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: A. Introduction / History of problem Any act is conditional on underlying processes. Visual identification of an object requires both the use of the eyes and that light is reflected from the object. Parapsychologists claim that some people have the ability to perform such acts as identifying objects when the conditions normally assumed to be necessary for their execution are absent. Such behavior they call extrasensory perception, or ESP (Kurtz, 1985). The ESP debate is about whether or not different forms of extra sensory perception exist and whether or not ESP should occupy a place in mainstream psychological thinking.
Extrasensory perception is part of a larger area of interest known as parapsychology, the study of psychic phenomena (large book? ). If people can act in this way new processes have to be admitted as underlying brain activity and the manner in which organisms interact with the environment. The existence of ESP would thus be profound significance not only to the understanding of human behavior but also to science in general. It would signify that there are underlying processes in nature so far undiscovered that permit ESP to occur. ESP is possible or impossible depending on whether or not such processes exist.
Parapsychologists started their inquiries by investigating unusual phenomena reported in everyday life and in the sance room. The general public often confuses parapsychology with spiritualism, ufology, astrological, palm- and tarot-card readings, hypnotic regression to past lives, and a host of other occult practices (Rao, 1984). In contradistinction to these practices, however, parapsychology is concerned with psychic abilities that can be studied empirically; that is to say, it is concerned with those abilities that can be studied by observation and experimentation under controlled conditions. Parapsychology, then, is the systematic and scientific study of psi.
The abilities that lend themselves to this scrutiny are broadly referred to as psi. Basically two forms of psi are distinguished: extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK). ESP is the ability to acquire information that is shielded from the senses. PK is the ability to influence external systems that are outside the sphere of ones motor activity. ESP is differentiated into telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retro cognition. Telepathy refers to the gaining of awareness or ESP of someone elses thoughts or feelings.
Clairvoyance refers to gaining information about objects or events without the use of the senses. Precognition and retro cognition refer to ESP of future and past events (Rao, 1984). The above proposed psychic phenomena, violate what is generally known by scientists about the measurable and physical world. Therefore most psychologists are skeptical about the claims of psychics. Among the first to experimentally study ESP in the United States was J. E.
Cover at Stanford University. His studies were followed by studies of Troland (1924) and Estobrooks (1927) at Harvard University. About the same time a group of psychologists in Germany carried out an ESP experiment, reported by H. J.
F. W. Brugmans (1922), which is still cited as an evidential experiment (Rao, 1984). Still, it was not until J. B. Rhine's arrival at Duke University that parapsychology as an experimental science was born.
The scientific stage of parapsychology began, as Brian Mackenzie (1977) has noted, with the founding of the Parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in 1927, or perhaps with the first major output of this laboratory, Rhine's Extrasensory perception (1973 / 34). By 1940, when another major work entitled Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years was published, 145 experimental studies of ESP had been carried out (Rao, 1984). With the increase in the number and sophistication of psi experiments has come rigorous and critical scrutiny of them by skeptics. One of the persistant criticisms of parapsychology is that there is no replicable experiment.
If by replication one means absolute replication, i. e. , the producibility of phenomenon on demand, then of course, there is no replicable experiment in parapsychology. If, however, one understands that replication is not strictly an either-or but a continuum ranging from zero to one hundred percent, a good case can be made that psi experiments are replicable to a statistically significant degree. Among process-oriented studies, a strong case has been made for a relatively reliable occurrence of psi under various conditions of reduced sensory input.
The number and rate of successful experiments which use procedures for sensory noise reduction (such as relaxation, mediation, hypnosis, and ganzfield stimulation), are indeed sufficiently encouraging us to lead to further work in consolidating the existing methods and concepts (Rao, 1984). ESP investigations have been of two main types (Kurtz, 1985). In the first type, the performance of a particular individual is studied. Here the subject has developed a procedure, which he claims to be able to demonstrate his psychic ability. He may not agree to modifications or alternative procedures required by the investigators. Any experimentation is then dependent on the extent to which the subject will do as he is asked by the experimenters.
The second type of investigation takes the form of an experiment in which the design, method, and procedure are decided by the experimenters while the subject does as he is told to do and takes no other part in the experiment. The experiment may eventually lead to a set of conditions and a procedure with which a particular result is demonstrable. One fact evident in ESP experiments is that subjects are only successful in a fraction of their attempts. A satisfactory demonstration therefore requires a sufficient number of observations to ensure that failure is extremely rare (Kurtz, 1985).
In ESP, incoming information somehow bypasses shielding or distance (Schmeidler, 1988). In PK what we do somehow bypasses the muscles and other effectors. When we use psi we apparently transcend the limitations of the body. With psi we make contact with events that are distant in time and space, and we thus apparently transcend physical limitations. One theory that I am going to discuss addresses this question about what we are, who have these abilities. The theory is that each of us has a spirit or soul or inner self with different properties from the bodys, and the theory is often extended to state that this inner self will continue to exist after the bodys death or has existed before conception.
The theory has been indirectly and partially examined by psychologists when they study the self, and its extensions have been examined by parapsychologists (who usually use the term spirit). If each of us has a soul-one unitary soul-it should show itself in consistent ways during the lifespan. Psychologists have repeatedly looked for the evidence but there is no consensus that it was found. A typical research method is to identify the psychological characteristics of a number of subjects at one age; to make a similar blind attempt when the subjects have reached some later age, then try to match the two sets. But again and again the matching is correct only for some of the subjects or for short time intervals. But, like any other theory this one ca be made so flexible that it is impossible to disprove.
Parapsychology raises further questions. If we take seriously the thesis that a self or soul shows by its use of psi that it transcends body functions, we must ask how psi ability originated (Schmeidler, 1988). One possible answer is that it was produced by some stage of body development, but this leads to other hard questions. But, if we reject this explanation of how the self began, the alternative is that it had some independent or prior source. This also raises a whole new set off questions (Schmeidler, 1988). Three different proposals have been examined by parapsychologists about the problems relating the self or soul with psi.
First that the self can be at a place distant from the living body, second that the self survives death, and third that the self existed before conception. For each proposal, it has been claimed that research demonstrates it is true. The same issues therefore arise as in any other type of research: whether there are possible sources of error, and whether the results of carefully conducted work can properly be dismissed as due only to chance. But when evidence is well validated and seems extra chance, another issue arises: a new argument based on psi is used to refute the claims. The argument is called the super ESP or super psi hypothesis.
It states that although evidence had been interpreted to mean a spirit or self was independent of the body, the evidence really shows only ESP and PK. It means nothing beyond those abilities. The general problem boils down to three possibilities. One is that much of the apparent evidence is weak, and that the little that remains can be attributed to chance. Another possibility is that the super-psi hypothesis can account for all the findings.
The third is that the evidence is convincing: it goes so far beyond what ESP and PK have been shown to do that the super psi hypothesis demands too many ad hoc assumptions and is implausible. It is a paradoxical situation. The better the evidence for the effectiveness of PK and ESP, the weaker the argument for a spirit that separates from the body (Schmeidler, 1988). Psychologists who study telepathy rejoiced when a 1994 study in a major scientific journal supported the existence of sensory perception. Both believers and skeptics agree that the most stringent method for studying psi is the one dubbed the Ganzfield (german for the whole field) procedure. In this technique researchers remove sensory distractions with the aim of promoting telepathic communication between subjects, called senders and receivers (Carpenter, 1999).
Subjects in the Ganzfield experiment are immersed in a uniform sensory field, typically by covering their eyes with Ping-Pong ball halves, directing a red floodlight toward their eyes and pumping white noise into their ears through headphones (Lilienfeld, 1999). Another individual (the sender) located in an acoustically shielded room attempts to transmit a specific visual stimulus to the percipient who then is asked to report all mental imagery that comes to mind. Finally the percipient is presented with a set of several, typically four, visual stimuli only one of which is the stimulus viewed by the sender, and asked to rate the extent to which each stimulus matches the mental imagery experienced during the session. The logic of the Ganzfield technique relies on the concept of the signal-to-noise ratio.
The mental information ostensibly detected by ESP percipient's is posited to be an extremely weak signal that is typically obscured by a large number of extraneous stimuli. By placing the percipient in a uniform sensory field the Ganzfield technique is hypothesized to decrease the proportion of noise relative to signal and thereby permit investigators to uncover normally weak ESP effects (Lilienfeld, 1999). In 1994, psychologist Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University and his colleague, the late Charles Horonton of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, described surprising results from Horonton's series of 11 ganzfield experiments. They found that more often than could be explained by chance, receivers chose the image that matched the one seen by senders. With the aid of statistical technique termed meta-analysis, which permits researchers to quantitatively pool results across a number of studies, Bem and Horonton reported what appeared to be strong, if not convincing evidence for ESP.
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Research essay sample on Extrasensory Perception Duke University
