Telepathy and Clairvoyance

Jane Henry

Telepathy refers to mind-to-mind communication without the intervention of the senses, e.g knowing what somebody is about to say. Clairvoyance refers to the mind picking up information from the environment, e.g knowing which card is about to be turned over or what horse will win a race. They are both forms of ESP or extra- sensory perception, a term which covers any communication between an organism and the environment that is essentially psychic in nature, i.e that cannot not accounted for by sensory contact, including subliminal cues or inference. ESP phenomena have been reported throughout history.

Around the turn of the century the early psychical researchers collected numerous accounts of psychic phenomena including telepathy and clairvoyance. One common type of telepathy experience is so called crisis telepathy, where individuals suddenly become conscious that someone they are mentally close to has died, even though they are physically distant.

Some early telepathy experiments were based round 'mental radio'. Here one person attempts to guess what another person has drawn. Psychologists are sceptical as to their significance as people such as husbands and wives who are close to each other often know each other well enough to predict what the other person is going to draw. Also even though they are free to draw anything, most people select their image from a limited and largely predictable set, which includes a house, a tree and a boat, (Sinclair 1962).

From the 1930s through to the 1950s Rhine conducted many so called 'forced-choice' experiments at Duke University in the US. Telepathy experiments involved a sender and a receiver; the sender turned over a card, for example, and tried to send the image mentally to the receiver. Clairvoyance experiments involved the subject guessing the image that the experimenter had turned over without even looking at it. Subjects had to guess the suits and numbers of a series of cards, the number on the face of a dice, or whether an image was a straight line, a cross, wavy lines, a circle or star (the images of the so called zener cards.) Subsequent meta-analyses of these experiments show a small but significant effect, i.e on average subjects do slightly better than chance even where the target is not selected until after they have made their guess precognitively (Honorton and Ferrari 1989).

More recently Honorton has introduced Ganzfeld experiments. These assume subjects will perform better at psychic tasks if sensory information is blocked out. They also let a machine randomly select the target (which is any one of a thousand-odd images). Meta-analyses of these experiments show very significant effects, possibly because the images are more interesting and/or because blocking out sensory information aids telepathy and clairvoyance (e.g Honorton 1985). Remote viewing experiments involve dispatching the sender to a randomly chosen location and asking them to attempt to convey the image to a distant receiver. The receiver draws and describes the location where they think the sender is. The statistical significance found in 'free choice' experiments like this is much stronger than that in forced choice experiments (Targ and Harary 1984). Another series of ESP experiments on, e.g knowing which card is about to be turned over or what horse will win a race. They are both forms of ESP or extra- sensory perception, a term which covers any communication between an organism and the environment that is essentially psychic in nature, i.e that cannot not accounted for by sensory contact, including subliminal cues or inference. ESP phenomena have been reported throughout history.

Around the turn of the century the early psychical researchers collected numerous accounts of psychic phenomena including telepathy and clairvoyance. One common type of telepathy experience is so called crisis telepathy, where individuals suddenly become conscious that someone they are mentally close to has died, even though they are physically distant.

Some early telepathy experiments were based round 'mental radio'. Here one person attempts to guess what another person has drawn. Psychologists are sceptical as to their significance as people such as husbands and wives who are close to each other often know each other well enough to predict what the other person is going to draw. Also even though they are free to draw anything, most people select their image from a limited and largely predictable set, which includes a house, a tree and a boat, (Sinclair 1962).

From the 1930s through to the 1950s Rhine conducted many so called 'forced-choice' experiments at Duke University in the US. Telepathy experiments involved a sender and a receiver; the sender turned over a card, for example, and tried to send the image mentally to the receiver. Clairvoyance experiments involved the subject guessing the image that the experimenter had turned over without even looking at it. Subjects had to guess the suits and numbers of a series of cards, the number on the face of a dice, or whether an image was a straight line, a cross, wavy lines, a circle or star (the images of the so called zener cards.) Subsequent meta-analyses of these experiments show a small but significant effect, i.e on average subjects do slightly better than chance even where the target is not selected until after they have made their guess precognitively (Honorton and Ferrari 1989).

More recently Honorton has introduced Ganzfeld experiments. These assume subjects will perform better at psychic tasks if sensory information is blocked out. They also let a machine randomly select the target (which is any one of a thousand-odd images). Meta-analyses of these experiments show very significant effects, possibly because the images are more interesting and/or because blocking out sensory information aids telepathy and clairvoyance (e.g Honorton 1985). Remote viewing experiments involve dispatching the sender to a randomly chosen location and asking them to attempt to convey the image to a distant receiver. The receiver draws and describes the location where they think the sender is. The statistical significance found in 'free choice' experiments like this is much stronger than that in forced choice experiments (Targ and Harary 1984). Another series of ESP experiments that asked people to dream images related to ESP targets was also successful (Ulirnan et al 1973).

Meta-analyses of telepathy and clairvoyance experiments have often shown strikingly positive results. In addition the effect found is consistently much larger in ESP than that found in psychokinesis or mind-over-matter experiments. The effect for ESP experiments is also much greater than that found in many medical experiments, for example the well-known effect of aspirin on heart attack reduction (Radin 1997). Sceptics can discount positive ESP results in less well-controlled experiments as being due to sensory leakage, inference or fraud. However where, as is normally the case now, experimenters announce in advance that they intend to do an ESP experiment and use automated target selection, coding and judging, it is hard to write off the extraordinarily significant effects found in meta-analyses of telepathy and clairvoyance experiments as nothing more than chance.

Jane Henry is a senior lecturer at the Open University. Chairs BPS Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section. Also chairs OU MBA Creative Management and Creativity, Innovation and Change programmes. Editor of 'Consciousness and Experiential Psychology'. Books include 'A-Z Parapsychology' (1999); 'Creativity and Cognition; Creative Management' 2nd ed; 'Managing Innovation and Change' (1999).

Key texts

Books: Henry and Radin are particularly recommended.

Henry, J. (2000) A-Z of Parapsychology, London: Routledge
Designed to provide a reliable but accessible introduction to research in and explanations for ESP. Contains chapters describing the parapsychological phenomena in question, the research that has been done in the area and explanations for the phenomena.

Radin, D. (1997) The Conscious Universe, San Francisco: Harper Edge
Offers an introduction to parapsychology by one of the leading researchers in the field. Chapter 5 concerns telepathy. Chapters 4, 6 and 7 are also relevant.

Edge, H., Morris, R.L., Palmer, J. and Rush, J. H. (1986) Foundations of Parapsychology, London: Routledge
A text of parapsychology, more advanced reading containing further details of ESP experiments.

Honorton, C. (1985) 'Meta-analysis ofpsi Ganzfeld research: A response to Hyman.' Journal of Parapsychology, 49, p51-91
A key researcher discusses the important meta-analysis of the Ganzfeld data base and attempts to refute sceptics' criticisms and suggest a way forward.

Ullman, M., Krippner, S. and Vaughan, A. (1973) Dream Telepathy, New York: MacMillan
Describes the Maimonades dream telepathy experiments Targ, R. and Harary, K. (1984) The Mind Race, New York: Villard Books Describes the SRI remote viewing experiments.

Sinclair, U. (1962) Mental Radio, Springfield.
Charles Thomas Describes Sinclair's mental radio experiments with his wife. An easy read.

Honorton, C. and Ferrari, D. (1989) 'A meta-analysis of forced-choice pre-cognition experiments', 1935-87, Journal of Parapsychology, 53, 281-308
An analysis of precognitive ESP experiments. Rather technical.

Website: Koestler Parapsychology Lab http://moebious.psy.ed.ac.uk
The Edinburgh University Koestler Lab web page offer further information on telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological phenomena plus abstracts from the European Journal of Psychology.

Organisation: The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) at 49 Marloes Rd, Kensington, London W8 6LA has a good library on ESP. They also have a series of fact sheets on various parapsychological phenomena

Conference: The SPR run a conference in the UK every autumn at which researchers present their latest findings.

Journals: The main journals in this area are:
The European Journal of Psychology,
The Journal of Society for Psychical Research,
The Journal of Parapsychology,
The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,
The Journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration.
They are available SPR members in the SPR library.