A PERCEPTUAL CHANNEL FOR INFORMATION TRANSFER OVER KILOMETER DISTANCES: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND RECENT RESEARCH

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 64, NO. 3, MARCH 1976
A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer
over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective
and Recent Research
HAROLD E. PUTHOFF, MEMBER, IEEE, AND RUSSFI TARG, SENIOR MEMBER, IEEE
Abstract?For more than 100 years, scientists have attempted to
determine the truth or falsity of claims for the existence of a perceptual
channel whereby certain individuals are able to perceive and describe
remote data not presented to any known sense. This paper presents an
outline of the history of scientific inquiry into such so-called paranor-
mal perception and surveys the current state of the art in parapsycho-
logical research in the United States and abroad. The nature of this
perceptual channel is examined in a series of experiments carried out
in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory of Stanford Research
Institute. The perceptual modality most extensively investigated is the
ability of both experienced subjects and inexperienced volunteers to
view, by innate mental processes, remote geographical or technical
targets including buildings, roads, and laboratory apparatus. The ac-
cumulated data indicate that the phenomenon is not a sensitive func-
tion of distance, and Faraday cage shielding does not in any apparent
way degrade the quality and accuracy of perception. On the basis of
this research, some areas of physics are suggested from which a descrip-
tion or explanation of the phenomenon could be forthcoming.
I. INTRODUCTION
"-TT IS THE PROVINCE of natural science to investigate
nature, impartially and without prejudice" [1]. Nowhere
in scientific inquiry has this dictum met as great a chal-
lenge as in the area of so-called extrasensory perception (ESP),
the detection of remote stimuli not mediated by the usual
sensory processes. Such phenomena, although under scientific
consideration for over a century, have historically been fraught
with unreliability and controversy, and validation of the phe-
nomena by accepted scientific methodology has been slow in
coming. Even so, a recent survey conducted by the British
publication New Scientist revealed that 67 percent of nearly
1500 responding readers (the majority of whom are working
scientists and technologists) considered ESP to be an estab-
lished fact or a likely possibility, and 88 percent held the
investigation of ESP to be a legitimate scientific undertaking
[21
A review of the literature reveals that although experiments
by reputable researchers yielding positive results were begun
oNer a century ago (e.g., Sir William Crookes' study of D. D.
Home, 1860's) [3], many consider the study of these phe-
nomena as only recently emerging from the realm of quasi-
science. One reason for this is that, despite experimental
results, no satisfactory theoretical construct had been advanced
to correlate data or to predict new experimental outcomes.
Consequently, the area in question remained for a long time
in the recipe stage reminiscent of electrodynamics before the
Manuscript received July 25, 1975; revised November 7, 1975. The
submission of this paper was encouraged after review of an advance
proposal. This work was supported by the Foundation for Parasensory
Investigation and the Parapsychology Foundation, New York, NY; the
Institute of Noetic Sciences, Palo Alto, CA; and the National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration, under Contract NAS 7-100.
The authors are with the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory,
Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA 94025.
329
unification brought about by the work of Ampere, Faraday,
and Maxwell. Since the early work, however, we have seen the
development of information theory, quantum theory, and
neurophysiological research, and these disciplines provide
powerful conceptual tools that appear to bear directly on the
issue. In fact, several physicists (Section V) are now of the
opinion that these phenomena are not at all inconsistent with
the framework of modern physics: the often-held view that
observations of this type are a priori incompatible with known
laws is erroneous in that such a concept is based on the naive
realism prevalent before the development of quantum theory.
In the emerging view, it is accepted that research in this area
can be conducted so as to uncover not just a catalog of inter-
esting events, but rather patterns of cause-effect relationships
of the type that lend themselves to analysis and hypothesis
in the forms with which we are familiar in the physical
sciences. One hypothesis is that information transfer under
conditions of sensory shielding is mediated by extremely
low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves, a proposal that
does not seem to be ruled out by any obvious physical or
biological facts. Further, the development of information
theory makes it possible to characterize and quantify the
performance of a communications channel regardless of
the underlying mechanism.
For the past three years, we have had a program in the
Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory of the Stan-
ford Research Institute (SRI) to investigate those facets of
human perception that appear to fall outside the range of well-
understood perceptual/processing capabilities. Of particular
interest is a human information-accessing capability that we
call "remote viewing." This phenomenon pertains to the
ability of certain individuals to access and describe, by means
of mental processes, information sources blocked from ordi-
nary perception, and generally accepted as secure against such
access.
In particular, the phenomenon we have investigated most
extensively is the ability of a subject to view remote geograph-
ical locations up to several thousand kilometers distant from
his physical location (given only a known person on whom to
target).' We have carried out more than fifty experiments
under controlled laboratory conditions with several individuals
whose remote perceptual abilities have been developed suf-
ficiently to allow them at times to describe correctly- often in
great detail?geographical or technical material such as build-
ings, roads, laboratory apparatus, and the like.
As observed in the laboratory, the basic phenomenon appears
to cover a range of subjective experiences variously referred to
Our initial work in this area was reported in Nature 141, and re-
printed in the IEEE Commun. Soc. Newsletter, vol. 13, Jan. 1975
Copyright ?1976 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A. Annals No. 603PR004
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330 PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, MARCH 1976
Fig. 1. Airport in San Andres, Colombia, used as remote-viewing target, along with sketch produced by subject
in California.
in the literature as autoscopy (in the medical literature); exteri-
orization or disassociation (psychological literature); simple
clairvoyance, traveling clairvoyance, or out-of-body experience
(parapsychological literature); or astral projection (occult liter-
ature). We choose the term "remote viewing" as a neutral
descriptive term free from prior associations and bias as to
mechanisms.
The development at SRI of a successful experimental pro-
cedure to elicit this capability has evolved to the point where
persons such as visiting government scientists and contract
monitors, with no previous exposure to such concepts, have
learned to perform well; and subjects who have trained over a
one-year period have performed excellently under a variety of
experimental conditions. Our accumulated data thus indicate
that both specially selected and unselected persons can be
assisted in developing remote perceptual abilities up to a
level of useful information transfer.
In experiments of this type, we have three principal findings.
First, we have established that it is possible to obtain signifi-
cant amounts of accurate descriptive information about remote
locations. Second, an increase in the distance from a few
meters up to 4000 km separating the subject from the scene
to be perceived does not in any apparent way degrade the
quality or accuracy of perception. Finally, the use of Faraday
cage electrical shielding does not prevent high-quality descrip-
tions from being obtained.
To build a coherent theory for the explanation of these
phenomena, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of
what constitutes the phenomena. In this paper, we first briefly
summarize previous efforts in this field in Section II. We then
present in Sections III and IV the results of a series of more
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than fifty experiments with nine subjects carried out in our
own laboratory, which represent a sufficiently stable data base
to permit testing of various hypotheses concerning the func-
tioning of this channel. Finally, in Section V, we indicate
those areas of physics and information theory that appear to
be relevant to an understanding of certain aspects of the
phenomena.
First, however, we present an illustrative example generated
in an early pilot experiment. As will be clear from our later
discussion, this is not a "best-ever" example, but rather a
typical sample of the level of proficiency that can be reached
and that we have come to expect in our research.
Three subjects participated in a long-distance experiment
focusing on a series of targets in Costa Rica. These subjects
said they had never been to Costa Rica. In this experiment,
one of the experimenters (Dr. Puthoff ) spent ten days traveling
through Costa Rica on a combination business/pleasure trip.
This information was all that was known to the subjects about
the traveler's itinerary. The experiment called for Dr. Puthoff
to keep a detailed record of his location and activities, includ-
ing photographs of each of seven target days at 1330 PDT.
A total of twelve daily descriptions were collected before the
traveler's return: six responses from one subject, five from
another, and one from a third.
The third subject who submitted the single response supplied
a drawing for a day in the middle of the series. (The subject's
response, together with the photographs taken at the site, are
shown in Fig. 1). Although Costa Rica is a mountainous
country, the subject unexpectedly perceived the traveler at a
beach and ocean setting. With some misgiving, he described an
airport on a sandy beach and an airstrip with the ocean at the
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THOFF AND TARG: PERCEPTUAL CHANNEL FOR INFORMATION TRANSFER
eni (correct). An airport building also was drawn, and shown
to have a large rectangular overhang (correct). The traveler
hal taken an unplanned one-day side trip to an offshore island
and at the time of the experiment had just disembarked from a
plane at a small island airport as described by the subject
4000 km away. The sole discrepancy was that the subject's
drawing showed a Quonset-hut type of building in place of the
rectangular structure.
The above description was chosen as an example to illustrate
a major point observed a number of times throughout the
program to be described. Contrary to what may be expected,
a subject's description does not necessarily portray what may
reasonably be expected to be correct (an educated or "safe"
guess), but often runs counter even to the subject's own
expectations.
We wish to stress again that a result such as the above is not
unusual. The remaining submissions in this experiment pro-
vided further examples of excellent correspondences between
target and response. (A target period of poolside relaxation
was identified; a drive through a tropical forest at the base of
a -runcated volcano was described as a drive through a jungle
below a large bare table mountain; a hotel-room target descrip-
tion, including such details as rug color, was correct; and so
on.) So as to determine whether such matches were simply
fortuitous?that is, could reasonably be expected on the basis
of chance alone?Dr. Puthoff was asked after he had returned
to blind match the twelve descriptions to his seven target
locations. On the basis of this conservative evaluation proce-
dure, which vastly underestimates the statistical significance
of the individual descriptions, five correct matches were ob-
tained. This number of matches is significant at p = 0.02 by
exact binomial calculation.2
The observation of such unexpectedly high-quality descrip-
tions early in our program led to a large-scale study of the
phenomenon at SRI under secure double-blind conditions (i.e.,
target unknown to experimenters as well as subjects), with
independent random target selection and blind judging. The
results, presented in Sections III and IV, provide strong evi-
dence for the robustness of this phenomenon whereby a
human perceptual modality of extreme sensitivity can detect
complex remote stimuli.
II. BACKGROUND
Although we are approaching the study of these phenomena
as physicists, it is not yet possible to separate ourselves entirely
from the language of the nineteenth century when the labora-
tory study of the paranormal was begun. Consequently, we
continue to use terms such as "paranormal," "telepathy," and
the like. However, we intend only to indicate a process of
information transfer under conditions generally accepted as
secure against such transfer and with no prejudice or occult
assumptions as to the mechanisms involved. As in any other
scientific pursuit, the purpose is to collect the observables that
result from experiments and to try to determine the functional
relationships between these observables and the laws of physics
as they are currently understood.
2The probability of a correct daily match by chance for any given
transcript is p = T . Therefore, the probability of at least five correct
matches by chance out of twelve tries can be calculated from
12 12! I i 16\(12-i)
P
(12- 0! 7 7 = 0.02.
i=5
331
Organized research into so-called psychic functioning began
roughly in the time of J. J. Thomson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and
Sir William Crookes, all of whom took part in the founding of
the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 in England.
Crookes, for example, carried out his principal investigations
with D. D. Home, a Scotsman who grew up in America and
returned to England in 1855 [3]. According to the notebooks
and published reports of Crookes, Home had demonstrated
the ability to cause objects to move without touching them.
We should note in passing that, Home, unlike most subjects,
worked only in the light and spoke out in the strongest pos-
sible terms against the darkened seance rooms popular at the
time [5] .
Sir William Crookes was a pioneer in the study of electrical
discharge in gases and in the development of vacuum tubes,
some types of which still bear his name. Although everything
Crookes said about electron beams and plasmas was accepted,
nothing he said about the achievements of D. D. Home ever
achieved that status. Many of his colleagues, who had not
observed the experiments with Home, stated publicly that they
thought Crookes had been deceived, to which Crookes angrily
responded:
Will not my critics give me credit for some amount of common
sense? Do they not imagine that the obvious precautions, which
occur to them as soon as they sit down to pick holes in my
experiments, have occurred to me also in the course of my pro-
longed and patient investigation? The answer to this, as to all
other objections is, prove it to be an error, by showing where
the error lies, or if a trick, by showing how the trick is per-
formed. Try the experiment fully and fairly. If then fraud be
found, expose it; if it be a truth, proclaim it. This is the only
scientific procedure, and it is that I propose steadily to pursue
[31.
In the United States, scientific interest in the paranormal
was centered in the universities. In 1912, John Coover [6]
was established in the endowed Chair of Psychical Research at
Stanford University. In the 1920's, Harvard University set up
research programs with George Estabrooks and L. T. Troland
[7] , [8] . It was in this framework that, in 1930, William
McDougall invited Dr. J. B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine to
join the Psychology Department at Duke University [91. For
more than 30 years, significant work was carried out at Rhine's
Duke University Laboratory. To examine the existence of
paranormal perception, he used the now-famous ESP cards
containing a boldly printed picture of a star, cross, square,
circle, or wavy lines. Subjects were asked to name the order
of these cards in a freshly shuffled deck of twenty-five such
cards. To test for telepathy, an experimenter would look at
the cards one at a time, and a subject suitably separated from
the sender would attempt to determine which card was being
viewed.
Dr. J. B. Rhine together with Dr. J. G. Pratt carried out
thousands of experiments of this type under widely varying
conditions [10] . The statistical results from these experiments
indicated that some individuals did indeed possess a paranor-
mal perceptual ability in that it was possible to obtain an
arbitrarily high degree of improbability by continued testing
of a gifted subject.
The work of Rhine has been challenged on many grounds,
however, including accusations of improper handling of statis-
tics, error, and fraud. With regard to the statistics, the general
consensus of statisticians today is that if fault is to be found
in Rhine's work, it would have to be on other than statistical
grounds [11]. With regard to the accusations of fraud, the
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tr ost celebrated case of criticism of Rhine's work, that of
G R. Price [12] , ended 17 years after it began when the
ai cusation of fraud was retracted by its author in an article
ei titled "Apology to Rhine and Soal," published in the same
jc urnal in which it was first put forward [13]. It should also
134 noted that parapsychological researchers themselves re-
c ntly exposed fraud in their own laboratory when they
er countered it [14].
kt the end of the 1940's, Prof. S. G. Soal, an English mathe-
m itician working with the SPR, had carried out hundreds of
card guessing experiments involving tens of thousands of calls
[15]. Many of these experiments were carried out over ex-
te ided distances. One of the most notable experiments was
cc nducted with Mrs. Gloria Stewart between London and
Antwerp. This experiment gave results whose probability of
occurring by chance were less than 10-8. With' the publication
of Modern Experiments in Telepathy by Soal and Bateman
(b )th of whom were statisticians), it appeared that card guess-
ink, experiments produced significant results, on the average.3
he most severe criticism of all this work, a criticism diffi-
cu t to defend against in principle, is that leveled by the well-
known British parapsychological critic C. E. M. Hansel [17] ,
wl o began his examination of the ESP hypothesis with the
stated assumption, "In view of the a priori arguments against
it we know in advance that telepathy, etc., cannot occur."
Therefore, based on the "a priori unlikelihood" of ESP,
Hansel's examination of the literature centered primarily on
th( possibility of fraud, by subjects or investigators. He
reN iewed in depth four experiments which he regarded as
providing the best evidence of ESP: the Pearce-Pratt distance
series [18] ; the Pratt-Woodruff [19] series, both conducted
at Duke; and Soal's work with Mrs. Stewart and Basil Shackle-
toi [15] , as well as a more recent series by Soal and Bowden
[211]. Hansel showed, in each case, how fraud could have been
committed (by the experimenters in the Pratt-Woodruff and
Soal-Bateman series, or by the subjects in the Pearce-Pratt
ane Soal-Bowden experiments). He gave no direct evidence
that fraud was committed in these experiments, but said, "If
the result could have arisen through a trick, the experiment
must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or
no, it is finally decided that such a trick was in fact used" [17,
p. 18]. As discussed by Honorton in a review of the field
121], Hansel's conclusion after 241 pages of careful scrutiny
therefore was that these experiments were not "fraud-proof"
and therefore in principle could not serve as conclusive proof
of ISP.
Even among the supporters of ESP research and its results,
thee remained the consistent problem that many successful
subjects eventually lost their ability and their scores gradually
drifted toward chance results. This decline effect in no way
erased their previous astronomical success; but it was a disap-
pointment since if paranormal perception is a natural ability,
one would like to see subjects improving with practice rather
than getting worse.
One of the first successful attempts to overcome the decline
effect was in Czechoslovakia in the work of Dr. Milan Ryzl, a
chemist with the Institute of Biology of the Czechoslovakian
Academy of Science and also an amateur hypnotist [22].
Through the use of hypnosis, together with feedback and
3Recently, some of the early Soal experiments have been criticized
1161. However, his long-distance experiments cited here were judged
in a double-blind fashion of the type that escaped the criticism of the
earl/ experiments.
reinforcement, he developed several outstanding subjects, one
of whom, Pavel Stepanek, has worked with experimenters
around the world for more than 10 years.
Ryzl's pioneering work came as an answer to the questions
raised by the 1956 CIBA Foundation conference on extra-
sensory perception. The CIBA Chemical Company has annual
meetings on topics of biological and chemical interest, and
that same year they assembled several prominent parapsy-
chologists to have a state-of-the-art conference on ESP [231.
The conference concluded that little progress would be made
in parapsychology research until a repeatable experiment
could be found; namely, an experiment that different experi-
menters could repeat at will and that would reliably yield a
statistically significant result.
Ryzl had by 1962 accomplished that goal. His primary con-
tribution was a decision to interact with the subject as a per-
son, to try to build up his confidence and ability. His protocol
depended on "working with" rather than "running" his sub-
jects. Ryzl's star subject, Pavel Stepanek, has produced highly
significant results with many contemporary researchers [24] -
[29]. In these experiments, he was able to tell with 60-percent
reliability whether a hidden card was green side or white
side up, yielding statistics of a million to one with only a
thousand trials.
As significant as such results are statistically, the information
channel is imperfect, containing noise along with the signal.
When considering how best to use such a channel, one is led
to the communication theory concept of the introduction of
redundancy as a means of coding a message to combat the
effects of a noisy channel [30]. A prototype experiment by
Ryzl using such techniques has proved to be successful. RyzI
had an assistant select randomly five groups of three digits
each. These 15 digits were then encoded into binary form and
translated into a sequence of green and white cards in sealed
envelopes. By means of repeated calling and an elaborate
majority vote protocol, Ryzl was able after 19 350 calls by
Stepanek (averaging 9 s per call) to correctly identify all 15
numbers, a result significant at p = 10-15 The hit rate for
individual calls was 61.9 percent, 11 978 hits, and 7372 misses
[31].
Note Added in Proof: It has been brought to our attention
that a similar procedure was recently used to transmit without
error the word "peace" in International Morse Code (J. C.
Carpenter, "Toward the effective utilization of enhanced
weak-signal ESP effects," presented at the Annual Meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
New York, NY, Jan. 27,1975).
The characteristics of such a channel can be specified in
accordance with the precepts of communication theory. The
bit rate associated with the information channel is calculated
from [30]
R H(x)- Hy(X) (1)
where H(x) is the uncertainty of the source message containing
symbols with a priori probability pi:
2
pi log2 pi (2)
i=1
and H (X) is the conditional entropy based on the a posteriori
probabilities that a received signal was actually transmitted:
2
Hy(X) = E p(i, i) log2 Pi(i)-
i,j=i
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Fc r Stepanek's run, with pi= 1, pj(j)= 0.619, and an average
time of 9 s per choice, we have a source uncertainty H(x)= I
bit and a calculated bit rate
R 0.041 bit/symbol
or
RIT 0.0046 bit/s.
(Since the 15-digit number (49.8 bits) actually was transmitted
at the rate of 2.9 X 10-4 bit/s, an increase in bit rate by a
fat tor of about 20 could be expected on the basis of a coding
scl eme more optimum than that used in the experiments. See,
for example, Appendix A.)
I Jr. Charles Tart at the University of California has written
ex ensively on the so-called decline effect. He considers that
ing subjects attempt to guess cards, or perform any other
re r etitious task for which they receive no feedback, follows
the classical technique for deconditioning any response. He
thi s considers card guessing "a technique for extinguishing
psy chic functioning in the laboratory" [32] .
1 art's injunctions of the mid-sixties were being heeded at
Mamonides Hospital, Brooklyn, NY, by a team of researchers
that included Dr. Montague Ullman, who was director of
research for the hospital; Dr. Stanley Krippner; and, later,
Charles Honorton. These three worked together for several
years on experiments on the occurrence of telepathy in dreams.
In the course of a half-dozen experimental series, they found
in their week-long sessions a number of subjects who had
dreams that consistently were highly descriptive of pictorial
ma lerial that a remote sender was looking at throughout the
nig at. This work is described in detail in the experimenters'
book Dream Telepathy [33]. Honorton is continuing work
of his free-response type in which the subject has no precon-
cei red idea as to what the target may be.
Li his more recent work with subjects in the waking state,
Ho rorton is providing homogeneous stimulation to the subject
wh ) is to describe color slides viewed by another person in a
rernote room. In this new work, the subject listens to white
nolie via earphones and views an homogeneous visual field
imposed through the use of Ping-Pong ball halves to cover the
subiect's eyes in conjunction with diffuse ambient illumina-
ti() a In this so-called Ganzfeld setting, subjects are again able,
now in the waking state, to give correct and often highly
aci Irate descriptions of the material being viewed by the
SCE ler [34].
Ii Honorton's work and elsewhere, it apparently has been
the step away from the repetitive forced-choice experiment
tha has opened the way for a wide variety of ordinary people
to lemonstrate significant functioning in the laboratory, with-
ow being bored into a decline effect.
1 his survey would be incomplete if we did not indicate
cer ain aspects of the current state of research in the USSR.
It is clear from translated documents and other sources [35]
that many laboratories in the USSR are engaged in paranormal
research.
Since the 1930's, in the laboratory of L. Vasiliev (Leningrad
Ins itute for Brain Research), there has been an interest in the
use of telepathy as a method of influencing the behavior of a
per on at a distance. In Vasiliev's book Experiments in Mental
Su3gestion, he makes it very clear that the bulk of his labora-
tor i's experiments were aimed at long-distance communica-
do I combined with a form of behavior modification; for
ex, mple, putting people at a distance to sleep through hyp-
no: is [36] .
333
Similar behavior modification types of experiments have been
carried out in recent times by I. M. Kogan, Chairman of the
Bioinformation Section of the Moscow Board of the Popov
Society. He is a Soviet engineer who, until 1969, published
extensively on the theory of telepathic communication [37] -
[40]. He was concerned with three principal kinds of experi-
ments: mental suggestion without hypnosis over short dis-
tances, in which the percipient attempts to identify an object,
mental awakening over short distances, in which a subject is
awakened from a hypnotic sleep at the "beamed" suggestion
from the hypnotist; and long-range (intercity) telepathic com-
munication. Kogan's main interest has been to quantify the
channel capacity of the paranormal channel. He finds that the
bit rate decreases from 0.1 bit/s for laboratory experiments
to 0.005 bit/s for his 1000-km intercity experiments.
In the USSR, serious consideration is given to the hypothesis
that telepathy is mediated by extremely low-frequency (ELF)
electromagnetic propagation. (The pros and cons of this
hypothesis are discussed in Section V of this paper.) In
general, the entire field of paranormal research in the USSR
is part of a larger one concerned with the interaction between
electromagnetic fields and living organisms [41] [42] At
the First International Congress on Parapsychology and
Psychotronics in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1973, for example,
Kholodov spoke at length about the susceptibility 01 living
systems to extremely low-level ac and dc fields. Ile described
conditioning effects on the behavior of fish resulting from the
application of 10 to 100 ?W of RF to their tank [431 The
USSR take these data seriously in that the Soviet safety re-
quirements for steady-state microwave exposure set limits
at 10 pW/cm2, whereas the United States has set a stead" state
limit of 10 mW/cm2 [44] . Kholodov spoke also about the
nonthermal effects of microwaves on animals' central nervous
systems. His experiments were very carefully carried out and
are characteristic of a new dimension in paranormal research
The increasing importance of this area in Soviet reseal ch was
indicated recently when the Soviet Psychological Association
issued an unprecedented position paper calling on the Soviet
Academy of Sciences to step up efforts in this area [451
They recommended that the newly formed Psychological
Institute within the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the
Psychological Institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences
review the area and consider the creation of a new lab,,ratory
within one of the institutes to study persons with unusual
abilities. They also recommended a comprehensive evaluation
of experiments and theory by the A::adeiny of Sciences' Insti-
tute of Biophysics and Institute for the Problems of Informa
tion Transmission.
The Soviet research, along with other behavioristicalF.,
oriented work, suggests that in addition to obtaining overt
responses such as verbalizations or key presses from a subject
it should be possible to obtain objective evidence of informa
tion transfer by direct measurement of physiological parame-
ters of a subject. Kamiya, Lindsley, Pribram, Silverman,
Walter, and others brought together to discuss physiological
methods to detect ESP functioning, have suggested that a
whole range of electroencephalogram (EEG) responses ,rich as
evoked potentials (EP's), spontaneous EEG, and the contingent
negative variation (CNV) might be sensitive indicators of the
detection of remote stimuli not mediated by usual sensory
processes [46].
Early experimentation of this type was carried cut by
Douglas Dean at the Newark College of Engineering. In his
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Approved For Release 2003/06/24
se; rch for physiological correlates of information transfer, he
us d the plethysmograph to measure changes in the blood
vcnume in a finger, a sensitive indicator of autonomic nervous
sy ;tem functioning [47]. A plethysmographic measurement
vy s made on the finger of a subject during telepathy experi-
m-nts. A sender looked at randomly selected target cards
consisting of names known to the subject, together with names
ur known to him (selected at random from a telephone book).
TI e names of the known people were contributed by the sub-
je? t and were to be of emotional significance to him. Dean
fo and significant changes in the chart recording of finger
blood volume when the remote sender was looking at those
names known to the subject as compared with those names
raildomly chosen.
'Three other experiments using the physiological approach
have now been published. The first work by Tart [48], a later
work by Lloyd [49], and most recently the work by the
authors [4] all follow a similar procedure. Basically, a subject
is closeted in an electrically shielded room while his LEG is
recorded. Meanwhile, in another laboratory, a second person
is stimulated from time to time, and the time of that stimulus
is marked on the magnetic-tape recording of the subject's EEG.
The subject does not know when the remote stimulus periods
are as compared with the nonstimulus periods.
With regard to choice of stimulus for our own experimenta-
tion, we noted that in previous work others had attempted,
without success, to detect evoked potential changes in a sub-
ject's EEG in response to a single stroboscopic flash stimulus
observed by another subject [50]. In a discussion of that
experiment, Kamiya suggested that because of the unknown
temporal characteristics of the information channel, it might
be more appropriate to use repetitive bursts of light to increase
Ulu probability of detecting information transfer [51]. There-
fo-e, in our study we chose to use a stroboscopic flash train of
10-s duration as the remote stimulus.
n the design of the study, we assumed that the application
of the remote stimulus would result in responses similar to
thuse obtained under conditions of direct stimulation. For
ex umple, when an individual is stimulated with a low-
frequency (< 30 Hz) flashing light, the EEG typically shows
a decrease in the amplitude of the resting rhythm and a
diving of the brain waves at the frequency of the flashes [52].
We hypothesized that if we stimulated one subject in this
manner (a putative sender), the EEG of another subject in a
remote room with no flash present (a receiver) might show
changes in alpha (9-11 Hz) activity and possibly an EEG
driving similar to that of the sender, or other coupling to the
sender's EEG [53]. The receiver was seated in a visually
opaque, acoustically and electrically shielded, double-walled
steel room about 7 m from the sender. The details of the
experiment, consisting of seven runs of thirty-six 10-s trials
each (twelve periods each for 0-Hz, 6-Hz, and 16-Hz stimuli,
randomly intermixed), are presented in [4]. This experiment
proved to be successful. The receiver's alpha activity (9-11 Hz)
sh awed a significant reduction in average power (-24 percent,
p (0.04) and peak power (-28 percent, p