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Så här lyder början av John McCrones artikel Roll up for the telepathy test ur New Scientist, 15 May 1993:
Psychic research has long been written off as the stuff of cranks and frauds. But there's now one telepathy experiment that leaves even the sceptics scratching their heads.
Isolated inside a steel-lined cubicle with walls a foot thick, the subject lay back in a chair. Two halves of a ping-pong ball were taped over his eyes and headphones filled his ears with white hoise. Three metres away, in a second padded and shielded cubicle, a sender was concentrating on a TV film of an eagle and trying to transmit the image telepathically. Something seemed to be coming through in the receiver's chamber: I see a dark shape of a black bird with a very pointed beak with his wings down... Almost needle-like beak... Something that would fly or is flying ... like a parrot with long feathers on a perch. Lots of feathers, tail feathers, long, long, long... Flying, a big huge, huge eagle. The wings of an eagle spread out.
Success: another direct hit for a parapsychology experiment - or so it would appear.
Det är Chuck Honorton från Psychophysical Research Laboratories i New Jersey som under sju års tid har utfört en serie ganzfeld-experiment. Ganzfeld är tyska för heltäckande fält och syftar på att man skärmar de fysiska sinnena hos försökspersonen för att denna inte ska distraheras och missa de svaga psi-signalerna. Efter ungefär en kvart i ett sådant tillstånd börjar man uppleva klara drömliknande bilder.
Susan Blackmore, en känd parapsykolog, kommenterar: I have come to the conclusion that Honorton hase done what the sceptics asked, that he has produced results that cannot be due to any obvious experimental flaw. He has pushed the sceptics like myself into the position of having to say it is either some extraordinary flaw which nobody has thought of, or it is some kind of fraud - or it is genuine ESP.
Senders - usually a friend or relative because Honorton believed this would maximise any psychic connection - sat in a second acoustically shielded cubicle. Their task was to transmit the target image, a minute-long sequence of video film that featured either a moving target, such as a clip from an old gangster film, or a static image such as a picture of a landing eagle. The strength of the experiment's design, compared with many previous parapsychology experiments, was that the targets were selected automatically under the control of a cumputer using a random number generator. This meant that even the experimentor should have no way of knowing which target was being used in a particular trial. A total of 160 targets were used, sorted into groups pf four. The computer would pick one group for a session and from this group it would then select a target.
Honorton's belief was that if telepathy existed, the target imagery should turn up in the hypnagogic visions being experienced by subjects in the ganzfeld chamber. Subjects were asked to describe aloud any images passing through their minds. Both experimenter and sender were able to listen in on this description over a one-way intercom, allowing the experimenter to record what was being said and the sender to give extra telepathic encouragement if the subject appeared to be close to identifying the target image.
At the conclusion of a session, the subject would be shown all four images from the group and asked to pick the one that seemed to best match the imagery experienced in the ganzfeld chamber. In a step that was later seen as controversial, this judging process was aided by the researcher, who pointed out correspondences that the subject might otherwise miss. Honorton felt it essential that the experimenter help the subject, who often emerged somewhat drowsy or disoriented from the experience. To his mind, the experimenter had no idea which film clips had been used.
If such an experiment were ruled by chance, subjects should pick the correct target only one in four times - a hit rate of 25 per cent. Honorton was disappointed to find that, despite a few seemingly impressive matches, scoring was not significantly above chance levels with the static photograph targets (45 hits in 165 trials). But, with the film and TV clips - a much richer source of target imagery, Honorton argued - the hit rate was about 40 per cent (77 hits in a total of 190 trials). The chance of this being a statistical fluke was just two in a million. ½
Totalt får vi en träffsäkerhet på 34 procent.
Kritikerna är i stort sett nöjda med experimentserien, men de vill inte dra några slutsatser redan nu: Remember, this is only one piece of kit and one lab. The strength of the ganzfeld design was that it was supposed to produce effects that would be straightforward to replicate.
Många nya experimentserier med ganzfeld-tekniken rullar igång nu. Men med denna metodiken tar det åt minstone 400 laboratorietimmar för att nå statistisk signifikans, så det blir till att vänta.
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Artickeln var ungefär till hälften inriktad på parapsykologi i allmänhet. Det finns många anledningar till varför ESP inte blivit allmänt accepterat. Brist på lyckade experiment är det egentligen inte. Däremot har konventionella kritiker ställt till stor skada, som artikeln beskriver här:
A spate of spoon-benders and card manipulators destroyed a number of academic reputations in the 1970s. Skeptics such as the magician James Randi and the former Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner have had a field day rubbishing the work of the gullible researchers. Such is the battering that parapsychology took that by the end of the 1980s, the field seemed to be in full retreat. Over half the laboratories in the US had to shut their doors as funds dried up, including Honorton's own laboratory. But the study of parapsychology survived and, after its earlier excesses, is now striving to become a model of empirical science.
Flera kommentarer och bitar ur artikeln:
I have come to the conclusion that Honorton has done what the sceptics asked, that he has produced results that cannot be due to any obvious experimental flaw, says Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of Western England in Bristol, and noted debunker of psychic claims. He has pushed the sceptics like myself into the position of having to say it is either some extraordinary flaw which nobody has thought of, or it is some kind of fraud - or it is genuine ESP.
At the conclusion of a session, the subject would be shown all four images from the group and asked to pick the one that seemed to be best match the imagery experienced in the ganzfeld chamber. In a step that was later seen as controversial, this judging process was aided by the researcher, who pointed out correspondences that the subject might otherwise miss. Honorton felt it essential that the experimenter help the subject, who often emerged somewhat drowsy or disoriented from the experience. To his mind, the results were not invalidated by this intervention because the experimenter had no idea which film clips had been used.
The reaction of sceptics since the publication of Honorton's results has been mixed. Hyman, the strongest critic of previous ganzfeld work, says he is reserving judgment until there is an independent replication of the results: Remember, this is only one piece of kit and one lab. The strength of the ganzfeld design was that it was supposed to produce effects that would be straightforward to replicate.
Hyman does concede that the methodological improvements Honorton made provides sceptics with their stiffest test to date: There are a lot of minor things I could quibble with but Honorton met most of the objections I had. Yet the study has not changed his views. He expects time will show that Honorton's results can be explained by some hidden experimental flaw just like so many other parapsychology claims before them. Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist currently working on a four-year study of parapsychology at the University of Cambridge, is more robust in his criticisms: The experiments are intresting and somewhat better done than others before them, but they certainly are not foolproof or conclusive...nobody need take them seriously until there are replications.
Yet some believe the sceptics have failed to give Honorton his due. Blackmore says that if she had to put her money on the table, she would still guess that psychic abilities do not exist. However, she feels that while parapsychologists have moved with the times and improved their methods, the same cannot be said for sceptics. Their arguments are ad hominem and poorly referenced, she says. I think a real challenge has now been presented.
While sceptics have yet to agree on where they think the ganzfeld experiments are flawed, they do see several weaknesses. Humphrey says his most serious concern is over an admission by Honorton that three-quarters of the way through the experimental series, it was discovered that a faulty soldering connection was allowing the soundtrack of the film sequence being viewed by the sender to leak through the system's wiring into the subject's headphones. Honorton claimed this leakage could have had no effect - even subliminally - as it was only audible with special amplification. Besides, he argued, there was no decrease in scoring once the fault was corrected. But this cuts little ice with Humphrey. The possibility of leakage means that the early data just have to be discarded, he says, and when you take those trials out, you don't have enough for a significant result.
Vad jag förstår är det frågan om att det någonstans hos videoapparaten fanns en oisolerad del vilken skulle ge en slags radiosignal som skulle snappas upp av elnätet och därifrån tas upp av white-noise-maskinen och blanda sig med bruset och på så sätt ge en subliminal signal till mottagaren.
Det är denna typen av skattning av våra sinnes skärpa som jag tycker är något överdrivet.
Another possible problem with Honorton's findings is that the researchers somehow knew which target segment was playing and deliberately, or even subconsciously, encouraged subjects to select the sorrect clip during the judging process. The tape counters of the video player used by the system were concealed by nothing more than a cardboard cover and it would have been possible for experimenters to work out which target was playing from a quick peek. Some critics have suggested that even hearing the time it took tapes to rewind may have given away subliminal clues.
Märk här att Honorton inte har kommenterat detta och därför kan detta vara en anmärkning som i praktiken är näst intill otänkbar.
Jag vet inte hur snuttarna (på ca 1 minut) var upplagda och hanterades av bandsepalern / bandspelarna. Så jag vet inte huruvida det här skulle vara något allvarligt fel.
Dock tycker man ju att alla sådana aparater borde vara åtskilda och inlåsta innan experimentet börjar så att man typ bara har en knapp att trycka på för proceduren att starta.
Others see the possibility of more direct fraud. Despite the degree of automation, it is conceivable that the record of the results could have been tampered with. Each session was taped, giving a means of corroborating the results recorded on the computer's disc. This would make selective recording or fabrication of results difficult rather than impossible. Humphrey stresses, however, that that he feels Honorton was an honest investigator and that his results are likely to be the product of an unforeseen flaw rather than deliberate deception.
Back in the University of Edinburgh, Morris agrees that no experiment will ever be fraud-proof. However, if fraud is the explanation of Honorton's results, it would have to have been a very organised and systematic sort of fraud given the number of subjects ""[över 240 stycken] and experimenters ""[åtta stycken] involved. In any case, he adds, one experiment was never going to decide the existence of paranormal powers. As in any other research field, the evidence will have to be acquired gradually. We have stopped searching for an instant yes or no, says Morris.
Honorton har länge varit en känd parapsykolog. Tror inte han fuskar.
Attention is now turning towards attempts to replicate Honorton's results. As well as the Edinburgh research, ganzfeld systems are being set up in the US by Daryl Bem at Cornell University, New York, and Richard Broughton at the Institute of Parapsychology in North Carolina, and in the Netherlands by Hans Gerding at the Parapsychology Institute in Utrecht.
Given the heavy workload involved - an experiment will have to reach 200 trials before it begins to produce statistically reliable results and that represent at least 400 hours of laboratory time - it is unlikely that any of the four groups will have much to report before the end of this year. In the meantime, somewhere in the clash between sceptics and parapsychologists must lie a fascinating thesis for someone on the sociology of science and the construction of knowledge.
