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Space, Time, and Mind : Presidential address by Charles T. Tart to Parapsychological Association, 1977 concerning 'trans-temporal liberat
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Presidential Address, 1977, 20th annual meeting, Parapsychological
Association. This was published under this title in W. Roll (Ed.),
"Research in Parapsychology 1977." Metuchen, NJ: 1978: Scarecrow Press,
pp. 197-250.
SPACE, TIME, AND MIND
Charles T. Tart
In recent years I have discovered something which has
undoubtedly been discovered by many others before me, but its
full significance only becomes clear when you personally make
this discovery for yourself. This discovery is that the most
exciting ideas often occur when you start taking closer looks at
things that are apparently obvious to everyone, things that are
so accepted that they become largely implicit habits of thought.
I have called my talk this evening, "Space, Time, and Mind"
because these are three things that we all take for granted
almost all of the time. If you want to know what space is, you
look around: if you want to be more precise about it, you take
out a ruler and measure it. If you want to know what time is,
you can simply feel time passing by, or you can use a clock and
measure it more precisely. In almost all cases we don't wonder
what space and time are, we simply use our rulers and clocks
without thinking. It is a similar case with the mind: we very
seldom ask ourselves questions about what the mind is, but we use
our minds (hopefully!) in almost every action of our life.
Our field of parapsychology is an excellent one for
providing the opportunity to think more deeply about space, time,
and mind. Every time that we deal with real time psi, such as
telepathy or clairvoyance, we are confronted with instances of
something that seems paradoxical in terms of our ordinary,
physical concepts of space: we arrange conditions so there is
too much space or too many barriers in space for information to
get from one point to another, yet sometimes it gets there.
Whenever we set up a precognition experiment and obtain
significant results, both our "common sense" and most physicists'
notions about the nature of time are paradoxically violated.
These apparent "violations" of our accepted conceptual framework
about space and time should serve as a constant reminder that the
most generally accepted scientific concept of the mind, that it
is totally equivalent to brain and nervous system processes, is
too limited: whatever the mind is, it does not seem to be fully
understandable within the ordinary conceptual framework of space
and time.
What I want to share with you this evening are the results
of almost two years of analyses and struggle with the
implications of some data of mine about time, and some of its
implications about mind. This has been the most exciting work of
my parapsychological career! The data also has implications
about space, but I will not stress these implications because, in
many ways, they are familiar to this very select group:
regardless of how profound the implications of psi phenomena
seeming to violate our general concepts about physical space are,
we are quite familiar with the violations, and seldom get
excited. I stress the time implications because personally they
have been exciting, puzzling, and frustrating to me. Perhaps the
most important personal discovery that I made from the work I
shall be describing to you is that while I believed, as a result
of the parapsychological data on it, in precognition, I did not
believe in precognition at all! I discovered that while I had
studied the experimental and spontaneous case evidence for
precognition for many years, and had lectured extensively on the
reality of precognition, that belief existed in isolation on a
purely intellectual level. On a deeper level, I found that I did
not believe in precognition at all: the idea of a future that
somehow existed and affected the present was just so ridiculous
that it had no reality at all for the rest of my psyche. When I
found that extremely significant precognitive effects had, as it
were, snuck into my own laboratory while I wasn't looking,
considerable intellectual conflict resulted, but I think the long
term results have been very profitable. Let me begin getting
more specific now.
I believe most of us here accept the existence of several
basic psi phenomena: we have studied reams of experimental
evidence, collected under very good conditions, and we know
something is happening that requires explanation. We also know
that the implications of the existence of psi are very important
for our understanding of space, time, and mind. Unfortunately,
our efforts to understand the nature of psi, even though they are
still in the beginning state, are progressing very slowly. Some
of the major problems that inhibit the efficient study of the
nature of psi are its unreliability, its overall level of
manifestation, and the prevalence of decline effects.
A decade ago, a survey that Burke Smith and I carried out
(Tart & Smith, 1967; Tart, 1973) suggested that about one in
three experiments carried out by members of this Association
showed statistically significant evidence for psi. While that is
far more than one would expect if there were no such thing as
psi, it is not a terribly good track record.
Second, even when we do get psi, that usually means we have
results significant at, say, the .05 or .01 level: the vast
majority of the time, the percipients are simply guessing, with a
little flash of psi once in a great while. In engineering terms,
we have a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, which makes study of
the characteristics of psi, the signal, very difficult.
Further, even when we find a good percipient, he seldom can
keep his ability. As J. B. Rhine put it so pointedly in 1947:
"As a rule a subject spoils as he continues long at the
same test...nothing could be more calculated to make the
experimenter wring his hands in despair than to watch a good
performer go bad, as so many have done with time. ...all of the
high scoring subjects who have kept on very long have declined,
whether or not any incident occurred. ...it is a baffling field
of research. We destroy the phenomena in the very act of trying
to demonstrate them. Evidently the tests themselves get in the
way of the abilities they are designed to measure. ...obviously
it cannot be brought under reliable control, either for
experimental study or for practical utility as long as this is
the case....." (Rhine, 1947, Pp. 189-190).
Sometimes I think it is rather heroic of us to continue
working on trying to understand the nature of psi under these
difficult conditions. Heroic as it is, though, I don't expect
very rapid progress in understanding to be made under these
circumstances. Thus I have thought for a long time that one of
our major concerns should be finding some way of greatly
increasing the reliability and level of psi in our experiments.
Toward this end, I theorized some ten years ago (Tart, 1966) that
some important aspects of the problems I've just noted resulted
from a lack of immediate feedback to percipients, so they could
not learn to distinguish the subtle characteristics of mental
events that indicated they were actually using psi from mere
guessing processes. I have elaborated the theory of how to teach
people more reliable psi performance via immediate feedback at
considerable length, and I shall present a paper on it tomorrow
morning (Tart, 1977a; 1977b). The data I want to report tonight
come from my and my colleagues' (John Palmer and Dana Redington)
two studies attempting to teach more reliable psi performance
with immediate feedback training, and so I shall review briefly
the experimental procedures used there, but not the results of
the effects of feedback on learning. Rather I shall present
results dealing with unexpected precognition effects. The data
on learning per se, as well as more details of the experimental
procedures, can be found elsewhere (Palmer, Tart, & Redington,
1976; Tart, 1975a, 1976a; Tart, Palmer, & Redington, submitted
for publication).
General Experimental Procedures
Figure 1 [sorry the figures won't reproduce in an ASCII
file] gives an overview of the general procedure of my
first and second studies of feedback training.* Since my
learning theory (Tart, 1966) predicted that experimental
percipients needed to have some demonstrable ESP to begin with if
the feedback training was to have much effect, we needed
relatively talented percipients, rather than unselected ones. As
percipients who can demonstrate individually significant ESP in a
short period of testing are generally considered to be relatively
rare, a two-stage selection procedure preceded the formal
Training Study in each case. In the first stage, teams of
student experimenters, trained by me in my Experimental
Psychology class at UC Davis, gave quick ESP card-guessing tests
to large classes of UC Davis students.
------begin note
*In the second Training Study we did record individual trial
target and response data, but as only three percipients worked
with the Aquarius in the second Training Study, this was too
little data to look for the sort of relationships described
later.
-------end note
Students who showed individually significant ESP hitting in
this initial Selection Study stage were invited to the second
stage, the Confirmation Study.
As we know, screening hundreds of percipients is bound to
produce some who score high by chance alone, so this second,
*I would like to thank the est Foundation, The Institute for the
Study of Human Knowledge, and the Parapsychology Foundation for
financial and administrative support on these studies, as well as
my many colleagues and assistants.
Confirmation Study where each student was individually tested was
necessary to weed out most of the false positive scores.
Students who scored well in both the Selection and Confirmation
Studies were invited to enter the Training Study. This procedure
might have let a few non-talented percipients through into the
Training Study, but the bulk of those who reached the final stage
should have had some ESP talent. I stress this point, as it
raises an interesting question later for some percipients who
stopped showing individually significant ESP in the Training
Studies: were they false positives who slipped through, or was
their psi ability suppressed or displaced under the psychological
conditions of the Training Study?
A few students, who were known to individual experimenters,
who thought they might have some psychic ability, went directly
into the Confirmation Study without going through the Selection
Study.
In the Confirmation Study, each student percipient was
tested individually on both the 4-choice Aquarius Model 1000 ESP
Trainer, and a 10-choice trainer, the TCT (Ten-Choice Trainer) in
the first Training Study or ADEPT (Advanced Decimal Extrasensory
Perception Trainer) in the second Training Study. Since
individual trial target and response data, from which
precognition could be scored later, was recorded only for the
10-choice machines* I shall not further describe the Aquarius
machine here. As you can see from Figure 1, ten percipients
completed the first Training Study. "Completed" means doing 20
runs of 25 trials on either of the 10-choice machines, usually at
the rate of 1 to 3 runs per hour session.
The Ten-Choice Trainer
The TCT consists of a percipient's and experimenter's
console. The experimenter also acts as agent. The two consoles
were located in separate rooms: the laboratory arrangement is
shown in the lower part of Figure 2. The percipient was alone in
his laboratory room (shown in the lower left hand corner of the
figure) sitting in front of his console. A closed circuit TV
camera was focused on this console. The experimenter/sender was
inside a Faraday cage, constructed of thin copper sheets soldered
together over an otherwise ordinarily constructed room, which was
mounted on rubber tires for vibration isolation. This Faraday
cage was inside another room, across the hall from the
percipient's room. The shielding of the Faraday cage was not
intact, however, due to power and apparatus connecting cables, so
it should be considered as being functional only for some sound
attenuation.
Figure 3 shows the arrangement of the percipient's console.
There are ten unlit target lamps, arranged in a circle about 15
inches in diameter, with a miniature playing card glued beside
each lamp to numerically identify it. A response push button is
located beside each lamp. When the ready lamp in the center of
the console came on, this signaled the percipient that the
experimenter/sender had selected one of the ten lamps to be the
target in accordance with the output of an electronic random
number generator (RNG), and was trying to telepathically send the
target identity to him.
The percipient could respond quickly or take as much time as
he wished to make his decision. This time ranged from a few
seconds to several minutes. When the percipient decided on which
target he thought was the correct choice, he pushed the response
button beside it: electrical circuitry immediately scored his
response as hit or miss, recorded hit or miss data on an
electrical counter, and lighted the correct target lamp on the
percipient's console to give him immediate feedback on whether he
was right or wrong. When he was right a chime also rang inside
his console, as well as the correct target lamp coming on.
If a percipient thought he had no idea what the target was
on a given trial, he could push the Pass switch, signaling to the
experimenter/sender that he did not wish to respond and wanted a
new target. A pass was not counted as a trial, and no feedback
on correct target identity was given. Percipients did not use
the pass option very frequently.
Figure 4 shows the experimenter/sender's console with the TV
monitor mounted above it. Except for additional operating
controls, this console is laid out identically to the
percipient's console. The TV monitor is very important: in
pilot work with the TCT, my students and I found that many
percipients would slowly move their hand around the circle of
unlit target lamps, trying to get some kind of "feel" as to when
they were over the correct lamp. The TCT was designed so that no
electrical or physical differences of any sort existed on the
front of the percipient's console, so this was totally irrelevant
behavior in terms of a null hypothesis of no ESP, but
psychologically it was very relevant behavior because of the TV
feedback to the experimenter/sender. The experimenter/sender
could not only send the abstract identity of the correct target,
but also such things as "warmer!", "colder!", or "stop, push it,
this is it!". Although I have not attempted to separately
evaluate this factor, at a minimum it keeps the experimenter/
sender highly involved psychologically in the experiment. It is
my and my experimenters' impression that it is also quite
effective at times, and we are going to try to evaluate this
factor objectively in later research. In terms of feedback
training then, we were attempting to train the team of percipient
and experimenter/sender, as both were receiving feedback on how
effective their performances were.
Electrical counters on the TCT automatically recorded the
number of trials and the number of hits. Runs were standardized
at 25 trials each. If, as rarely happened, the pass option was
used, the experimenter generally added additional trials to bring
the total up to 25. Occasionally he forgot to do this, so a run
might consist of 24 or 23 trials. On a few occasions an
experimenter/sender ran a few more trials than 25, but, according
to an a priori decision, no more than the first 25 trials were
ever counted in the analyses.
Random Number Generator
Target selection in the first Training Study was controlled
by an electronic RNG. This generator was of the "electronic
roulette wheel" type. An oscillator or clock was producing more
than a million output pulses per second. When the
experimenter/sender depressed a push button, this drove a one to
ten counter over and over again. The length of time, and so the
number the generator ultimately selected, was controlled by how
long the experimenter/sender held down the push button. Since
controllable human reaction time is, at its very best, measured
in hundredths of and usually tenths of a second, this was so much
slower than the clock speed that the particular output selected
was totally beyond the experimenter's control, and so random.
As part of a pre-experimental plan, in the first Training
Study we sampled 1000 numbers from the RNG before the experiment
and 1000 numbers after it, and tested them for randomicity, using
a chi-square analysis for equal incidence of individual targets
and equal incidence of all 100 possible target doublets. The
results were satisfactorily random. We did not test for possible
higher level sequential effects, such as triplets, as there is no
theoretical reason to expect these kinds of sequential effects of
this style of random number generator. The small size of the
sample used for testing randomicity has been severely criticized
by Rex Stanford (1977), on the grounds that there might be subtle
departures from randomicity that could aid percipients in scoring
by some kind of mathematical inference. I have argued elsewhere
(Tart, 1977c; in press) that this was not likely, but since it is
an important question with respect to the precognition effects I
shall be reporting. I shall return to the question of departures
from randomicity in more detail a little later.
In our second Training Study, done two years after the first
Training Study, with an entirely new student percipient
population, we used a more sophisticated model of the TCT, ADEPT,
designed and constructed by Dana Redington. This was basically
similar to the TCT except for the fact that the individual trial
target and response data were generally recorded automatically by
teletypewriter, and the random number generator was internal to
the machine, rather than external. Randomicity was satisfactory
in the planned pre- and post-experimental samples. With the TCT
the individual trial data were recorded by hand, although total
hits and trials were recorded automatically. The teletypewriter
occasionally developed a malfunction in the second Training
Study. It was always clear that the teletypewriter was
malfunctioning and individual trial target response data were
then recorded by hand, but the bulk were automatically recorded.
Psychological Focus on Real Time Targets
In the first Training Study, neither I, my experimenters,
nor (to my knowledge) the percipients had any formal interest in
precognition. Our conception of the experiment was that we were
trying to train real time ESP, whether it was clairvoyance or
telepathy. The same focus on real time hits existed for the
second Training Study: although I discovered significant
precognitive effects in a retrospective analysis of the first
Training Study data while we were midway through the second
Training Study, I deliberately refrained from saying anything
about it to the experimenters and percipients until the study was
over, in order not to shift this psychological focus.
Figure 5, showing the temporal sequence of target
generations, further defines this focus. Given that a target has
already been generated and the TCT or ADEPT activated (Ready
light comes on on the percipient's console) for trial N, the
percipient would take a variable period of time, from a few
seconds to several minutes, to decide on what he thought the
target was. Then he would push a response button, giving himself
immediate feedback as well as giving the experimenter/sender
immediate feedback on what the percipient's response had been.
The experimenter/sender recorded the response on his record sheet
in the first Training Study (the target had already been noted),
turned off the TCT, and then pushed a button on the RNG to select
the next target. When a selection had been made, in a second or
so, he switched on the selected target lamp for trial N+1. The
time sequence of responses was basically the same for ADEPT in
the second Training Study.
During the time the percipient was trying to use ESP to
determine what the current, real time target was, the target for
the next trial had not yet come into existence, nor could it be
inferred from any knowledge of current events, given the nature
of the RNG. All of the experimenter/sender's attention was
focused on the real time target. Any significant effects
relating responses to future targets, then, would be attributable
to precognition.
Scoring Responses
For evaluating the presence of ESP and its relation to the
learning hypothesis, I was interested in real time hits, and all
initial scoring was done for such hits. The top third of Figure
6 shows a sample of actual data from a run by one of the
percipients in the first Training Study, E1S5. The top row shows
the 25 targets that were sequentially generated, the second row
the percipient's responses to each one. Real time hits are
circled: there were 6 of them for this particular run. This
happened to be an individually significant run, as the one-tailed
binomial probability of 6 or more hits in 25 trials is three in
100.
E1S5, Run #3
Targets 3 7 5 2 7 9 6 0 7 8 3 7 4 8 5 1 4 9 0 7 9 4 3 8 5
Responses 4 8 5 2 4 9 7 5 1 7 2 8 3 9 5 7 4 5 6 7 2 5 0 6 4
_______________________________________________________
REGISTER SHIFT FOR +1 TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT #TRIALS = 24
Targets 3 7 5 2 7 9 6 0 7 8 3 7 4 8 5 1 4 9 0 7 9 4 3 8 5
Responses 4 8 5 2 4 9 7 5 1 7 2 8 3 9 5 7 4 5 6 7 2 5 0 6 4
_______________________________________________________
REGISTER SHIFT FOR -1 TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT #TRIALS = 24
Targets 3 7 5 2 7 9 6 0 7 8 3 7 4 8 5 1 4 9 0 7 9 4 3 8 5
Responses 4 8 5 2 4 9 7 5 1 7 2 8 3 9 5 7 4 5 6 7 2 5 0 6 4
FIGURE 6
I mentioned earlier that while intellectually I accepted the
reality of precognition, on a deeper level I did not believe in
it at all. Although I knew that it was common to look for
immediate precognitive effects in parapsychological studies, and
while I had said that I was going to do it, I had not done it at
the time the initial publication of results, the
Parapsychological Foundation monograph, The Application of
Learning Theory to ESP Performance, (Tart, 1975a) was on the
verge of appearing. I do not honestly know whether I would have
even gotten around to looking for precognition, or simply kept
myself busy with other work. About that time, however, a
colleague from the Genetics Department at UC Davis, Lila Gatlin,
asked for copies of my raw data so she could try out various
information theoretic approaches on them. The analyses she
carried out did not take into account real time factors in the
data, such as intervals between runs, but they did suggest that
in addition to highly positive hitting on the real time target,
there was highly significant missing on the +1 precognitive
target, so I was inspired to systematically analyze my data for
temporal displacement effects. This register displacement
technique for scoring such effects is illustrated in the middle
and lower thirds of Figure 6.
ESP Missing in the First Training Study
The ten percipients who completed the first Training Study
showed exceptionally significant results in terms of real time
hitting. For their total of 5000 trials,* we would expect 500
hits by chance, but 722 were observed. The two-tailed
probability of such an occurrence, using the normal approximation
to the binomial, is 2x10^-25. For the group as a whole, this
corresponded to an average of about 3.61 hits per run of 25,
rather than the chance expected average of 2.50.
------begin note
*In the original publications of these ESP learning results
(Tart, 1975a; 1976a), I worked with total run scores and did not
realize that the total number of trials was slightly less than
5000, namely 4994. The current total analysis here retains the
convention of 5000 trials to be consistent with the original
publication, as it is a conservative error: the data are
slightly more significant than the results here calculated.
per run, with a probability of 4x10^-28, two-tailed.
-----end note
There is considerable individual variation in scoring, of
course, with five of these 10 percipients apparently having their
overt manifestation of ESP suppressed under the change of
psychological conditions of the Training Study, at least in terms
of real time hitting: their scores did not reach significance.
The other five percipients all showed exceptionally significant
individual scoring. The least significant of these five averaged
3.90 hits per run, with an associated probability of 4x10^-5,
two-tailed, and the most significant percipient averaged 6.20
hits
In scoring for hits on the +1 future trial (after subtracting
a few trials that were lost when an experimenter inadvertently
only gave 24 trials in a run, as well as the routine loss of one
trial per run on the displacement analysis), there were 4790
trials where hits could have occurred. By chance we would expect
approximately 479 hits. Only 318 occurred: this has an
associated, two-tailed probability of 8x10^-15. Thus some part of
the percipients' minds were occasionally using precognition to
know what the +1 future target was and then affecting the
conscious calling of the real time target to be sure it was not
what the +1 target would be. All other possible future
displacements over the run (+2, +3, ....+24) were checked, but
were not of obvious significance, and so they will not be
reported on further in this paper.
Past temporal displacements were also checked, and a rather
regular pattern was found for the -1 (immediately past) and -2
(two trials back) displacements. Figure 7 is a bar graph of this
for one percipient, E1S1, whose pattern is representative of that
of many other percipients. This particular percipient made 78
real time hits, when 50 would be expected by chance, with an
associated probability of 4x10^-5, two-tailed. On the +1 future
scoring, he made only 25 hits when 47 would be expected, another
highly significant, with a probability of 6x10^-4, two-tailed. For
the -2 displacement he made only 29 hits when 46 would be
expected, significant avoidance of the -2 target. On the -3
displacement he made 42 hits when 44 would be expected, a
negligible departure from chance. As I said, this is a typical
pattern for the past displacements: significant avoidance of the
immediately past target, significant, but not as great avoidance
of the second past target, falling off to generally chance
variations by about the third target and further back. The mean
CRs (Critical Ratios, Z-scores) for the -1, -2, and -3
displacements for the 10 percipients in the first Training Study
are -4.93, -2.67, and +.13.
At first glance this pattern seems to be in accordance with
what we know about most people's psychological guessing habits,
namely that they underestimate the probability of a target XX
doublet, and so rarely call what the immediately past target has
been. This avoidance apparently carries over to a lesser extent
for two trials past the target and then is pretty much
inoperative.
Real Time Hitting and Precognitive Missing
Although discovering such extremely strong precognitive
missing was important to me personally in making me struggle with
the concept of precognition, precognitive missing per se is
probably not an exciting finding to most of you. What became
more exciting as I examined the data was the discovery that the
precognitive avoidance of the +1 future target was not an
isolated event, haphazardly scattered throughout the data, but
was quite strongly and negatively related to the degree of real
time hitting shown by various percipients. Figure 8 plots the
magnitude of real time hitting and +1 missing (hitting in one
case) for each individual percipient. The vertical axis is the
CR of the hitting or missing. I deliberately ordered the real
time hitting scores from the highest on the left (a CR of 11.03)
down to the greatest degree of missing on the real time target to
the right. The consequent good ordering of +1 missing scores
that then results is an indication of the strength of the
relationship between these two measures. If hitting in real time
and missing on the +1 future target had nothing to do to each
other, these scores should be independent of each other. But the
correlation here is -.84, which has a two-tailed probability of
less than .005. A rank order correlation coefficient, which
makes fewer assumptions about the characteristics of the
numerical scaling, gives a correlation of -.89, a negligible
change.
As a further check on the solidity of this relationship, I
added in the data from three more percipients who had, in
accordance with a pre-data analysis decision, been excluded from
formal data analyses because they did not complete the first
Training Study. These three percipients had 11, 10, and 6 runs
respectively. One of them was scoring quite significantly when
he decided he could not take the time to continue the experiment
(CR = 2,11), the others were near chance expectation for real
time hits. When their data was added in, the correlation changed
from -.84 to -.82, a negligible change.
The small squares beside each individual percipient's data
in Figure 8 indicate significant results from a t-test, applied
post hoc to each individual's data, comparing the hitting on the
real time targets with the missing on the +1 future targets
applied over each percipient's 20 runs. Six of the 10
percipients show such significant differences, including one
percipient whose real time hitting was not individually
significant. As I will comment later, I think this latter
finding suggests an interesting answer to the question of why did
some of these carefully selected percipients apparently stop
showing ESP in the Training Study.
Replication of Effects in the Second Training Study
In terms of the magnitude of real time ESP shown, the second
Training Study, which will be reported on in a future publication
(Tart, Palmer, & Redington, submitted for publication), was much
less successful for the 10-choice machine data than the first
Training Study was. Our second Selection Study and Confirmation
Study procedure (described fully in Palmer, Tart, & Redington,
1976) simply did not give us individual percipients with as high
ESP scores as we had in the first Training Study. The group of
percipients who completed the first Training Study had
Confirmation Study scores ranging form 2.50-6.00 hits per run of
25 (chance is 2.50), with a mean group score of 4.78, while the
corresponding range was 2.75-4.50, with a group mean of 3.61 hits
per run, for the percipients who completed the second Training
Study. Using a t-test, the difference in ESP talent levels of
the percipients going into the two studies was significantly
different (P<.05, two-tailed).
Ideally, we should have run more students through our
Selection and Confirmation Study procedures until we picked up
enough highly talented percipients to make the ESP talent level
comparable to that of the first Training Study, but a lack of
time, money, and manpower prohibited this. Thus we used the
percipients we had, but predicted, before the second Training
Study, that our overall yield of ESP would be smaller than it had
been in the first Training Study. Regretfully, this prediction
was confirmed! It is not, of course, the most powerful
prediction one could make, as it is a fairly general finding that
second studies of a problem do not give as strong results as the
first studies.
Seven percipients completed the second Training Study. The
overall group mean (2.61) did not differ significantly from
chance expectation, although two of the seven percipients showed
individually significant results. One of them showed
individually significant real time hitting (average of 3.20 hits
per run, P<.05, two-tailed), but the other showed individually
significant real time missing (average of 1.85 hits per run,
P<.05, two-tailed), so they effectively canceled each other out
in the total.
Figure 9 shows the individual percipient results for real
time hitting and +1 precognitive scoring, plotted in the same
manner as Figure 8. The prediction I made on the basis of the
first Training Study's finding, that there would be a strong
relationship between real time hitting and +1 missing, was
confirmed. The correlation coefficient between hitting in the
two time registers was -.73, P<.05, one-tailed. The more
conservative rank order correlation coefficient was -.79, a
slight increase. As predicted, five of the seven percipients
showed individually significant t-test difference between their
real time scores and their +1 precognitive scores. Figure 9
suggests that there might be some curvilinearity in the
relationship, but I tend to doubt that this is so, although it
should be kept in mind for future studies. The significant
replication of the negative relationship between real time and +1
future scoring, even when the overall yield of psi in the second
Training Study was so much less than in the first Training Study,
convinced me that the relationship is both real and strong,
strong enough to be of practical significance as well as
statistical significance.
In terms of real time hits, the percipients from the second
Training Study amounted to a sampling of the lower end of the
distribution sampled in the first Training Study, so I combined
the results of these two Training Studies, as shown in Figure 10.
Here the strong negative relationship between real time hitting
and +1 hitting stands out very clearly. The correlation is -.85,
P<.001, two-tailed. The more conservative rank order correlation
is also -.85. The highly successful ESP percipients strongly
suppressed hitting on the immediately future target, while the
ones who, perhaps because of the increased psychological pressure
of the Training Study, tended to switch toward ESP missing on
real time targets, an incorrect focusing of their ESP, showed a
suggestive tendency to switch to hitting on the immediate future
target. This switching toward hitting on the immediate future
target is quite interesting, and I shall comment on it later.
A significant negative relationship between real time
hitting and +1 precognitive hitting has not, to my knowledge,
previously been reported in the literature. This may be due, at
least partially, to the fact that it has not been looked for:
insofar as this is true, I hope that those of you with relevant
data will examine it for this sort of relationship. I suspect
that it may also be unreported because of a procedural difference
in my two Training Studies from most parapsychological studies,
namely that in my studies there was a sequential generation of
targets "on line." That is, no future target came into existence
until a call had been made on the present target. In most
parapsychological studies of precognition, especially those using
shuffled decks of cards for targets, the entire sequence of
future targets is generated simultaneously during the shuffling
procedure, rather than being generated one by one.
Control Procedures
When I first discovered this relationship, and in the almost
two years I have worked with it, I have been nagged by the
question of whether the relationship might have been
artifactually generated by some sort of peculiar non-randomicity
in the target sequences, or some other sort of statistical
artifact. Given the novelty of this relationship and its
potential importance, I think it appropriate to be concerned with
any possible artifacts here, so I shall take a few minutes to
describe the kinds of control analyses I have carried out that
have satisfied me that the relationship is not artifactual.
I mentioned earlier that I made an a priori decision to test
the randomicity of the electronic RNGs used with the TCT and with
ADEPT before and after each Training Study, but not during it.
This was because numerous studies (Andre, 1972; Braud et al.,
1976; Honorton & Barksdale, 1972; Matas & Pantas, 1971; Miller &
Broughton, 1976; Schmidt, 1970; 1973; 1975; 1976; Schmidt &
Pantas, 1972; Stanford & Fox, 1975; Stanford et al., 1975) have
shown that human agents can influence the output of electronic
RNGs simply by wishing for some output to come up more
frequently. While I conceived of these Training Studies as
training ESP, and wanted the percipients to use ESP, their task,
both as defined to them and in terms of what they were rewarded
for, was to push a button that corresponded to the current time
target. While utilizing some kind of ESP is the obvious way to
do this, unconsciously utilizing some kind of PK to influence the
electronic RNG to match the percipient's response preferences
would also produce hits. Thus I anticipated that there might be
unusual numerical patterns appearing in the target data
collected, and so made the decision to check the RNG for
satisfactory operation before and after each study, but not
during the studies. I do believe there was some PK influence on
the RNG in the first Training Study, although I have not yet
devised a satisfactory way of separating this from ESP effects,
which I believe were predominant.
As I began to carry out analyses of various internal effects
in the data, it became important to conduct classical randomicity
tests on the target sequences actually used in order to allow for
any effects resulting from possible lack of randomicity. In
examining the data of the first Training Study, I found that two of
the high scoring percipients had statistically significant
departures from randomicity at the singlet and doublet levels in
their target sequences, using chi-square at the singlet and
generalized serial test (Davis & Akers, 1974) at the doublet
levels.* The magnitude of these departures from randomicity
seemed to be rather small in comparison with the magnitude of the
ESP effects, but, to be on the safe side, I recalculated the
relationship between real time hitting and +1 future hitting
after deleting the data of these two percipients. This changes
the correlation coefficient from -.84 to -.81. The change is
negligible, and the latter figure is still significant at the .02
level, two-tailed.
-----begin note
*I wish to thank Lila Gatlin for carrying out these tests.
-----end note
In testing the target sequences of the seven percipients of
the second Training Study by chi-square tests, one percipient's
target showed significant departure from randomicity, although he
was a percipient whose real time hitting score was at chance.
Conservatively deleting his data from those of the other seven
percipients in the second Training Study, the correlation changes
from -.73 to -.74, a negligible change, and the latter
correlation is still independently significant (P<.05,
one-tailed). If the data of all three of the percipients are
deleted from the combined correlation across the two studies, the
correlation negligibly changes from -.84 to -.82.
The next control analysis resulted from detecting a
systematic kind of non-randomicity in almost all of the target
sequences of the first Training Study, namely a great lack of XX
doublets. That is, there were not enough one ones, two twos,
etc. in the target sequences: there were only 193, when there
should have been 500.
This is a striking discrepancy, and one which is of
practical significance, for these particular XX doublets are not
simply any target doublet but, given common human qualities, ones
which are psychologically significant to people. My first
question was how could this have happened? There was no such
problem in the formal randomicity testing sequences before and
after the study.
Through using the electronic RNG used in the first Training
Study and questioning one of the experimenters, I think I now
understand the lack of XX doublets. In order to select a new
target on the RNG, a push button on its panel was depressed, held
down for a second or two, and let up. This push button was not
of the type that made a tactically discernible click when it was
depressed, but simply one that got harder to push as you pushed
it further in. Thus it was not sensorily obvious if you had
indeed pushed the button in far enough to activate the generator.
What apparently happened is that an experimenter would sometimes
push and release the button to get the next target, look at the
RNG and see that the same number was still in the readout, and so
assume that he had not pushed the button in sufficiently to
activate the generator. So he would push it again to get a new
target. This would lead to a systematic depletion of XX
doublets.*
-----begin note
*Part of the lack of XX target doublets might also have been
caused by unconscious PK by the percipients and/or by the
experimenters. Given the common human underestimation of the
frequency of target XX doublets, unknowingly PKing the RNG to
reduce the frequency of such doublets would make it appear that
the RNG was working "correctly." I see no way of objectively
testing this hypothesis, however, and mention it only to provoke
thought.
-----end note
How serious is this effect? Since it is generally known
that people tend to avoid calling the previous target, whose
identity they know through feedback, due to their fallacious
belief that XX doublets are rare in a true random number
generator, we now have an interesting case where XX doublets were
actually rare from this particular generator, so their habit of
not calling XX doublets should increase their scores. Indeed, it
will, but a simple approximation shows that the effect is quite
small. Assume the worse case, where we have no XX doublets at
all. This means that there are only nine alternative targets on
each trial (barring the very first trial of each run), and so the
probability of a hit on any trial is one-ninth rather than
one-tenth. For the experiment as a whole, then, with 5000 trials
we would expect 556 real time hits by chance rather than 500
hits.
There were 722 hits, and, with the one-ninth hit probability
figure put in, this yields a CR of 7.49. The probability of such
a result by chance is less than 10^-13, two-tailed. Applying the
same correction in a somewhat more sophisticated fashion
(allowing for passes and occasional missing data due to ambiguous
handwriting, as well as a systematic depletion of end trials) to
+1 hits, we expect 454 +1 hits by chance alone, but there were
only 301, yielding a CR of 7.62, with an associated probability
of less than 10^-13, two-tailed. Even generously allowing for
lack of XX doublets then, we still have exceptionally significant
real time hitting and exceptionally significant +1 precognitive
missing.
I have not been able to figure out any kind of way in which
the lack of XX doublets per se would create a correlation between
real time hitting and +1 missing. As an empirical control, there
was no lack of XX doublets in the second Training Study target
sequences, yet the relationship is there just about as strongly
as in the first Training Study, so I do not believe the lack of
XX doublets in the first Training Study is of any real relevance
to the relationship reported here.
Third, the possibility has been suggested that there are
higher order biases or sequential dependencies between the
targets in my first Training Study data (Gatlin, in press;
Stanford, 1977). This has led Gatlin to hypothesize, if I
understand her correctly, that percipients, by keeping track of
previous targets through the immediate feedback, may have
gradually estimated what these biases were and then used them as
a basis for a (non-conscious) strategy of mathematical inference
that would increase their scores above chance expectation, in
addition to, or perhaps without even any need to invoke ESP. I
am not convinced there are any significant sequential
dependencies of the third order and higher that are of any
consequence, but I felt that this kind of hypothesis needed to be
tested, not only in terms of its importance to the data of the
first Training Study that was already in, but because many
studies are now employing immediate feedback, so this is a
question of general interest.
The hypothesis of scoring high by mathematical inference as
a result of figuring out target biases needs to be cast in a
specific and testable form to be viable, and mathematical
inference is the sort of thing that allows precise expression. A
colleague in the Computer Sciences Department of the University
of California at Berkeley, Eugene Dronek, and I have now
completed what we believe is a very powerful test of this
hypothesis, and we shall be preparing the results for publication
in the near future. We set ourselves the task of devising a
computer-assisted inferential calling strategy that would have
enormously more power than what we could reasonably attribute to
human percipients. We gave our program powers such as an
absolutely perfect memory for all previous targets to date, all
previous target doublets, etc., up to all previous target
sextuplets, as well as perfectly accurate and well nigh
instantaneous (in terms of human time) computing capacity to
assess possible biases. To get an overview of what the program
does, assume that the 101st trial is coming up. To make its
call, our inference program looks at all hundred previous targets
which have come up on previous trials. It has already sorted
them into a singlet file, a doublet file, and so on through a
sextuplet file. It looks at the singlet file, asks what has been
the most frequent singlet to date, and, given 100 trials, what is
the exact binomial probability that a singlet should have come up
with such an observed frequency compared to the null hypothesis
that all singlets have an equal probability of one-tenth? This
binomial probability is computed and stored. The program then
asks if there is relevant information in its doublet file: that
is, say the 100th target was a 7. Does the doublet file have any
information on what 7s have been followed by in the previous 100
trials? If not, it will guess on the basis of the most
improbable (compared to the null hypothesis) target to date in
the singlet file, but if the doublet file does have relevant
information, it will again compute the exact binomial probability
of that many or more doublets having occurred in the 100 trials
to date, compared to the null hypothesis of equal probability for
all possible doublets. This binomial probability will then be
compared to the binomial probability of the highest singlet to
date: if the highest doublet to date is less probable, i.e.,
represents more of a departure from the model of sequential
independence than the highest singlet to date, the program will
use that doublet information as the basis of its guessing
strategy. Similarly if there is a relevant triplet, quadruplet,
quintuplet, or sextuplet, the most radical departure from the
model of equal probability and sequential independence will be
used as a basis for the guessing strategy. On the 102nd trial,
all computations will be re-done because there is now a data base
of 101 trials instead of 100, etc., so the program constantly
updates itself in order to get the maximum information from all
the material to date. Because of this updating, it is quite
sensitive to locally shifting biases, as well as general biases.
Figure 11 is a comparison of what our inferential strategy
program, with all of its advantages, can do on the target
sequences, compared to the scores of the actual percipients of
the first Training Study. As you can see, the inferential
strategy program manages to reach statistical significance on
only two of the ten target sequences, and it is generally scoring
well below the actual percipients' scores. In two cases of
percipients who did not show individually significant ESP scores,
the inferential strategy program did better, although it did not
reach statistical significance. In general, the inferential
strategy program can only get about 30% as many hits above mean
chance expectation as the actual percipients achieved. Further,
the strategy program shows patterns in its calling output that do
not look anything like those used by the actual percipients. I
doubt very much that the percipients were doing much of the kind
of estimation that the calling program was. Thus, given this
very powerful test of how much biases can be capitalized on, the
bulk of the data is still attributable to ESP.
Our main concern in this kind of control, given our focus
this evening, however, is might some kind of deliberate
estimation strategy create the relationship found between real
time hitting and +1 precognitive missing? The answer is no. I
had the inferential strategy program's calls. working with a
memory span up to the triplet level,* punched on IBM cards in the
same format as the percipients' calls. The resulting
correlations do not look at all like those obtained with the
actual percipients. The relationship between real time hitting
and +1 hitting for the inferential strategy program, for example,
is highly positive, rather than negative. Indeed, there are
extremely significant positive correlations across almost all
temporal displacement register scorings, because the estimator
program is constantly adjusting itself to fit the characteristics
of the target distribution to date.
-----begin note
*I used the triplet level (no memory categorizations at higher
levels) because the inferential strategy program scores as high
as it ever will by the triplet level (and often the doublet or
singlet level) on this target data, which empirically argues that
there are no relevant higher order biases that percipients might
have used in an inferential strategy.
estimation strategy.
-----end note
To give you an example of the flavor of this, Figure 12
shows a computer printed graph of the temporal displacement
scoring over all possible registers (-24 to +24) for one of the
significantly scoring percipients (E1S1) of the first Training
Study. Notice the crowding of effects around the origin (real
time), the strong negative scores on +1, -1, and -2 registers,
and the approximately equal number of positive and negative CRs
computed. Figure 13 shows the same kind of analysis done on the
inferential strategy output for the target sequence of the same
percipient. Notice the massive block of positive displacements
in the past direction, and the tremendous preponderance of
positive correlations in the future direction. Clearly, whatever
percipients are doing does not look at all like a powerful
estimation strategy.
Let me make it clear that Dronek and I are not claiming that
we have devised the most powerful inferential strategy for taking
advantage of possible biases that might exist in target
sequences: we are claiming that we have devised a very powerful
one. We would like our inferential strategy to stand as a
challenge to other investigators to see if they can devise a more
powerful strategy, actually model it, and demonstrate empirically
that it is more powerful. Given our results to date, however, I
am convinced that the strong relationship between real time
hitting that +1 missing found in my Training Studies is not due
to any kind of statistical artifact.
We have a novel finding: what might it mean? I shall now
present a theory I have devised to explain this phenomenon, which
will bring us back to concepts of space, time, and the mind. I
should note that I am deeply indebted to Enoch Callaway, a
colleague at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, who,
after seeing a preliminary analysis of this data, suggested that
the effects resembled a neural inhibitory surround, and started
the train of thought in me that led to the following theory.
The Duration of the Present
There are two general senses in which the concept of the
"now" or the "present" is used. One refers to our immediate
psychological experience: there is a certain small duration of
time that I think of and experience as the present. There is
also the mathematical concept of the present, namely a temporal
point of zero width, zero duration, sandwiched between past and
future. The mathematical concept is a useful abstraction for a
large variety of applications, but is a poor representation of
the psychological present: we simply don't experience our
present as having no duration!
In Figure 14 I have sketched a model of the experienced
present. The vertical axis represents the intensity of
experience, the horizontal axis is time in a conventional sense,
with the now at the center of it. The heavy lines show a band
width for the experienced present, probably on the order of
one-or two-tenths of a second. That is where all of our ordinary
experience is concentrated, and it is obviously intense: we
perceive it. The band width of this experienced present is
slightly variable: meditative techniques or other psychological
changes can sometimes make the present seem shorter or more
fleeting, or bigger and wider.
For those of you who are familiar with electrical filters,
the experienced present is like a high gain, narrow band width
filter. The experienced present is its pass band. Everything
within that narrow pass band comes through very strongly, but as
soon as signals fall outside that pass band they come through
very weakly or not at all. The one- or two-tenths of a second
band width of the experienced present is probably a function of
the neural circuitry that underlies immediate memory: sensory
input and other kinds of psychological processes are, in a sense,
literally held or stretched out for one- or two-tenths of a
second. Dynamically, we could picture this pass band of the
experienced present as ordinarily moving along horizontally from
past to future on our physical concept of time. Whether
experience within this pass band of the experienced present is
actually continuous, or consists of discrete frames, with
awareness of the frame intervals suppressed, is an interesting
question we shall leave for the future.
There is an older psychological term for the experienced
present, the "specious present," a term which I shall not use, as
it implies a theoretical commitment to the mathematical
abstraction of the present as having no duration, as being more
real than what we experience! Keep in mind that the mathematical
concept of time is an abstraction, even if extremely useful, and
we should not casually deny our own experience in favor of
abstractions.
Precognition and the Experienced Present
The model of the theory shown in Figure 14 postulates that
there is some other temporal dimension of mental functioning, an
extended temporal dimension different from our ordinary one. We
may talk about time "flowing at a different rate" compared to
ordinary time, or some such analogy, but the important property
of some aspect of the mind existing in an extended dimension of
time is that the experienced present of that part of the mind
has, compared to ordinary time, a greater duration for its now, a
wider pass band than our ordinarily experienced present. This
wider pass band is shown in Figure 14 by the light, dotted line.
I have no idea what the exact shape or duration of the pass band
of this second temporal dimension of the mind is, so I have
simply shown it tapering off at some temporal distance in the past
and future, without attempting to represent anything exactly.
I am proposing that this extended aspect of the mind, which
is activated on those occasions when psi abilities are used, has
two properties different from our ordinary consciousness. Our
ordinary consciousness seems both spatially and temporally
localized with respect to ordinary spatial and temporal
constraints on physical brain and nervous system processes. It
operates in what we call "real time." The first property of this
extended dimension of the mind is that it is not so spatially
localized as the ordinary one, and so somehow can pick up
information at spatial locations outside the sensory range of the
body/brain/nervous system. The second property of this extended
dimension of the mind is that the center point of its experienced
present can be located at a different temporal location than the
center point of the experienced present of ordinary
consciousness. That is, it may be centered around a time that,
by ordinary standards, is past or future, although it is probably
usually centered on the same temporal location as ordinary
consciousness. Further, the size of this extended dimension of
the mind's experienced present, its pass band, is wider than the
pass band of our ordinarily experienced present. Even if the
experienced present of this extended dimension of the mind is
centered on the ordinary present, what is now in this extended
dimension of the mind may include portions of time that, from our
ordinary point of view, are past and future, as well as present.
Similarly in a spatial way, what is here to this extended
dimension of the mind may include aspects of physical reality
that are there or elsewhere to our ordinary consciousness.
Since our ordinary consciousness is ordinarily fully
identified with and preoccupied with body/brain/nervous system
functioning, very little basic awareness, if any, is left over to
be aware of activity in this extended dimension of the mind.
Thus its experienced intensity is ordinarily quite low, usually
below conscious threshold, and so it is accordingly drawn as
quite low in Figure 14. To put this more precisely, in my
systems approach to consciousness (Tart, 1974; 1975b; 1975c;
1976b; 1977d; 1977e), I postulate basic awareness as something
different from consciousness: consciousness is a combination of
the more basic awareness we have with the properties of the
physical brain/body/nervous system. It is a gestalt, an
interactive creation. Because awareness is ordinarily fully
identified with, influenced by and influencing body/brain/nervous
system processes, we commonly, but mistakenly, equate the two.
In the theory I am presenting here tonight, basic awareness can
sometimes be withdrawn from its total identification with
ordinary body/brain/nervous system processes and then takes in
the activity of this extended dimension of the mind.
When a percipient is asked to us ESP, his first task is to
disregard incoming sensory input: after all, we set up
conditions so that no sensory input that reaches the percipient
contains any relevant information about the ESP target. Second,
he must disregard or inhibit his ongoing fantasies and any
guessing strategies he has that attempt to figure out the RNG,
since we design random number generators to be equiprobable and
sequentially independent.* Third, he must try to contact or tune
in to that aspect of his mind which exists in or is capable of
existing in and using this extended spatial and temporal
dimension of the mind.
-----begin note
*Note the slight lack of randomicity of some of the target
sequences in the first Training Study is not really relevant to
the points made here.
-----end note
Considering the temporal aspects of ESP, we have a problem:
if the percipient's desire is to obtain real time, concurrent
information by ESP (the state of the apparatus or the mental
processes of the experimenter/sender in another laboratory room),
then simply tapping into the wider experiential present of this
extended dimension of the mind is not sufficient. This wider
experiential present includes information about past and future
events, as well as present events. since the percipient desires
to get present time information, this past and future information
is noise, which may interfere with the detection of the desired
target.
Recall now that the primary psychological set of the
experimenters and percipients in my Training Studies was on
getting the real time target information via ESP. Occasionally
experimenters or percipients might have had a temporary interest
in precognitive events, but while I cannot assess this precisely,
the constant focus on real time targets in our strategy sessions
and the like definitely made the real time target focus of most
attention. By focusing on the real time target, this implicitly
defined the temporal boundaries of that real time information as
the immediately past (-1) target and the immediately future (+1)
target. What the percipient wanted was now, not past or future.
Spatially, the experimenters' and percipients' attention was
fixed on a particular location for the desired target
information, namely the experimental apparatus and/or the
experimenter/sender's mind. The target information was not
sensorially here to the percipient, but at a specific there, out
of many possible elsewheres.
Figure 15 models the psychological processes a percipient
must carry out, consciously or unconsciously, in order to use ESP
successfully for getting real time information. His basic
awareness or consciousness is receiving a variety of irrelevant
sensory information and irrelevant internal process information
that must be ignored or inhibited. A particularly important
source of irrelevant information here is his memory of what
recent past targets have been, combined with that common human
tendency to try to outguess the random number generator, leading
to a guessing strategy. Note that I want to carefully
distinguish here call strategies, which produce the final
response, and guessing strategies, which are only a subset of
call strategies. A guessing strategy is, by definition,
irrelevant with a random target source, but the call strategies
may include psychological processes which are relevant. Some of
those kinds of calling strategies will be discussed in my paper
on the expanded learning theory model of tomorrow (Tart, 1977a).
In addition to disregarding irrelevant information then, he
must, at least occasionally tap into that extended dimension of
the mind that can use ESP, but since that aspect of the mind is
getting, as an integral part of its experienced present,
information about past and future (and possible targets that are
spatially elsewhere, as well as the desired ones) as well as real
time, present information, he must further carry out some kind of
discrimination process. This discrimination process must clearly
identify the past, present, and future aspects of the ESP
information being gathered, and then actively suppress the past
and future aspects of the ESP information in order to enhance the
detectability of the desired real time ESP information. That is,
a kind of contrast sharpening must be employed.
The output of the discrimination process then, consists of a
mixture of information, some of it designed to positively
influence the percipient to call the identity of the present time
target, and some of it consisting of negative, inhibitory
tendencies to not call the target numbers belonging to the
immediately past targets. This combination of tendencies
probabilistically increases the chances of a correct call. These
nonconscious Psi Receptor and discrimination processes obviously
work intermittently and imperfectly, although they might be
capable of much better functioning, are influenced by factors we
cannot yet specify, and are probably affected by both systematic
and random noise. Perhaps the positive and inhibiting components
of this process work semi-independently. Systematic and random
noise may occur at all stages of this discrimination and calling
process.
In spatial terms, the discrimination process must further
identify targets that are at the correct location there, and
discriminate them from target identity information that is here
to ordinary consciousness, i.e., irrelevant information in the
percipient's sensory environment, and elsewhere, target identity
information from the wrong targets than the desired ones.
Trans-Temporal Inhibition
What I am postulating, then, is an active inhibition of
precognitively and postcognitively acquired information about the
immediately future and the immediately past targets, which serves
to enhance the detectability of ESP information with respect to
the desired real time target. As the inhibition extends over
time, I have named this phenomenon transtemporal inhibition.
Except for the unusual (in terms of our ordinary concepts)
feature of extending over time rather than space, trans-temporal
inhibition is like a widely used information processing strategy
in our nervous systems called lateral inhibition (Von Bekesy,
1967). This is a general phenomenon, found in all sensory
systems, whereby a highly stimulated neuron sends out inhibitory
impulses to neurons and receptor endings which are
laterally/spatially adjacent to it, thus suppressing their
initially weaker output unless they are also strongly stimulated.
Lateral inhibition is illustrated for touch receptors in the skin
in Figure 16.
If you press on your skin with a sharply pointed object, say
under the middle receptor shown in Figure 16, not only is the
touch receptor immediately under that point strongly stimulated
but, because of the mechanical deformation of the skin also shown
in the figure, receptors laterally adjacent to the stimulation
point are also stimulated, although not as intensely. The neural
impulses from the receptors at this first stage of detection,
then, would show rapid firing (the neural code for high
intensity) immediately under the stimulated point, but also
fairly rapid firing on each side of it, gradually tapering off
with distance, so that you have a neural signal pattern
suggesting that you were stimulated by a blunt, rounded object,
rather than by a point. The stimulated receptor under the point,
however, sends out lateral inhibitory impulses which suppress the
weaker, less frequent impulse trains from the laterally adjacent
receptors, so by the time you are several steps up in the neural
chain, you have recovered a pattern indicating point stimulation.
In engineering, this kind of contrast enhancement effect is
referred to as edge detection: it was used on the signals
transmitted back from the Viking landers on Mars, for example, to
produce crisp, clear pictures, even though the actual signal
received was rather noisy. The phenomenon of trans-temporal
inhibition, then, suggests that a generally useful information
processing procedure also operates for ESP.
Although I have not yet fully worked out the implications, I
suspect that we will find a similar phenomenon for the spatial
dimensions of targets. This is, when ESP works well detecting a
spatially distant target that is surrounded by other targets,
there will be an increased missing or inhibition on the
immediately surrounding targets. Such a phenomenon could be
called trans-spatial inhibition. As well be discussed later,
possible widening of the band width of the extended dimension of
mind needs also to be taken into account in empirically looking
for this.
All right. We started with an unexpected finding of
extremely significant precognitive missing, missing which was
highly correlated with real time ESP hitting. The relationship
was solidly confirmed in a second study. This relationship, plus
the inspiration of Enoch Callaway's remark about neural
inhibitory surrounds, plus my personal struggle to think about
precognition in spite of my prejudices, led to a theory about an
extended dimension of the mind and the consequent necessity of
trans-temporal inhibition in order for ESP to work effectively.
A good theory should make more and more sense out of the data.
Let's look at some applications of the theory to the data from my
two Training Studies.
Strategy Boundness
In showing the +1 displacement, real time hits, and -1 past
displacements score patterns of percipient E1S1 in Figure 7, I
indicated that the highly significant degree of missing on the
immediately past target seemed to be caused, at first glance, by
maladaptive guessing habits on the percipient's part, namely a
mechanical avoidance of calling whatever the previous target had
been. Ideally, the RNG is so constructed that there are no
sequential dependencies between targets, so this strategy, while
common among people, is maladaptive. Even considering the
experimenter error which led to a deficiency of target doublets
in the First Training Study, mindless and automatic avoidance of
the immediately past target is a poor strategy for using ESP:
there are some XX doublets, and ESP could allow hits on them.
In postulating the existence of trans-temporal inhibitor, I
also postulate that the effect is roughly symmetrical in time, as
symmetry seems to be a basic principle in the world. In
principle, then, there is probably an extrasensory postcognitive
inhibition against calling the immediately past target, mixed in
with not calling it due to mechanical avoidance of the target,
given knowledge of it because of the feedback. Although I have
no independent measure of the degree of such postcognitive
avoidance, I decided to assume that the magnitude of the
extrasensory postcognitive -1 avoidance for each percipient would
be equal in magnitude to that of his +1 precognitive avoidance.
I could then subtract the magnitude of the +1 precognitive
avoidance from the magnitude of the -1 avoidance, and the
remainder left over would be a component I have named maladaptive
strategy boundness. Strategy boundness is thus a measure of
mechanical avoidance of the previous target via ordinary
psychological processes.
Figure 17 shows this kind of partialing out applied to the
data of percipient E1S1. On the assumption that extrasensory
postcognitive avoidance is equal to extrasensory precognitive
avoidance, you can see how I have split the magnitude of the -1
score, and gotten a strategy boundness measure for this
particular percipient. A similar procedure was carried out
individually for all other percipients in both Training Studies.
My understanding of the optimal way to try to use ESP is
that any sort of calculation processes are irrelevant. This
includes any kind of guessing strategy which involves keeping
track of what the past targets have been and then trying to
outguess the random number generator. This is not only a waste
of time, given sequential independence of the random number
generator, but, as I mentioned earlier, since there is only a
limited amount of awareness available, this kind of maladaptive
guessing strategy uses up some awareness which might otherwise be
used to activate relevant mental processes for actually using
ESP.
On theoretical grounds, then, we would expect that the more
maladaptive strategy boundness a percipient showed, the less real
time ESP he would show. Since trans-temporal inhibition of the
future (and, by assumption, of the past) is also adaptive for
enhancing real time ESP, we would also expect that with more
strategy boundness there would be less missing on the +1 target,
that is, the contrast between real time hitting and +1 missing
would be less with increased strategy boundness. The data seem
to bear this out quite strongly.
Because the signs for the arithmetical computations of
missing, strategy boundness, etc. require a good deal of
attention to follow in terms of their relationships, I have taken
the value of strategy boundness resulting from the above
computations and made it positive to make the following
discussion clearer.
In originally computing the correlations between real time
hitting, +1 future hitting, -1 past hitting for percipients in
the combined two Training Studies, I found that +1 future hitting
correlated significantly negatively with real time hitting (r =
-.85, P<.001, two-tailed), but the magnitude of -1 past hitting
did not correlate significantly with either the magnitude of real
time hitting (r = -.24) or with the magnitude of +1 future
missing (r = +.14). When strategy boundness is factored out as
described above, however, it is significantly correlated with the
other two measures. Strategy boundness correlates r = -.64,
P<.01, two-tailed with present time hitting, and r = +.83,
P<.001, two-tailed with +1 future missing. Referring back to
Figures 8, 9 and 10, the magnitude of each individual
percipient's strategy boundness score is plotted in the lower
part of the graph, and the strength of the relationship is quite
clear.
Applying the symmetry assumption to trans-temporal
inhibition then, takes some meaningless data, the absolute
magnitude of the -1 past deviations, and partials it into highly
meaningful data. There is only one problem: although I checked
with three mathematicians about the validity of this partial
correlation procedure, and they all thought it would not
artifactually lead to a high correlation if none actually
existed, this has turned out to be wrong! Recently Eugene Dronek
set up a computer program to empirically check this procedure.
It took the actual CR values for real time hitting and +1 missing
for each of the 17 percipients in the combined Training Studies,
and then drew a sample of 17 digits from the computer's random
number generator program. If that particular sample of 17 digits
showed a very low correlation (less than - .2) with both the real
time hitting and the +1 missing scores, thus duplicating the
original data pattern, a strategy boundness score was then
computed on these random numbers as if they were the -1 deviation
score, and the correlation of this strategy boundness figure
computed with both real time hitting and +1 missing. One
thousand correlations were generated in this way. Unfortunately,
it turns out that the procedure does artifactually generate quite
high correlations! Thus I am not at all sure that the
maladaptive strategy boundness measure I have just described to
you is really valid. Obviously we need independent measures of
postcognitive avoidance and strategy boundness. Nevertheless, I
intuitively feel this strategy boundness measure is reflecting
something quite important, and I've presented it to you for its
stimulus value.
Persistence of Inhibition
Recall now that the theory of trans-temporal inhibition says
that if the Psi Receptor and appropriate discrimination processes
are working on trial N, not only does this positively influence
you to call a digit that corresponds to the actual identity of
the target at that time, but it inhibits or prejudices you
against calling the digit which is the identity of the target on
trial N+1 in the immediate future. Now, human psychological
processes generally have some degree of "inertia," i.e., our
immediate past is constantly having some influence on the
present. It follows then that after making a call on trial N, on
trial N+1 a problem exists: the percipient is likely to still be
carrying some inhibitory bias against calling the digit which
corresponds to the identity of the target on trial N+1. Thus the
operation of trans-temporal inhibition is likely to produce a
kind of "stuttering" of ESP, a break in its continuity. If you
hit by using ESP, you are more likely to miss on the next trial
than if you hadn't hit, an effect we might call psi stuttering.
In terms of the data available for analysis, we should expect to
see fewer hit doublets, two hits in a row, than would be expected
if every trial were independent of the previous one.
The appropriate test for this is to use the actually
obtained proportion of real time hits to recalculate the
probability of a hit: then the probability of a real time hit
followed by a real time hit, is simply the square of this
empirically obtained proportion, given the assumption that real
time hits are temporally independent of one another. Calculating
this, I found that in the first Training Study there was a
deficiency of real time hits following real time hits, only 86
when about 106 would be expected. This has a CR of -2.07, P
= .02, one-tailed. More importantly, the degree of lack of real
time hit doublets is strongly and negatively correlated with the
degree of real time hitting: r = -.71, P<.025, one-tailed. That
is, the more a percipient showed real time hitting, the more this
hitting tended to be broken up and not occur sequentially, as we
would expect from the trans-temporal inhibition theory.
This same relationship was found in the data of the second
Training Study (r = -.40), but while it is in the right direction
the correlation does not reach significance with the smaller
number of percipients and a much more restricted range of ESP.
Such a lowering of the range of ESP would automatically lower the
estimate of the true population correlation coefficient. If the
data from the two Training Studies are combined, r = -.60 between
real time hits and real time hit doublets, with an associated
P<.01, one-tailed.
We would also expect that the degree of lack of real time
hit doublets would correlate with our direct measure of
trans-temporal inhibition, the degree of missing on the +1
precognitive target. It does, although not quite so
outstandingly. In the first Training Study, r = +.48, which does
not quite reach the .05 level of significance; in the second
Training Study, r = +.47, also below the level of statistical
significance. When the two Training Studies are combined to
produce a larger sample size, r = +.47, with an associated
probability of P<.05, one-tailed.
Thus this persistence of inhibition aspect of the theory of
trans-temporal inhibition has received good support.
Shifting the Focus: A Case Study with Ingo Swann
As I mentioned earlier, percipients and experimenters in
both my Training Studies were usually focused on getting real
time hits and trying to learn to do better on real time hits.
This implicitly defined the immediate boundaries of the now as
the +1 and -1, future and past, target events. The
trans-temporal inhibition theory, however, is not restricted to
this particular focus.
We have many studies of precognition which have shown
successful calling of events which are much further ahead in the
future than the minute or two of one trial. The trans-temporal
inhibition theory would predict in general that inhibition
missing of targets would immediately surround the future target
focused on, in terms of its immediate past and immediate future,
regardless of how far ahead that target event is in the future.
If percipients were trying to guess the targets 20 trials ahead,
for example, we would expect to see missing on the 19th and 21st
trials ahead.
In actual situations the predictions might be somewhat more
complicated if the percipient's focus included more than one
trial, say that he was trying to get the target on the 20th
trial, but was also thinking about the 21st trial ahead. Then we
might expect the inhibition to be on the 19th and 22nd trials. I
have not yet worked out whether there should be a definite
relationship between the width of the focus of interest of the
percipient's attention (the pass band of the experienced present
of the extended dimension of the mind) and the size of the
inhibition, but there are some interesting future possibilities
there. To use our filter analogy, we should be able to shift the
center point and/or the band width of the filter that is used in
psi.
An interesting opportunity to test this prediction occurred
spontaneously when the noted artist and psychic, Ingo Swann,
attended a small meeting of parapsychological researchers at my
home in October, 1976. I spent the evening presenting much of
the above data (minus the material on the lack of pairs of hits)
and the basic theory about trans-temporal inhibition, although I
did not say much about the possibility of shifting the center
point of the experienced now of this extended dimension of the
mind. Swann was quite intrigued by my data, especially in terms
of learning to use ESP better and precognition, and made a number
of useful comments on the studies. This included his own
observation that what I was calling maladaptive strategy
boundness was conceptually similar to a concept that he and the
Stanford Research Institute researchers, Russell Targ and Harold
Puthoff, had worked out, "analytical overlay." Swann wanted to
try my ADEPT training device, and a few days later was able to
briefly visit my laboratory.
I looked forward to his visit with great interest, for he
would be the first percipient who, because he had heard about
trans-temporal inhibition, would knowingly (to me) be
psychologically set to have some concern with the immediate, +1
future target, as well as the real time target. I predicted that
he would probably show hitting on the +1 future target rather
than missing as well as real time hitting, but missing on the +2
future target because of trans-temporal inhibition. I did not,
of course, inform Swann of this prediction, as that might have
altered his psychological focus.
Swann did five runs on ADEPT in the course of a little over
an hour, all of the time available for him to work with the
training machine on this visit. In one run he inadvertently did
29 trials instead of the usual 25, so we had a total of 129
trials. His performance is shown in Figure 18. He made 21 real
time hits in the 5 runs, where only 12.9 would be expected by
chance, so P = 9x10^-3, one-tailed. He showed a lack of pairs of
real time hits in a row, as would be predicted from the
persistence of inhibition aspect of the theory, although with
such a small number of trials the effect did not reach
statistical significance (CR = -.77).
On the +1 future target, he made 19 hits when only 12.4 were
expected by chance, P = .03, one-tailed, as predicted. On his +2
precognition hits, he scored only 7 hits when 11.9 would be
expected by chance, P = .07, one-tailed. This is not quite
independently significant (CR = -1.50, P = .07, one-tailed) but
using a t-test comparison between +1 hitting and +2 hitting, as
it was used to compare real time and +1 hitting for
percipients in the Training Studies, and difference is
statistically significant (t = 2.59, 4 df, P<.05, one-tailed.*
This is pushing the assumptions of the t-test somewhat, but the
*In comparing run scores between real time, +1, and +2 hits, we
deal with a shortened run length in each case (25, 24, 23), so
the chance expected number of hits is slightly lower (2.5, 2.4,
2.3) with each further displacement. This was compensated for in
doing t-tests by testing the null hypotheses
[real time hits] = [(+1 hits) + (.1)]
and
[(+1 hits) + (.1)] = [(+2 hits) + (.2)].
main point is that the scores are quite strongly in the
theoretically expected direction.
It is also interesting to note, from the Figure, Swann's
performance on the -1 past displacement: it is only slightly
larger than the +2 missing displacement, indicating a very low
degree of maladaptive strategy boundness. This is precisely what
we would expect for someone with high ESP abilities.
The Generalized Trans-temporal Inhibition Test
Given the existence of a trans-temporal inhibition, I now
believe that a more sensitive test for the presence of ESP, in
the data of percipients run under conditions comparable to those
of the present studies (where targets are generated one by one)
is to look at the contrast, the difference between hitting on the
target on which ESP is focused and missing on the immediately
adjacent (in our case, +1 precognition) targets. If we could
always assume that our instructions to a percipient to focus on
the real time target were completely effective, the particular
measures to test the difference between would always be real time
hits versus +1 precognitive hits (and/or -1 postcognitive hits in
non-feedback studies). As Ingo Swann's data demonstrated,
however, the focus of ESP hitting and the consequent inhibition
may be shifted to other than the real time and +1 targets.
Indeed, I had suspected such shifts had occurred for at least one
of the percipients of the first Training Study and at least one
of those of the second Training Study, but for a long while I had
not seen how to objectively test this rather than doing a purely
post hoc analysis. I have now devised a more general test for
trans-temporal inhibition which allows for the fact that a
percipient might focus somewhat off from the real time target
and/or have a somewhat wider pass band than just the designated
target. I suspect this may be partially post hoc because of the
influence of looking at my data at great length, but it does
follow from the theory. The ultimate test will be others'
application of it. The test works as follows.
If psi is operating and trans-temporal inhibition is present
to some degree, but the focus of a percipient's ESP is not
necessarily on the real time target, it is nevertheless more
likely to be focused close to the real time target than distantly
from it. Thus I took as a contrast measure the first four data
registers, the real time, +1, +2, and +3 precognitive registers.
Within these four registers, I created a contrast score for each
percipient by taking the absolute magnitude of the difference
between the highest (usually a hitting) score and the lowest
(usually a missing) score. For most percipients this meant the
difference between real time hits and +1 misses, but for a few
this was the +1 precognitive hits minus the -2 precognitive
misses, etc. As a control for each percipient, I randomly
selected (using my Texas Instrument SR-52 calculator's random
number program) four other precognitive registers from the
remaining +4 to +24 precognitive registers of that percipient,
and computed a contrast score between the highest and lowest of
these four registers. If ESP and trans-temporal inhibition
effects are concentrated on or near real time, the designated
focus of attention, then the control contrast scores we compute
from the registers further away from real time should, in
general, be less. The results support this prediction.
In the first Training Study the mean contrast score, in CR
units (unit normal deviation) was 6.90 around the real time
focus, while the control contrast score had a mean of only 1.96.
This difference is highly significant: t = 3.13, P<.01,
one-tailed. The significance comes from both the high scores per
se (t = 2.80, P<.025, one-tailed, and the low scores per se (t =
3.09, P<.01, one-tailed). In the second Training Study, the
contrast scores are again significant, with a mean contrast score
of 2.76 in real time and adjacent registers, compared to a mean
contrast score of 1.76 in the control registers: t = 3.37,
P<.01, one-tailed. The significance here is contributed
primarily by the high scores in the experimental versus control
registers.
We have an interesting result then. The data of the second
Training Study were not independently significant for real time
hitting (CR = +.85) because the data of a strong psi misser
balance out the data of a strong psi hitter. This study was
statistically significant when evaluated by contrast scores. The
real time psi misser who wiped out the significance on overall
real time hits was a percipient who may very well have been
inadvertently focused on the +1 future target: the difference
between +1 hits and +2 misses is independently significant by a
post hoc t-test for him. I hope then that this contrast measure
may serve to find evidence of ESP in many experiments that were
initially considered failures in terms of overall hitting.
Insofar as trans-spatial inhibition is real, similar
relationships between hitting and missing contrasts should be
looked for in existing data: studies using playing cards in the
DT mode, e.g., call for the strong sort of spatial discrimination
that might call for trans-spatial inhibition.
Which Leads Us To...
It is traditional for scientific papers to end with a call
for further research, and I shall do that, not simply out of
respect for tradition, but because I am quite excited about the
implications of the findings I have reported to you, and where
they might lead. A number of early obvious research
possibilities have been suggested as we went along, but let me
just mention some here.
First and foremost, I would be most happy to see this strong
relationship between hitting on real time target and missing on
+1 future target replicated by others. First attempts should use
carefully screened percipients who have some psi ability and on
line target generation, as in my Training Studies, but if the
effect can be found with other experimental procedures, so much
the better. I particularly would like to see further tests on
using the contrast effect as a more sensitive measure for the
presence of ESP than the conventional number of real time hits,
as well as its application in the generalized trans-temporal
inhibition test. Along that line, I strongly hope that others
who have data where spatial discrimination was required, which
means most ESP experiments, will look for the sorts of
relationships that might provide empirical evidence for the
concept of trans-spatial inhibition. I have no time tonight to
even begin talking about the extension of this theory into PK.
There are a number of important questions that need to be
asked about trans-temporal inhibition. For example, my measures
have not been in seconds or minutes of clock time, but the
psychological units of one trial to the next. Although I have
some response time data from the percipients in the second
Training Study, I have not had a chance to look at it yet. Is
trans-temporal inhibition necessary only in terms of
psychologically adjacent targets, as from one trial to the next,
or is it more closely related to clock time? If trials were a
long distance apart in clock time, say many minutes, would
trans-temporal inhibition be unnecessary, because the "strength
of the signal" from the future event would be diminished
sufficiently by temporal distance so that it wouldn't need to be
inhibited? Does this mean that trans-temporal inhibition is even
more necessary with rapid calling? Might a reason for the poor
success rate that often accompanies rapid fire, massed trials be
that the signals from future or spatially adjacent events are so
strong that the trans-temporal inhibition discrimination strategy
can't deal with them very well?
Along a similar line, our most striking ESP results often
come with free response targets, where we usually have trials
separated by very long periods of time. This might cut the need
for trans-temporal inhibition because interference from the
future may be greatly reduced. Further, in a free response
situation, subsequent targets usually have very little
resemblance to each other, so there may be even less need to
discriminate among similar targets, further reducing interference
so ESP can manifest more strongly. Perhaps the much higher psi
quotients I have gotten from percipients on my 10-choice training
machines are due to the fact that they represent an approach
toward the free response situation, more so than the 4-choice
Aquarius machine, although this finding may be mixed up with the
fact that percipients usually responded much faster on the
Aquarius machine, thus putting subsequent targets much closer to
one another and possibly adding more confusion this way.
The concept of maladaptive strategy boundness needs further
investigation with measures that are independent of the ESP data
per se. I should imagine that various existing psychological
tests of cognitive functions which measure rigidity of function,
as well as special purpose tests we might devise, could enable us
to categorize percipients as to how much they could be, as it
were, in the "here and now" on each trial, which I believe is
optimal for making ESP function, versus how much their awareness
is being taken up by strategies that maladaptively bind them to
the past.
For a long time I have thought that the statistical measures
we commonly use in parapsychological research are valid, but
really not very sensitive. Already we have learned that variance
tests sometimes show significant evidence of psi operating in
data that looks otherwise insignificant. I wonder how many other
ESP experiments that we think were insignificant have more subtle
indications of ESP in them, such as might be revealed by the
generalized trans-spatial inhibition test?
I began my talk this evening by mentioning how exciting it
can be to question our generally accepted concepts of space,
time, and mind. I have used up quite a bit of ordinary time by
now! The work I have talked about this evening has been the most
exciting research in my entire professional career: I hope I
have conveyed some of that excitement and promise to you, and
that we will all help each other to learn more about space, time,
and mind.
Thank you.
_____________________
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