Approved For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701040004-2 38 The Relentless Question e. See "Richard George Med6urst 1920-1971, "an obituary by Mary Rose Bar- ringtonj.S.P.R. 46(1971), 124-6. f, Some years later I was reminded of this remark by Charles Honorton. By then claims were confidently being made that techniques such as the ganzfeldand remote-viewing were producing success rates approaching 50 percent. Unfor- tunately, success was still limited to a few favored experimenters. My students at Edinburgh were no more successful using these new techniques than they hadbeen with traditional methods of testing for ESP. g. At that time Walterj. Levy at the Institute for Parapsychology was still producing an unprecedented string of successes with his gerbils and other animal subjects who were required to influence a random-event generator in order to obtain some reward. The crash came in the summer of1974 when Levy was detected by his colleagues fiamdulently manipulating the computer. h. That is, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Recently, however, Hall (1984) has raised serious doubts as to whether Daniel Home was, in fact, related to the Earls ofHome. It was thought that hisfather was an illegitimate son ofthe 14th Earl. D. D. Home, for understandable reasons, sought to foster belief in a rela- tionship by adopting, as his middle name, "Dunglas. In the Currie register he if listed simply as Daniel Home. The Subliminal and the Extrasensory What follows was my contribution to an international conference at Amsterdam in August 1972 to which I hadbeen invitedby the Parapsychology Foundation of New York. The theme of the conference was "Parapsychology andthe Sciences" (Parapsychology Foundation 1974) but the one science about which I had any qmalifications to speak was, of course, psychology and it was the experimental study ofvisualperception that had been my special concern. While reviewing Norman Dixon's Subliminal Perception (1971) for a psychology journal, Ihadbeenstruck by the implications of his findings for Parapsychology. At that time there hadas yet been no empirical research link ing subliminal with extrasensory perception but since then there have been a fair number ofsach studies (Roney-Dougall986; Nash 1986). Professor Dixon, himself, is one ofthefew distinguishedB.,itishpsychologists who has been con- si.stently f7jendly to parapsychology. He has himself speculated since then on the reiationship that I here discuss (Dixon 1979; 1987) andprovided valuable assistance to Serena Roney-Dougal when she was working on her doctoral dissertation on this topic (Roney-Dougal 1987). From the earliest days of parapsychology it has generally been acknowledged that, whatever part of us is responsible for mediating extrasen- sory information, it is not the part that we associate with our conscious or ra- tional intellect. The concept of the unconscious became a commonplace of nineteenth-century thought long before it reached fruition in the work of Freud and, as can'be seen from the writings of Frederic Myers or of William James, the phenomena of the s6ance-room played a part in its development second only to those of the clinic. Indeed both depth psychology and para- psychology can trace a common ancestor in the mesmerist movement of the early 19th century. But., although parapsychologists have never ceased to bor- row freely from the treasure house of psychoanalytic ideas, these ideas for the most part were lacking the rigorous experimental basis that was necessary if Approved For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701040004-Zg Apm , gxV For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701OA99,9#zgaiad the Extramnmry 40 ,,s Question they were to be integrated into an experimental consciousness, a relatively high state of arousal parapsychology. There was, and the mediation of thi however, one concept of a psychodynamic nature ascending reticular activating system of the brain. that right from the start was There is, on the other hand firmly grounded in laboratory experiments rather a secondary system that may operate in the absence than in clinical observations. of consciousness, i Such was the concept of subliminal perception. associated with a relatively low state of arousal In this paper I want to consider a'nd is mediated by limbic: an( what implications, if any, the findings on subliminalmidbrairl mechanisms. The function of this secondary perception may have for system is less easy t( the study of extrasensory perception. Is there, define but it appears to be a kind of cognitive in short, a useful parallel to be safety valve that allows us to ac drawn between SP (Subliminal Perception) and ESP cess to a wide range of information that would (if you will allow me this otherwise be entirely exclude( play on words or on letters)? by the inhibitory mechanisms of the primary system. It is, we may suppose My interest in this question arose from reading involved in dreaming, in free-association and a recent book by Dr. Nor- spontaneous imagery, in in man Dixon of University College, London, entitledtuitive thinking and, no doubt, in those "games Subliminal Perception of the underground" tha (Dixon 1971), which I had been asked to review. Koestler has described for us so graphically in Dixon, I should say, is the connection with the bisociativ foremost authority on this topic in my country leaps of his creative thinkers (Koestler 1964). and his extensive researches It is to this secondary system tha have done as much as anything to establish, on Dixon ascribes our capacity for subliminal perception a secure scientific footing, a and it is my thesis tho concept that not long ago was still being treatedit is this system that is involved in the psi with suspicion, if not derision. process. It is noteworthy that Dixon subtitles his book In the classical or Cartesian tradition of European "The Nature of a Controversy." philosophy "mind" an, As I read the book I was struck repeatedly by "consciousness" are interchangeable concepts so the fact that what he had to say that events or processes th-, about SP seemed to apply equally to ESP, and the are not conscious cannot be mental, and must therefore analogy seemed the more be physical. Accordin telling inasmuch as Dixon nowhere makes it explicit.to a very different philosophical tradition, however, In fact, though I gather of which Bergson may her that he is open-minded on -the question, he has be taken as representative (Bergson 1911), our no special interest in and no conscious self is nothing moi definite views about paranormal phenomena. To than the residue that remains when awareness has make my intentions quite been filtered of everythin clear from the beginning, however, let me declareexcept that which pertains to the individuals' straight away how far I pro- biological needs. Mind itself pose to press my analogy and what I take to be conceived of as being potentially omniscient and its necessary limits. all-embracing but this un Obviously, no amount of knowledge that we may versality is sacrificed, according to Bergson, acquire about the work- in the ego-centered struggle f, ing of SP will account for the existence of ESP. survival. Now, just as Dixon regards SP as a compromise There is, after all, an absolute between the restricti, difference between a stimulus of very low intensitydemands of selective attention and the need for and a target that, being the organism to monitor isolated from all sensory contact with the subject,much wider range of stimuli, so I am going to is, in effect, a stimulus of suggest ESP may be regard( zero intensity. Thus, whereas Dixon devotes a as a compromise between the exclusiveness of the considerable portion of the book Bergsonian filter and t1. to arguing that there is nothing in the physiologycosmic capacity of mind to transcend the limits of the brain or nervous of the senses. Both ph system that should preclude the existence of SP, nomena, however, seem to be of marginal importance this, of course, is just what in everyday life relati we cannot argue with respect to ESP. For, whetherto normal perception. or not one believes that ESP may eventually be assimilated within the frameworkSo much for the general viewpoint from which I of an expanded physics am approaching tt and physiology, the obdurate fact that we have question. Now let us take a look at some of the to face is that, as of now, the facts and findings that resear, problem of how a subject might acquire informationon subliminal perception has uncovered. First about an extrasensory we should note that SP is target remains a total and absolute mystery. special case of the more general phenomenon of discrimination without awal Hence my analogy can begin only at the point at ness. No one can deny that we constantly make which we may suppose all kinds of adaptive discrin that, somehow or other, the target has been apprehended.nations without being aware of what we are doing. But, from that Indeed, the more skill point on, what happens to the information, how we are at any given activity the less we need it is decoded and processed, to be aware of the details of c, how the transition is effected from unconscious performance. What is peculiar about SP is that to conscious awareness, to in this case the cues are so feet questions of this order, Dixon's evidence and physically that they could never reach the threshold interpretations are, I maintain, for conscious recogniti relevant and illuminating. Following Dixon I am however hard we might try attending to them. Now going to assume that we all it is one of the key poii possess two distinct cognitive systems, each mediatedof Dixon's argument that SP is not just a dilute by its own set of brain form of ordinary perceptic mechanisms. There is, on the one hand, a primary Provided (a) the stimulus is well and truly below system whose main function recognition threshold and ( is to subserve selective attention and logical that it still retains any efficacy at all, then thought. This always involves it will be dealt with by the subj, Approved For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RD P96-00792ROO0701040004-2 Apqroved For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701040004-2 42 he Relentless Question The Subliminal and the Extrasensory in qui ite a different way from one that is strong enough to elicit a conscious sensation. This is best illustrated when the stimulus in question is a familiar word. Suppose your subject is shown a word and asked to report, as best he can, what he sees. Then, provided the word is visible at all, however faintly or however briefly, the subject's response is likely to bear at least some structural resemblance to the actual word. But if that word is exposed at such a low inten sity or for such a minute duration that it is in effect invisible, so that the subject can do no more than guess at it, as if it were an ESP target, then the evidence suggests that the response is unlikely to have any structural resemblance to the stimulus word but may very well have a semantic relationship. Sometimes the semantic processing involved, which, of course, all takes place at a purely un conscious level, seems to involve a rather elaborate symbolic transformation. This is particularly so if the word has some emotional or sexual significance for the subject. Dixon himself gives several examples of such responses that show a distinctly Freudian character. This qualitative shift in the response, which oc cuts when the intensity of the stimulus falls well below recognition threshold, is e plairied by su posing that it is then that our secondary system takes over X1 . p from the primary system. Dixon further points out that subliminal perception is more likely to occur when the subject is in a relaxed or passive state, as when he is made to recline on a couch; in other words he functions best in a low state of arousal. A special kind of subliminal perception that has long intrigued in- vestigators is the so-called "PoetzI Phenomenon," after the Austrian neurolo- gist, Otto Poetzl, who first drew attention to it in 1917 (Poetzl et al. 1960). Briefly, what he found was that if his subjects were shown a picture in a tachis- toscope for about a lom.s. duration, so that it was impossible for them to discern more than the most fragmentary features of the picture, much of the remaining content could still be recovered, even if in a somewhat disguised or symbolic form, if the subject was later asked to recall his dreams of the subse- quent night. Although, needless to say, the validity of this phenomenon has been strongly challenged, there have also been some good confirmations of it from recent experiments using very carefully controlled experimental designs (Dixon 1971). However, recent work has also shown that the effect is not limited to dreams. It appears to be sufficient if, after being presented with the picture in the tachistoscope, the subject is merely asked to relax and describe any spontaneous images that may then emerge into consciousness. It surely re- quires no special pleading to find a parallel here with the Maimorrides situation (Ullman et al. 1970). The Maimonides experiments exploit the same oblique approach in demonstrating an ESP cffect in the way the picture target in- fluences the dream imagery of the sleeping subject. Moreover, in this case, too, (Krippner 1968). in general wherever free-response techniques have been use to test for ESP, as for example in token-object reading, the symbolic distortior. noted by Dixon when testing for SP are liable to occur. One of the main points of departure for the modern study of SP was series of observations arising out of the work of a group of experiment. psychologists in the late 1940s who came to be known as the "New Look Scho( of Perception." Leo Postman andjerome Bruner, two of its leading exponent,, claimed that, in general, recognition thresholds for emotive words differe from those for neutral words. If the threshold was raised, i.e., recognition too longer, as might be expected when the word had unpleasant, alarming c distressing connotations for the subject, then one had a case of "perceptu-, defense." If, on the contrary, the threshold was lowered, i.e., recognitio became easier, as might be expected if the word had positive connotations fc the subject, then one had a case of perceptual sensitization. Actually, wheth( the threshold for a given word is raised or lowered relative to a neutral wor may depend as much on the personality of the subject as upon the charact( of the word, so that a perceptually vigilant subject may be expected to respon sooner even to a distressing signal. The important point, however ,is the e5 istence of this differ-ential effect as between emotionally charged stimulL -words and neutral words. A particular experiment by E. McGinnies (McGinnies 1949) in 194 sparked off what may well qualify as the longest specific controversy in th history of experimental psychology (Brown 1961). In this experiment he e), posed a series of words in a tachistoscope in which the critical items were sc called "taboo" words, i.e., words with a strong sexual flavor like "whore" c 11 tape." He duty reported that these critical items required longer exposure t, reach recognition than control items of the same length. _The interpretatiof was that a censorship was operating at an unconscious level to prevent iden tification of the forbidden words for as long as possible. Thus the concept c, 11 perceptual defense" was postulated as a direct analogue to the Freudian con cept of repression in the field of memory phenomena. Of course McGinnie,, experimentwas far too full of flaws to establish the validity of such a concep of its own accord. All kinds of reasons were put forward by critics to accoun for the fact that the taboo words took longer to recognize - subjects might hav hesitated before pronouncing the words until they were quite sure, or th words might be less common than the control words, or perhaps less expecte( in the laboratory situation. Evidence and arguments both for and against th reality of perceptual defense continued to pile up during the 195os and 196o as supporters of the concept strove to meet each new criticism and counter explanation. Everitually, however, though there still are doubters an( waverers, perceptual defense does appear to have been vindicated as a genuin manifestation of the unconscious. hypnotic dreams and waking imagery can be used aswell as A- onstration of perceptual defensi~, of th Approved For Release i6c(%,%efgn.'CIA-RDP96-007km6b'dfolf6w6tj4-L2m Approved For Release 2000/08/15: CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701040004-2 44 The Relentless Question The Suhliminal and the Extrasensory 45 kind we owe to Dixon, or to A.G. Worthington, a Canadian psychologist, the subject never, at any time during the experiment, suspects that there are any words involved, let alone that some of them may be obscene. All the experi- menter looks for is whether the critical words will raise the recognition threshold relative to the control words with respect to some quite neutral stimulus such as a patch of light, Thus, in Dixon's set-up, the critical word is exposed continuously to one eye only and at a level well below that at which he could be aware that there Z*s any kind of stimulus present. At the same time the other eye is presented with a visible spot of light whose intensity the subject himself can control. His instructions are to keep the spot of light from disap- pearing altogether while at the same time not to let it exceed in brightness a second spot of light that surrounds it. Dixon duly found that the mere presence of the taboo word was in itself sufficient to raise the threshold-setting for the spot of light; the implication being that resistance to seeing the taboo word raised the general threshold for form discrimination. In an experiment of this kind which one of my own students carried out this year (Gregor 1972), the subject was required only to indicate when a cer- tain luminous rectangle was visible against a uniform luminous background. Unbeknown to the subject the luminous rectangle was in fact a slide containing a word, either a sexually suggestive word or a carefully matched neutral word. Although great care was taken to guard against artifacts -for example the ex- perimenter himself did not know which slide was being used on which trial - it duly transpired that the mean intensity necessary to discriminate the rectangle against its background was significantly greater when the word it contained was of an obscene nature than when it had no such emotional connotation. Findings like these strike one as so bizarre, from a commonsense point of view, that one may be forgiven for wondering whether ESP might not be a more straightforward explanation for the results than one in terms of SP. Ac- tually, Dixon himself has told me that one cannot rule this out as a hypo- thetical possibility since few experimenters have bothered to control for an ESP effect. Not that this would be difficult, all one would need would be for the stimulus to be present, as a target, on certain trials but completely screened from the subject. I do not think Dixon takes this possibility very seriously or he would already have done something about it. Neither do I take it seriously for that matter. Nevertheless, it is a nice stroke of irony that, for once, we should be discussing ESP as a potential explanation of an alleged case of SP in- stead of, as so often, SP as an explanation for an alleged case of ESP. The acknowledgment of perceptual defense as a genuine psychological phenomenon should make it that much easier for us to accept the concept of psi-missing" as a parapsychological phenomenon. For the point about percep- tual defense is that it implies the possibility of identifying a stimulus at an un- conscious level in order to prevent its recognition at a conscious level. Now it is true that in a case of psi-miAppWMqOsFG1nReJfia;56f 20NIQUO IYU threatening or disturbing nature; negative scoring is more likely to occur if, for some reason, the subject is feeling anxious at the time or is acting under stress. Nevertheless, given that we all tend to be apprehensive about anything paranormal, that we instinctively recoil from anything that threatens to penetrate our safe Bergsonian filters, it becomes understandable that we sometimes consciously deny what our unconscious, so to speak, already knows. For methodological reasons, however, it is difficult to compare psi-missing at all directly with perceptual defense since the former can be clearly demon- strate'd only by using quantitative experiments of the forced-choice variety whereas the latter rely on qualitative free-response tests.' A type of perceptual defense that has been studied exhaustively in Sweden is that which is observed in the so-called "Defense Mechanism Test" designed by the Swedish psychologist Ulf Kragh (Kragh et al. 1970). This test uses as a stimulus a TAT type of picture that invariably contains one threaten- ing figure and one figure who is being threatened. A picture of this sort is then exposed in a tachistoscope at successive trials of increasing duration starting at a subliminal level, progressing through stages of preconscious recognition and ending when the entire picture is clearly visible. The assumption behind it is that an anxious subject will postpone for as long as possible acknowledging the threatening figure that he will contrive to see in various innocuous ways. Mar- tin Johnson, a parapsychologist and a colleague of Kragh's at Lund University, using the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT) as a measure of anxiety, was able to demonstrate a very significant correlation between the subject's score on the DMT and his ESP score on a standard test of clairvoyance (his DMT protocols were of course scored blind, i.e., in ignorance of his ESP scores). In general the more anxious subject tended to be a psi-misser and the less anxious subject tended to be a psi-hitter (Johnson et al. 1967). Philosophers who write about parapsychology like to point out that ESP is a misnomer, that really ESP is not a species of perception at all, or even of cognition, since the typical FSP test is assessed solely according to the propor- tion of guesses that coincide with the targets even though the subject himself cannot distinguish in any way between his correct and his incorrect guesses. This objection, however, stems from adopting the classic empiricist assump- tion that we cannot know anything unless we are consciously aware of knowing it. But it is precisely such an assumption that is challenged by the whole body of evidence that Dixon brings to our notice. Consider modern signal-detection theory as it has been developed by J.A. Swets and others as a branch of decision-making theory (Swets 1964). Here the concept of a conscious recogni- tion threshold is abandoned entirely. The subject is asked simply to guess whether the signal in question is on or off for a given trial. Much of the time the subject behaves in the same sort of way as an ESP subject, that is to say he goes on guessing to oblige the experimenter but is not conscious either of the CIA-RDP9$4ff92RQW7040MQO14s.2Yet the percentage of correct &ucsses Ln RrRv tnVAr Release 2000/08/15 CIA-RDP96-00792R000701JMQQA4mT and theFxtrasensory 46 wl~ estion be shown to be a direct mathematical function of the intensity of the stimulus starting at the baseline of chance expectation, when the stimulus is at some very low level of intensity, and climbing to 100 percent accuracy when the in- tensity reaches some optimal level. Of course, somewhere along this con- tinuum consciousness must supervene but from the standpoint of signal detec- tion theory, which is behavioristic and operationist in its approach, this is quite immaterial. Ultimately what terms we choose to employ is always a question of seman tics and if a philosopher wants to insist that perception implies conscious perception he is free to do so and can no doubt adduce good precedents for his usage. The point I want to make here, however, is that the modern psychophysical study of sensation and perception provides us with a good analogue for describing extrasensory perception. The typical card-guessing demonstration of ESP corresponds to the subliminal zone of the perceptual continuum whereas an accurate clairvoyant ascertainment of pictures, objects and scenes, such as is occasionally reported with certain exceptional sensitives, corresponds to the superliminal zone. That, subjectively, there is no difference between ESP uesswork and subliminal guesswork was shown in an experiment 9 thatJ.G. Miller published in 1940 (Miller 1940). He told his subjects that the task was one of telepathy and that they were to gaze into a mirror, as if into a crystal ball, and try imagining certain geometric figures that he was going to try and transmit to them, Actually, he projected very faint real images of the figures onto the back of the semitransparent mirror and the subjects duly scored well above the chance level but, and this is the point I wish to bring out, none of them suspected this ruse and all were surprised to learn that it was not after all a genuine test of telepathy. Finally, are there any practical implications to be derived from the work on SP for research on ESP? One enticing possibility worth mentioning is that of using an SP set-up in order to disguise a test of ESP. The idea has gained currency lately that subjects perform better when they are unaware that they are using their ESP. For example, some success has been reported using an ostensible test of memory. Items on which the subject recalled one of the wrong alternative answers were analyzed to see whether these corresponded significantly with the alternatives which the experimenter arbitrarily desig- nated as being the correct ESP target (Stanford 1971). It would not be difficult at all from a practical point of view to reverse J. G. Miller's procedure and make the subject think he was using his SP while in fact he was required to use his ESP. There is, in fact, one experiment in the literature which I have come across which does use this stratagem. This was an experiment byJule Eisenbud pub- lishcd in 1965 (Eisenbud 1965). He presented the numerals 2, 3 or 4 In a tachis- toscope and the subject had to guess at each trial which of these three different numerals had just been presented. On the critical runs, however, the same con- stant stimulus, consisting of an amalgam of all three numerals, was presented Approved For Release 2000/08/15: at every trial. Meanwhile, in the next room, an agent was synchronously watch- ing a series composed of the numerals 2, 3 or 4 being flashed on a screen at superliminal durations, the idea being to influence the subject's responses. Un- fortunately, however, this ingenious idea did not work and no significant scores were found on these critical runs, nor did it make any difference on the ordinary runs whether an agent saw the stimuli or not. There are, however, other ways of combining the subliminal and the ex- trasensory that are worth trying. Here again Martin Johnson has been breaking new ground with promising results (Johnson 1972), in an experiment, which he has recently completed, he exposed his words subliminally but these words were in the Finnish language so that any effects that they might have on the responses of his Dutch subjects would have to be due to ESP over and above any SP . it has also been suggested that, in a telepathic experiment, it is the agent who should be presented with the targets on a subliminal basis. The idea being that if it is indeed our unconscious that mediates the information, the best results should be expected if the target directly enters the unconscious of the agent. But, as yet, I have come across no actual accounts of experiment,, using this procedure. Lastly, as I have already suggested, I hope the time wil' come when experimental psychologists will have sufficient respect for the EST hypothesis to take the precaution of always introducing a setaf B&P contro trials in any future experiment on SP. It is not, however, my main concern it this paper to suggest how SP might be exploited in parapsychological research My concern has been rather to consider how the advances that have been mad, in our knowledge of subliminal processes, both on the psychodynamic and ol the physiological fronts, might contribute to advancing our knowledge of p,, processes. Note a. This was a mistake, as I later discovered thanks to Michael Thalbourne. a ranking procedure is used in connection with some free-response target, as w, the case in Tbalbourne's own experiment on the ParanormalreProduction oftarg drawings (Thalbourne 1981), then it is Perfectly possible to demonstrate p-, missing. CIA-RDP96-00792ROO0701040004-2