How ESP Works

by Tom Harris

Introduction

Most likely, you've never been abducted by aliens, and you

probably don't know anybody who's had a brush with Bigfoot.
But undoubtedly, you or somebody close to you has had the
apparently paranormal experience of "seeing" the future or
distant events. Most of us have dreamt something that -
eventually came true, had a correct hunch about an event
miles away, or predicted an out-of-the-blue phone call from an
old friend. The experience is incredibly strange -- positively
spooky -- but it happens all the time.

So what's going on here? Depends on who you ask. A sizable ESP is thought to be a special sense
beyond the physical world. See
chunk of the world's population attributes these strange events more paranormal pictures.
to extrasensory perception (ESP), a special sense beyond
vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. Unlike ordinary senses, ESP has virtually unlimited range,
and it's experienced mainly as thoughts rather than bodily sensations.

The other view holds that there's nothing supernatural about these events at all. These things do
happen, the skeptics say, but they're perfectly in keeping with conventional science.

In this article, we'll take a look at both sides of the argument to find out what might be behind the
ESP phenomenon. We'll also find out how false psychics can fake ESP, and we'll see how this
sort of trickery factors into the ongoing parapsychology debate.

Types of ESP

Extrasensory perception is a collective term for various hypothetical mental abilities. These
abilities (along with other paranormal phenomena) are also referred to as psi.

The major types of ESP are:

• Telepathy - the ability to read another person's thoughts

• Clairvoyance - the ability to "see" events or objects happening somewhere else
• Precognition - the ability to see the future
• Retrocognition - the ability to see into the distant past
• Mediumship - the ability to channel dead spirits
• Psychometry - the ability to read information about a person or place by touching a
physical object
A closely related psi phenomenon, not technically part of ESP, is telekinesis, the ability to alter
the physical world with mind power alone.

All of these abilities are based on the idea that human beings can perceive things beyond the
scope of known bodily senses. This concept has been around since the beginning of human
civilization, under many different names, but the modern conception didn't develop until the first
half of the 20th century. The term ESP itself was coined in 1934, by Duke University professor
J.B. Rhine, one of the first respected scientists to conduct paranormal research in a university
laboratory.

ESP believers around the world have different ideas of how these abilities manifest themselves.
Some people believe everybody possesses these abilities, and we involuntarily experience
moments of ESP all the time. Others say only a handful of psychics, shamans or mediums have
the special power, and that they can only access this power when they put themselves into a
special mental state. Most believers think that everybody has the potential for ESP, but that some
people are more in tune with their paranormal abilities than others.

Believers also disagree on how ESP actually works. One theory says that, like our ordinary
senses, ESP is energy moving from one point to another point. Typically, proponents of this
theory say ESP energy takes the form of electromagnetic waves -- just like light, radio and X-ray
energy -- that we haven't been able to detect scientifically.

This theory was fairly popular in the early 20th century, but it's out of favor today due to several
inherent problems. For one thing, the explanation only accounts for telepathy, not clairvoyance
or precognition. Presumably, if the information travels as electromagnetic energy, it has to be
sent by someone -- it has to travel from mind to mind. It doesn't explain how information would
move through time or from an object to a mind.

Secondly, the theory doesn't jibe with what we know about ourselves and the universe. In most
reported cases of telepathy, ESP works totally independent of distance. That is, the power of the
"signal" is the same whether the transmitting mind and the receiving mind are in the same room
or on opposite sides of the earth. No other form of energy behaves this way, skeptics point out, so
it doesn't make sense that "psi waves" would either. Furthermore, it seems strange that we
haven't found any unexplained sense organs in the body that might pick up on this energy, nor
any evidence of the energy waves themselves.

In light of these problems, the prevailing theory among believers today is that ESP is a result of
something beyond the known physical world. For example, many people view it as "spillover"
from another reality. According to this theory, in addition to the physical universe we are
consciously aware of, we all exist in another dimension that has completely different governing
laws. Time and space work very differently in the other reality, allowing us to know about other
people's thoughts, distant events or things that haven't happened yet in the physical reality.
Normally, our awareness of this plane of existence is completely unconscious, but every once in
a while, the conscious mind picks up on this information.
Needless to say, this theory is also completely outside our scientific understanding of the world.
But, according to the theory's proponents, it's not supposed to fit into that conception. Like the
concepts of God or an afterlife, the hypothetical reality would not rely on the physical laws of the
universe. It would depend on the existence of a soul of some sort.

So, given that it's completely at odds with our understanding of the world, why do so many
people believe in ESP? In the next section, we'll find out some of the reasons for this belief, and
we'll see what scientific evidence supports it.
Intercessory Prayer
Many people categorize forms of
The Case for ESP
religious prayer with ESP and
other psi phenomena. The notion
Most believers come by their convictions either through personal of intercessory prayer holds that
experience or anecdotal evidence. If you have a dream that focusing mental energy in the
eventually comes true, in strikingly similar detail, you might form of prayer can actually have
an effect on reality, whether
very well take it as proof that you're psychic. And if you hear through a divine force, or by
enough incredible ESP stories from reliable sources, you may virtue of the energy itself.
have a harder and harder time discounting the phenomenon.
Undeniably, the world is full of both of these forms of evidence. As it turns out, there is some
Most of us encounter extraordinary coincidences now and then, scientific data supporting this
and there are many well-documented cases of apparent belief. In a number of double-
blind experiments, scientists
precognition and clairvoyance. For example, in 1898, Morgan
monitored a control group of
Robertson published "Futility," a novel about a huge luxury liner patients who are not being
called the Titan. The story allegedly came to him in a sort of prayed for and an experimental
trance. In the novel, the ship zips through dense fog late one group of patients who are being
April night, crashes into an iceberg and sinks, killing hundreds prayed for. The results have
been mixed, but some studies do
of people. Fourteen years later, the Titanic, similar in size and
indicate a correlation between
structure to the fictional ship, did exactly this, at the same time prayer and recovery. For more
of year, under the same conditions. For both the fictional ship information, see A Prayer Before
and the real ship, the casualties were high because there weren't Dying and Study Yields No
nearly enough lifeboats on board. Evidence for Medical Efficacy of
Distant Intercessory Prayer for
two different views.
There are dozens of other famous stories, most not as well
documented, detailing major and minor examples of apparent ESP all over the world. But as
compelling as these stories may be to believers, they're of limited use to scientists because they
occur in an uncontrolled environment. In order to effectively demonstrate something with hard
evidence, scientists need to conduct structured laboratory experiments with closely controlled
conditions.

Since the 1930s, parapsychologists around the world have been doing just that. J.B. Rhine,
often dubbed the father of parapsychology, was behind one of the earliest and most famous
efforts, the Zener cards experiments. The original Zener cards (named after their designer, Karl
Zener) were a deck of 25 plain white cards, each printed with one of five simple, distinct
patterns. Each deck contained five cards of each pattern, so anybody had a one-in-five chance of
correctly guessing the pattern on any particular card.
 The standard Zener card designs

The experiment was simple: Rhine would ask his subject to guess which pattern was on each
card and record the result. On average, random guessing would yield five "hits" (correct guesses)
per deck of 25. Rhine reasoned that consistent accuracy above that level, barring any cheating,
indicated ESP ability.

The scientific community was certainly surprised, and largely incredulous, when Rhine claimed
in his treatise, "Extra-Sensory Perception," that some of his subjects consistently guessed
correctly above chance levels. Many disputed Rhine's methods and his credibility, but in general,
he was regarded as a legitimate, sincere scientist.

In the years since Rhine's pioneering work, hundreds of parapsychologists have conducted
similar experiments, sometimes with the same positive results. Most of these researchers have
moved away from the rigid patterns of Zener cards to more open-ended images, such as paintings
or photographs. In a typical experiment, a "sender" will concentrate on a particular image (a
target) and try to communicate it telepathically to an isolated subject. The "receiver" subject
describes what he sees in his mind, and the research team records his impressions. At the end of
the session, the receiver attempts to pick the correct target out of a collection of images created
from his impressions during the session.

In ganzfeld (German for "whole field") target experiments, developed in the 1970s, the receiver
is deprived of sensory information to make it easier to focus on ESP messages. The subject lies
in a room filled with dim red light, listening to white noise, with his or her eyes covered (by
halved ping pong balls in the conventional experiment). Most of the time, receivers in these
experiments are way off in their guesses, but some subjects do describe the target images in
striking detail. There are several examples of impressive hits at PSI Explorer: The Ganzfeld
Experiment. In similar experiments, designed to test clairvoyance alone and not telepathy, there
is no sender, only a receiver.
In another popular experiment, subjects attempt to influence a machine, such as a random
number generator, with their minds. Over the course of hundreds of runs, researchers have found
that subjects do appear to have some influence over machine behavior, though it is very slight.
Check out Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research department Web site for more
information.

Many parapsychologists say their findings indicate the existence of ESP, but skeptics are far
from convinced. In the next section, we'll look at some of the arguments against claims of ESP
evidence.

The Case Against ESP

Parapsychology has gained a lot of credibility over the past 100 years, but there is still a strong
contingent of skeptics who see ESP studies as misguided at best and completely worthless
pseudoscience at worst.

For a number of these skeptics, the primary argument against ESP is, quite simply, that it doesn't
make any sense. As we saw earlier, the existence of the ESP phenomenon is fundamentally at
odds with the known "rules" of the universe, as supported by countless scientific experiments. As
much as we might want to believe it, these skeptics say, ESP is just too extraordinary to accept
without equally extraordinary evidence.

And the widespread anecdotal evidence of ESP, they say, certainly isn't extraordinary -- not when
you consider the big picture. To the average person, a dream or feeling coming true, in precise
detail, seems too amazing to be simple coincidence. But if you look at it from a statistician's
viewpoint, it's much less incredible. There are more than 6 billion people on earth, constantly
thinking and all experiencing dozens of significant events every day. Statistically, on any
particular day, some of the things some people envision will line up closely with some of the
things those people happen to experience. In all of your time on earth, this will undoubtedly
happen to you now and then. Add to this the desire for an afterlife, the skeptics say, and it's no
wonder such a large section of the population deludes itself into believing in psi phenomenon.

The chances of a hit climb even higher when you consider people's ability to make reasoned,
educated guesses. For example, Morgan Robertson's apparent prediction of the Titanic disaster
seems less incredible when you learn that he was a former seaman who knew a lot about modern
ship technology. His book correctly guessed details of the real ship and the crash, skeptics say,
because he had a good understanding of how a ship like that would be built, how it might get into
trouble and what would happen in that scenario.

Similarly, some people may seem to have psychic powers when they really just have heightened
intuition. Your five senses are constantly picking up on information, and your brain is constantly
processing this information on an unconscious level. Some people are particularly adept at
analyzing seemingly irrelevant information and putting the pieces together to make highly
accurate guesses. For example, you might inexplicably know when somebody is lying to you
because you unconsciously recognize subtle variations in facial expression or tone of voice.

Many ESP believers counter these arguments with the assertion that true psychic visions aren't
everyday thoughts, but rare revelations easily distinguished from a person's normal thinking. If
you only consider these special visions, they argue, the coincidence explanation doesn't hold up.
The educated guessing theory may explain a lot of apparent revelations, they say, but not all.

In any case, it's clear that human nature does lead people to focus on a few instances of
extraordinary coincidence as evidence of something supernatural, while completely ignoring the
thousands of dreams and visions that don't line up with reality in any remarkable way. Out of
context, the individual hits are very impressive, especially if you start to misremember your
thoughts so that they correspond even more closely with reality. Whether or not this accounts for
all alleged ESP phenomena, it most likely accounts for a lot of it.

But what about the research subjects and the professed psychics who demonstrate ESP abilities
above chance levels? In the next section, we'll look at the skeptic's response to this data.

ESP Research

It's not too difficult to explain anecdotal evidence of ESP, but scientific data is a little trickier.
The common skeptical view is that parapsychologists' positive lab results come from problems
with the experiment or plain old bad science. If the researcher's mathematical model is faulty, for
example, simple chance guessing might look like something exceptional. Or the researchers
could accidentally influence the subject to pick the right target. This could certainly happen, if
the experiment isn't tightly controlled. In Rhine's early experiments, for example, he knew the
correct card and he usually made eye contact with the guesser. The subject could have guessed
correctly by unconsciously picking up on Rhine's body language -- what looked like ESP could
have been simple intuition. Rhine later improved his methods, and his subject's accuracy did
drop off somewhat.

The biggest problem with a lot of ESP research is it isn't reproducible. That is, one scientist may
get results that another scientist can't get by replicating the experiment with different subjects.
Parapsychologists might point out that some people aren't as psychically in-tune as others, so
different subjects will yield different results, but the stigma still sticks. Reproducible results are
essential to the conventional scientific method, so many scientists discount any irreproducible
data no matter how credible the source.

In some cases, skeptics charge that ESP evidence is the product of outright fraud. There have
certainly been experiments where parapsychologists manipulated data to support their own
theories (this has occurred in most, if not all, scientific disciplines), and even an innocent
scientist can have a hard time disproving these claims. Accusing a respected scientist of fraud is
pretty serious business, however, so most skeptics are hesitant to take that step.
Skeptics are much more likely to point out fraud in unscientific ESP demonstrations, such as
stage psychic shows. Most parapsychologists are also wary of ESP demonstrations for
entertainment, simply because it's too easy to create the illusion of psychic powers.

The most ubiquitous fraudulent method is cold reading, in which the stage psychic rapidly
throws out general, broad suggestions to an audience member until something "hits." For
example, the psychic might say, "I see a man very close to you -- the name starts with J -- Jason,
John, Jim? -- An uncle, or grandfather, or older friend?" Objectively, you can see that this is so
broad it could apply in some way to just about everybody. But in the moment, subjects typically
concentrate on any correct guesses and ignore everything that misses. It's the age-old trick of
never being wrong and occasionally being right.

The ESP Debate

Most parapsychologists recognize that the skeptical viewpoint is largely beneficial to the public's
understanding of ESP phenomena. High-profile skeptics, such as former magician James Randi,
help steer the ESP discussion away from emotional responses and toward logical analysis by
unmasking false psychics and providing other reasonable explanations for apparent paranormal
phenomena. By explaining the statistics of coincidence and the tricks of the magic trade, these
skeptics get the public thinking critically about its beliefs and assumptions.

But skeptics like Randi can also detract from the ESP discussion. Randi is widely known for his
offer of one million dollars to anyone who can prove the existence of paranormal phenomena in
a supervised demonstration. So far, nobody has been able to claim the prize, which Randi
suggests is evidence that none of this stuff exists. Several high-profile professed psychics have
accepted the challenge and then backed out, which certainly casts them in a bad light.

To many parapsychologists and ESP believers, Randi's challenge is just theatrics, like the psychic
stage shows he exposes. Generally, legitimate scientists are not in the business of claiming prize
money in publicized demonstrations, nor are they necessarily out to prove ESP's existence in the
first place. The primary mission of science is to investigate truth -- generally speaking, scientists
are not out to profess their own beliefs, only their own findings. By lumping legitimate
researchers in with entertainers, skeptics may confuse the issue.

ESP believers mainly find fault with the implication that providing a logical explanation for
apparent psychic phenomena and unmasking false psychics disproves the existence of ESP. It's
an absolute certainty that many demonstrations of psychic power are fraudulent; it's also certain
that experiments will be imperfect, and that data may turn out to be useless. But this has no
bearing on the validity of the theory itself.

When all is said and done, we simply don't know whether ESP exists. Given what we do
understand about the way physics operates in the universe, ESP doesn't make any sense, but this
is not a valid reason to rule it out. In the history of mankind, thinkers have reevaluated their
model of the universe many times in response to new evidence. The scientific process is never
about deciding what can't be; it's always about figuring out what is.
For much more information about ESP, including intriguing experiments, famous predictions and
notable frauds, check out the links on the next page.