I did a brief search on the net looking for something on PSI (ESP). And of course a lot of the site were there to make money and sell you something, so I read some sites looking for some names of someone with an accademic backround and came up with the name of a Cornell University psychology professor Daryl Bem, so I thru that into google and he has a site with alot of article on it not mainly about PSI but other subject heres the link and a small clip:
http://www.dbem.ws/psi_world.html
Bem, D. J. (1994, August). Does Psi Exist? The World & I , 215-219.
Does Psi Exist?
Daryl J. Bem
Cornell University
Recent laboratory research suggests that parapsychologists might finally have cornered their elusive quarry: Reproducible evidence for psychic functioning.
Reports of psychic phenomena are as old as human history. Experimental tests of psychic phenomena are almost as old. According to Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, King Croesus of Lydia dispatched several of his men to test seven oracles to see if any of them could divine what he, the king, was doing on the day of the test. Only Pythia, priestess of Apollo at Delphi, was able to divine correctly that the king was making a lamb and tortoise stew in a bronze kettle.
Convinced of her powers, Croesus then posed the question that really interested him: If he attacked the rival kingdom of Persia, would he be able to defeat its army? Pythia replied, "When Croesus has the Halys crossed, a mighty empire will be lost." Insufficiently alert to the ambiguity of this prediction, Croesus crossed the river, attacked, and lost his mighty empire. Evaluating "psychic" data is a risky business.
The contemporary technical term for psychic phenomena is psi. More precisely, psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer, processes that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. These processes include extrasensory perception (ESP), the acquisition of information without using the known senses, and psychokinesis, the ability to affect physical objects or events without the intervention of any known physical force.
In turn, ESP comprises the following:
- Telepathy. The transfer of information from one person to another without the mediation of any known channel of sensory communication.
- Clairvoyance. The acquisition of information about places, objects, or events without the mediation of any of the known senses (for example, Pythia's knowledge that the king was making stew).
- Precognition. The acquisition of information about a future event that could not be anticipated through any known inferential process. (Pythia's prediction about the loss of an empire, although dubious, is an example.)
Serious scholarly investigation of psi began in 1892, when a group of scholars in London founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to
investigate that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic...without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.
The SPR was active until the early years of the twentieth century when many of the original founders had died and enthusiasm declined.
Contemporary psi research is usually considered to have begun in 1927, when Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife/collaborator, Louisa, arrived in the psychology department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Rhine's experiments, which tested for ESP with decks of cards containing geometric symbols, became well known to the general public in 1937, when he published New Frontiers of the Mind. The book received widespread press coverage and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Even today, many Americans know of Rhine's work.
Since Rhine many parapsychologists have reported positive psi results using a wide variety of experimental procedures. Yet, most academic psychologists are not yet persuaded that the existence of psi has been established.
Searching for a repeatable experiment
In science generally, a phenomenon is not considered established until it has been observed repeatedly by several researchers. This criterion has been the source of the most serious criticism of parapsychology: that it has failed to yield a single reliable demonstration of psi that can be replicated by other investigators. In 1974, an experimental procedure was introduced that holds out the promise of supplying that repeatable demonstration: the ganzfeld procedure.
By the late 1960s, several parapsychologists had become dissatisfied with the repetitive forced-choice procedures pioneered by Rhine, believing that they failed to capture the kinds of psi experiences that people report in everyday life. Both historically and cross-culturally, psi has usually been associated with dreaming, meditation, trances of various kinds, and other altered states of consciousness. This suggested that psi information may function like a weak signal normally masked by the sensory "noise" of everyday life. Thus, altered states of consciousness may enhance a person's ability to detect psi information simply because they reduce interfering sensory input. Psi researchers first sought to test this hypothesis by adapting the ganzfeld procedure, a mild sensory isolation technique first introduced into experimental psychology during the 1930s.
In a ganzfeld telepathy experiment, one subject (the receiver) rests in a reclining chair in a soundproof chamber. Translucent ping pong ball halves are taped over the eyes and headphones are placed over the ears. A red floodlight is directed toward the receiver's eyes and white noise is played through the headphones. (White noise is a random mixture of sound frequencies similar to the hiss made by a radio tuned between stations.) This homogeneous visual and auditory environment is called the Ganzfeld, a German word meaning "total field." To quiet "noise" produced by internal bodily tension, the receiver is also led through a set of relaxation exercises at the beginning of the ganzfeld period.
While the receiver is in the ganzfeld, a second subject (the sender) sits in a separate soundproof room and concentrates on the "target," a randomly selected picture
