Consciousness

Chapter

Fourteen

Reality and imagination

and many failures of replication (Irwin and Watt, 2007). In

general, this method of ‘forced-choice’ guessing with bor-

ing cards obtained only extremely weak effects  – if indeed

they were effects at all. For this reason, by the 1970s various

‘free-response’ methods were developed which, although

more time-consuming, are much more enjoyable to do.

In ‘remote viewing’, for example, a target person goes to a

randomly selected remote location and looks around for a

specified length of time. Meanwhile, the receiver sits and

relaxes, reporting any impressions or images that arise.

Afterwards, either the receiver or an independent judge tries to match up the

impressions with a limited set of possible target locations and pick the right one.

This means that although the descriptions are given freely, inferential statistics

can be used to test the results. Remote viewing became famous when physicists

Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff (1977), at the Stanford Research Institute in Cal-

ifornia, obtained highly significant results. Then two psychologists, David Marks

and Richard Kammann, argued that there were clues in the transcripts which

might have been used to obtain spurious results. This lead to a controversy in the

prestigious journal Nature and attempts by others to determine the relevance of

these clues (Marks, 2000).

In 1995, the American Institutes for Research reported on ‘Stargate’, a 24-year,

$22-million government-funded research project on the feasibility of using

psychic powers for intelligence gathering. Many of their experiments used the

same remote-viewing protocols, but arguments about the adequacy of the

methods used and the significance of the results followed (Hyman, 1995; Utts,

1995; Wiseman and Milton, 1998). American statistician Jessica Utts described

Stargate as providing some of the most solid evidence of psi to date, whereas

Marks described it as ‘a series of closed-off, flawed, nonvalidated, and nonrepli-

cated studies’, concluding that ‘Remote viewing is nothing more than a self-ful-

filling subjective delusion’ (Marks, 2000, p. 92) – that is, the remote-viewers or the

experimenters imagine connections with the target, even though if the protocols

are adhered to correctly, their imaginings should have no effect. Regardless of

who is right, the US government decided that remote viewing could not be used

for gathering intelligence. Documents from the Stargate project were released

and made available online in January 2017. There is no evidence that any other

country has successfully employed ESP for spying.

Targ continued his research and used the findings of remote viewing to illus-

trate his contention that most of us have untapped psychic powers. The clatter

of our conscious minds suppresses our natural abilities, he claims, but if we

learn to quiet this noise through meditation and other forms of self-inquiry,

we may be able to experience what the remote-viewing data show: ‘without

a doubt, that our mind is limitless and that our awareness both fills and tran-

scends our ordinary understanding of space and time’ (Targ, 2004, p. xiii; see

Activity 14.1).

Even more controversy ensued over another method for testing ESP, this time in

the ganzfeld (German for total field). Participants in a ganzfeld experiment lie com-

fortably, listening to white noise or seashore sounds through headphones, and

‘remote viewing must

signify the existence of

an astonishing hidden

human potential’

(Targ and Puthoff, 1977, p. 9)

PSI

ESP PK

Extrasensory perception Psychokinesis

Clairvoyance Telepathy Precognition

FIGURE 14.8 • Terms used in parapsychology.

‘Psi’ is a general term that

refers to all kinds of paranormal

phenomena or the supposed

mechanism underlying them.

There are four forms of psi and

three types of ESP.