![]() After all, 3% better than chance is rather unremarkable. "If you really have ESP, you should be able to get it right maybe 65%, 80% of the time," Rouder said. This type of result is consistent across parapsychological research, said Jeffrey Rouder, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. And they did - but only by a small margin: They selected the window hiding pornography 53% of the time, to be exact. Bem hypothesized that if ESP were real, participants would pick that window more than half of the time. ![]() Behind one window was a screen showing pornography. For example, one of Bem's studies asked participants to select one of two windows, both of which were hidden behind curtains. In addition, skeptics point out that results that appear to provide evidence for ESP aren't actually much different from what you'd expect based on chance. "They can't do it when the conditions are tight." "Scientists can't do it again," Alcock said. No one seems to be able to repeat the exact same experiment and get identical results. For example, one set of experiments might find that ganzfeld experiments work with photographs, and another study might add videos and find that the participants guess the videos correctly but not the photographs. But if you look closely at these studies, you'll find slight differences in both the methods and the results. Sometimes, it may seem as if certain results - such as those from ganzfeld experiments - can be replicated, Alcock told Live Science. "In science, if you discover something and claim it as a fact, then other scientists following similar procedures should find the same thing," said James Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. There's a major problem with ESP research: You can't replicate it. Bem has since received widespread criticism for using study methods known to encourage false positive results. In other words, it appeared that precognition helped participants "remember" words based on their future practice. Participants remembered more of the words they would later practice than those they didn't. Later, he would give them a subset of those words to "practice" by copying them out. He conducted nine standard psychological experiments, with well-established psychological effects - but did them in reverse.įor example, he would show participants a long list of words, and would have them memorize as many as possible and then repeat what they remembered. In 2011, he published a paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that appeared to demonstrate evidence for precognition, or the ability to predict the future. One of the best-known and most controversial figures in ESP research today is Daryl Bem, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. If they selected the target image, it was considered a "hit." Similar to the results of Rhine's earlier research, a review article aggregating the results of dozens of these studies found that people consistently selected the target more often than one would expect based on chance. Afterward, the study participants would view a set of images, one of which was the target. The researchers would ask participants to focus on whatever images floated into their minds while a "sender," sitting in another room, viewed a "target" video clip or image and attempted to transmit the information to the participant. ![]() The goal was to deprive the participants of sensory stimuli, making it easier to focus on ESP messages. In the 1970s, researchers began conducting ganzfeld experiments, in which participants would sit in darkened rooms with their eyes covered, listening to white noise. Many of these studies appear to provide evidence for the existence of ESP. Today, ESP research appears alongside orthodox psychology research in high-profile, peer-reviewed journals, including American Psychologist and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The program, later nicknamed " Stargate," was devoted to ESP applications in the Cold War. ![]() This research hasn't just taken place on the fringes between 19, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), spent $20 million on ESP-related research efforts conducted largely at Stanford Research Institute, according to a 2015 article published in the journal SAGE Open. Since parapsychology took off, some scientists have devoted their careers to investigating the existence of ESP. (Image credit: Getty Images/Hulton Archive) Does extrasensory perception exist? This illustration of amateur thought-reading was published in the Illustrated London News on Oct. Fascination with ESP phenomena, including thought-reading, took off in the late 19th century. ![]()
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