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Back to Main PageTelepathy, perception of another person’s thoughts by means beyond the ordinary senses. English essayist and poet Frederic W. H. Myers first used the term telepathy in 1882. Myers defined telepathy as "the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independent of the recognised channels of sense." An example is that of a person in one room knowing what a person in another room is thinking. Telepathy is usually considered one of three kinds of extrasensory perception (ESP), the other two being clairvoyance (the ability to visualise or perceive remote objects and events) and precognition (the ability to foretell future events). Most scientists doubt the existence of telepathy and other forms of ESP because rigorous tests have failed to produce any reliable evidence for psychic phenomena.
Extrasensory Perception (ESP) is knowledge of external objects or events without the aid of the senses. Since ancient times, people have wondered about various so-called psychic experiences that seem to defy scientific explanation. Often these phenomena have been associated with communication with the dead. Mediums, who purport to mediate between the living and the dead, were particularly popular in the 19th century. Often mediums deliver utterances while in a trancelike state, and their followers believe that they can deliver messages from the deceased.
In 1882 a group of scholars in London founded the Society for Psychical Research to study such mysterious events. In the United States, philosopher and psychologist William James discovered a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, named Mrs. Piper, who reportedly had the ability to disclose information about events of which she could not have had personal knowledge. James first began investigating Mrs. Piper’s trance phenomena in 1885, and he and others continued these investigations for 30 years. No adequate explanation was ever offered to explain Mrs. Piper’s seeming ability to communicate with the dead.
In 1930 Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychology professor at Duke University, founded a parapsychology laboratory at the school. The laboratory became a famous centre for investigating ESP. Rhine’s investigations focused on what he called psi, or psychic phenomena. He believed that there might be natural, although unknown, causes of mysterious occurrences, and he attempted to establish their existence by use of experimental and mathematical techniques. These techniques included testing people who seemed to possess an unusual ability for ESP. As part of these tests, Rhine developed a deck of 25 cards, each bearing one of five different symbols, and had his subjects attempt to guess the right symbol when the cards were concealed. Certain individuals guessed correctly more often than the law of averages would predict, and Rhine concluded those individuals possessed ESP. Rhine’s investigations led him to believe that ESP underlies clairvoyance, the perception of external things without sensing them; telepathy, the perception of another person’s thoughts; and precognition, the ability to predict events. However, later scientists criticised the methodology of Rhine’s studies, noting some subjects could identify the symbols by physical marks on the cards.
More recently, computers and other instruments have been used in the study of ESP. However, most scientists do not believe that ESP exists. These scientists note that thousands of controlled studies have failed to show any evidence of psychical phenomena, and that no person has ever successfully demonstrated ESP for independent investigators. Despite these findings, surveys indicate that a substantial portion of the public believes in ESP.
Psychical Research, also parapsychology, scientific investigation of alleged phenomena and events that appear to be unaccounted for by conventional physical, biological, or psychological theories. Parapsychologists study two kinds of so-called psi phenomena: extrasensory perception (ESP), or the acquiring of information through nonsensory means; and psychokinesis (PK), or the ability to affect objects at a distance by means other than known physical forces. Psychical research also investigates the survival of personality after death and deals with related topics such as trance mediumship, haunting, apparitions, poltergeists (involuntary PK), and out-of-body experiences. The name of this field of investigation is taken from the Society of Psychical Research, founded in England in 1882 and in the U.S. in 1884; both groups continue to publish their findings today.
Historical Development
Among the early achievements of the British group was the investigation of hypnotism, a field later claimed by medicine and psychology. The society also investigated phenomena produced at spiritualistic séances and the claims of spiritualism. Psi phenomena to be investigated were classified as either physical or mental. The physical effects, or PK, include the movement of physical objects or an influence upon material processes by the apparent direct action of mind over matter. The mental manifestations, or ESP, include telepathy, which is the direct transmission of messages, emotions, or other subjective states from one person to another without the use of any sensory channel of communication; clairvoyance, meaning direct responses to a physical object or event without any sensory contact; and precognition, or a noninferential response to a future event.
One of the first specific investigations in the field was the examination, by the British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes, of the phenomena produced at séances held by the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Home, a physical medium, generally used some type of lighting during his séances, and the validity of the paranormal phenomena he produced has never been successfully impugned. The contents of verbal utterances by mental mediums were also studied. Significant early research involved the American medium Leonore E. Piper, whose apparent psychical gifts were discovered by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. Other lines of investigation dealt with psychic experiences that seemed to occur spontaneously in everyday life, and involved the controlled testing of persons with apparently outstanding ESP abilities.
Rhine's Laboratory
In the U.S., one of the earliest groups to become active in parapsychology was the Parapsychology Laboratory of North Carolina's Duke University, which began publishing literature in the 1930s. There, under the direction of the American psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, methods were developed that advanced psychical investigations from the correlation of isolated and often vague anecdotal reports to a mathematical study based on statistics and the laws of probability.
In the experiments dealing with ESP, Rhine and his associates used mainly a deck of 25 cards, somewhat similar to ordinary playing cards but bearing on their faces only five designs: star, circle, cross, square, and wavy lines. If a subject correctly named 5 out of the shuffled deck of 25 concealed cards, which was considered pure chance. Certain subjects, however, consistently named 6 out of 10 cards correctly; so Rhine and his associates concluded that this demonstrated the existence of ESP. In their experiments on PK, the group used ordinary dice that were thrown from a cup against a wall or tumbled in mechanically driven cages. In these tests, an apparent relationship was found between the mental effort of subjects to "will" particular faces of the dice to appear upward and the percentage of times the faces actually did so. The results obtained in many individual experiments and in the research as a whole, Rhine and his workers decided, could not reasonably be attributed to the fluctuations of chance.
Rhine retired from Duke University in 1965 and transferred his research to a privately endowed organisation, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. Since that time parapsychology has become better established in other universities, as illustrated by the offering of credit courses in the subject in increasing numbers. In addition, independent research centres continue to be founded, among them the American Society for Psychical Research, with headquarters in New York City. The Parapsychological Association, an international group of scholars actively working in the field, was formed in 1957 and was granted affiliation status by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969.
Criticisms
Although Parapsychologists are increasingly employing and refining scientific methodologies for their observations, one of the chief criticisms of their work is that experiments in psi phenomena can rarely be duplicated. Under the most rigorous laboratory controls, for example, experiments on phenomena such as out-of-body experiences—in which individuals demonstrate an apparent ability to locate their centre of perception outside their bodies—indicate that even reputable psychics are rarely able to duplicate earlier, high-scoring performances. The scores of such individuals, in fact, tend to drop to the level of probability the more the experiment is repeated. Nonparapsychologists find psi experiments even more difficult to repeat, and a majority of conventional scientists dismiss parapsychology findings as unscientific or at best inconclusive.
A similar criticism is based on the claim by most parapsychologists that psi phenomena occur beyond the law of causality, which is one of the fundamental premises of any scientific investigation. Indeed, results of psi experiments often turn out to be far from or even contradictory to the original predictions. Parapsychologists admit that psi phenomena fall so far outside ordinary comprehension that they are often unsure whether an ESP event or a PK event has occurred; Rhine himself stated that one kind of event could not occur without the other. Because these phenomena are difficult to define or isolate when they appear to happen—and, further, because the phenomena occur only for a select group of observers—most scientists think that psi investigations fall far short of the rules of objectivity required by the scientific method. As a result, many parapsychologists, rather than trying to demonstrate the reality of psi phenomena to a sceptical scientific community, have turned to exploring how such phenomena might actually work; they even have drawn on quantum physics for empirical support. Some workers in the field object to the very notion of repeatability of experiments as foreign to the nature of psi phenomena; they consider the scientific method, as currently understood, too restrictive a formulation for exploring the unknown.
Hypnosis altered state of consciousness and heightened responsiveness to suggestion; it may be induced in normal persons by a variety of methods and has been used occasionally in medical and psychiatric treatment. Most frequently hypnosis is brought about through the actions of an operator, the hypnotist, who engages the attention of a subject and assigns certain tasks to him or her while uttering monotonous, repetitive verbal commands; such tasks may include muscle relaxation, eye fixation, and arm levitation. Hypnosis also may be self-induced, by trained relaxation, concentration on one's own breathing, or by a variety of monotonous practices and rituals that are found in many mystical, philosophical, and religious systems.
Characteristics
Hypnosis results in the gradual assumption by the subject of a state of consciousness in which attention is withdrawn from the outside world and is concentrated on mental, sensory, and physiological experiences. When a hypnotist induces a trance, a close relationship or rapport develops between operator and subject. The responses of subjects in the trance state, and the phenomena or behaviour they manifest objectively, are the product of their motivational set; that is, behaviour reflects what is being sought from the experience.
Most people can be easily hypnotised, but the depth of the trance varies widely. A profound trance is characterised by a forgetting of trance events and by an ability to respond automatically to posthypnotic suggestions that are not too anxiety provoking. The depth of trance achievable is a relatively fixed characteristic, dependent on the emotional condition of the subject and on the skill of the hypnotist. Only 20 percent of subjects are capable of entering somnambulistic states through the usual methods of induction. Medically, this percentage is not significant, since therapeutic effects occur even in a light trance.
Hypnosis can produce a deeper contact with one's emotional life, resulting in some lifting of repressions and exposure of buried fears and conflicts. This effect potentially lends itself to medical and educational use, but it also lends itself to misinterpretation. Thus, the revival through hypnosis of early, forgotten memories may be fused with fantasies. Research into hypnotically induced memories in recent years has in fact stressed their uncertain reliability. For this reason a number of state court systems in the U.S. have placed increasing constraints on the use of evidence hypnotically obtained from witnesses, although most states still permit its introduction in court.
Medical Uses
Hypnosis has been used to treat a variety of physiological and behavioural problems. It can alleviate back pain and pain resulting from burns and cancer. Some obstetricians as the sole analgesia for normal childbirth have used it. Hypnosis is sometimes also employed to treat physical problems with a possible psychological component, such as Raynaud's syndrome (a circulatory disease) and fecal incontinence in children. Researchers have demonstrated that the benefit of hypnosis is greater than the effect of a placebo and probably results from changing the focus of attention. Few physicians, however, include hypnosis as part of their practice.
Some behavioural difficulties, such as cigarette smoking, overeating, and insomnia, are also amenable to resolution through hypnosis. Nonetheless, most psychiatrists think that fundamental psychiatric illness is better treated with the patient in a normal state of consciousness.