Performance at a Precognitive Remote Viewing Task, with and without Ganzfeld Stimulation: Three Experiments

Abstract

Recent research by the lead author has sought to incorporate ganzfeld stimulation as part of a remote viewing protocol. An initial exploratory experiment (Roe & Flint, 2007) suggested that novice participants can successfully describe a randomly selected target location while in the ganzfeld context but did not make a direct comparison with performance in a waking state. This paper describes a series of three subsequent experiments that compared performance at a remote viewing task in a waking condition with a ganzfeld stimulation condition using a counterbalanced repeated measures design. There were only minor variations in design across the three experiments to enable combination of data in a summary analysis. In total, 110 participants produced 43 hits in the ganzfeld stimulation condition (39%), giving a highly significant positive deviation from chance expectation (sum of ranks = 225, p = .000012), whereas in the waking RV condition they achieved 30 hits (27.5%), which is marginally better than chance expectation (sum of ranks = 253, p = .034). The difference in z scores for target ratings in the two conditions approached significance (t[39] = 1.86, p = .065). In experiment 1, individual difference measures identified as predictors of psi performance were unrelated to target ratings. Participants completed Pekala’s (1991) Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) in order to gauge their responsiveness to the ganzfeld protocol and of the 12 sub-dimensions tested, ganzfeld performance correlated significantly with greater absorption in their subjective experience, lower arousal, and less internal dialogue. In experiments 2 and 3 individual differences measure were replaced by measures of transliminality, openness to experience, and dissociative experiences, but these were unrelated to task success. Data from experiment 2 did not confirm the findings using the PCI from experiment 1, though a significant association was found with the time sense dimension. In experiment 3 no PCI dimensions correlated with task performance, a pattern that was confirmed when data were combined across all three experiments. Remote viewing (RV) can be defined as “the ability to perceive and to be able to describe what would be experienced if one were at some specified distant location” (after Hansel, 1989, p. 160). Al1 We should like to thank the Perrott-Warrick Fund, the Society for Psychical Research Research Grants Committee and the Parapsychological Association Research Endowment (PARE) Fund for their kind financial support of the experiments included in this series. Address correspondence to: Prof. Chris Roe, Faculty of Health, Education & Society, The University of Northampton, University Drive, , Northampton NN1 5PH, UK. © 2020 Roe et al. http://doi.org/10.30891/jopar2020.01.06 Journal of Parapsychology 2020, Vol. 84, No. 1, 38-65 Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Open Access 39 PRECOGNITIVE REMOTE VIEWING though the method can vary in practice (cf. Schwartz, 2015; Utts & May, 2003), experimental work typically involves a protocol in which the sender visits a randomly selected remote location and actively engages with the target material by attending to the features of the site and participating in activities appropriate to it (see Targ, 1994, for a more detailed description). Meanwhile, the receiver is led through a series of visualization techniques while in an ordinary waking state of consciousness by an experimenter who, masked to the identity of the target, directs them to describe particular features of the site using an interview format (Baptista, Derakshani, & Tressoldi, 2015). From its inception at SRI as a means of testing for ESP with Ingo Swann and its first published formal testing with Pat Price (Targ & Puthoff, 1974, 2005), the method seems to have been remarkably successful; so much so that when Utts (1996) was asked to review the evidence accumulated under the SRI and SAIC programs, she asserted: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established” (p. 3). Some of the early work at SRI has been criticized (Marks & Kamman, 1980), particularly with respect to potential problems with the randomization and editing of transcripts, which might have left cues to the order in which sites served as targets. These concerns were challenged by Tart, Puthoff, and Targ (1980), who demonstrated that when cues were removed a new independent judge was still able to match transcripts to target sites to a highly significant degree. Later, successful replications (e.g., Schlitz & Gruber, 1980, 1981; Schlitz & Haight, 1984), similarly took great care to ensure that neither the order of target selection nor of the transcripts could be inferred from material they contained. However, part of that solution involves either editing the transcripts, which itself can be grounds for criticism (e.g., Marks & Kamman, 1980, p. 16), or deferring feedback about target identities until the end of the series, which may be de-motivating (see, e.g., Tart, 2007). Of course, these concerns only apply to studies in which the same participant serves as viewer for a number of trials in the series, and thus is potentially able to refer in their transcripts to earlier targets and later planned sessions — this would not be possible if one were to adopt a design in which a larger number of participants contributed just one trial each. Militating against the use of a larger sample of participants is the difficulty in finding a sufficient number of able persons; for example, Utts (1996) estimated that only around 1% of those screened were suitable for RV work. This might be overcome if an induction procedure could be identified that facilitated the performance of novice participants. One candidate is the ganzfeld induction procedure. Although the ganzfeld does not necessarily induce a hypnagogic state (Wackermann et al., 2002), it does seem to share properties with other psi-conducive states that distinguish it from a “standard” RV protocol, such as systematically reducing external sensory stimulation and passively shifting the participants’ attention to internal sources of information (Braud & Braud, 1973; Honorton, 1977; Parker, 1975). There is some evidence to suggest that novice participants may be able to succeed at a free response ESP task under laboratory conditions where it incorporates a ganzfeld-induced altered state of consciousness (ASC; e.g., Baptista et al., 2015; Storm et al., 2010).2 The lead author conducted a pilot study (Roe & Flint, 2007) to test the speculation that ganzfeld stimulation might enable novice participants to succeed at a remote viewing task. Fourteen sender-receiver pairs of novice participants each contributed one remote viewing trial. Receivers underwent a 2 This is not to say that unselected participants are necessarily able to perform at similar levels as selected participants, but rather to note that unselected participants may be able to perform above chance expectation when conditions are conducive. 40 ROE, COOPER, HICKINBOTHAM, HODRIEN, KIRKWOOD & MARTIN progressive relaxation induction procedure followed by ganzfeld stimulation, during which they reported their sensory experiences, with the intention of describing a randomly-selected target site to which their sender partner had been sent. On completion of the trial the sender returned to provide feedback about the nature of the target. An independent judge ranked all 8 possible locations against each mentation, producing 12 binary hits across the 14 trials and a combined sum of ranks that was significant (SOR = 42, p = .008), suggesting that this approach might overcome the weaknesses just outlined. Although the study was successful, it was not clear whether this was a consequence of incorporating a ganzfeld protocol for our novice participants, since we did not have a comparison condition in which those participants attempted to generate impressions about a target location without the assistance of ganzfeld stimulation. The current experimental series was designed to address this shortcoming. Recruiting a wide range of participants allows researchers to explore various individual differences factors (such as personality, belief, and prior experiences) to determine whether they are associated with task success. Given that extant remote viewing research had paid relatively little attention to individual differences, we took our lead from other free response literature. We speculated (after Honorton, 1997; Roe, Jones & Maddern, 2007) that performance might be related to practice of a mental discipline, personal psi experience, paranormal belief, Feeling-Perceiving personality type as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, extraversion, and self-rated creativity (see Cardeña & Marcusson-Clavertz, 2015, for a more thorough review of individual differences variables associated with psi). Additionally, working with a range of participants allows us to consider individual differences in responsiveness to ganzfeld stimulation. The lead author has been a vocal advocate (e.g., Roe, 2009) of Stanford’s criticism of ganzfeld researchers for implicitly assuming that this induction procedure elicits a uniform response from all participants. In practice it is clear that some participants experience no shift at all from their ordinary waking state so that they will not benefit from any psi-conducive properties it supposedly confers. We therefore planned to investigate whether subjective shifts in state of consciousness, as measured using Pekala’s (1991) Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) were associated with better performance at the remote viewing task. Finally, it is di