Reviewed by Robert A. Charman
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 79(4).
The title is unambiguous. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. It states without qualification that there is empirical evidence for the existence of psi and that this evidence can be found in the enclosed thirteen empirical reports. The editors state that “The book is intended for rational, open-minded observers without expertise in the study of psi phenomena” who possess “a basic understanding of the scientific method and sufficient technical education to understand elementary statistics (odds and percentages, averages and deviations, etc.)”. To appreciate the argument fully you probably need rather more expertise in statistics than this, since the empirical reports rest upon many metaanalyses and contain a very large number of statistical findings presented in a variety of formats. Collectively, this volume contains a huge amount of fully referenced information, together with much in-depth discussion of the implications of these empirical findings concerning the possible nature of psi and consequent implications for the nature of mind, and this review can offer only a very limited outline of the material covered.
On the Contents page the contributions are listed by title and author(s) only, rather than by chapter and title. Of these contributions, nine (not thirteen) are strictly empirical reports on the findings from trials related to particular aspects of psi phenomena. In their extensive Introduction the editors take the reader through the scope of psi research with brief descriptions of each approach, such as Ganzfeld, remote viewing, presentiment, psychokinesis and experimenter effects, emphasising the high standard of parapsychology research, including publication of failures (rare in conventional research, including psychology) as well as success.
The empirical reports are preceded by an informative contribution on “The Significance of Statistics in Mind–Matter Research” by Jessica Utts, who tells us that “Statistical methods are designed to detect and measure relationships and effects in situations where results cannot be identically duplicated because of natural variability in the measurements of interest”. Unlike the hard sciences, different aspects of psychology cannot be accurately defined and measured, and even if the methodology is repeated different participants may respond differently, so it requires large numbers (statistical power) to even out such variability. Many of the basic terms used in statistics are clearly defined with examples. As far as empirical evidence for psi is concerned, Utts points out as an example that meta-analyses of Ganzfeld studies and remote viewing studies have demonstrated a far greater percentage of ‘hits’ compared with chance expectation than that demonstrated by meta-analyses of studies assessing the efficacy of aspirin in reducing the incidence of cardiovascular conditions, yet the latter has been accepted as the basis for evidence-based clinical practice while findings from stronger parapsychology studies are rejected. The nine empirical research reports can be grouped under Anomalous Cognition and Anomalous Perturbation respectively.
Anomalous Cognition
Julia Mossbridge’s chapter, “Physiological Activity that seems to Anticipate Future Events”, reviews empirical studies that record physiological changes occurring in subjects sitting in front of a blank screen on which randomly chosen neutral or emotionally charged images will be projected. They are wired up to detect any changes in breathing, heart rate, sweating as registered by changes in electrical conductivity of the skin (the most sensitive indicator), and sometimes brainwaves (electroencephalography or EEG) that will indicate any change in physiological variables preceding what type of image will be seen next. As the future is assumed to be unknowable in principle the null hypothesis of no more than chance change should be confirmed. In fact, study after study has shown a rise in physiological anticipation preceding an emotionally charged image and no change from the mean preceding a neutral image that is far beyond chance. Dean Radin has termed this anticipatory change presentiment but the author and her colleagues prefer the term ‘anomalous anticipatory activity (AAA)’. It is anomalous, in the sense of being inexplicable by current mainstream thought concerning what we can know about the future. The hypothesis advanced here is that it is a predictive property of human (and presumably animal?) physiology as preparedness for sudden imminent attack.
Next Edwin May, Tamas Paulinyi and Zoltan Vassy present “Anomalous Anticipatory Skin Conductance Response to Acoustic Stimuli: Experimental Results and Speculation about a Mechanism”. In these studies the experimental procedures follow the same principles as in the preceding chapter but for trials in which random periods of 3 seconds of silence or 3 seconds of loud noise are experienced instead. Again, there was selective anticipation of noise rather than silence well beyond chance expectation. The authors, however, suggest a different interpretation of this finding than the usual one: that it is the subject’s subconscious autonomic nervous system (ANS) that is doing the anticipating. They suggest that it is the experimenter’s intuitive anticipation as to when to initiate successful trial sequences that accounts for the anomalous results. This is termed the Decision Augmentation Theory (DAT) and the reverse of this is that sceptics will initiate trials confirming the null hypothesis.
Bryan Williams’s chapter is entitled “Revisiting the Ganzfeld ESP Debate: A Basic Review and Assessment”, and is a review of meta-analyses of the many Ganzfeld studies including the automated Ganzfeld. Since the famous exchange in Psychological Bulletin involving Daryl Bem, Charles Honorton and Ray Hyman on whether psi exists and how to eliminate experimental flaws, there have been a further 57 studies performed with tightened procedures. Again, the percentage of successful ‘hits’ has consistently exceeded chance expectation.
Next Rupert Sheldrake describes “Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and e-mails”. Readers will be familiar with Sheldrake’s initial studies as to whether a person about to receive a telephone call could intuitively guess in advance who the caller would be. Again and again receivers have successfully intuited who the communicator would be well beyond chance and his findings have been replicated by many other investigators. Since those early days he has extended his research into e-mails and onwards into text messaging, Short Message Service (SMS) and instant messaging, with similar positive findings including random computer choosing of who will be the communicator.
The next chapter, by Bryan Williams, is concerned with “Empirical Examinations of the Reported Abilities of a Psychic Claimant: A Review of Experiments and Explorations with Sean Harribance”. Harribance is a psychic who has submitted his professed psychic abilities to laboratory tests over many years and in 1995 established the not-for-profit Sean Harribance Institute for Parapsychology Research, Inc. He has voluntarily undertaken a wide variety of card tests, forced-choice clairvoyance, PK dice and REG tests, DMILS including reducing the time of mice waking up after anaesthetic compared with controls, and submitting to EEG and brain scanning while doing the tests. These have indicated that his right cerebral hemisphere differs both physically and functionally from the normal with enhanced alpha (4–7 Hz) activity during trials. The author concludes by saying that analysis of the findings from over 30 years of investigation has demonstrated that Harribance has produced “significant above-chance scoring under a variety of controlled conditions” in many different laboratories.
Suitbert Ertel’s chapter is entitled “Assessing Psi Ability via the Ball Selection Test: A Challenge for Psychometrics”. In his Introduction, Ertel is somewhat critical of parapsychologists from J. B. Rhine onwards for not developing “reliable, valid and standardized tests for distinguishing degrees of individual psi ability amongst test takers”. In consequence, parapsychology still does not have a psychometrically graded ‘PsiQ’ conceptually equivalent to the IQ measure of intelligence. Ertel does not consider that the apparent elusiveness of psi is a property of psi itself but that it is an artefactual consequence of “a lack of expertise needed to master problems related to statistical effect size and power”. No one until Ertel had devised a test of consistent reliability that is also a valid test for whatever aspect of psi is being investigated. To remedy this deficiency Ertel developed the Ball Selection Test (BST) in 1998. The BST consists of 50 table tennis balls, of which each set of 10 is marked several times around its circumference with a single number from 1 to 5, so each number is carried by 10 balls. The 50 balls are then placed in an opaque bag such as a gymnastic bag and the bag thoroughly jumbled to ensure random disorder. Each participant then predicts a number out loud, puts a hand into the bag to grasp and take out a ball and reads out the number, confirmed by the experimenter. The trial prediction and result is recorded and the ball dropped back into the bag, which is shaken again before the next call. Sixty trials make one run and three runs per session has become standard, each run taking about 15 minutes. The BST is fun to do and can be done anywhere including at home. Self-proclaimed high hitters from home are then tested under controlled conditions. To check that sensory detection of a pre-chosen number is not possible, two balls, one marked and one unmarked, were placed into separate bags. Volunteers were asked to put their right and left hands into the separate two bags at the same time to see if they could detect which was the numbered ball but no one has ever detected any difference.
Hundreds of sessions by many investigators amounting to thousands of trials have now been performed. As a psychometric test of an individual’s intuitive psi ability the BST has been a reliable indicator of consistent differences between high, middling and low positive psi scorers as well as high, middling and low psi-missing scorers. Ertel strongly favours the concept of individual psi ability rather than the DAT hypothesis. As one of his statistical tables showing positive results recorded by different experimenters includes Prof. Chris French he may have a point.
The final chapter in this section is by Stephan A. Schwartz and considers “Through Time and Space: The Evidence for Remote Viewing”. This is a very large and detailed account of the hundreds of trials of remote viewing (RV) carried out since the 1960s from the US-Government-funded Stargate trials, where subjects like Pat Price and Joseph McMoneagle were asked to describe military targets when given longitude and latitude coordinates, to numerous studies carried out by individual institutes. These have included using RV to find submerged shipwrecks and identify archaeological sites, such as the location and layout of submerged sections of the Egyptian city of Alexandria and the location and layout of the ancient Egyptian city of Maria buried beneath the sands. Laser physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ will be familiar names. Their first peer-reviewed paper on successful RV was published in Nature in 1974. Again, successful ‘hits’ have far exceeded chance expectation.
Anomalous Perturbation
Section 2 begins with a chapter by York Dobyns, “The PEAR Laboratory: Explorations and Observations”. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory was established in an unused basement of Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, Professor of Plasma Physics and Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Princeton University (later Dean Emeritus) with psychologist Brenda Dunne as manager, later joined by experimental psychologist Roger D. Nelson together with a staff of five to seven researchers. PEAR was formed with two main research objectives in mind. One was to determine whether subjective intention could affect physical systems. Several approaches were used, including whether intention could affect the random quantum fluctuations of a random event generator (REG), also known as a random number generator (RNG), the output of which was converted into positive or negative electrical pulses as 0 or 1 bits. For given periods volunteers tried to influence the trace path of a signal crossing a computer screen that varied about a horizontal mean of random positive and negative pulses into increasing deviation of either the negative or positive away from the random horizontal. If successful this meant that the intention had somehow influenced the random source into less random increases about a positive or negative mean. Another approach was to see whether intention could influence the direction of fall of some 90,000 polystyrene balls cascading through an array of pegs before falling into a row of bins. The other objective was to determine whether claims of remote viewing (known at PEAR as ‘remote perception’ to remove the visual connotation) were valid. For each RV trial an ‘agent’ visited, described and photographed a scene and the ‘percipient’ attempted to describe it knowing only the identity of the agent and time of viewing. Audio recordings, written transcripts and sketches were used and then compared against a set of 30 descriptors salient to the scene. These were binary rated as present or absent. For the thousands of REG trials and polystyrene ball trials the overall effect size was low but was considered to be statistically significant. For the RV trials the percentage of ‘hits’ considerably exceeded chance expectation.
Roger Nelson then reports on “The Global Consciousness Project: Subtle Interconnections and Correlations in Random Data”. This is a development of the PEAR REG studies using a worldwide array of 60 RNGs linked together and providing a continuous stream of random digital data for analysis. The difference is that the objective of this project is to see whether local or worldwide changes in mass consciousness as a response to tragedy such as 9/11, or Diana’s death, or the 2004 Asian tsunami, or any other unexpected and widely broadcast event, would be registered by a reduction of random data into either more noughts or ones beyond chance fluctuation. The hypothesis is that such events are likely to create similar thoughts and emotions in thousands to millions of people at the same time and their brain waves may enter a more coherent frequency unity, creating a mental field effect that might affect quantum fluctuations in the RNGs. Over the past 15 years over 400 socially significant major and minor events have been identified, demonstrating individually a very weak effect upon RNG noise but when an accumulation of such events are analysed the effects exceed the mean of random noise.
Commentaries on Empirical Findings
Peter Bancel offers a response in “An analysis of the Global Consciousness Project”. The GCP has been operating for some 15 years. During each second for each RNG 200 consecutive bits are collected, summed, date stamped and added to a data archive in Princeton which now holds more than 23 billion data trials from which deviations from null expectation of zero change from the random mean can be calculated in a signal-to-noise analysis. In this contribution Bancel explores a wide range of possible interpretations of event deviations from normal. While the hypothesis of a collective global consciousness psi may be the agent affecting the RNGs during responses to dramatic events there is still much uncertainty as to whether this is the right hypothesis, and if it is how to confirm it beyond reasonable doubt.
This is followed by “Psi and the Environment: Local Sidereal Time and Geomagnetic Effects” by James Spottiswoode. Most psi research has been performed and analysed within the context of psychology but Spottiswoode argues that psi doesn’t just happen in the mind but must also interact with the matter and energy of the external world, as in the physics and mechanics of the physical universe. Consider, he says, how psi data would be approached if these psi signals had appeared as sporadic bursts of information from a complex physical experiment. The aim would be to search for possible sources of sporadic local noise, from the wider earth environment to the cosmos: were they related to time, power fluctuations, ground vibrations and so on. Thinking about successful trials demonstrating psi in an environmental rather than a psychological context led Spottiswoode and colleagues to look at possible external transmission agents, especially evidence that geomagnetic fluctuations modified psi or, as they prefer to call it, “anomalous cognition (AC)” as reported by the neuropsychologist Michael Persinger. Are there any external factors that enhance or inhibit AC? If we knew at what time of day the most successful trials of AC were performed, and then correlated this with recurring environmental influences, we would be able to establish a predictable relationship.
In brief, after exhaustive inquiry as to those trials with the most convincing effect sizes for AC, their geographical location and the time period during which these trials were held, a striking coincidence was found with local sidereal time (LST), which is the time each day when the stars are in the same local overhead position. This coincides with that period when the Earth’s magnetic flux (technically the geomagnetic flux or GMF) is at its local minimum and when incoming 21cm radio frequency from cosmic hydrogen atoms is most vertical. This time period is around 12 noon to 2 p.m. with a minimum GMF at 1.30 p.m., and this is when the most successful psi results are obtained. In summary Spottiswoode says that the effect size for 1,468 free-response trials increased by 340% for trials within one hour of 1.30 p.m. LST (p = 0.001) and a further database of 1,045 trials performed within the same period showed a 450% increase (p = 0.05). The implication is that there may be a causal connection between the AC performance of trial participants, their LST orientation to the fixed stars in the Milky Way, and minimum GMF. Against this, there has been no confirmation of this effect from GCP events but this is looking for a very different aspect of psi phenomena.
These reviews of the empirical literature are followed by “Skeptical Responses to Psi Research” by Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel. The authors discuss the historical roots of the now very vocal sceptical movement, especially online, and then go on to consider extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, what is meant by scientific evidence, the ever ‘moving goalposts’ of sceptical analyses of psi, and how we might be able to bridge the gap towards a common consensus.
The volume ends with “The Future of Psi Research” by Damien Broderick and Ben Goertzel. The authors state that this book contains ample evidence for the existence of psi, and denial of it is based upon a prior assumption that our mainstream understanding of how the universe works precludes the very possibility of psi. They point out that every shift of scientific paradigm has been preceded by stubborn anomalies that refuse to go away. They say that “the evidence for psi speaks for itself . . . and the closer you listen the louder it speaks”. But psi is often frustratingly unpredictable and elusive. They wonder if our present division of psi into telepathy, clairvoyance, etc., has become a conceptual barrier to progress and should be replaced by AC and AP. Laboratorybased research leads to effect sizes and p-values but seems unrelated to what they term ‘psi in the wild’ which, they think, should be the focus of further research. The major problem of having no accepted theory upon which to base testable hypotheses remains. They review various parapsychologists’ views on the reality of psi phenomena, including Guy Lyon Playfair’s views following his research into twin telepathy, the possible relationship of psi to psychology and physics, and what may be the most fruitful lines for future research.
This book, in effect, throws down the empirical psi gauntlet to the sceptics, saying that for any rational, even-handed reader not blinkered by prejudice the empirical evidence for the existence of psi is now beyond reasonable doubt and should be accepted as such by the scientific community. It deserves to be on the bookshelf of every parapsychologist, should be essential reading for all parapsychology students and, at the least, strongly recommended reading for the related disciplines of psychology and the neurosciences.
Robert A. Charman can be reached at email: [email protected]