Extra Sensory Perception: a brief history
The concept of Extra Sensory Perception has been around for more than a century but was only popularised in the 1930s.
1870 – Term 'Extra Sensory Perception' allegedly coined by the British explorer Sir Richard Burton.
1882 – 'Telepathy' – mind reading – formally introduced after research undertaken by the Society of Psychical Research in Britain, and in 1884 by similar organisations in the US.
1892 – Dr Paul Joire, a French researcher used the term ESP to describe the ability of a person who had been hypnotised or was in a trance-like state to sense things without using ordinary senses.
1930s – Duke University psychology JB Rhine popularises the term to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. Rhine and his wife Louisa tried to develop research into "parapsychology". They used a set of cards, originally called Zener Cards, now called ESP cards, which bear the symbols of a circle, square, wavy lines, cross and a star. There are five cards of each in a pack of 25. In an experiment, the "sender" looks at a series of cards while the "receiver" guesses the symbols.
Rhine argued that when his subjects scored highly, it could only be expect by chance once in a thousand.
The experiments faced several criticisms, namely that the statistics were not reliable, that only favourable results were published and that "fraud" was possible. Computers are now being used to determine ESP.
1940 – Rhine, JG Pratt and others at Duke author a review of card-guessing experiments conducted since 1882 – 'Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years', which becomes recognised as the first meta-analysis in science. More than 60 per cent of the results indicate the presence of ESP ability.
1953 – Report by Rhine on the ability of dogs to detect landmines through ESP. After a training period of more than three months, two dogs in California successfully found mines six out of seven times without any sensory cues.
1964 – Scientists demonstrate that through use of hypnosis, there is a success rate of 64 per cent.
1971 – Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Dean Mitchell allegedly conducted secret ESP experiments during the mission with collaborators on Earth. Following 'sleep time' on the ship, he concentrated on a series of symbols and shapes on a clipboard. Four men on Earth tried to 'receive' them.
1974 – Ganzfeld test findings published by Charles Honorton and Sharon harper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The 30-minute procedure involves two subjects, one the sender and the other the receiver. Both persons lie on chairs, eyes covered with halved ping pong balls so the visual field was solid white. White noise was played in the background. Subjects were asked to free-associate out loud while their responses were put on to a magnetic tape. In another room, the telepathic sender chose at random a set of slides to look at and try to send the subject. After the experiment, the subject was asked to guess which of the reels, of a group of four, had been the target.
1984 – Test results from 10 different laboratories find superior results. Hypnosis proved to enhance ESP ability more than anything else.
1988 – Psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler finds that higher scores are obtained when the experimenter was warmer and friendly to the subject than a cold, formal one. Dr Schmeidler, in her research, also divided subjects into "sheep", who believed ESP might work, and "goats", who did not. Her studies found that "sheep" scores were generally above expectation and "goats" scored below.
2011 – Academic paper argues that people may be able to see into the future to be published by the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Prof Daryl Bem of Cornell University, said the results of nine experiments he carried on students over the past decade suggested humans could accurately predict random events.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8244695/Extra-Sensory-Perception-a-brief-history.html
But the scientific community is filled with grumbles over Bem's work. Many researchers question the wisdom of writing, much less publishing, research on humans' ability to see the future.
Now retired from a long career of mainstream psychological research, Bem says he started looking at ESP for fun, then began to take it more seriously. Over an eight-year period, he says he conducted experiments with more than 1,000 volunteers on "precognition" -- the ability to perceive things before they actually happen -- and submitted it to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. The reviewers went over it and accepted it for an upcoming issue, despite some initial skepticism.
"It is not my job to decide what hypotheses are good or bad," said Charles Judd, a professor at the University of Colorado who has been serving as the journal's editor. "It's our responsibility to look at papers and give them a fair hearing, even if they fly in the face of conventional wisdom."
Judd provided ABC News with the text of an editorial that will run along with Bem's paper: "We openly admit that the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling," it says in part. "Yet, as editors we were guided by the conviction that this paper — as strange as the findings may be — should be evaluated just as any other manuscript on the basis of rigorous peer review."
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/extrasensory-perception-scientific-journal-esp-paper-published-cornell/story?id=12556754
The experiments faced several criticisms, namely that the statistics were not reliable, that only favourable results were published and that "fraud" was possible. Computers are now being used to determine ESP.
1940 – Rhine, JG Pratt and others at Duke author a review of card-guessing experiments conducted since 1882 – 'Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years', which becomes recognised as the first meta-analysis in science. More than 60 per cent of the results indicate the presence of ESP ability.
1953 – Report by Rhine on the ability of dogs to detect landmines through ESP. After a training period of more than three months, two dogs in California successfully found mines six out of seven times without any sensory cues.
1964 – Scientists demonstrate that through use of hypnosis, there is a success rate of 64 per cent.
1971 – Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Dean Mitchell allegedly conducted secret ESP experiments during the mission with collaborators on Earth. Following 'sleep time' on the ship, he concentrated on a series of symbols and shapes on a clipboard. Four men on Earth tried to 'receive' them.
1974 – Ganzfeld test findings published by Charles Honorton and Sharon harper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The 30-minute procedure involves two subjects, one the sender and the other the receiver. Both persons lie on chairs, eyes covered with halved ping pong balls so the visual field was solid white. White noise was played in the background. Subjects were asked to free-associate out loud while their responses were put on to a magnetic tape. In another room, the telepathic sender chose at random a set of slides to look at and try to send the subject. After the experiment, the subject was asked to guess which of the reels, of a group of four, had been the target.
1984 – Test results from 10 different laboratories find superior results. Hypnosis proved to enhance ESP ability more than anything else.
1988 – Psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler finds that higher scores are obtained when the experimenter was warmer and friendly to the subject than a cold, formal one. Dr Schmeidler, in her research, also divided subjects into "sheep", who believed ESP might work, and "goats", who did not. Her studies found that "sheep" scores were generally above expectation and "goats" scored below.
2011 – Academic paper argues that people may be able to see into the future to be published by the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Prof Daryl Bem of Cornell University, said the results of nine experiments he carried on students over the past decade suggested humans could accurately predict random events.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8244695/Extra-Sensory-Perception-a-brief-history.html
ESP Study Gets Published in Scientific Journal
Cornell University Psychologist Daryl Bem Writes Paper on Precognition
Jan. 6, 2011
Daryl Bem is a Cornell University psychologist who says he's been doing magic as a hobby since he was 17. Now he has managed what some scientists may call his greatest trick: he's written a paper attempting to prove the power of ESP -- extrasensory perception -- and had it accepted for publication in a major scientific journal. "From seeing my own data, and from looking at other research on ESP, I think I could be classified as someone who now believes there's something there," Bem said in an interview with ABCNews.com. But the scientific community is filled with grumbles over Bem's work. Many researchers question the wisdom of writing, much less publishing, research on humans' ability to see the future.
Now retired from a long career of mainstream psychological research, Bem says he started looking at ESP for fun, then began to take it more seriously. Over an eight-year period, he says he conducted experiments with more than 1,000 volunteers on "precognition" -- the ability to perceive things before they actually happen -- and submitted it to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. The reviewers went over it and accepted it for an upcoming issue, despite some initial skepticism.
"It is not my job to decide what hypotheses are good or bad," said Charles Judd, a professor at the University of Colorado who has been serving as the journal's editor. "It's our responsibility to look at papers and give them a fair hearing, even if they fly in the face of conventional wisdom."
Judd provided ABC News with the text of an editorial that will run along with Bem's paper: "We openly admit that the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling," it says in part. "Yet, as editors we were guided by the conviction that this paper — as strange as the findings may be — should be evaluated just as any other manuscript on the basis of rigorous peer review."
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/extrasensory-perception-scientific-journal-esp-paper-published-cornell/story?id=12556754
