Extrasensory perception

Tema	Anglų kalba
Tipas	Topikas
Aprašymas	Extrasensory perception (ESP) is defined as perception that does not depend on known sensory channels. ESP-response to external stimuli without any known sensory contact.
Patalpinta	2005-05-07
Parsisiuntė	115
	Parsisiųsti6 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

A small number of scientists investigate ESP and other parapsychological phenomena systematically. Joseph Banks Rhine began pioneering work on ESP under carefully controlled conditions more than 50 years ago. For many observations he used a special deck of 25 cards: 5 cards of each of 5 symbols. For parapsychological studies the cards were often shuffled mechanically. Then the participant was given 25 “trials”. In studies of telepathy, the scientist chose a card and looked at it before the subject “guessed” the symbol. In research on clairvoyance, the investigator selected a card and placed it facedown on the table without looking at it. Then the participant “guessed” the symbol. For work on precognition, the subject “guessed” the symbol that would appear before the experimenter selected the card.
While the number of hits among people who perform well is typically small (7 out of 25), some subjects do surprisingly well. Spontaneity and trancelike states seem to increase the magnitude of ESP effects. People who believe that ESP exists make slightly higher scores on laboratory tests than skeptics do.
In the public’s mind the evidence for ESP consists primarily of personal experiences and anecdotes. Such evidence is unpersuasive in science because it suffers from many problems:
1.The replication problem is acute because most such evidence consists of one-time occurrences (for example a woman announces a premonition that she will win the lottery that day-and she does). There is no way to evaluate it because it is not repeatable.
2.The problem of inadequate controls and safeguards is decisive because such incidents occur under unexpected and ambiguously specified conditions. There is no way of ruling out such alternative interpretations as chance, faulty memories, and deliberate deception.
3.and finally the file-drawer problem is also fatal. The lottery winner who announced ahead of time that she would win is prominently featured in the news. But the thousands of others with similar premonitions who did not win are never heard from; they remain in the file-drawers. It is true that the probability of this woman’s winning the lottery was very low. But the critical criterion in evaluating this case is not the probability that she would win, but the probability that anyone of the thousands who thought they would win would do so. That probability is much higher.
The same reasoning applies to precognitive dreams. We tend to forget our dreams unless and until an event happens to remind us of them. We thus have no way of evaluating how often we might have dreamed of similar unlikely events that did not occur. We fill our database with positive instances and unknowingly exclude the negative instances.
Extraordinariness is a matter of degree. Telepathy seems less extraordinary to most of us than precognition cause we are already familiar with the invisible transmission of information through space. Precognition seems more extraordinary because we have no familiar phenomena in which info flaws backward in time.
National polls find that about ½ of all adult Americans believe in ESP. Psychologists are a particularly skeptical group.

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