Heads and tails and ESP

Heads and tails and ESP

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Originally published 11 December 1989

Few sub­jects so rat­tle the equi­lib­ri­um of the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty as ESP — extrasen­so­ry per­cep­tion — espe­cial­ly when it comes tricked out in the garb of sci­ence. When the New York Times Mag­a­zine pub­lished a sto­ry on the work of Prince­ton ESP researcher Robert Jahn, one could almost hear the col­lec­tive groan rise from the ivy-cov­ered build­ing of that New Jer­sey cam­pus. This is the kind of research that most sci­en­tists would pre­fer to have at some­one else’s institution.

Jah­n’s sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials are impec­ca­ble: Phi Beta Kap­pa at Prince­ton, dean emer­i­tus of the uni­ver­si­ty’s engi­neer­ing school, a lead­ing aero­space engi­neer. It is there­fore par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing that he should be espous­ing the real­i­ty of a phe­nom­e­non that most sci­en­tists con­sid­er pure bunk.

The arti­cle was appro­pri­ate­ly hedged with “seems” and “maybe,” and point­ed out that a 1988 Nation­al Research Coun­cil report found “no sci­en­tif­ic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion from research con­duct­ed over a peri­od of 130 years for the exis­tence of para­psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na.” Still, the arti­cle com­plete­ly ignored the long, sor­ry his­to­ry of ESP research, and gave the read­er very lit­tle con­text in which to eval­u­ate Jah­n’s claims for ESP. Rather, Jahn was por­trayed (per­haps unin­ten­tion­al­ly) as an intre­pid pio­neer of unpop­u­lar but sig­nif­i­cant research.

Jahn is not the first sci­en­tist to claim that ESP is real. The sci­en­tif­ic study of ESP gained con­sid­er­able momen­tum after Joseph Rhine’s work on ESP at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty in the 1930s. Rhine was a botanist-turned-para­psy­chol­o­gist. Cer­tain of his sub­jects appeared able to guess what cards (marked with spe­cial sym­bols) had been turned face-up by a researcher in anoth­er room. Rhine’s results were con­tro­ver­sial, and his meth­ods round­ly crit­i­cized by oth­er scientists.

Since then, many sim­i­lar exper­i­ments have been per­formed at oth­er insti­tu­tions, per­haps because they are so cheap and easy to do, or because the pos­si­bil­i­ty of “knock­ing sci­ence on its ear” is an attrac­tive idea to cer­tain rebel­lious minds.

Poor science

The vast major­i­ty of ESP exper­i­ments have yield­ed neg­a­tive results. Those exper­i­ments that seemed to con­firm ESP were often marked by shod­dy con­trols, flawed sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, or out­right trick­ery or fraud. Pos­i­tive results have been impos­si­ble to dupli­cate by inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tors. ESP is appar­ent­ly an effect which is detectable only by advo­cates of ESP.

Robert Jah­n’s evi­dence for ESP comes from exper­i­ments in which an elec­tron­ic ran­dom­iz­er “flips a coin” and a sub­ject tries to men­tal­ly influ­ence the out­come by think­ing “heads” or “tails.” What makes Jah­n’s exper­i­ments inter­est­ing is the sheer vol­ume of his data, which great­ly improves the sta­tis­ti­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of results. Accord­ing to the Times arti­cle, 33 dif­fer­ent vol­un­teers attempt­ed to influ­ence the out­come of 750,000 tri­als. The results were not 50 – 50, as expect­ed by chance, but 50.02 – 49.98, a tiny dis­crep­an­cy, but sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant if real.

But is the effect real? A com­mit­tee of the Nation­al Research Coun­cil vis­it­ed Jah­n’s lab­o­ra­to­ry before writ­ing their 1988 report. They fault­ed Jah­n’s exper­i­ments for such things as fail­ure to ran­dom­ize the sequence of groups of tri­als at each ses­sion, inad­e­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion on pre­cau­tions against data tam­per­ing, and pos­si­bil­i­ties of data selec­tion. Fur­ther, the com­mit­tee said it appears as if all the suc­cess of Jah­n’s huge data base could be attrib­uted to the results of one indi­vid­ual who pro­duced almost 25 per­cent of the data, and who there­fore may have been famil­iar with any non-ran­dom idio­syn­crasies of the equip­ment. None of these crit­i­cisms are men­tioned in the Times article.

Uncrit­i­cal pub­lic­i­ty for Jah­n’s work will only encour­age those who believe that ESP research has been sup­pressed by the “sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment.” This idea of close-mind­ed sci­en­tists refus­ing to rec­og­nize evi­dence for ESP is non­sense. Sci­en­tists have good rea­son to be skep­ti­cal: After more than a cen­tu­ry of inves­ti­ga­tion of the sup­posed effect, not a sin­gle break­through has been achieved.

A lack of evidence

If even one exper­i­ment showed clear, unam­bigu­ous evi­dence for ESP, sci­en­tists would be the first to crowd onto the band­wag­on. Good researchers are always on the look­out for a break­through that will win a Nobel prize or make a career. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the fren­zy of activ­i­ty that fol­lowed Mar­tin Fleis­chmann and Stan­ley Pons’ announce­ment of cold fusion. Rather than try­ing to sup­press this off-beat work, half the physi­cists and chemists in the world scram­bled to con­struct their own cold fusion cells.

Yes, estab­lish­ment sci­en­tists are skep­ti­cal of ESP, but they do not under­es­ti­mate the pow­ers of the human mind. Jahn claims to lie in bed at Prince­ton and form men­tal images of scenes being viewed by a col­league in Paris; we watch events in oth­er parts of the world every day, as they occur, as a result of the pow­ers of the human mind (the effect is called tele­vi­sion). Vol­un­teers in Jah­n’s lab will try to lift a weight sus­pend­ed from a bar by men­tal con­cen­tra­tion; human men­tal pow­er lift­ed humans to the moon. Jah­n’s sub­jects will try to raise the tem­per­a­ture of water in a tank by think­ing “hot”; human tech­nol­o­gy may raise the tem­per­a­ture of the entire plan­et (green­house warm­ing), and only human men­tal pow­er can eval­u­ate and address the threat.

By all means, let hon­est researchers like Robert Jahn have a go at ESP. But the New York Times and oth­er respon­si­ble news media should report such work with unam­bigu­ous skep­ti­cism. Enthu­si­asm for ESP and pseu­do-psy­chol­o­gy is already ram­pant among the Amer­i­can peo­ple, divert­ing us from the real and use­ful work of the human mind.

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