Chapter 16

What Does ESP Prove?

Many professionals and experts who advocate a more human experiential dimension to science see clearly how the materialist straitjacket of the current paradigm of science is limiting the possibilities we are all entitled to live. What they don't agree on is the best way to convince the general public and eventually the scientific community about the limits of today's establishment materialist science.

Many of these people believe that it is the research of our paranormal experiences, extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, etc., that will lead the way to a new scientific paradigm. Naturally, materialist scientists fight back tooth and nail trying to discredit the paranormal research. And thus arise all the controversies that surround paranormal research today. Is ESP real or is it all a carefully concocted fraud by clever magicians? Paranormal research itself is bogged down by these controversies.

What has gotten lost in all this debate is that we don't need ESP to prove the inadequacy of the current scientific paradigm. As I have amply demonstrated in this book, ESP is not needed to prove the existence of God and downward causation either. Now we can relax and ask objectively: is there evidence of ESP? And what does it mean?

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION

Whereas the role of nonlocal quantum consciousness (God) is somewhat implicit in ordinary perception (you don't see the role without much analysis, as discussed earlier), in ESP phenomena nonlocality is explicit; the only analysis we need is to demonstrate the role of consciousness.

Let's set the context by describing a typical distant viewing experiment pioneered by the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff (1974) and replicated many times by other researchers. One subject looks at a double-blind selected scene or an object; at a distance another subject in a controlled laboratory setting draws a picture or gives an oral description of what his or her partner is observing. What is viewed and the description received of it at a distance are then compared. The experimenter looks for a matching rate that substantially beats the odds of random matching.

Targ and Puthoff made history with such an experiment in their pioneering paper, successfully demonstrating nonlocal transfer of information and meaning from one mind to another. Subsequent experiments verified the efficacy of distant viewing in a variety of ways. I cite here some of the notable ones.

The effect persists even when matching is done objectively via the use of computers (Jahn, 1982).

One of the most stringent protocols used is the ganzfeld experiment. A ganzfeld (German for “whole field”) is created through sensory isolation of the receiver. The receiver is put into a soundproof room. His or her visual field is made uniform and featureless by covering his or her eyes with halves of ping-pong balls and bathing them with uniform red light. White noise is fed into his or her ears through earphones. Many ganzfeld experiments have been conducted with good success rates (Schlitz and Honorton, 1992; Bem and Honorton, 1994).

Distant viewing works with both psychic and non-psychic subjects, trained or untrained. (For details see Targ and Katra, 1998.)

Distant viewing works even at international distances (Schlitz and Gruber, 1980).

Distant viewing works between humans and dogs and even between humans and parrots (Sheldrake, 1999).

TELEPATHIC DREAMS

The research of Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, and Alan Vaughan (1973) carried out at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, for over a decade, as mentioned in chapter 14, has established the validity of dream telepathy. In their many carefully controlled experiments, a subject (the receiver) was asked to sleep and dream; the dream state was monitored through observation of rapid eye movements and with electroencephalography (EEG). At the sign of REM, the researchers would alert a second subject (the sender) to view attentively a certain selected painting. At the end of each dream period, the receiver would be awakened and asked to talk about his or her dreams. The descriptions of the dreams (see Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan, 1973, for details) leave no doubt that the sender had affected the content of the receiver's dream through the telepathic transfer of information and meaning.

WHY PARAPSYCHOLOGY IS CONTROVERSIAL

If mind-to-mind nonlocal transfer of information and meaning is so well demonstrated, then why is ESP still controversial? Partly it is because ESP is such an affront to the belief system of the typical materialist scientist that it causes cognitive dissonance. Partly, and more important, it is because one can never guarantee 100 percent replicability of the data. This is actually quite consistent with quantum behavior. But our classical mindset gets agitated whenever the effort to replicate a parapsychological experiment shows ambiguous results.

In this connection, I will now discuss distant prayer-healing experiments. Can you be healed if I pray for you in your name at a distance without even knowing you?

This idea of “other healing” through prayer at a distance was proposed by the physician Larry Dossey in the early 1980s. This hypothesis was duly verified by the double-blind experiment of the physician Randolph Byrd (1988), working with a sample of 393 patients recovering from cardiac surgery. A Christian prayer group did the praying by randomly choosing names from a list of the patients, so neither the physician nor the patients knew who was the subject of their prayers. The healing rate of patients who were prayed for was found to be, statistically speaking, significantly higher than the healing rate of the control group.

But then, in the first decade of the 21st century, researchers convinced the Templeton Foundation to come up with a large grant for doing a repeat experiment on a larger scale. The experiment was carried out by Harvard physician Jeffrey Dusek and collaborators on 1,800 post-coronary bypass patients. The results (Benson et al., 2006) came out negative: no significant healing for patients who were prayed for.

The later experiment was supposedly more carefully planned and carried out, so what should we make out of the results? Were the earlier data faulty because of faulty procedure? One has to be very cautious here!

First of all, if quantum nonlocality is responsible for the distant healing, then all other quirkiness of quantum physics must be allowed to enter the scene. And one quirky part of quantum physics is the statistical nature of quantum events. This statistical nature precludes complete replicability in any case.

Second, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Goswami, 2004), “other healing” ultimately is self-healing, which is creative. So all the uncertainties of creative phenomena further complicate the results. Creativity en masse is very difficult to attain!

Third, there is some evidence that the potency of parapsychological evidence of a particular kind seems to decrease as more studies accumulate and as expectations grow.

Fourth, there is the well-known observer effect that Marilyn Schlitz has demonstrated over the years. The intention of the observer affects the result of parapsychological experiments.

Fifth, this is related to previous ones. I personally think that quantum creative downward causation, nonlocal or not, can be used for large enough samples to be statistically significant only to a limited extent. As I pointed out earlier, for large samples, consciousness tends to give up the creative potency of individual choice and allows the probabilistic law of quantum physics to take over. There is a tug-of-war here between the power of intention and the power of randomness to prevail. Quantum physics says that for large enough samples, randomness is bound to prevail.

Under these circumstances, the most sensible research strategy is to choose a sample size and do the experiment tongue-in-cheek. If we get a negative result, the conclusion is clear: the sample size is too large. So we reduce the sample size until we get a positive result. So what does the positive result prove? Statistics unambiguously tells us the odds against the particular deviation from randomness that we have observed in our data.

So you see, by this criterion, both the San Francisco and the Harvard experiments are explained.

IS QUANTUM NONLOCALITY THE CORRECT THEORY OF ESP?

So finally, is the nonlocality exhibited in distant viewing an example of quantum nonlocality? Parapsychologists hesitate to accept this idea because of the Eberhard theorem, which purports to have proven that no information can be transferred using quantum nonlocality. I have repeatedly pointed out (Goswami, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004) that for information transfers between brains and minds, in which consciousness collapses the synchronistic events that constitute the transfer of information, Eberhard's theorem does not apply. And of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. My theoretical idea has been verified by the replicated transferred potential experiments (Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., 1994; Fenwick and Fenwick et al., 1998; Standish et al., 2004).

Let's discuss the latest experiment of this series (Standish et al., 2004), which was designed much like a distant viewing experiment, except that EEG machines were used to demonstrate a “physical” and objective transferred potential. Two subjects were chosen satisfying the following criteria: knowing each other well, having previous emotional and psychological connections, and having experience in meditation and other introspective techniques. One person (the sender) was instructed to send an image or a thought and the other (the receiver) was instructed to remain open to receive any image or thought from the sender during the experiment. The sender and receiver were put into sensory-isolated rooms ten meters apart and their brains were connected to individual EEG machines. The sender was alternately subjected to visual stimulation (stimulus on) and then no visual stimulation (stimulus off). The receiver didn't receive any light stimulation. In spite of this, the EEG of the receiver detected a signal whenever the sender's brain was stimulated (was under stimulus on condition).

As I have stated earlier, the only explanation of the transferred potential is that consciousness collapses the similar events in correlated brains. In this kind of experiment, information is transferred nonlocally between brains by virtue of quantum consciousness. By comparing a transferred potential with the very weak brain potential you get for a control subject, you can tell that a subject is sending information and when. Clearly, Eberhard's theorem is violated when consciousness is involved in the transfer of information.

The explanation of quantum nonlocality via quantum consciousness should hold for mental telepathy as well as for distant viewing: consciousness collapses similar events of meaning in correlated minds.

Unfortunately, the parapsychological community seems to be a little squeamish about accepting the primacy of consciousness. Perhaps now that so much evidence has accumulated in favor of a nonlocal quantum consciousness explanation, parapsychologists will see the light (in a flash) and abandon their somewhat hidden materialist prejudice.