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PARAPSYCHOLOGY
TELEPATHY
COULD BE
REAL
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
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
that it's all swamp grass doesn't make if his efforts go unrewarded. If a psychic
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
learning theorists call an extinction
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
warning of which light was about to go
hides under bladFor Releases2004/03/26 PiCIA-RDP96-00787R0002000800-50+9at information
The fact that lots of people are jeering
peck a key for food will eventually stop mentally to the receiver, who sat in

Approved For Releas
787R000200080050-9
scores at other times and found a sig-
nificant difference. The husband's
scores, meanwhile, were virtually
identical in both conditions (see the
chart at bottom of this page).
In another series of games, Fouts's
Scribbage-playing telepather tried to
help as well as interfere with his wife's
performance. As before, negative
thoughts seemed to produce lower
scores, but attempts to raise her scores
failed.
The victim in these Scribbage
studies was not aware of her husband's
efforts, or even that an experiment was
under way. Fouts admits that the inter-
ference that took place might have
come from nonverbal cues, such as
changes in the husband's body posture,
rather than from telepathic influence.
It is interesting to note, however, that
during the interference sessions the
wife sometimes commented, "I can't
think ... my mind is blank."
Researchers have tried to strengthen
other paranormal skills such as pre-
cognition and clairvoyance. In general,
their efforts have supported the notion
that paranormal skills can be en-
hanced, or at least maintained, with
feedback. But Tart is quick to admit
that even his best students did not
show the rapid improvement you
might expect with more ordinary
skills. What's needed, he argues, is
more sophisticated feedback. Even a
talented person gets little information
from being told that he guessed correct-
ly. A pat on the head tells him he did
something right, but it doesn't tell him
what that something was.
Brain Signals. The problem is further
complicated by the fact that some
guesses are just that, guesses. But the
psychic has no way of knowing when a
correct answer came from psychic in-
sight and when it was just a lucky stab.
To beat that problem, researchers will
have to find a psychic indicator,
perhaps a kind of cerebral knee-jerk
like the response a brain makes to a
sudden noise. Each time the brain sig-
naled the arrival of a telepathic mes- .
sage, the researcher could cue the
psychic. This way, the psychic should
be able to learn to distinguish extraor-
dinary intuition from ordinary co-
incidence.
There's some evidence that the brain
does know more than it's telling us.
Charles Tart wired up 11 college stu-
dents to record their brain waves and
¥240
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:220
210
200
(wife)
-190
180
170
no interference
: Interference
no interference
interference
RESULT OF INTERFERENCE The higher scores of the husband show little change,
while the wife's scores dipped when the husband tried to
Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R0002006800509and nut
left them alone. Tart then went to
another room and wired himself to a
machine that gave him electric shocks
at random intervals. The idea was to
see whether the students' brain waves.
would be different when Tart was get-
ting jolted than when he wasn't. They
were. The difference wasn't the sort
that would leap out at you from the
pattern of wavy lines on an elec-
troencephalograph, but a piece of
equipment called a Period Analyzer
picked it up. We're still a long way
from having a psychic thermometer,
but researchers at Stanford Research
Institute in Palo Alto, California in-
tend to continue the search.
In a recent poll conducted by the Na-
tional Opinion Research Center, 58
percent of those surveyed said that
they believed they had had one or more
telepathic experiences. But even the
baptized believer in parapsychology
has to admit that it is a field with some
mushy ground. It is hard to find a study
that doesn't have a lot of ifs and
maybes in it. And psychic researchers
rarely have the hard, oaklike quality of
pigeon-tutor B.F. Skinner or neuro-
psychologist D.O. Hebb.
The conversation of parapsy-
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
miracle workers were fakes. Those
skinny fellows &
on page 65.7
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY FABRIL
FebruAry 1976
44
average Scribbage scores
(husband)

Telepathy (Continued from page 44.)
. diets and theis vedeFor Release 20
and put their guts through 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
that.
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.
Paul Chance joined psychology today in 1972
as Manuscripts Editor and became assistant
managing editor a year
ago. He took a master's
degree in counseling
from the University of
Northern Colorado and a
Ph.D. in psychology from
Utah State University. A
rigorous methodologist,
Chance went to Tart's lab
to see his telepathy setup. For more 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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