Marios Kittenis
Contemporary Theories and Experiments in Parapsychology.
Marios Kittenis, a parapsychologist persuing a PHD at the Koestler Institute in Edinburgh in parapsychology - the study of unexplained human perception, and interactions with matter.
[28:09]It's actually the first time I'm speaking to an audience of non scientists and its really good, its quite, well, not scientist's, probably more not professional scientists because I think we're all scientists in some sense of the work, we all a scientist in some way as we're all an artist to different degrees. What I'm going to talk about is parapsychology research, I'm part of the Koestler Parapsychology unit in Edinburgh University for the past 2 and a half years, I'm doing my PhD there. The Koestler unit is basically part of the psychology department but its semi-independent, it was set u in 1985 by an endowment left by Arthur Koestler in his will, so it's been around for a good 18 years now. So I'm going to talk a bit about the research that's been done in the past, not just in the Koestler unit but in parapsychology in general, and a little bit about where it seems to be going. If at any point you want to ask questions, just feel free to interrupt, it's better to have an interactive rather than a monologue.
[29:57] Ok, so I'd thought I'd base the theme around resonance, quite loosely. I'll just go quickly through the different areas that parapsychology is trying to investigate. Experimental parapsychology, that is because parapsychology as a discipline is probable almost a hundred years old now and it started off by looking at people's experiences, pre-cognate dreams or telepathic experiences or poltergeist effects, so at first they were looking at spontaneous human experiences, now it's more focused into more experimental laboratory research, trying to see if we can recreate these kind of effects in the laboratory, to, well, first of all, there's a bit of resonance going on (adjustment of microphone required, made and laughter from the audience).
[31:16]Yes, first of all to see if there actually is something going on because when you start looking at peoples experiences of telepathy what you find a lot of the time is that a lot of it is a bit dubious, that we tend to have selective memory of things that are impressive, like picking up the phone to call someone and they're at the other end of the line. that may happen a few times in our lifetime but you tend to remember that and you don't remember all the other time where nothing happened. So there's a lot of self deception going on in our memory of experiences like this so taking it into the lab and trying to recreate it under controlled conditions is first of all a step to see if it's actually happening, it's not just completely self-deception, and then to look at the possible mechanisms that might be involved.
[32:33] Roughly speaking what Parapsychology is studying; Experimental Parapsychology, is divided into 2 mail areas. Extrasensory perception, which is perception from outside the commonly recognised senses, and Psycho-Kinesis, which is mind matter interaction, so effecting matter through intention, again without any physical interaction.
Extra sensory perception, there seem to be 3 human experiences falling into that category, the most common, with which most people are familiar, is telepathy. People describe it as the experience of perceiving what somebody else is experiencing from a distance without communicating verbally or non verbally. So it might be someone in another room, a very common example is sensing when a loved one is experiencing while they're in a crisis, like mothers sensing when there children are in an accident. So telepathy being perception from another person. Clairvoyance refers to the experience of receiving something remotely without any other person being involved. For example, an event that is happening some place else without anyone being there to observe it. The procedure usually used is called remote viewing when people go into an altered state and try to perceive something remote from them and the location.
[34:49] The third kind of experience people report is pre cognition. That's awareness of information before it actually happens, like having a dream of an event happening and the event happening the next day. In a sense, clairvoyance is perception across space and precognition is perception across time. It's very hard to tell sometimes the separation between these three experiences.
[35:31]Another kind of experience that people report that seems to be quite different to extra sensory perception is what is being called psycho-cognesis. Things like poltergeist effects, things moving without anyone physically touching them. Again these are all reported experiences, we can't be a hundred percent sure if there's any validity to peoples experiences, its what people report and parapsychology is attempting to see if there is anything more than illusion or self deception when people have these kind of experiences.
[36:50] Collectively all these phenomena are called Psy, and they are represented wit the Greek letter 'c' from psyche Greek word for mind and soul. So a lot of what we do is concerned with what isn't Psy but looks like it, the way people deceive themselves and others, the psychic claimants who used to convince others that they're using psychic skills when a lot of the time they're just using clever educated guessing.
[37:45]So I'll go through some areas of characteristic research that as been done so far. Unsurprisingly, parapsychology has had quite a lot of criticism, in their methods, or in the past 30 years of so, you will see a very clear refining of techniques and more and more control against both intentional deception from either experimenters or participants and unintentional deceptions. One of the most well explored and most well used technique and probably what most people would be familiar with is what is being called Ganzfeld ESP studies. Ganzfeld is German for blank field, or neutral field and what it consists of is having 2 people, one designated as a receiver and the other one designated as a sender, usually in sound shielded and electromagnetically shielded rooms.
The receiver is in a very comfortable chair with some kind of filter across their eyes to induce the sensation of looking through deep fog. Basically its perceptual deprivation, its not sensory deprivation, there is sensation hitting the retina so there is sensory stimulation but there is no perception there. And the same thing with auditory, putting on headphones with white noise. so there is sensory noise there but there is no information, there is no pattern to it. What usually happens is that people tend to drift off into hypnotic-like states, the state in which you often find yourself in when you are falling asleep but before you actually fall asleep. so a kind of day dreaming state.
People get imagery or sounds and they just report what they are experiencing through a microphone and that's recorded in another room by the experimenter. The sender, in another room, is sitting in front of a computer and the computer randomly chooses a few pictures out of a pool of a few hundred, sometimes static pictures, sometimes video clips, lately they've been using video clips. So the computer chooses 4 clips out of a few hundred and out of the 4 the experimenter chooses 1 and shows it to the sender repeatedly. The sender is just focusing on the image. They're chosen to be quite distinct from each other but they're quite emotionally charged. So the receiver is just describing what they are experiencing and at the end they are shown all 4 pictures without knowing which one was shown to the sender and they're asked to choose which one was the most likely one which best fitted their experiences.
[41:57] Just by chance you would expect people to get the correct one 25 percent of the time. There was a meta analysis grouping all these results from 1074 to 1997 so about 2500 sessions, and the over all hit rate was about 33.2 percent which isn't huge but the odds of that happening by chance are quite staggering. There is always a possibility of us missing something, something else going on apart from telepathy. The terms we are using are just metaphors, as Denna was saying earlier. They're just labels for this and they're bound to be imprecise. I personally don't like the terminology we se but we're stuck with it until we come up with something better. (43.45) This clock has actually stopped, your watch stopped so I don't know how I'm doing with time (laughter from audience).
[43:59] Ok speaking of time, the next well studied effect is precognition and the protocol people have been using is electro-dermal activity measurements whereby you're attached to electrodes by your palms or fingers. Its basically very similar to what they use for lie detector tests. It basically passes a small current through your palm and depending on how sweaty your palms are, the resistance changes and the moisture on your palms changes depending upon your level of arousal. It's very easy to measure and its quite a fast response. What seemed to come out of it, they had a protocol whereby they had 3 kinds of pictures, 2 kinds of emotionally charged pictures, one sexual and one violent and the third kind of stimuli was emotionally neutral images. And what you tend to see when you flash one of these images in front of someone on a screen is that 150 to 250 milli seconds after they see the picture their arousal level goes up if its an emotionally charged image. And it goes up when it's a neutral image but much less. What seems to be happening a lot of the time, but not always, is that the people show some kind of response before they see the picture. A lot of the time its just anticipation because they know something is coming so they become more aroused, but funny thing is, the arousal seems to be greater when there is an emotionally charged picture coming up and much less when there's an emotionally neutral picture coming up and its not possible for them to predict which is next because the computer chooses randomly.
[46:09]So quite funny, leaves us all very puzzled. If you ask people to press a button when they think there is an emotionally charged picture coming up, their scores are flat chance really, don't seem to be able to do it consciously. They can't seem to be able to predict it, it seems to be a very ingrained physiological response.
[47:27]Next set of studies is on Psycho-Kinesis, the initial studies in the 50's and 60's used dice, just people trying to effect the outcome of rolling dice, in the last few years people have started using random number generators. They're usual binary so it's a bit like an electronic coin toss but you get usually about 200 coin tosses per second and its basically as random as it gets. They used to use radioactive decay, now they are using tricks with electronic noise so if you take a long enough sample you should have a 50 percent 1s so a normal distribution. You get some variation but the bigger the sample you get the more settled it will be. They had that fed into a computer which is controlling an image on a screen, the simplest one usually is the size of a shape, so circles or whatever, when the output was one, it would make the output a little bit bigger and when the output was zero, it would make the circle a little bit smaller. And because you have 200 of those outputs per second the effect was basically increasing and decreasing all the time.
[48:59]When you have people trying to effect it, trying to make it bigger or smaller, what seems to happen is that the distribution tends to nudge to one end or the other. Again, it's very hard to tell if that's an effect of human intention or non physical mechanism, or if its some kind of correlation of precognitively guessing what the output would naturally have been skewed in that direction and choosing that period to start tee trial and finish it, or if there is some physical effect is going on.. But the effect is still there, its very tiny though, overall the effect is some 51 percent where you would expect 50, so its tiny but its extremely unlikely for that effect to be just due by chance. Which kind of begs the question, if we're dealing with effects this small, why should we bother studying them even if they are genuine?
[50:27]If it is something so tiny and so insignificant why bother, the arguments a lot of scientists come up with is that there might be something going on there but its so tiny that should we mess everything up because of it, well I guess the answer to that is maybe they're tiny but if your looking at interactions with living organisms small effect can have quite large impacts on the organism as a whole, its very similar to chaos theory, systems that are in a state of chaotic flux are very sensitive to external influences. I haven't been to the exhibition yet but I've noticed that there is an artwork on butterflies, seems to be tied in with that idea of the air current caused by a butterflies wing could cause a hurricane elsewhere a few months down the line. When you have chaotic systems in flux, miniscule effects could possibly magnify and that's the situation we have with something like the human brain, its very complex system in chaotic flux. so there've been quite a few studies looking at the interaction between living organisms, people trying to effect the growth of bacteria cultures or trying to effect physiological functions in other humans, heart rate or electro-dermal activity.
[52:43] What I'm involved in is an EEG study using an electroencephalogram recordings between two pairs and stimulating one person of the pair with flashes of light which induces a very standard brain response to the flash and looking to see if the partner responds in the same period of time. I'm recruiting pairs of people who have some kind of emotional connection, some kind of bond just for the fact that people like that seem to report strange coincidences or telepathic like interaction wit each other.
[53:40] The kind of effect rate of human intention of physiological systems seems to be a little bit higher, around 53 percent, again its quite small but it seems to be quite robust, it seems extremely unlikely to be due to chance alone. I'm probably running out of time so I'll go quickly through the rest of the conclusions that we seem to be coming to. If this is something involving an actual human ability or and actual mechanism rather than just fluke, then you would expect it to correlate with things like cognitive traits, individual personality characteristics and with physical variables, like, for example, temperature. And what seems to be coming up is that there are some variables that seem to be successful. One is meditation. People who experience meditation or any kind of mental discipline like yoga or martial arts, rock climbers, jugglers, seem to do generally better that people with no such training. Artists seem to do a lot better than people wit no explicit creative output.
[55:54] Another predictor is previous experience of perceived Psy events, perceived because we can't really know if they are actual, just people who think they've experienced ESP or Telepathy before seem to do better that people who never ad any experience like that. People who believe in the possibility of Psy seem to do better which is quite odd if it's just a statistical fluke, you would expect people to do the same regardless of their belief system. The different scales were looking at cognitive styles and you have scales putting intuitive people who tend to approach problems with a kind of holistic intuitive approach and on the other extreme people who have a more down to basics, breaking down approach and more intuitive people do a lot better that people with a more analytical outlook. And extroverts seem to do a lot better than introverts. There is a lot of debate about whether extroverts are actually better that introverts or whether its just an artefact of the social situation.
[57:52] So they are the psychological variables that people seem to be coming across a lot of the time. Physical variables. Well there are 2 striking points where there are a lack of physical correlations, one is Psy effects don't seem to decline by distance. People have tried ESP or remote viewing experiments from a distance of up to several thousand kilometres and it doesn't seem to effect the experiment. So that challenged what people originally thought might be involved -that telepathy was some kind of mental radio. But if there is no signal that we know of that could do that without declining by distance. And again there's no apparent decline by separation in time. For example in remote viewing experiments, people could view a location that's not chosen until a few hours after the experiment. Or they could try to predict the outcome of a computer choosing some random targets a few weeks or months before its actually chosen and it doesn't seem to make any difference. And that's quite a bit of a problem because if its a physical mechanism then its very difficult to explain these kind of lack Psy limitations in space and time. But thankfully there are some correlations with geomagnetic activity. The strength of the earths magnetic field fluctuates depending on where the earth is in relation to the sun, depending on solar activity, depending on where moon is, where the other Planets are, depending on storm activity, and if you plot ESP results with Electromagnetic activity, people do better when it's quiet, when we have less Geomagnetic noise basically.
[60:12] And the other effect that seems to be very robust and very consistent is a correlation with sidereal time. Sidereal time is basically star time, its different to solar time that we normally use because a solar day is a bit longer than a star day. A star day is defined as a full earth rotation in relation to the distant stars because the earth is not only rotating on its own axis but also moving through space to rotate around the sun.
[61:60] (Graph) if you plot sidereal time and ESP effect you get this huge peek 13.45. its about a 200 percent increase in a two hour period. It could be anything, it could be gamma radiation from a distant star, it could be anything, but its quite encouraging that there is a robust physical correlation.
[61:40] one thing it seems to be related to is the earths position in relation to the Galaxy. So if you imagine the galaxy as a disc, and the earth is on the edge.
[63:38] I feel quite lucky to be involved in parapsychology, it's quite controversial, working in hostile territory all the time is quite fascinating because its important to look into it. I mean, people have these kind Psy experiences and its not enough to tell people, well, you're imagining things, we have to look closer into it and I think there is quite a lot of evidence that there is some kind of anomaly there. We can't really tell what it is, you can call it Telepathy you can call it ESP but they're all just metaphor, they're just label you stick to some kind of experience.
[64:30] The bottom line is that there is some kind of communication anomaly that people seem sometimes to be able to interact with their environments in ways that we don't understand. We Seem to be quite a long way before coming up with some kind of technology to use this but that's always possible. Most of the remote viewing research in the 70's was funded by the US military, in the end they decided that its not Rely able enough to use it in the field, so I think that's probable a good thing. We might come up with a reliable way of using it so like Denna said earlier, its good to be aware of where its going because there are obvious ethical issues that we need to be aware of, I mean scientific experiment.
[65:37]
Last updated on 18th February 2007
