TELEPATHY COULD BE REAL

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 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
 ht
 s
 b
 ...       lig
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 out to go
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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,
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