A Sample and Critique of psi Research

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Recommended: Brief summary of parapsychology

"Do you remember how electrical currents and 'unseen waves' were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still in its infancy." - Albert Einstein

Introduction

Perception of future events (precognition), communication through thoughts (telepathy), material manipulation without physical contact (telekinesis), sight of an object or place millions of miles away with enough accuracy to draw it (remote viewing) – these are a few cases of what is referred to as "psi phenomena," also known as parapsychological or psychic phenomena. "Psi" refers to "anomalous processes of energy or information transfer... that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms."(1) Long dismissed by scientists and other skeptics all over the world, these occurrences are often attributed to trickery, hallucination, lying, chance, and even spiritual influence. Claims of psychic ability come from many varied sources. From the friend who has premonitory dreams and the dog who knows when the master has decided to come home, to the glamorous astrologer with a 900-number and the clairvoyant with a TV show, stories of paranormal abilities range from personal and thought-provoking to distant and Hollywood-esque. Are these things really possible? What does the scientific community actually know about these phenomena? Ultimately, one must ask the question, what can the scientific community know about these phenomena?

This paper is intended to provide a small sample and critique of the available scientific research on these unexplained and often dismissed phenomena. The examples which form this review are: research on unexplained phenomena not associated with "psychic" individuals, large-scale research centering on many individuals with "psychic talent," and an investigation of the claimed abilities of a single internationally celebrated "psychic."

Despite the historical and prevalent stigma and sensationalization associated with this field, many respected educational establishments have laboratories involved in the research of psi. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, instituted in 1979 to investigate mind-matter interactions (2); the Parapsychological Association, a 1957 offshoot of the Duke Laboratory (3); the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh (4); and Stanford University's 1946 endeavor, Stanford Research Institute are four of these. It should be noted that Stanford Research Institute separated from the university in 1970, and became SRI International. (5)

Examples

Impersonal phenomena

If a person is asked to identify the color of a rectangle, and is subsequently asked to read a randomly generated color name, it is well-known that a matching color name will be called out faster than a mismatching color name.

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