PARAPSYCHOLOGY Approved For Re1ea%Aft1Q=1 6 00200080050-9@ Though 58% of ali 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 MARKTWAIN, the author that if his effortsko unrewarded. of Huckleberry it's If a psychic all swamp grass doesn't make Finn and Tom Sawyer and the work reads a couple of hundred a member of any telepathic easier. the Psychical Society Disappearing messages without a payoff, of England,.was Act. he's on an one of@ the paradoxes especially interested of this extinction schedule. What in "mental teleg- spooky para- field is that while re- raphy." His interest grewsearchers psychologists ought to out of dozens cannot do, Tart argues, reliably. demonstrate of personal experiences that is put the psychically too freakish to extrasensory gifted on a rein- perception (.ESP) write off as anything exists, forcement schedule., but telepathy. In they can count on it to go away. 1878 he wrote, "DoubtlessTime The payoff might consist the Some.- after sirriply of time, people who initially thing which, conveys 'ourshow telling the psychic when thoughts psychic he has scored talent lose their skill as through the air from brainthe researchers a hit. But Tart warns to brain is a study that the pupil them, and their finer and subtler form success should have some psychic of electricity, scores, ability to drop. The phenomenon and ali we need do is is so begin with. No matter to find out how to dependable how good a that parapsychologists capture it and how to call training program is, you force it to do its it the cant teach a decline. effect. Critics point work, as we have had to to it dog to fly or a pigeon do in the case as evidence to bark. To Ae- that there was never of the electric currents..anything velop someone into a reliable Before the day paranormal psychic to begin with; of telegraphs neither sometimes performer a researcher of these marvels a person must start with will get lucky, but would have seemedi any eventually a person who has at least easier to the a little ESP. laws of chance win out. achieve than the other." Parapsychologists Striving psychics. To aren't find the talented convinced, We're now in the age of because minority, Tait screened television the over 1,500'col- beginning scores are often and the videophorie, and so high lege students. Of these, researchers that 138 showed it is difficult to believe are still trying to capturethat promise; thesewere further the elusive luck screened to has anything to do with it. telepathic force. Charles cull those who might have Tart, been lucky of the University of The trouble is that telepathyCalifornia on the first tests. Twenty-five won't at Davis, of Tart's is trying some- stand still. Yarapsychologiststhing,that most promising students are like may went on to explain the decline ef- modern Leeuwenhoeks peeringfeet complete the main study. and, at the same time, give the re- through primitive microscopessearcher The psychic's job Was at tiny a way to guess which to nail psychic creatures dancing in swampphenomena one of a series of lights water.' down would go on. A flat. Each time somebody calls Tart sender, not one of the out, "I've got wondered gifted 25, sat in if people with tele- the little bugger; come pathic another room; he would take a look," talent get an early weren't being put on what the little bugger slips learning warning of which light out of view or theorists was about to go call an extinction hide O?y 6WOos-2004ffiLSt26 riCtAtMVSBaWT87 RQONGOOSOM-t9at information sM MF6rR , peck or food will eventuallymentally to the receiver, The a key stop who sat in a t people are Jeering f Approved For Rel 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- fe,rence 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 A ,ills. 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. Brain 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 I I college stu- dents to record their brain waves and M K , . "".1 A- 90 A n ZA a al n 7 'LU '33 > 170 no interference tnterference no interference interference RESULT OF INTERFERENCE The higher scores of the husband show little change, while the wife's scores dipped when the husbandirL eo Jg Jftrjp@e pJ%paA Jef &h a 7ROO0200080050-9 left them alone. Tart then went to another room and wired himself to a machine that gave him electric shocks at random intervals. The idea was to see whether the students' brain waves. would be different when Tart was get- ting jolted than when he wasn't. They were. The difference wasn't the sort that would leap out at you from the pattern of wavy lines on an elec- troencepbalograph, but a piece of equipment called a Period Analyzer picked it up. We're still a long way from having a psychic thermometer, but r 'esearchers 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, 58 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- redibility subjects and dismiss tele- pathy and related phenomena as the delic mentations of a spooky psyche group. just file them away with the w tches, the shamen and the root doc nd 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- 44 - - F.hr,,A@ 1078 yot. Telepathy (Continued from page 44.) iliets @4kf e@#tdeFdr1R#1"WA and p eir s through gymnastic workouts. A few scientists studied them as they altered their blood pres- sure or changed the temperature of their hands, but almost no one believed that what they did could really be done. Sloppy 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 psychologists taught people to do just that. Their Insides Upside Down. The success of 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 one? No honest statistician can shrug that off as a run of good luck. No, we're right where we were 15 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 right, 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. I - I g] @ Paul Chance joined psychology today in 1972 as Manuscripts Editor and became assistant managing editor a year ago. He took a master's 3 degree in counseling from the University of Northern Colorado and a j, Ph.D. in psychology from Utah State University. A rigorous methodologist, Chance went to Tart's lab to see his telepathy setup. For more informa- tion, read: Tart, Charles T. Learning to Use ESP. University of Chicago, in press. Twain, Mark, "Mental Telegraphy" in Literary Essays, Vol. 24, P.F. Collier and Son, 19 is, To obtain rep ' When people relate to each other, a responsive camera can help you relate to them. You're comfortable with a Minolta SR-T from the moment you pick it up. This is the 35mm reflex camera that lets you concentrate on the picture, because the viewfinder shows all the information for correct exposure and focusing, You never have to look away from your subject, so you're ready to catch that once-in-a-lifetime photo. And when subjects call for a. different perspective, Minolta SR-T cameras accept a system of interchangeable lenses, from "i 2 "fisheye" wide angle to super- telephoto. Let a Minolta SR-T help capture the pictures in your mind's eye. 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