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- EXTRA SENSORY PERCEPTION
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- by
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- Treegoods, Inc.
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- February 84
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- Copyright Notice
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- Copyright (c) 1984 by Treegoods, Inc., Box 814, Hockessin, DE
- 19707. All rights reserved. This document may be copied along with
- the ESP program under conditions specified for the copying of that
- program.
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- TREEGOODS, INC. PSI AND THE ESP COMPUTER PROGRAM
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- PSI AND THE ESP COMPUTER PROGRAM
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- People have always speculated about the "other" senses: e.g.
- those beyond the common "sight", "hearing", "touch", etc. Are
- there such senses, or are they a part of humankind's fantasy world
- along with fairies and magic carpets?
-
- Serious scientific investigation of parapsychology began in
- Victorian times and led to the founding of The Society for
- Psychical Research in London. Alas, things are not always what
- they seem and this well intentioned start foundered on a lack of
- controls. Mediums were found to be frauds and eyewitness reports,
- even when made by careful observers, were too often in error.
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- In despair of finding a workable methodology for dealing with
- "spontaneous" psychic phenomena, researchers retreated into the
- laboratory and restricted their investigations to environments that
- could in theory be controlled. Thus has grown up a protocol for
- testing psi abilities.
-
- The laboratory equipment usually consists of a deck of cards and
- the subject is asked to perform tasks such as naming the top card
- or reading the mind of a "sender" who is looking at a card. In a
- clairvoyance experiment for example, the cards are shuffled and
- dealt face down, one at a time. The subject is required to write
- down the card without seeing its face. After the pack has been
- dealt, the cards are turned up, compared with the subjects' notes
- and the degree of clairvoyance assessed by statistical formulas
- that indicate the frequency of chance "hits".
-
- J.B. Rhine of Duke University found subjects who could produce
- truly astonishing numbers of "hits" by such techniques. At first
- he was rather casual in his protocol, but as time passed and as he
- or his associates thought of objections to one technique or
- another, he tightened up his protocol until the subject was even in
- another building from the deck of cards. References to his
- publications are given in the bibliography.
-
- Since Rhine's publications began appearing, other investigators
- have found subjects able to produce similar results, but by and
- large the scientific community has not been too impressed. The
- problem is much more difficult that it seems at first thought. No
- one seriously disputes the results or impugns the integrity of
- Rhine or most other serious investigators. The scientific
- objections are on other grounds.
-
- These objections are detailed at length in the literature and
- they will not be dwelt on here, but to provide some feeling for the
- difficulties, consider the usual psi test with a deck of 25 Zener
- cards. These are ordinary sized cards consisting of 5 each of 5
- different symbols: star, square, circle, cross, and 3 wavy lines.
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- Page 1
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- TREEGOODS, INC. PSI AND THE ESP COMPUTER PROGRAM
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- It is no great trick to remember a sequence of 25 cards. Some
- people can do it naturally, but most people can be trained to it
- with the use of mnemonics. If one can do this, one can also learn
- to "shuffle" and cut the cards mentally. Of course a mental
- shuffle will not necessarily agree with an actual shuffle, but the
- results will be good enough to throw off the statistical
- calculations and increase the number of hits to a significant
- degree. In one series of 100 shuffles, the average number of hits
- by such mental gymnastics was raised from the expected value of 5
- to 8.6. The odds against this are quadrillions to one by the usual
- statistical formulas.
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- This is only one way in which an ESP test can be "beaten". There
- are many others depending on how the particular ESP test is
- conducted. The ESP computer program avoids them all by generating
- a sequence of symbols with a pseudo random number generator. It
- can be shown that the series of symbols used in an ESP test is too
- short for the sequence to be "broken" and thus even "lightning
- calculators" will possess no advantage. Improper mixing of cards
- by shuffling is avoided in this way as is any possibility of
- "trickery" with physical objects such as cards.
-
- The precognition test is completely foolproof. However, there is
- some possibility for error in the telepathy and clairvoyance tests
- because of the need for human intervention. For valid results in
- the clairvoyance test the lower portion of the screen must be
- completely masked off. With care in this, the test should be
- secure. The telepathic test is open to question because the sender
- and the receiver are physically present and thus able to signal one
- another. Some people have extremely acute senses and others
- possess great powers of observation. Conscious chicanery is thus
- possible, as is the unconscious sensing of body language or
- subvocalizations. It is important to remember that one does not
- have to get all the answers right to succeed with an ESP test, one
- only needs to increase the odds enough to upset the statistical
- calculations. Running the ESP program from a remote terminal might
- overcome these problems.
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- There are some fine points is assessing the statistical
- significance of results that have confounded even good scientists
- in the past. The ESP computer program deals with these and prints
- out a clear statement of the odds. In most scientific endeavors,
- odds of 19 to 1 are considered "significant" and any subject who
- can consistently produce such odds using the ESP computer program
- must be considered to possess psi abilities. Successful subjects
- reported in the literature usually do considerably better than
- this: odds exceeding a million to one are common.
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- Page 2
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- TREEGOODS, INC. REFERENCES
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- REFERENCES
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- Douglas, Alfred (1977) Extra-sensory powers. The Overlook Press,
- Woodstock, NY.
- Eysenck, H.J. (1958) Sense and Nonsense in Psychology. Penguin,
- Baltimore, MD.
- Hansel, C.E.M. (1980) ESP and parapsychology: a critical
- reevaluation. Prometheus, Buffalo, NY.
- Rhine, J.B. (1934) Extra-Sensory Perception. Bruce Humphries,
- Boston.
- Rhine, J.B. (1960) The reach of the mind. William Sloane
- Associates, New York.
- Schmeidler, Gertrude (ed) (1969) Extrasensory perception. Atherton
- Press, New York.
-
- JOURNALS
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- Journal of Parapsychology. Inst. of Parapsychology. Durham, NC.
- Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Am. Soc. Psy.
- Res. NY
-
- SOCIETIES
-
-
- American Society for Psychical Research. 5 West 73rd St., New York,
- NY 10023. (212) 799 05050.
- Institute of Parapsychology. PO Box 6847, Durham, NC 27708-6847.
- (919) 688 8241.
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- Page 3
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- TREEGOODS, INC. ALGORITHMS
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- ALGORITHMS
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- The sequence of symbols is generated by a multiplicative
- congruential random number generator
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- x[i+1] = Ax[i]mod P
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- where P=2E31-1 and A=7E5. The starting seed x[0] is obtained from
- the least significant bits of the computer's clock.
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- An evaluation of the properties of this generator and others
- appears in Fishman, G. S. and Moore, L. R. (1982) A statistical
- evaluation of multiplicative congruential random number generators
- with modulus 2E31-1. J. Am. Statist. Assoc. 77-377, pp129-136.
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- Odds are obtained from the binomial distribution by evaluating
- the incomplete beta function using a partial fraction expansion.
- Fifteen place accuracy is attained for odds less than 4.5E-15 to 1.
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- Page 4
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