Though 58% of all Americans believe
they have had telepathic experiences,
researchers are just now
beginning to comer it. The people
they study, talented telepathic receivers,
produce results that defy mere luck.
by Paul Chance
mark twain, the author ofHuckleberry
Finn and Tom Sawyer and a member of
the Psychical Society of England, was
especially interested in “mental teleg-
raphy." His interest grew out of dozens
of personal experiences too freakish to
write off as anything but telepathy. In
1878 he wrote, “Doubtless the some-
thing
which
conveys
our
thoughts
through the air from brain to brain is a
finer and
subtler form
of
electricity,
and all we need do is to find out how to
capture it and how to force it to do its
work, as we have had to do in the case
of the electric currents. Before the day
of telegraphs neither of these marvels
would
have
seemed, any
easier
to
achieve than the other."
We're now in the age of television
and
the videophone, and researchers
are
still trying to capture the elusive
telepathic force.
The trouble
is that telepathy won't
stand
still. Parapsychologists are like
modern
Leeuwenhoeks
peering
through primitive microscopes at tiny
creatures
dancing
in
swamp
water.
Each time somebody calls out, "I've got
the
little
bugger,- come take a look,"
the
little bugger
slips out of view or
hides
The
that it's all swamp grass doesn't make
the work any easier.
Disappearing Act. One of the paradoxes
of this spooky field
is that while re-
searchers cannot reliably, demonstrate
that
extrasensory
perception
(esp)
exists, they can count on it to go away.
Time after time, people who initially
show psychic talent lose their skill as
the researchers study them, and their
success scores drop. The phenomenon
is so dependable that parapsychologists
call it the decline effect. Critics point
to it as evidence that there was never
anything paranormal
to
begin
with;
sometimes a person will get lucky, but
eventually the laws of chance win out.
Parapsychologists
aren't
convinced,
because the beginning scores are often
so high that
it
is
difficult to believe
that luck has anything to do with it.
Charles
Tart,
of
the University
of
California
at
Davis,
is
trying some-
thing that may explain the decline ef-
fect and, at the same time, give the re-
searcher
a
way
to
nail
psychic
phenomena down flat.
Tart wondered
if people with
tele-
pathic talent weren't being put on what
a. i
•
_ .11
if his efforts go unrewarded. If a psychic
reads
a couple
of hundred telepathic
messages without a payoff, he's on ar
extinction
schedule.
What
para
psychologists ought to do, Tart argues,
is put the psychically gifted on a rein-
forcement schedule.
The payoff might consist simply oi
telling the psychic when he has scored
a hit. But Tart warns that the pupil
should have some psychic
ability
to
begin
with. No matter how good
a
training program
is, you can't teach a
dog to fly or a pigeon to bark. To de-
velop someone into a reliable psychic
performer a researcher must start with
a person who has at least a little esp.
Striving Psychics. To find the talented
minority. Tart screened over 1,500 col-
lege
students. Of
these,
138 showed
promise; these were further screened to
cull those who might have been lucky
on the first tests. Twenty-five of Tart's
most promising students went on
to
complete the main study.
The psychic's job was to guess which
one of a series of lights would go on. A
sender, not one of the gifted 25, sat in
another room; he would get an early
warning of which light was about to go
information
who
sat
in
Approved For Relea^
8^000200080050-9
scores at other times and found a sig-
nificant
difference.
The
husband's
scores,
meanwhile,
were
virtually
identical
in both conditions
(see the
chart at bottom of this page).
In another series of games, Fouts's
Scribbage-playing
telepather
tried
to
help as well as interfere with his wife's
performance.
As
before,
negative
thoughts
seemed
to
produce
lower
scores, but attempts to raise her scores
failed.
The
victim
in
these
Scribbage
studies was not aware of her husband's
efforts, or even that an experiment was
under way. Fouts admits that the inter-
ference
that
took
place might have
come from nonverbal
cues,
such
as
changes in the husband's body posture,
rather than from telepathic influence.
It is interesting to note, however, that
during
the
interference
sessions
the
wife sometimes commented,
"I can't
think ... my mind is blank."
Researchers have tried to strengthen
other paranormal
skills such
as pre-
cognition and clairvoyance. In general,
their efforts have supported the notion
that
paranormal
skills
can
be
en-
hanced,
or
at least maintained, with
feedback. But Tart
is quick
to admit
that even
his
best
students
did not
show
the
rapid
improvement
you
might
expect
with
more
ordinary
skills.
What's
needed,
he
argues,
is
more
sophisticated feedback. Even
a
talented person gets little information
from being told that he guessed correct-
ly- A pat on the head tells him he did
something right, but it doesn't tell him
what that something was.
Brafn Signals. The problem
is further
complicated
by
the
fact
that
some
guesses are just that, guesses. But the
psychic has no way of knowing when a
correct answer came from psychic in-
sight and when it was just a lucky stab.
To beat that problem, researchers will
have
to
find
a
psychic
indicator,
perhaps a kind
of
cerebral knee-jerk
like the response a brain makes to a
sudden noise. Each time the brain sig-
naled the arrival of a telepathic mes-
sage,
the
researcher
could
cue
the
psychic. This way, the psychic should
be able to learn to distinguish extraor-
dinary
intuition
from
ordinary
co-
incidence.
There's some evidence that the brain
does know more than
it's
telling us.
Charles Tart wired up
1 1 college stu-
dents to record their brain waves and
i2l0
(wifely
j
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.
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I
170.
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•
'
o interference
interference
no interference
interference
t
left them
alone.
Tart
then went
to
another room and wired himself to a
Y
machine that gave him electric shocks
s
at random intervals. The idea was to
a
see whether the students' brain waves-
i
would be different when Tart was get-
-
ting jolted than when he wasn't. They
l
were. The difference wasn't the sort
t^at would leap out at you from the
pattern
of wavy
lines
on
an
elec-
troencephalograph,
but
a
piece
of
equipment
called
a
Period Analyzer
picked
it up. We're
still a long way
from having a psychic thermometer,
but
researchers
at
Stanford Research
Institute
in Palo Alto,
California in-
tend to continue the search.
In a recent poll conducted by the Na-
tional
Opinion
Research
Center,
percent
of
those
surveyed
said
that
they believed they had had one or more
telepathic
experiences. But even the
baptized
believer
in
parapsychology
has to admit that it is a field with some
mushy ground. It is hard to find a study
that
doesn't
have
a
lot
of
ifs
and
maybes in it. And psychic researchers
rarely have the hard, oaklike quality of
pigeon-tutor
B.F.
Skinner
or
neuro-
psychologist D.O. Hebb.
The
conversation
of
parapsy-
chologists
is
apt
to
shift
from
the
mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle to
the Loch Ness Monster. The tempta-
tion is to latch onto one of these low-
credibility
subjects and dismiss
tele-
pathy and related phenomena as the
psychedelic
mentations
of
a spooky
group.
Just
file them away with the
witches, the shamen and the root doc-
tors, and forget them.
Inflating Our Flat World. But remember
that
in
the
early
1960s
just
about
everybody was convinced that the yogi
miracle
workers
were
fakes.
Those
nut
psychology TODAY, February 1076
Telepathy (Continued from page 44.)
-
eir ®uts through gymnastic
workouts. A
few
scientists
studied
them as they altered their blood pres-
s'6
or changed
the
temperature
of
their hands, but almost no one believed
that what they did could really be done,
loppy research. Clever trickery. Any
intelligent, educated person knew that
it was impossible, for example, to vol-
untarily control one's blood pressure.
Then
Neal
Miller
and
other
fhIt
Ch0 °SiStS t3Ught Pe°ple t0 d° |ust
Their insides Upside Down. The success
o
Miller et
al. did more than change
. our ideas about the nuts and bolts of
the nervous system,- it inflated our flat
world into
a sphere connecting East
- and West. And
if the heart-stopping
yogi can no longer be dismissed as a
clever trickster, how can we ignore the
feat
of
S3,
who
outguessed
Tart's
machine
at
odds
of
2,500,000 000
000,000,000,000,000,000,
to mie? No
honest statistician can shrug that off as
a run
of good
luck. No,
we're
right
where we were
years
ago when
those skinny yogis turned their insides
upside down. Either it's a hoax, or it's
real.
We probably won't have an answer to
that question until some tough-minded
scientist like Neal Miller takes a crack
at
it. He might simply prove that
all
those confident, jeering skeptics were
nght,
after
all. But
it's disconcerting
to think that
it might come out the
other way. Your local high school might
, one day offer a course in telepathy as it
now
does
in
typing. And
think
of
how
different your
life would
be
if
your thoughts were no longer private
property.
Hmmmm.
I
see
you're
thinking
about
it.
Jjgjigfev
:
j Hanging
editor a year
AlisSSMh,
ago- He took a master's
V
i degree
in
counseling
| from
the
University
of
i Northern Colorado and a
'! Ph-D. in psychology from
i Utah
State
University. A
•
r,9°rous
methodologist,
nwR'A'
• Chance went to Tart’s lab
tion^ead
-
telepathy setup
‘ For more informa-
press
0113 "98 T ' Leamin°
USB ESP Unive,si,y of Chicago, in
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