TELEPATHY COULD BE REAL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080050-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 5, 1998
• Sequence Number: 50
• Publication Date: February 1, 1976
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Relea
PARAPSYCHOLOGY
6;...CIA RD,
Though 58% of all Americans believe
they have had telepathic experiences,
researchers are just now
beginning to corner it. The people
they study, talented telepathic receivers,
produce results that defy mere luck.
by Paul Chance
that it's all swamp grass doesn't make
the work any easier.
Disappearing Act. One of the paradoxes
of this spooky field is that while re-
searchers cannot reliably. demonstrate
that extrasensory perception (ESP)
exists, they can count on it to go away.
Time after time, people who initially
show psychic talent lose their skill as
the researchers study them, and their
success scores drop. The phenomenon
is so dependable that parapsychologists
call it the decline. effect. Critics point
to it as evidence that there was never
anything paranormal to begin with;
sometimes a person will get lucky, but
eventually the laws of chance win out.
Parapsychologists aren't convinced,
because the beginning scores are often
so high that it is difficult to believe
that luck has anything to do with it.
Charles Tart, of the University of
California at Davis, is trying some-
thing that may explain the decline ef-
fect and, at the same time, give the re-
searcher a way to nail psychic
phenomena down flat.
Tart wondered if people with tele-
pathic talent weren't being put on what
if his efforts go unrewarded. If a psychic
reads a couple of hundred telepathic
messages without a payoff, he's on an
extinction schedule. What para-
psychologists ought to do, Tart argues,
is put the psychically gifted on a rein-
forcement schedule.,
The payoff might consist simply of
telling the psychic when he has scored
a hit. But Tart warns that the pupil
should have some psychic ability to
begin with. No matter how good a
training program is, you can't teach a
dog to fly or a pigeon to bark. To de-
velop someone into a reliable psychic
performer a researcher must start with
a person who has at least a little ESP.
Striving Psychics. To find the talented
minority, Tart screened over 1,500'col-
lege students. Of these, 138 showed
promise; these were further screened to
cull those who might have been lucky
on the first tests. Twenty-five of Tart's
most promising students went on to
complete the main study;
The psychic's job was to guess which
one of a series of lights would go on. A
sender, not one of the gifted 25, sat in
another room.. he would get an early
of
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The a a ots o people` are jeering peck a key for food will eventually stop mentally to the receiver, who sat in
MARK TWAIN, the author of Huckleberry
Finn and Tom Sawyer and a member of
the Psychical Society of England,.was
especially interested in "mental teleg-
raphy." His interest grew out of dozens
of personal experiences too freakish to
write off as anything but telepathy. In
1878 he wrote, "Doubtless the Some-
thing which conveys our thoughts
through the air from brain to brain is a
finer and subtler form of electricity,
and all we need do is to find out how to
capture it and how to force it to do its
work, as we have had to do in the case
of the electric currents.. Before the day
of telegraphs neither of these marvels
would have seemed: any easier to
achieve than the other."
We're now in the age of television
and the videophone, and researchers
are still trying to capture the elusive
telepathic force.
The trouble is that telepathy won't
stand still. Parapsychologists are like
modern Leeuwenhoeks peering
through primitive microscopes at tiny
creatures dancing in swamp water.
Each time somebody calls out, "I've got
the little bugger; come take a look,"
the little bugger slips out of view or
 scores at other times and found a sig- that even his best students did not left them alone. Tart then went to
nificant difference. The husband's show the rapid improvement you another room and wired himself to a
scores, meanwhile, were virtually might expect with more ordinary machine that gave him electric shocks
identical in both conditions (see the skills. What's needed, he argues, is at random intervals. The idea was to
chart at bottom of this page). more sophisticated feedback. Even a see whether the students' brain waves.
In another series of games, Fouts's talented person gets little information would be different when Tart was get-
Scribbage-playing telepather tried to from being told that he guessed correct- ting jolted than when he wasn't. They
help as well as interfere with his wife's ly. A pat on the head tells him he did were. The difference wasn't the sort
performance. As before, negative something right, but it doesn't tell him that would leap out at you from the
thoughts seemed to produce lower what that something was. pattern of wavy lines on an elec-
scores, but attempts to raise her scores Brain Signals. The problem is further troencephalograph, but a piece of
failed. complicated by the fact that some equipment called a Period Analyzer
The victim in these Scribbage guesses are just that, guesses. But the picked it up. We're still a long way
studies was not aware of her husband's psychic has no way of knowing when a from having a psychic thermometer,
efforts, or even that an experiment was correct answer came from psychic in- but researchers at Stanford Research
under way. Fouts admits that the inter- sight and when it was just a lucky stab. Institute in Palo Alto, California in-
ference that took place might have To beat that problem, researchers will tend to continue the search.
come from nonverbal cues, such as have to find a psychic indicator, In a recent poll conducted by the Na-
changes in the husband's body posture, perhaps a kind of cerebral knee-jerk tional Opinion Research Center, 58
rather than from telepathic' influence. like the response a brain makes to a percent of those surveyed said that
It is interesting to note, however, that sudden noise. Each time the brain sig- they believed they had had one or more
during the interference sessions the naled th
ri
l
f
e ar
va
o
a telepathilh
c mes- teepatic experiences. But even the
wife sometimes commented, "I can't sage,. the researcher could cue the baptized believer in parapsychology
think ... my mind is blank." psychic. This way, the psychic should has to admit that it is a field with some
Researchers have tried to strengthen be able t
l
d
o
earn to
istinguishth
exraor- musy ground. It is hard to find a study
other paranormal skills such as pre- dinary intuition from ordinary and clairvoyance. In general, incidence. azY co- that doesn't have a lot of ifs and
their
ff
h
e
orts
n psychic
ave suppotd thihs r r
ree noton Tere' some evidence that the brainely have the ha
rd, a k ike q alityeof
that paranormal skills can be en- does know more than it's telling us. pigeon-tutor B.F. Skinner or neuro-
hanced, or at least maintained
with Ch
l
T
,
ar
es
art wired up 11ll
coege stu- psychologist D.O. Hebb.
feedback. But Tart is quick to admit dents to record their brain waves and The conversation of parapsy-
t I
no interference interference no interference interference
RESULT OF INTERFERENCE The higher scores
e..._. _ : .-_ -
f th
o
e
chologists is apt to shift from the
mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle to
the Loch Ness Monster. The tempta-
tion is to latch onto one of these low-
credibility subjects and dismiss tele-
pathy and related phenomena as the
psychedelic mentations of a spooky
group. just file them away with the
witches, the shamen and the root doc-
tors, and forget them.
Inflating Our Flat World. But remember
that in the early 1960s just about
everybody was convinced that the yogi
iracle work
rs were fak
es. Those
m
e
0` 00909 e 9 igand nut -
44 PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. February 11-176
 diets 4 O'VEU &RVt1
and p eir guts t rou
gh gymnastic
workouts. A few scientists studied
them as they altered their blood pres-
sure or changed the temperature of
their hands, but almost no one believed
that what they did could really be done.
Sloppy research. Clever trickery. Any
intelligent, educated person knew that
it was impossible, for example, to vol-
untarily control one's blood pressure.
Then Neal Miller and other
psychologists taught people to do just
h
t
at.
Their Insides Upside Down. The success
of Miller et al. did more than change
our ideas about the nuts and bolts of
the nervous system; it inflated our flat
world into a sphere connecting East
-and West. And if the heart-stopping
yogi can no longer be dismissed as a
clever trickster, how can we ignore the
feat of S3, who outguessed Tart's
machine at odds of 2,500,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000, to one? No
honest statistician can shrug that off as
a run of good luck. No, we're right
where we were 15 years ago when
those skinny yogis turned their insides
upside down. Either it's a hoax, or it's
real.
We probably won't have an answer to
that question until some tough-minded
scientist like Neal Miller takes a crack
at it. He might simply prove that all
those confident, jeering skeptics were
right, after all. But it's disconcerting
to think that it might come out the
other way. Your local high school might
one day offer a course in telepathy as it
now does in typing. And think of
how different your life would be if
your thoughts were no longer private
property.
Hmmmm. I see you're thinking
about it. fl
Paul Chance joined Psychology today in 1972
as Manuscripts Editor and became assistant
ago. fie took a master's
degree in counseling
from the University of
Northern Colorado and a
Ph.D. in psychology from
Ulan state University. A
rigorous methodologist,
Chance t~-fl
e
to see his telepathy setup, For
mo e informa
tion, read:
Tart, Charles T. Learning to Use ESP. University of Chicago, in
press.
Twain, Mark, "Mental Telegraphy" in Literary Essays, Vol. 24,
P.F. Collier and Son, 1918,
relate to them. " 1-1-ol C cdrnera can tieip you
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