unselected
persons
can
be
assisted
in
developing remote
perceptual
abilities
up
to
a
level of useful information transfer.
In experiments of this type, we have three principal findings.
First, we -have established that
it
is possible to obtain signifi-
cant amounts of accurate descriptive information about remote
locations.
Second, an
increase
in
the
distance from a few
meters up to 4000 km separating the subject from the scene
to be
perceived does not
in any apparent way degrade the
quality or accuracy of perception.
Finally; the use of Faraday
cage electrical shielding does not prevent high-quality descrip-
tions from being obtained.
To
build
a
coherent
theory
for the explanation
of these
phenomena,
it
is necessary to have
a
clear understanding of
what constitutes the phenomena.
In this paper, we first briefly
summarize previous efforts in this field in Section II. We then
present in Sections
III and IV the results of a series of more
Approved For Release 2003/09/10
:
than
fifty experiments with nine subjects
carried out
in our
own laboratory, which represent a sufficiently stable data base
to permit testing of various hypotheses concerning the func-
tioning of
this
channel.
Finally,
in
Section V, we indicate
those areas of physics and information theory that appear to
be
relevant
to
an
understanding
of
certain
aspects of the
phenomena.
First, however, we present an illustrative example generated
in an early
pilot experiment.
As will be clear from our later
discussion,
this
is not
a
“best-ever”
example, but
rather
a
typical sample of the level of proficiency that can be reached
and that we have come to expect in our research.
Three
subjects
participated
in
a
long-distance experiment
focusing on a
series of targets in Costa Rica.
These subjects
said they had never been to Costa Rica.
In this experiment,
one of the experimenters (Dr. Puthoff) spent ten days traveling
through Costa Rica on
a combination business/pleasure trip.
This information was all that was known to the subjects about
the traveler’s itinerary.
The experiment called for Dr. Puthoff
to keep a detailed record of his location and activities, includ-
ing photographs of each of seven
target days at 1330 PDT.
A total of twelve daily descriptions were collected before the
traveler’s return:
six responses from one
subject,
five from
another, and one from a third.
The third subject who submitted the single response supplied
a drawing for a day in the middle of the series. (The subject’s
response, together with the photographs taken at the site, are
shown
in
Fig.
1).
Although Costa
Rica
is
a mountainous
country, the subject unexpectedly perceived the traveler at a
beach and ocean setting. With some misgiving, he described an
clK
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331
end (correct).
An airport building also was drawn, and shown
to have a large rectangular overhang (correct).
The
traveler
had taken an unplanned one-day side trip to an offshore island
and at the time of the experiment had just disembarked from a
plane
at
a small
island
airport
as
described by the subject
4000 km away.
The sole discrepancy was that the subject’s
drawing showed a Quonset-hut type of building in place of the
rectangular structure.
The above description was chosen as an example to illustrate
a major
point
observed
a number of times throughout the
program to be described.
Contrary to what may be expected,
a subject’s description does not necessarily portray what may
reasonably be expected to be correct (an educated or “safe”
guess),
but
often
runs
counter
even
to
the
subject’s own
expectations.
We wish to stress again that a result such as the above is not
unusual.
The remaining submissions in this experiment pro-
vided further examples of excellent correspondences between
target and response.
(A target period of poolside relaxation
was identified; a drive through a tropical forest at the base of
a truncated volcano was described as a drive through a jungle
below a large bare table mountain; a hotel-room target descrip-
tion, including such details as rug
color, was correct; and so
on.)
So as to determine whether such matches were simply
fortuitous—that
is, could reasonably be expected on the basis
of chance alone—Dr. Puthoff was asked after he had returned
to
blind match the
twelve
descriptions
to
his seven
target
locations.
On the basis of this conservative evaluation proce-
dure, which
vastly underestimates the
statistical significance
of the individual descriptions,
five correct matches were ob-
tained.
This number of matches
is significant at p = 0.02 by
exact binomial calculation.2
The observation of such unexpectedly high-quality descrip-
tions
early
in our program led to
a large-scale study of the
phenomenon at SRI under secure double-blind conditions (i.e.,
target unknown
to experimenters
as
well as subjects), with
independent random target selection and blind judging.
The
results, presented
in Sections
III and
IV, provide strong evi-
dence
for
the
robustness
of
this phenomenon whereby
a
human perceptual modality of extreme sensitivity can detect
complex remote stimuli.
II. Background
Although we are approaching the study of these phenomena
as physicists, it is not yet possible to separate ourselves entirely
from the language of the nineteenth century when the labora-
tory study of the paranormal was begun.
Consequently, we
continue to use terms such as “paranormal,” “telepathy,” and
the
like.
However, we intend only to indicate a process of
information
transfer under
conditions generally accepted as
secure against such transfer and with no prejudice or occult
assumptions as to the mechanisms involved.
As in any other
scientific pursuit, the purpose is to collect the observables that
result from experiments and to try to determine the functional
relationships between these observables and the laws of physics
as they are currently understood.
*The probability of a correct daily match by chance for any given
transcript
is p = -$-.
Therefore, the probability of at least five correct
matches by chance out of twelve tries can be calculated from
Organized research into so-called psychic functioning began
roughly in the time of J.
J. Thomson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and
Sir William Crookes, all of whom took part in the founding of
the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 in England.
Crookes, for example, carried out his principal investigations
with D, D. Home, a Scotsman who grew up in America and
returned to England in 1855 [3]
.
According to the notebooks
and
published
reports of Crookes, Home had demonstrated
the ability to cause objects to move without touching them.
We should note in passing that, Home, unlike most subjects,
worked only in the
light and spoke out in the strongest pos-
sible terms against the darkened seance rooms popular at the
time [5]
.
Sir William Crookes was a pioneer in the study of electrical
discharge in gases and in the development of vacuum tubes,
some types of which
still bear his name. Although everything
Crookes said about electron beams and plasmas was accepted,
nothing he said about the achievements of D. D. Home ever
achieved
that
status.
Many of his colleagues, who had not
observed the experiments with Home, stated publicly that they
thought Crookes had been deceived, to which Crookes angrily
responded:
Will not my critics give me credit for some amount of common
sense? Do they not imagine that the obvious precautions, which
occur
to them
as soon as they
sit down to pick holes in my
experiments, have occurred to me also in the course of my pro-
longed and patient investigation?
The answer to this, as to all
other objections
is, prove
it to be an error, by showing where
the
error
lies,
or
if a trick, by showing how the
trick
is per-
formed.
Try the experiment fully and fairly.
If then fraud be
found, expose
it;
if
it be a truth, proclaim
it.
This is the only
scientific procedure, and
it
is that
I propose steadily to pursue
[3].
In
the United
States, scientific interest in the paranormal
was centered
in the
universities.
In
1912, John Coover [6]
was established in the endowed Chair of Psychical Research at
Stanford University.
In the 1920’s, Harvard University set up
research programs with George Estabrooks and L. T. Troland
17],
[8],
It was in
this framework that, in
1930, William
McDougall invited Dr.
J. B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine to
join the Psychology Department at Duke University [9]. For
more than 30 years, significant work was carried out at Rhine’s
Duke
University
Laboratory.
To examine the existence of
paranormal
perception,
he
used
the now-famous ESP cards
containing
a
boldly
printed
picture of a
star,
cross, square,
circle, or wavy lines.
Subjects were asked to name the order
of these cards
in
a freshly shuffled deck of twenty-five such
cards.
To
test
for telepathy, an experimenter would look at
the cards one at a time, and a subject suitably separated from
the sender would attempt to determine which card was being
viewed.
Dr.
J.
B. Rhine
together with Dr.
J. G. Pratt
carried out
thousands of experiments of this type under widely varying
conditions [ 10]
.
The statistical results from these experiments
indicated that some individuals did indeed possess a paranor-
mal perceptual
ability in
that
it was
possible
to obtain an
arbitrarily high degree of improbability by continued testing
of a gifted subject.
The work of Rhine has been challenged on many grounds,
however, including accusations of improper handling of statis-
tics, error, and fraud.
With regard to the statistics, the general
consensus of statisticians today
is that
if fault
is to be found
in Rhine’s work, it would have to be on other than statistical
12 !
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h *J (12 - i)l
.
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= 0 .02 .
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IEEE > MARCH 1976
most
celebrated
case of
criticism
of
Rhine’s work,
that of
G.
R.
Price
[12], ended
years
after
it began when the
accusation of fraud was retracted by
its author
in an article
entitled “Apology to Rhine and Soal,” published in the same
journal in which
it was first put forward [13].
It should also
be
noted
that
parapsychological
researchers
themselves
re-
cently
exposed
fraud
in
their own
laboratory when
they
encountered
it [14].
At the end of the 1940’s, Prof. S. G. Soal, an English mathe-
matician working with the SPR, had carried out hundreds of
card guessing experiments involving tens of thousands of calls
[15]
.
Many of these experiments were carried out over ex-
tended 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 10“8
. With the publication
of Modem Experiments
in Telepathy by Soal and Bateman
(both of whom were statisticians), it appeared that card guess-
ing experiments produced significant results, on the average.
The most severe
criticism of all this work, a criticism
diffi-
cult 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 occur.”
Therefore,
based
on
the
“a
priori
unlikelihood”
of
ESP,
Hansel’s examination of the
literature centered
primarily on
the
possibility
of
fraud,
by
subjects
or
investigators.
He
reviewed
in
depth
four
experiments 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 Shackle-
ton [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
therefore 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 remained 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 disap-
pointment since
if paranormal perception
is a natural ability,
one would like to see subjects improving with practice rather
than getting worse.
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
*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 experiments.
reinforcement, he developed several outstanding subjects, one
of whom,
Pavel
Stepanek,
has worked with experimenters
around the world for more than 10 years.
Ryzl’s pioneering work came as an answer to the questions
raised by
the
1956 CIBA
Foundation conference on extra-
sensory perception.
The CIBA Chemical Company has annual
meetings on
topics of
biological and chemical interest, and
that same
year
they
assembled
several prominent
parapsy-
chologists to have a state-of-the-art conference on ESP [231.
The conference concluded that little progress would be made
in
parapsychology
research
until
a
repeatable
experiment
could be found; namely, an experiment that different experi-
menters could repeat
at
will, and that would
reliably yield a
statistically significant result.
Ryzl had by 1962 accomplished that goal.
His primary con-
tribution was a decision to interact with the subject as a per-
son, to try to build up his confidence and ability.
His protocol
depended on “working with” rather than “running” his sub-
jects.
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 60-percent
reliability
whether
a
hidden
card was
green
side
or
white
side up,
yielding
statistics
of
a
million
to one with only a
thousand trials.
As significant as such results are statistically, the information
channel
is imperfect, containing noise along with the signal.
When considering 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 experiment by
Ryzl using such techniques has proved to be successful. Ryzl
had
an
assistant
select randomly
five groups of three
digits
each.
These
1 5 digits were then encoded into binary form and
translated into a sequence 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 9 s per
call) to correctly identify
all 15
numbers,
a
result
significant
at p = 10-15
The
hit rate
for
individual calls was 61.9 percent,
1 1 978 hits, and 7372 misses
[31].
Note Added in Proof:
It has been brought to our attention
that a similar procedure was recently used to transmit without
error the word
“peace”
in
International 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, NY, Jan. 27, 1975).
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)-Hy (x)
(1)
where H(x) is the uncertainty of the source message containing
symbols with a priori probability Pj
:
H{x) - - £
Pi log2 Pi
(2)
/=i
and Hy (x)
is the conditional entropy based on the a posteriori
probabilities that a received signal was actually transmitted:
Hy (x) = - £
p (/, /) log2 Pi (/)
.
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puthoff AND
2O03KJSW0ATC1AJR0P«S®JOO787ROOO7OOO7OOO1 -9
For Stepanek’s run, with p,- =
p,- (/') = 0.619, and an average
time of 9 s per choice, we have a source uncertainty H(x) =
bit and a calculated bit rate
R » 0.041 bit /symbol
or
R/Ta* 0.0046 bit/s.
(Since the 15-digit number (49.8 bits) actually was transmitted
at the rate of 2.9 X
10-4
bit/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
extensively 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 deconditioning any response.
He
thus
considers
card guessing
“a technique for extinguishing
psychic functioning in the laboratory” [32]
.
Tart’s injunctions of the mid-sixties were being heeded
at
Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn, NY, by a team of researchers
that
included
Dr. Montague
Ullman, who was
director
of
research
for the
hospital;
Dr.
Stanley Krippner; and,
later,
Charles Honorton.
These three worked together for several
years on experiments on the occurrence of telepathy in dreams.
In the course of a half-dozen experimental series, they found
in
their week-long
sessions
a number
of
subjects who had
dreams
that consistently were highly descriptive of pictorial
material that a remote sender was looking at throughout the
night.
This work
is described in detail in the experimenters’
book Dream Telepathy
[33].
Honorton
is continuing work
of this free-response type in which the subject has no precon-
ceived idea as to what the target may be.
In his more recent- work with subjects in the waking state,
Honorton
is providing homogeneous stimulation to the subject
who
is to describe color slides viewed by another person in a
remote room.
In
this new work, the subject listens to white
noise
via
earphones and views an homogeneous visual
field
imposed through the use of Ping-Pong ball halves to cover the
subject’s
eyes
in
conjunction with diffuse ambient illumina-
tion.
In this so-called Ganzfeld setting, subjects are again able,
now
in
the waking
state, to
give
correct and
often
highly
accurate
descriptions
of
the
material being viewed by the
sender [34],
In Honorton’s work and elsewhere,
it apparently has been
the
step away from the repetitive forced-choice experiment
that has opened the way for a wide variety of ordinary people
to demonstrate significant functioning in the laboratory, with-
out 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 translated documents and other sources
[35]
that many laboratories in the USSR are engaged in paranormal
research.
Since the 1930’s, in the laboratory of L. Vasiliev (Leningrad
Institute for Brain Research), there has been an interest in the
use of telepathy as a method of influencing the behavior of a
person at a distance.
In Vasiliev’s book Experiments in Mental
Suggestion, he makes
it very clear that the bulk of his labora-
tory’s experiments were aimed
at long-distance communica-
tion
combined
with
a
form
of behavior modification;
for
example, putting people at a distance to sleep through hyp-
nosis [36]
.
Approved For Release 2003/09/10
:
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, until 1969, published
extensively on the theory of telepathic communication [37]-
[40]
.
He was concerned with three principal kinds of experi-
ments:
mental
suggestion without
hypnosis over
short
dis-
tances, in which the percipient attempts to identify an object;
mental awakening over short
distances, in which a subject
Is
awakened from a hypnotic sleep at the “beamed” suggestion
from the hypnotist; and long-range (intercity) telepathic com-
munication.
Kogan’s main interest has been to quantify the
channel capacity of the paranormal channel. He finds that the
bit
rate decreases from 0.1
bit/s
for laboratory experiments
to 0.005 bit/s for his 1000-km intercity 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 interaction 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 and dc fields. He described
conditioning effects on the behavior of fish resulting from the
application of 10 to 100 juW of RF to their tank [43],
The
USSR take these data seriously
in that the Soviet safety re-
quirements
for
steady-state
microwave
exposure
set
limits
at
1 0 pW/cm 2
, 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
indicated recently when the Soviet Psychological Association
issued an unprecedented position paper calling on the Soviet
Academy of Sciences to
step up
efforts
in
this area
[45].
They
recommended
that
the newly formed
Psychological
Institute
within
the
Soviet
Academy
of
Sciences
and
the
Psychological 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 comprehensive evaluation
of experiments and theory by the Academy of Sciences’ Insti-
tute of Biophysics and Institute for the Problems of Informa-
tion 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 informa-
tion transfer by direct measurement of physiological parame-
ters
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 electroencephalogram (EEG) responses such as
evoked potentials (EP’s), 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
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