This section provides an overview of several issues that arise when discussing parapsychology. You can use the subcontents menu at the right to navigate through the issues.

For over two millennia, people all over the world have reported experiencing psychic phenomena (referred to as the second sight, the third, eye, the sixth sense, etc.) ⁵, and for almost as long, scholars and scientists have been trying to understand what these mean. Even in this highly technological and scientific era, surveys have repeatedly shown that anywhere from one-half to three-fourths of the population have had experiences they believe to be psychic. For those that claim there is no evidence for parapsychological phenomena and no subject matter to study, these surveys show that there is indeed "a strong subject matter with a large initial data base" of reported experiences. Thus, the task that parapsychology is presented with is how to explain these experiences.

The first step in dealing with these experiences is to determine how well "normal" or conventional explanations interpret the experiences. Investigators must consider such factors as malobservation, faulty memory, or deceit. If all normal explanations fail to explain the experience adequately, then there exists what is termed an anomaly, something that science at its present stage is unable to explain. "Anomalies are what fuel scientific advances, and persisting anomalies force science to revise its theories and bring about a new and more complete understanding of nature."

Parapsychology (and its predecessor, psychical research,) deals with confronting those anomalies that are connected with the human mind. (The foundations for parapsychology as a science were created by Dr. J.B. Rhine in 1930.) Over the decades, parapsychologists have developed a classification system of the phenomena. Broadly speaking, there are two main abilities with which parapsychology in concerned (collectively termed psi): extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK).

Many reports have also arisen regarding reincarnation, hauntings, and poltergeists. Early psychical researchers proposed that the investigation of these phenomena could provide evidence to demonstrate that human beings have a soul, "or an independently existing consciousness that is separate from the body and even survives the death of the body."

There are also certain types of phenomena that involve both parapsychology and orthodox medical and psychological fields. These include near death experiences (NDE's) and out-of-body experiences (OBE's). The near death experiences, reported by people who are brought back from near death, are of interest to some parapsychologists for what these reports have to offer to the life-after-death issue. Out-of-body experiences, sometimes called astral projection or traveling clairvoyance, interest some parapsychologists because of what they indicate about the possibility of "the mind detaching itself from the body." Psychologists typically regard both experiences as hallucinations.

It must be noted that, when dealing with various scientific anomalies, "the absence of a normal explanation does not mean that something paranormal is happening. It only means that there is one more class of unusual phenomena that deserves further investigation." Typically, there are three investigative approaches that parapsychologists take when researching psi phenomena: the case-study approach, the field investigation, and the experimental method.

The case-study approach to psi phenomena is a good way for researchers to begin studying psychic experiences. A case study typically consists of a testimonial about an unusual experience that a person might label psychic. "However, case-study investigators have always been aware of the problems inherent in basing investigations on human testimony. Faulty memory or the natural tendency to mold perceptions to expectations or to embellish or reinterpret memories are ever-present hazards, not to mention the possibility of outright fraud." Even so, in many cases the evidence is very compelling.

While the case study method remains an important part of parapsychology today, case collections alone can never be sufficient to establish the reality of psi phenomena, primarily because they consist of reports on what people "think about their experiences, not what those experiences actually are." ¹ The greatest usefulness of case studies has always been "to shape and guide experimental efforts, to provide hypotheses for experimental verification, to indicates how psi phenomena occurs in ordinary life, and to reveal how people interpret and cope with information that appears to be paranormally acquired."

Field investigations present opportunities for parapsychologists to investigate apparent psi effects of a magnitude far greater than what is typically seen in the laboratory, and they also allow for research into the psychological and sociological effects of such phenomena (for example, how such phenomena is interpreted by the witnesses, how it has affected their lives, how their cultural beliefs have affected their view of the experience, etc). ¹ Some of the more well known field investigations usually involve hauntings or poltergeists.

Unfortunately, field investigations usually also bring with them "a large number of potential pitfalls. Typically, a field investigation is hurried and somewhat improvised, and all too frequently the circumstances are such that conscious or unconscious fraud on the part of some of the affected parties is a distinct possibility." As a result, field investigations are not particularly common in current parapsychological research.

As fascinating as the case studies and the field investigations are, they ultimately leave the parapsychologist with nothing more than a collection of stories. Despite the most detailed documentation, the evidence for psi will not be present in the amounts necessary to establish scientific fact. For this end, parapsychologists use the experimental approach.

The experimental method has been a part of parapsychology from the very beginning. However, it was the work of J.B. Rhine at Duke University in the early 1930's that established the experimental method as the primary means of investigating psi phenomena. "This emergence of parapsychology as an experimental science finally made the rest of the scientific world take notice."

The early experimental research, conducted by psychical researchers, used a deck of playing cards to test for ESP. One isolated person would concentrate on a card and try and send the identity of that card to another isolated person. In this experiment, the odds of making a correct guess by chance alone was 51-to-one, so if the receiver was able to correctly guess substantially more than one out of fifty-two cards, then the experimenter could conclude that something other than chance was involved.

Using playing cards, however, had some shortcomings. For example, even if a person was able to guess cards correctly quite a bit more than chance would predict, he or she would still be getting most of the guesses wrong, resulting in lower morale on the part of the subject. Rhine's solution to this problem was to create a better card deck.

Working with colleague Karl Zener, Rhine developed the famous ESP cards, which have been used in thousands of experiments since the early 1930's (this experiment, however, has not been used significantly since the 1960's, when new experiments were designed to eliminate boring, forced-choice guessing). The five symbols, a star, a circle, a squiggly line, a square, and a plus sign, were selected because "they are easy to tell apart, easy to remember, and of roughly equal visual weight." Five were chosen because a one-in-five chance hit-ratio seemed about right for holding a subject's interest. Five of each symbol were included to create a conveniently sized deck of twenty-five cards.

The core procedure of Rhine's early experiment was to have a subject guess the sequence of the symbols in a well shuffled deck, and often a subject would go through many decks in a sitting. For a deck of twenty-five cards, one would expect on average that five cards would be guessed correctly by pure chance. This is called the mean chance expectation, or the MCE. The point of the experiment, however, is to see whether the subjects can guess correctly more often than chance would predict. "In order to determine when someone exceeds chance's boundary, Rhine turned to the field of statistics."

The aim of the statistical tests is to determine whether a particular experimental result could be explained by chance variation in the scores. For example, suppose that a subject goes through five decks of cards. Of the 250 cards, chance would predict that they would correctly guess 50 cards. By chance, they may also correctly predict 55, or 45, but is it just chance variation if someone correctly guesses 75 cards?

By using a simple statistical formula, the experimenter can determine what the odds against chance are, that is, the odds against chance alone accounting for the event. In social sciences, the convention is that when odds against chance for a given result are better than one-in-twenty, then chance is ruled out and the result is said to be significant. In many parapsychology experiments, however, the experimenter may hold out for odds against chance of one-in-100, or even one-in-1000 before he is willing to say that chance is ruled out as an explanation. Using the previous example, the chance of guessing 75 cards correctly is one-in-1000, so one would say that chance has been ruled out as an explanation for that result.

It is important to note that a statistical test does not automatically determine that ESP was demonstrated. It merely gives researchers a certain confidence that the results were not simply chance variation. "Whether or not one is willing to say that the high score was due to ESP depends on how well the controls of the experiment were exercised." For example, in an ESP experiment, the experimenter must make sure there was no way the person could have inferred the cards from use of the normal senses. Similarly, in PK tests, the experimenter must ensure that there was no way the subject could have affected the test equipment by normal means. "It is precisely the issue of whether or not the experimenter has ruled out all normal explanations that is at the heart of the controversy that rages about parapsychology."

If all the controls are adequate, then the experimenter can claim to have demonstrated "communication anomalies," which parapsychologists have termed ESP. Parapsychologists must also determine what is behind these anomalies, what patterns and regularities can be uncovered. Are certain personality types more successful in ESP experiments than others? Can conditions be created in the lab to facilitate ESP? Can it be learned? Parapsychologists are beginning to develop ideas to answer these questions.

Presently, parapsychologists do not know for certain if psychic ability is something everyone has, but they do know that psychic experiences are widespread.

On the one hand, there are claims that 'everyone has psychic abilities, they just have to learn how to use them', but there is no evidence supporting these claims. "Having an experience does not necessarily translate into having an ability a person can use at will." However, on the other hand, there are so many people who report experiences that seem to involve ESP, or less commonly PK, that parapsychologists cannot help but entertain the possibility that psychic phenomena are the result of some sort of ability that may be widely distributed in the population or perhaps even universal.

What is more certain, however, is the prospect that psi ability may be something "that is unconscious in its operation...[meaning that] in most cases people cannot turn it on and off at will."

This issue, then, raises the question of what type of people are more apt to display psi abilities. The results of several dozen experiments have given parapsychologists the ability to venture a few hypotheses as to the type of person who is most likely to succeed in an ESP test.

Parapsychologists have found that people who believe in the existence of psychic phenomena (called "sheep") are more likely to do better in ESP tests, while those who do not believe in the existence of psychic phenomena (called "goats") often do more poorly than chance would predict.

The other characteristics that are considered optimal for ESP test performance is dependent upon the personality theory developed by Carl Jung, today called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI divides the personality into four main aspects and considers people as one of two types within these aspects. None of these types are considered negative, however, since it is believed that all personality types are desirable for a healthy society.

The first division is labeled extroversion/introversion (E/I). Extroverts are those who are oriented more towards people and the world around them, while introverts are those whose orientation is more inward.

The second division describes a person's perceptual style as being either sensing or intuitive (S/N). Sensing types are more comfortable with concrete, practical matters, while intuitive types are more comfortable with "abstractions, inferred meanings, and hidden possibilities."

The third division deals with one's decision-making style, which can be either thinking or feeling (T/F). Thinking types are best at "organizing material, weighing facts, and making true-false judgments impersonally", while feeling types are best at "understanding the feelings of others and analyzing subjective impressions...and are usually very interested in human values and interpersonal relationships."

The final division is concerned with the way a person deals with the outer world, which can be either judging or perceiving (J/P). Judging types are typically "organized and systematic...living in a planned, orderly way, aiming to regulate life and control it." Perceiving types are "more curious and open-minded...tending to go through life in a flexible, spontaneous way, aiming to understand life and adapt to it."

So, for example, a person who is an introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging type would be labeled as an INFJ. What some parapsychologists have found is that those who are ENFP's on the MBTI scale are more likely to perform well on ESP tests.

Other factors include whether or not the person has felt that he or she has experienced any psychic phenomena in the past and whether or not the person practices any mental discipline, such as meditation. Those who have had experiences that they believe to be psychic and those who regularly engage in activities such as meditation are more likely to perform well in psychic tests.

This is not to say, however, that these are the only people who display psychic abilities. For example, extroverts may be labeled as being more likely to possess psychic ability simply because their personality lends itself to showing it. Introverts, on the other hand, by nature are not likely to reveal much about themselves, therefore their ability may not be as easily witnessed by experimenters. These classifications merely help to define what type of people are expected to show more psychic ability than others.

Although there is great public interest in the topic, the popular scientific press often print vicious attacks on parapsychological research and on the researchers themselves. Parapsychology is controversial, there is no doubt about that, "but why this is so turns out to be a fairly complicated issue."

"Fundamental to the controversy are the claims of parapsychology. Parapsychological hypotheses at the very least claim that humans can acquire information or affect external physical systems in ways that science, in its present state, cannot explain." If these claims are correct, then the existing worldview that science gives us will have to be modified.

Surveys have shown that an overwhelming majority of the public accept the reality of ESP or have had psychic experiences themselves, and that a majority of scientists consider ESP a likely possibility. Why, then, is it that there are hardly any parapsychology classes taught at universities or very many active research groups? The answer lies in the fact that surveys have also shown that only roughly 25% of those who run the scientific community believe in the reality of psi.

Conventional explanations of psi phenomena basically fall into two categories: incompetence on the part of the experimenter and fraud on the part of the claimer. Certainly these objections are not without basis, as there have been parapsychological experiments in which weaknesses (most of which have been caught by fellow parapsychologists) have been discovered, and there have been many people (such as mediums) who have reported having psychic powers and turned out to be frauds.

However, this does not negate the fact that experiments have shown that something is happening. As Charles Honorton and his colleagues began applying meta-analysis to parapsychology, they have consistently proven that the results of many parapsychological experiments are genuine and cannot be easily dismissed as chance, incompetence, or fraud. Also, the work of Helmut Schmidt has consistently disproved many of the critics' theories of incompetence, as he as successfully "fool-proofed" many of his experimental methods. Indeed, even Ray Hyman, a staunch critic of parapsychology, admitted that "by almost any standard, Schmidt's work is the most challenging ever to confront critics such as myself. His approach makes many of the earlier criticisms of parapsychological research obsolete."

However, not all scientists are skeptics about the reality of psi. Some scientists "maintain that certain axioms of quantum physics virtually demand that psi phenomena exist," and that some of the most convincing evidence in support of psi phenomena comes from experiments in quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics refers to the "behavior of matter at the subatomic level, where basic units are neither particles nor waves, but act like both, [and] where matter cannot even be said definitely to exist Rather, it has a 'tendency to exist,' expressed as a mathematical probability." ⁵

Now take for example the event in which "an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron, collide...and [create] two photons, which speed off in different directions." ⁵ The laws of quantum mechanics state that prior to measurement, particles such as photons do not have properties such as spin and velocity. Once the particle is measured, however, it's properties are found to have discrete values.

This means that the moment an observer measures the first photon, "causing it to acquire a certain spin, [the second photon] will acquire the opposite spin, no matter how far away it is, and despite having no connection with the first particle." ⁵ The second photon simply seems to know in which direction it must spin--hinting at the possibility of something like telepathy.

One question that arises from this type of experiment concerns the fact that the values that appear during measurement all have the same probability of occurring. So what is it, then, that determines the value? Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wagner suggested that consciousness itself was the hidden variable that decided which value actually occurs. Indeed, "the inescapable conclusion from this line of reasoning is that consciousness plays a role in what reality will be." This explanation resembles the experimental work being done with micro-PK.

It is on this path of experimentation that "parapsychology comes face to face with modern physics." Perhaps the research conducted by parapsychologists will help to answer some of the most fundamental questions science can ask, thereby fitting parapsychology into the common scientific worldview.

How does psi present itself in daily life? The topic of applied psi partially deals with answering this question. Stories from people who claim to have had psychic experiences, such as prophetic dreams or escaping death as a result of an intuition, raise the question of whether this is merely coincidence or applied psi.

If humans have the ability to acquire information without the normal senses and to alter the probabilities of events, then this ability is likely to have certain characteristics in common with other human abilities, and it will probably blend in seamlessly with these other abilities "so as not to call attention to itself and its unconventional way of operating."

This, however, raises an important question: if psi is a human ability like anything else, then what is it for? Parapsychologists do not know for sure, but Rex Stanford of St. John's University has come up with a theory known as PMIR (psi-mediated instrumental response). Stanford believes that a person uses psi to accomplish something that fulfills certain needs he or she has (called "functional significance"), though the person may not even know that they have these needs. (Another view of psi abilities is that it's purpose is the same as every other ability, which according to Darwinism, is survival.)

Using the PMIR theory, two possible examples of psi in ordinary life may be intuition and luck.

The conservative view of intuition is that it is "a judgment based on information that one already posseses...below the threshold of conscious awareness." The most liberal view of intuition is that it is "a direct, nonsensory perception of a truth...in a situation." It can be considered as a separate mental function, along with sensation, thinking, and feeling. Parapsychologists typically view intuitions as a mixture of normally acquired data and ESP.

Following the theory that psi in human life probably exists to be useful, one would suspect that PK, partially the ability to alter the probabilities of random events, "would look like our commonsense notion of luck." This means that certain individuals may unconsciously be using PK to get the random events of life to fall in their favor more often than chance would predict.

This does not mean, however, that every person has the guaranteed ability to psychically influence their surroundings. Like most other abilities, psi ability varies from person to person. "The exceptional individuals who come to light may simply be the psychic equivalent of rare geniuses or prodigies."

Applied psi also refers to the deliberate and controlled use of psi. The people who claim this ability, however, are wildly different. On one end of the spectrum are the "storefront psychics" who offer "readings" at a modest fee, and who may or may not be frauds, but for the most part cause no harm. On the other end of the spectrum are those individuals who claim astronomical abilities, and who will "demonstrate" them for outrageous fees. In the middle are those who believe their abilities to be genuine, and who offer their services to people without charge, or to cover expenses.

Some believe that practical applications of psi include using psychics to: help police officers during investigations, locate and identify archeological artifacts (similar to dowsing and psychometry, respectively), make business predictions (typically involving the stock market), and help heal the ill.

One of the principal growth areas for psi research may revolve around the relationship between the human mind and emerging technology. Since it has been determined that people are able to alter the probabilities of random events with PK, even in electronic systems (operating at suboptimal level and therefore causing random output), this is a possibility. For example, theories have been tossed around about creating a "psibot," or a robot that is capable of responding to human intention. "Such technologies would significantly benefit handicapped persons." ¹ While this may be far into the future, it is still a possibility.

Already there have been many studies performed in this area, such as the "Testing the Plausibility of Psi-Medited Computer System Failures" research done by Dean Radin, a scientist with Contel, the investigations done by the Princeton University's School of Engineering PEAR lab, and the investigations done by Robert Morris at the Syracuse University Computer Science Department.

A Basis for Study

Investigative Approaches

Psi Phenomena and the Ordinary Person

Controversies

Applied Psi

The Future of Psi