Research into paranormal beliefs and experiences
BY: CAROLINE WATT
Extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to apparent paranormal communication, where a person seems to obtain information from another person without the use of the currently known senses or inference. Looking at the psi hypothesis, several different kinds of ESP and PK studies have been conducted, but I will focus on a single example: ESP studies using the ‘ganzfeld technique’.
The ganzfeld is a mild sensory isolation
procedure that is thought to be conducive to ESP. It is based on a noise-reduction model of ESP that hypothesizes that
ESP functions like a weak signal that is ordinarily drowned out by
surrounding well-understood signals, such as somatic, visual,
and auditory information. By reducing external and
internal sources of distraction,
parapsychologists reasoned that any ESP ‘signal’ would be
more easily noticed.
Two individuals are usually involved in this procedure: the sender will attempt to mentally communicate
a randomly chosen ‘target’ to the receiver. The sender and receiver are placed
in separate acoustically shielded rooms. The receiver wears translucent
eye-shields and is bathed in red light. The receiver also reclines in a
comfortable chair and wears headphones that play ‘white noise’.
The aim is for the receiver to become mentally and
physically relaxed, and for their eyes, ears, and bodies to receive unchanging and
unpatterned stimulation (ganzfeld literally means ‘whole field’ and originates from
gestalt psychology). Under such stimulation, thoughts and images become more
salient to the receiver.
A computer is used to randomly choose a target
(such as a one-minute video-clip) from a large selection of possible targets, and
plays that clip repeatedly to the sender. At the same time, the receiver
reports out loud any thoughts or images that come to mind (the ‘mentation’),
and these verbal reports are recorded. Of course, neither the experimenter nor
the receiver has any idea of what target the sender is viewing.
At the end of the sending period, the sender remains
in their room while the computer plays four video clips to the receiver – the target
plus three decoys. The receiver’s task is to compare each clip to their mentation,
and to select which of the clips most closely matches the mentation.
If no information transfer is taking place (this
is the null hypothesis), then we would expect the receiver to correctly identify
the clip that was viewed by the sender 25 per cent of the time by chance alone. If the target clip is correctly identified, this counts as a ‘hit’.
Over a number of trials, usually with different sender–receiver
pairs and with different sets of targets and decoys, the actual hit-rate is
compared with the chance expectation using standard statistical techniques. Extrasensory
perception is inferred to have taken place if the target is correctly
identified more often than chance expectation.
There are good methodological reasons for
presenting the target along with three decoys. Firstly, it controls for the
process of subjective validation (Marks & Kammann, 1980) – with a single
target it is easy to find similarities between aspects of the target and various
mentation items. Similarities will of course occur by chance alone, but with
four different target possibilities there will be chance matches to each of the
possible targets. However, if ESP is taking place, one would expect there to be
a greater number of matches (i.e. more similarities) between the actual target
and the receiver’s mentation.
Secondly, having four target possibilities enables
parapsychologists to know the exact likelihood of obtaining a hit by chance
alone, and this enables statistical tests to be used to quantify the outcome of
the study. In typical real-world situations, the factors leading to a
coincidence – say between a person’s dream and real-world events the following
day – are so complex that it is practically impossible to give an accurate
calculation of the odds of that coincidence.
This is one reason why parapsychologists tend to
focus on laboratory methods such as the ganzfeld to investigate ESP. Using this procedure, a number of KPU studies have looked at
individual differences in scoring on the ganzfeld ESP task.
One theme that appears to be emerging is that
individuals who regard themselves as ‘creative’ (e.g. artists, musicians) tend
to score more ‘hits’ (to correctly identify the target from a set of four
possibilities) than less creative individuals (see Dalton, 1997; Morris et al., 1998). This line of
research may throw some light on the question of the conditions needed to
demonstrate psi, and further studies are needed to understand why creative
individuals seem to perform well at ESP tasks.
Included in the KPU’s psi research are
meta-analytic reviews of the wider experimental literature, including ganzfeld ESP
(Milton & Wiseman, 1999) and a comparison of clairvoyance and precognition
(Steinkamp et al., 1998). Methodological
guidelines have also been produced for ESP testing (Milton & Wiseman,
1997), and issues about the validity of different research approaches have been
discussed (Stevens, 2004; Watt, 1994).
Research into paranormal beliefs and experiences
This line of research is primarily concerned with exploring the psychological factors underlying people’s paranormal beliefs and experiences. Many anomalous experiences, for example out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, past-life experiences, and spontaneous psi experiences, are not uncommon, and psychologists and parapsychologists are beginning to build a picture of their phenomenology and psychological function (e.g. Cardeña et al., 2000).
For example, one KPU (The Koestler Parapsychology
Unit) study of individuals claiming aura vision found
this to be positively correlated with imagery abilities, as did experiences of
being out of one’s body (Alvarado & Zingrone, 1994). Another study
(Lawrence et al., 1995) found
evidence that childhood trauma was associated with belief, supporting a
psychodynamic model of paranormal belief. This finding suggests that, for some,
paranormal belief fulfils a need for control in an otherwise chaotic and
uncontrollable environment.
References:
CAROLINE WATT, The
Psychologist Vol 19 No 7, July 2006, www.thepsychologist.org.uk
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