This is not the usual book about ESP. It is not another attempt to convince the world that ESP exists, nor is it completely autobiographical. Rather, it delves into novel discoveries about the processes of ESP functioning, discoveries based on the author’s eighteen years of experience in a dozen ESP laboratories across the United States. It demonstrates that anyone attempting to utilize ESP must also encounter the process manifestations which are illustrated in this book.
We would all like to understand more about ESP processes and how they work for each of us. Wanting to understand—our world, others, our selves—is a basic aspect of being human. Why did things happen this way and not that way? What would happen if…? Indeed, if this fundamental curiosity disappears, it is a sad sign of death in life.
Unfortunately, the desire to understand all too frequently is subtly transformed into a desire to understand on our own terms. We become psychologically rigid and emotionally attached to our established ways of understanding and dealing with reality, so instead of approaching puzzles in a genuinely curious and open-minded way we see them from an already fixed, prejudiced (literally prejudged) position. Reality may not reveal itself from that position, and our emotional attachment to our expectations may make us angry or fearful, so that we fight the challenge to become really open-minded.
Dealing with ESP is an especially difficult area. To begin with, we have the phenomena of a type of communication at a distance that seems to violate our common sense and popularly understood scientific rules about what can and can’t happen in the world. This is a considerable challenge to our existing intellectual framework. To make matters worse, many studies (including my own) have suggested that we have varying degrees of deep-seated, semi- or unconscious fears of ESP which can seriously distort our so-called rational approach to it.
This attempt to make reality fit in with what you already know, on your own terms, may be easy to see in the pseudo-skeptics who loudly denounce ESP and try to debunk and stop scientific research dealing with it. When you consider the emotional fervor they bring to debunking (while claiming to be rational and scientific about their actions) against what is usually their vast ignorance of the facts of actual scientific data (and their distorted reporting of what they do know about it), you know something is psychologically out-of-kilter. In comparison, parapsychologists who go to considerable trouble to conduct experiments to study the nature of ESP are obviously the open-minded people. It is not as easy to see that, to varying degrees, parapsychologists are also implicitly trying to make ESP fit into their own fixed positions.
Parapsychologists are conditioned and programmed to reflect the biases of our culture to various degrees, just like the rest of us. Particularly, they want to be recognized as real scientists, like physicists or chemists. Yet you cannot measure ESP with a ruler, weigh it on a balance or analyze its chemical constitution. This is an inherently more difficult field of study. Add in the emotional, a priori rejection of ESP by many physical scientists and you get a constant and futile struggle for recognition. A typical result is that many parapsychologists try harder, consciously and unconsciously, to use the methods of the accepted sciences so it looks like they are doing real science. As a conscious strategy, with awareness of its costs and limitations, this can be useful. As automatized habits of thought, it is stifling.
Many ESP impressions come as sensory-like impressions, for example. If there is a seemingly obvious match to distant events, as shown in many examples in this book, we conclude that ESP has worked. Yet what is obvious to one person may not be at all so to another, especially if the ESP impression is vague. Numbers, on the other hand, not only look scientific, they can actually be statistically analyzed to yield usefi.il information. Thus the history of the main thrust of parapsychological research is that of names and numbers, of trying to use ESP to, for example, identify the number value of ordinary playing cards, after stripping out the face cards. We might have someone try this a thousand times, ending up with precise looking statement like
In 1,000 trials with an a priori hit probability of .1, 117 direct hits were observed, leading to a Z-score of 1.79 and an associated P = .037, one-tailed. We may infer that ESP was operative in the experiment.
This not only looks scientific, it is. Taking away the jargon and compact style, it means the percipient was correct 117 times in her 1,000 calls. We expect only 100 hits by chance alone, and getting 117 would happen only about 4 times in 100 by chance. Since that’s unlikely, it’s reasonable to infer the ESP was happening some of the time.
What is seldom estimated in that kind of experiment is the frequency with which ESP is actually being used: in this example, after subtracting 100 hits for chance we can estimate that there were only 17 instances of ESP in the remaining 900 trials. That is, about 98 percent of the trials were probably just guesses.
For all the apparent precision in the traditional parapsychology which has tried to force ESP to fit into a framework developed in the other sciences, I have found that:
only about a third of the experiments work, in the sense that ESP manifests strongly enough to produce a statistically significant result;
of those that work, the vast majority produce statistically significant but practically tiny manifestations of ESP; and
attempts to understand the nature of ESP or to bring it under better control have shown little progress. In engineering terms, the signal-to-noise ratio is very low: too much guessing which adds confusion; not enough ESP to see what it is related to.
I’m not saying that conventional parapsychological research has been useless—we have learned some basic things from it—but that it doesn’t show much promise of progress by continuing to do what we do now.
Ingo Swann began his involvement with parapsychology as an experimental subject, tested in the conventional name-that-target way. He experienced tantalizing fragments of success but an overall feeling that something wasn’t being done right, the research was not true to the inherent nature of ESP and our deeper psychological self. Discontented, he thought, studied the old literature and experimented. The result is this challenging book, with a new and creative approach to ESP. I want to emphasize that this is not just a set of good ideas or theories, either: Ingo Swann, using his approach, has consistently produced superior ESP results for many years. I consider this book must reading, not only for parapsychologists hut for any serious student of the human mind, as well as those interested in developing their own ESP abilities.
Charles T. Tart, Ph. D.
University of California at Davis,
and Institute of Noetic Sciences,
Sausalito, California.
February, 1991