Have you ever had a hunch or made a wild guess about an event that proved correct? Your sudden insight, some scientist claim, may have been a form of extrasensory perception called clairvoyance.
According to the findings of some research that this article will examine, the clairvoyant mind "see" objects or events with the use of the sense.
Advertisement
Crystal Lamp | 16 Color Diamond Table Lamp USB + Remote
Clairvoyance, say scientists, is one of four categories of extrasensory perception: (1) telepathy--reading the thoughts of another,
(2) Precognition--sensing future events, (3) psychokinesis--affecting objects by thinking about them, and (4) clairvoyance-- perceiving objects or events that are impossible to perceive by the normal senses (cherry 84). The category of clairvoyance includes such acts as guessing the unknown contents of a sealed envelope or describing the location of a lost child.
In one account of supposed clairvoyant ability, a young woman was driving home at night with her husband. They came to a roadblock, where a police officer told them about an accident a half-mile ahead.
After they had made a detour and had continued driving for a few minutes, the woman began to tremble and cry. She told her husband her sister was lying dead on the road they had just left!
Forty-five minutes after they had arrived home, the phone rang.
The caller, a local doctor, told the woman that her sister was dead.
She had been killed instantly in a car accident, the same accident the couple had heard of an hour before (Louisa E. Rhine, "Psychological processes" 95-96).
Was the woman's sudden knowledge an example of clairvoyance?
Montague u11man, a leading researcher of extrasensory perception, warns, "Scientifically, of course, such cases don't prove anything, because they can be called coincidence, unconscious self-deception, or deliberate hoaxes".
u11man and other investigators insist that clairvoyance exists; yet in order to prove their claim, they recognize the need for reliable data. According, clairvoyance has been the focus of experiments based upon careful controls. following the scientific method, scientist gather evidence from these experiment and use the evidence as the basis of proof.
During experiments, subjects may guess at hidden cards, locations, numbers, or a variety of other items.
If enough of these guesses are correct, then scientist can be certain that more than mere luck is at work. However, as an added precaution against lucky guesses, scientist require extensive evidence. drawn from thousands of experiments.
They may even repeat a particular experiment with one person hundreds of times before accepting it results.
This experiment research is relatively new. it began during the 1930's. When Dr. J. B. Rhine conducted experiment for all four categories of extrasensory perception (Bowles and Hynds). In his earliest attempts, he found clairvoyance the most suitable for research. He stated.
Clairvoyance experiments are the easiest of all to conduct . . . . Not only is it easier to control against the more common experimental errors, but it is also easier to eliminate any alternative hypothesis that might be applied to the data (Rhine and Pratt 53) .
Enthusiastically, Dr. Rhine performed hundreds of experiments, testing the clairvoyant powers of ordinary people. His method was record-keeping, anyone can imitate it.
Rhine used a pack of cards called zener cards, which contained five symbols: a star, a circle, a cross, a square, and a wavy line.
One of these symbols was printed on each card. In the deck there were twenty-five cards, five of each symbol.
After shuffling the cards, the experimenter placed the deck on a table. Behind an opaque screen, which concealed the experimenter and the cards at all time, the subject either wrote down or called out chance, one would expect five correct gusses out of twenty-five in a single run-through of cards. Any scoring consistently higher than five correct gusses, Rhine concluded, was evidence of clairvoyance (Cohen 76).
**** The paper goes on to discuss Dr. Rhine's interpretation of his data, the favorable results of his studies, and the experiments of Dr. Rhine's followers. The following paragraph make a transition from this section of the paper to the objections against clairvoyance experiments.****
One recent development in clairvoyance research involves hypnosis. In tests, two groups of people perform Dr. Rhine's card-guessing experiment. One group is awake, while the other group is under hypnosis.
The group under hypnosis has scored a significantly greater number of correct guesses than the other group. Although researchers find these results encouraging, they are performing further tests to measure the effect of hypnosis
(Sargent).
As research into clairvoyance continues, however, opponents refuse to accept the findings. According to Bowles and Hynds, the unfavorable publicity the Rhines' work received my still be influencing the general public's attitudes toward psychical research (27). Critics cite three overwhelming problems in the studies: first, that researchers do not guard enough against fraud; second, that they get lower scores as they improve testing methods; and third, that they cannot get the same results everytime they repeat an experiment.
Defenders, meanwhile, claim that scientific standards, such as requiring similar results each time an experiment is repeated, need not apply to research into the human mind. Arthur Koestler writes,
"[The standard of] repeatability [is] valid in the physical sciences, but less so in the frontiers of medicine and even less in those branches of psychology which involve unconscious processes. . ." (29).
Although Koestler and others claim that clairvoyance " is a hard reality" (23) . many disagree, and the future of clairvoyance studies is uncertain. Philip H. Abelson, editor of the authoritative journal science, sums up the controversy when he states that "these extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Findings that question the basic laws of nature must be subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny"
("A stepchild of science"42). Many, like Abelson, believe that statistical evidence charting an unknown power at work gives insufficient reason for abandoning assumptions about the way the mind works. Remarks D.o. Hebb, professor of psychology at McGill university, " I do not accept Esp for a moment, because it does not make sense" (45).
Skeptics like Abelson and Hebb may be unfairly dismissing the positive results of clairvoyance studies, which, compared with many other fields, are still very new. By demanding "extraordinary evidence" that extrasensory perception exists, they may be overlooking much of the evidence this paper has discussed.
On the other hand, scientists who claim that clairvoyance is a fact of life are exaggerating, for many questions remain. H. J. Eysenck, professor at the University of London, calmly states the crux of the issues:
. . . Very intriguing demonstrations have been given that suggest the existence of something outside the purview of physics and psychology, but no one has yet succeed in bringing this something under adequate experimental control (1004).
Until scientists can present a reasonable explanation for clairvoyance, Eysenck contends, "It would be unwise to claim anymore". (1004).
Comments