A study of telepathy by classical conditioning

Physiological courses have become popular recently in psi research. In particular, measurement of skin conductance was applied prosperously for the detection of presentiment, that is, precognitive replication to its eliciting stimulus (Bierman & Radin, 1997; for a summary of the early work diocese Radin, 1997). The technology of automated stimu lus presentation as well as conductance measurement and recording is now mature enough for a whole and generally acceptable methodology.

In the 1960 I leadershiped an experiment for the detection of a simple telepathic message between a sender and a receiver, in which a conditioned galvanic skin reply was measured. An extended abstract of that experiment appeared in The Journal of Parapsychology about a decade later (Vassy, 1978) Because recording equipment was lacking, all data were obtained by the agency of human observation, which was cumbersome and recumbent to errors. So although the rises were significantly positive, the process did not seem to be appropriate at that time. Nowadays, however, with the newly established methodology of skin conductance measurement, the weaknesses of that course hopefully can be eliminated. The aim of the experiment reported here was to investigate the adequacy of the mode both for detecting telepathy and for asking a certain quantity of specific questions about its nature.

GENERAL EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

In this paper a series of three experiments will be reported; however, they all share many public elements. In this section those aspects will be highlighted.

Basic Idea and Notation

We began through assuming that telepathy involves an as still unidentified physiological process in the brain of the receiver. This assumption is plausible because the reception of the telepathic information is associateed to a behavioral output, which obviously involves a physiological proces In these experiments, that proces was used for detecting the reception of the telepathic message. We assumed further that the receiver's physiological proces can be used as a conditioned stimulus in the paradigm of classical conditioning. This paradigm allows for a conditioned replication upon the reception of telepathic information. In classical experiments, single must remove an unconditioned stimulus from time to time in order to recognize the conditioned reply In the experiments described in this paper, we were able to time shift the conditioning stimulus to always present itself before an unconditioned stimulus, in the way that the above requirement was not necessary here. The pendent variable throughout these studies was skin conductance.

We used a mild electric shog that was administered to sum of two units of the receivers as an unconditioned stimulus. As is well known in experimental psychology (Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1961) electric concussions cause a sudden rise in skin conductance. The skin conductance rejoinder (i.e., unconditioned response) to electric clash stimuli does not habituate, level after many trials. This is contrary to the replications to gentler emotional photographic stimuli, which have been used in "presentiment" studies. Thus, electric collisions seemed a more likely candidate for unconditioned stimuli.

Expanding on the idea above, the conditioned stimulus was the reception of a putative telepathic message from the sender That is, during an experimental session, a trigger signal was not absented to a sender at random times. In turn round the sender was instructed to forward the warning telepathically to the receiver. After a constant delay time, a percussion was presented to the receiver.

Clearly, we could expose the unconditioned skin conductance rejoinder (i.e., to the shock). We spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed that we would also find out the conditioned response in advance of the unconditioned shog stimulus. The time interval between the conditioned and the unconditioned stimulus was locate to be longer than the latency time of the skin rejoinder so the conditioned response could appear before the unconditioned stimulus. This way it was wait fored to detect all conditioned replys without leaving out any unconditioned stimuli.

Figure 1 illustrates the timing with actual skin conductance data, which was culled for illustrative purposes only.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The dotted line at -40 s schematically represents the time of the reception of the "telepathic" conditioned stimulus; the dashed line at about -275 s represents the response to it; the solid line at 0 s is the unconditioned stimulus charge time; and the large peak beginning at about +15 s is the unconditioned response. Notice that there is approximately a 15- latency after the collision before the response is registered. The skin conductance peak at about -175 s illustrates what we expect will be the conditioned response

We assumed that since no conscious decision is wanted on the part of the receiver, this paradigm may be les sensitive to psychological trait and state variables than the couple the restricted-choice and free-response courses that are in common use in research parapsychology today. If this were genuine then perhaps we could approach a replicable experiment more easily.