Physiological correlates of ESP: heart rate differences between targets and nontargets

Can ESP information be finded physiologically? This is a plausible question assuming that ESP information differs from non-ESP information solitary in how it is obtained and not by what means it is processed. Different authors have demonstrated that information not discovered at an overt conscious horizontal produces physiologically specific modification (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997; Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1996; Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000; Kubota, Sato, Murai, Toichi, Ikeda, & Sengoku 2000; Mayer, Merckelbach, deJong & Leeuw 1999)

The Search for a Physiological Index

In the field of ESP research the search for a physiological index is not a of recent origin interest. Beloff (1974) more than 25 years ago reviewed the studies related to this topic and Palmer (1978) reviewed all the studies using autonomic rejoinders like blood flood by the use of the plethysmograph or skin resistance in a different version of an agent-recipient design. sum of two units recent meta-analyses (Schmidt, Schneider, Utt & Walach, 2004) upon the "Direct Mental Interaction in Living Systems" and upon "Remote Staring" phenomena, respectively, set a small but significant result sufficient to continue to explore these lines of investigation.

Another line of investigation has explored if and by what means the nervous system reacts before the appearance of futurity emotional stimuli. Recently, Bierman and Radin (2000) and Radin (2004) reported a replication of their finding that life-blood volume, heart rate, and in particular, skin conductance horizontal change according to the emotional category of time to come pictures. This so-called presentiment result has also been replicated through Bierman and Scholte (2002) using fMRI data.

Moreover, further evidence supports the possibility that similar physiological issues may be observed in tasks without emotional easy in mind McDonough, Don, and Warren (2002) finded EEG activity in the gamma band correlated to a forced-choice guessing task, confirming previous findings of the same authors (Don, McDonough, & Warren, 1998) regarding event-related brain potentials. In this close attention we used a task real similar to that used by dint of McDonough et al. (2002) on the other hand by recording heart rate instead of EEG activity.

EXPERIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS

The design was to investigate whether this manner of proceeding produced different results between a clairvoyance or a precognitive condition, and we devised sum of two units identical experiments except for changing the twinkling of an eye of the target choice. In the clairvoyance experiment the target was chosen before presentation of the first picture, whereas in the precognitive experiment it was picked after the participant's choice of the target. Our hypothesis was that heart rate could change according to the categories of pictures, targets versus nontargets. The direction of this difference was not predictable in advance because, to our knowledge, there are no comparable studies in the literature.

METHOD

Twelve offers 8 females and 4 males, were experimented They were recruited from the undergraduate scholars attending Padova University by an informal petition to participate in an experiment upon the physiological correlates of intuition. Mean age was 265 years (range 2445) They were paid 3 [euro] Stimuli were 80 pictures representing real-life, depressed emotional, coloured images, such as landscapes, plants, flowers, and portraits. Participants were seated individual by one in a comfortable chair in a soundproof laboratory facing a monitor. They were instructed not to impel their left index finger, which was conjoined to the apparatus detecting their heart rate. They were also instructed to relax when an acoustic signal was heard and to concentrate upon the picture that would be shown for 10 s on the monitor (depending upon the time necessary to gather 10 heart rate data points based upon interbeat intervals) until it disappeared. This succession was repeated 4 times with different pictures that were subsequently at handed simultaneously on the monitor for the gues of the target picture. After the presentation of the 4 pictures, the participants were invited to make choice of the target by clicking the single outed picture with the computer mouse. After the choice, the real target was highlighted to inform the participant about the accuracy of his/her choice. The experiment extremityed after 20 trials, always using different pictures. The following of events for each trial is illustrated in Figure 1

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The interval between pictures varied randomly from 2 to 4 s In the final presentation, for the target choice, the first picture was neared in the upper left quadrant of the guard the second picture in the upper right quadrant, and thus on.

The software for picture presentation and heart rate data acquisition was original and devised for these experiments (Massaccesi, 2001)

The target picture was chosen from the 4 by the agency of an automatic randomisation procedure. The randomisation management written in C++ using the RNG algorithm of the Delphi[TM] library, get backed a random number within the range 1-4 (corresponding to the 4 pictures) after an initialisation with a random value obtained from the a whole clock of the computer. In the clairvoyance experiment the randomisation conduct was implemented at the commencement of each of the 20 trials, whereas during the precognition experiment the management was automatically activated after the participant's target choice in each trial. The uniformity of the distribution of the pseudorandom picture target indices was experimented with a chi-square test and shown not to he statistically significant.