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NOT TO DE BULLISTED ON SERVAMAJT MITNOT
FRIOR RAYSRACE TO MIE 38C
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Recordod:
20.6.62
Tape No. :
73 TLU 162067
Duration: 8'55"
Producer: JOHN NEWELL
735 CB Bush
Direction: H. O.T. P.
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"RESEARCH PROJECT"
STAT
26. A Fresh Look at Extrasensory Perception
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by
Stephen I. Abrams
Transmissions:
GOS
Monday
25th June 1962
2020 GIA
GOS
Tuesday
26th June1962
1645 GMT
GOS
Wednesday 27th June 1962
0935 GMT
NAS
Thursday
28th June 1962
1640 GHT
OPENING ANNOUNCEMENT:
This is the General Overseas Service of the BBC. The last
talk in the series "RESEARCH PROJECT" is by Stephen Abrams,
Director of the new Oxford Parapsychological Laboratory. He calls
his talk "A Fresh Look at Extrasensory Perception".
ABRAMS :
Some months ago I was conducting a routine experiment in
hypnosis, using an Oxford undergraduate as my subject.
I decided
to see if I could set up a post-hypnotic suggestion;
this is,
e hypnotically conditioned response that would persist in the
waking state.
I told the subject that his first cigarette after
waking would taste foul. He woke up, took a puff on a cigarette
and said it was vile. I gave him another, which tasted OK. There
were several persons present and they became involved in an
animated conversation, when I noticed the bad cigarette burning in
the ash tray.
I waited until the subjectput down the OK cigarette
and then switched cigarettes.
He picked up the bad cigarette,
thinking it was the OK one, and complained about its taste, which
made him ill.
We tried this several more times and always got
the right answer.
I was able to repeat this result with several
other subjects.
This curious ability of hypnotized persons to discriminate
between two cigarettes looks like "extrasensory perception", or
ESP as I am going to call it from now on - response to an external
event or idea where ordinary communication is blocked out. I am
not much worried about whether "ESP" really worked in this instance,
The important thing was that the incident suggested new
departures in research.
:
Previously, evidence for ESP had been based on experiments
in card guessing, where subjects tried to reproduce the order of
a pack of cards out of sight and hearing.
In some experiments
the odds in favour of ESP and against chance coincidence were of
the order of billions to one. But these results proved difficult
to repeat and there is reason to believe that such experiments
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do not exploit the full range of ways in which ESF might appear
and that they, in fact, put serious obstacles in its way.
Certainly card guessing is only a faint, if sometimes persistant,
echo of spontaneous ESP experiences, such as having a clear vision
of circumstances surrounding the death of a relative or friend.
Consider the ways in which cigarette tasting differs from card
guessing.
The subject is not told to"try " to "guess" correctly;
the answer occurs to him through involuntary activation of a
conditioned sensory process.
This resembles the spontaneous cases,
where the subject does not deliberately invoke ESP but allows it
to occur.
Thus hypnosis suggests itself as a particularly
favourable experimental environment.
Hypnotized subjects'
motivations are easily manipulated over a wider range, and the
experimenter has special control over his subject's actions and
attention. Lord Kelvin once said that half of hypnosis and
clairvoyance was imposture and the rest bad observation. He may
have been completely wrong.
A program of ESP research began at Oxford University last year
in the newly established parapsychological laboratory.
One of the
projects under way involves putting people into hypnotic sleep and
waking them up by "thought transference".
Our initial success in
this project was again fortuitous.
I had told a hypnotized subject,
a girl studying at the Sorbonne, that she would lapse into a trance
when I clapped my hands, a convenient shortcut for re-hypnosis.
I was sitting in a cabaret that she was also visiting, and several
times she went into a trance, and I had to go to her table and wake
her. Each time the band finished playing a mumber I joined in the
applause, and this faint stimulus apparently put her in a trance.
She might have heard me clap, but under better conditions, where
sensory. perception was ruled out, I was able to put her to sleep and
awaken her at a distance of 100 yards and across several rooms,
Similar experiments were conducted in France in the nineteenth
century, /and have recently been repeated in Leningrad with elaborate
recording apparatus and careful precautions against experimental
error.
The Oxford research group are particularly interested in the
use of ESP signals to initiate simple conditioned reflexes. The
subject might clap his hands or burst into laughter - knowing what
he is doing, but not controlling his actions - when a light flashes
on in a sealed box or an experimenter in another room thinks of a
code word.
In choosing the reflex behaviour we want to study, we
are exploring simple modes of sensory experience, such as taste and
touch.
The possibility of "transmitting" drawings of simple objects
by ESP is also under study, and special mathematical techniques have
been devised to analyze the results.
Copying drawings by ESP is
obviously not a hit or miss proposition, but some information
apparently gets through, often in distorted or disguised form.
On
one occasion a subject responded to a picture of a church by
drawing a horse. But the horse was of the same shape as the outline
of the church, and in fact had spots on it : representing, I think,
windows. We are therefore studying the associations of the subjects
and the distortions and symbolism of their responses to explore the
principles and dynamics of more complex extra.sensory perceptions.
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The new experimental work I have oited gives my colleagues
and me reason to believe that a reliable source of high grade ESP
may have been tapped in experiments concerned with involuntary"
responses of hypnotized subjects. It is difficult to suggest a
mechanism by which these and other ESP effects might occur.
Perhaps ESP information is propagated by radio waves of some
unknown frequency. This is a possibility suggested before the
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turn of the century by Sir William Crookes and, curiously enough;
by Mark Twain. It has received serious consideration in Russia,
where ESP subjects have been placed in electromagnetically shielded
chambers which cancel out radio waves. In most of the Russian
research these chambers seemed to cancel out ESP as well and so td
support the "mental radio" hypothesis. But in experiments in
distance hypnosis conducted by Professor Leonid Vasiliev of
Leningrad the use of lead chambers hermetically sealed with mercur
had no effect on highly positive results.
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My own impression is that at the present stage of investigation,
psychological explanations are likely to be of greater value in
predicting and controlling ESP behaviour than investigations of
hypothetical physical factors like radio waves.
I am reminded
of a classic experiment by J.G. Pratt and Jack Woodruff of Duke
University who wished to study differences in card guessing scores
as a function of the size of the symbols and found that the scores
increased temporarily each time a new stimulus size was introduced
into the experiment. They found evidence linking ESP with
novelty, not with the size of
symbols. This is a common
finding in ESP research.
The search for a physical dimension
fails and ends in the discovery of a psychological dimension.
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I am sure that many listeners find the concept of ESP
unpalatable and perhaps impossible to swallow.
. I can only remind
them of the advice the White Queen gave to Alice, who couldn't
believe impossible things.
"Try again;
draw a long breath and
shut your eyes."
In this way the White Queen believed as many
.
as six impossible things before breakfast.
CLOSING ANNOUNCEMENT :
The last talk in "RESEARCH PROJECT" was given by Stephen Abrams,
Director of the Oxford Parapsychological. Laboratory. .
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