Telepathy

At last week's British Association meeting, Professor Robert Morris of Edinburgh University's Koestler parapsychology unit announced that his team's experiments continue to suggest the reality of telepathy.

While Morris avoids the T word, preferring the broader "anomalous
cognition", his team's research is merely the tip of a very ancient iceberg.
Herodotus recorded the first known telepathy experiment when, in 550BC, King Croesus of Lydia challenged seven famed oracles to tell his messengers exactly what he was doing on a given day. Only the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, answered correctly - Croesus was making lamb and turtle stew in a bronze kettle. The tale may be apocryphal, and Croesus's isinterpretation of the oracle's advice eventually led to his defeat - but as an experiment, parapsychologists admit it wasn't bad.

Modern interest in thought transference arose in late 18th-century France, when it was observed as a side effect of Franz Mesmer's proto-hypnotic work.
The term telepathy - meaning distant occurrence or feeling - was coined by Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1882. Telepathy was a hot topic in fin de siécle salon culture, perplexing great minds from Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud.

In the 1920s and 30s, JB Rhine's experiments using Karl Zener's symbol cards captured the public imagination and popularised the notion of extra sensory perception. Rhine's dry statistics - still a hallmark of the Science - were supplemented by the conviction expressed in Pulitzer-prize winner Upton
Sinclair's book Mental Radio (1930).

Today's experiments tend to use the ganzfeld method, where the
subject's senses are blocked with white noise and half ping pong balls over the eyes. A sender then views images and attempts to transmit impressions to the subject.

Ongoing experimentation points to a number of factors that might
increase a subject's telepathic hit rate, including a pre-existing belief in psi phenomena, a relaxed demeanour and, perhaps more worryingly, scoring highly on the schizotypal personality disorder test, ie being a little odd.

Morris' appearance at the BA festival is significant, and represents a growing acceptance within the orthodoxy that this ancient enigma deserves further study.

By Mark Pilkington
Thursday September 18, 2003
The Guardian (UK)

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1044102,00.html



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