◆ SpookStack

Approved For Release 2000/08/09 5 CIA-RDP96-00792R000 PUTHOFF AND TARG: PERCEPTUA H For Stepanek’s run, with p; = 3, p; (/) = 0.619, and an average time of 9s per choice, we have a source uncertainty H(x) = 1 bit and a calculated bit rate R © 0.041 bit/symbol or R/T = 0.0046 bit/s. (Since the 15-digit number (49.8 bits) actually was transmitted at the rate of 2.9 X 10 bit/s, an increase in bit rate by a factor of about 20 could be expected on the basis of a coding scheme more optimum than that used in the experiments. See, for example, Appendix A.) Dr. Charles Tart at the University of California has written extensively on the so-called decline effect. He considers that having subjects attempt to guess cards, or perform any other repetitious task for which they receive no feedback, follows the classical technique for deconditioning any response. He thus considers card guessing “a technique for extinguishing psychic functioning in the laboratory” [32]. Tart’s injunctions of the mid-sixties were being heeded at Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn, NY, by a team of researchers that included Dr. Montague Ullman, who was director of research for the hospital; Dr. Stanley Krippner; and, later, Charles Honorton. These three worked together for several years on experiments on the occurrence of telepathy in dreams. In the course of a half-dozen experimental series, they found in their week-long sessions a number of subjects who had dreams that consistently were highly descriptive of pictorial material that a remote sender was looking at throughout the night. This work is described in detail in the experimenters’ book Dream Telepathy [33]. Honorton is continuing work of this free-response type in which the subject has no precon- ceived idea as to what the target may be. In his more recent. work with subjects in the waking state, Honorton is providing homogeneous stimulation to the subject who is to describe color slides viewed by another person in a remote room. In this new work, the subject listens to white noise via earphones and views an homogeneous visual field imposed through the use of Ping-Pong ball halves to cover the subject’s eyes in conjunction with diffuse ambient illumina- tion. In this so-called Ganzfeld setting, subjects are again able, now in the waking state, to give correct and often highly accurate descriptions of the material being viewed by the sender [34]. In Honorton’s work and elsewhere, it apparently has been the step away from the repetitive forced-choice experiment that has opened the way for a wide variety of ordinary people to demonstrate significant functioning in the laboratory, with- out being bored into a decline effect. This survey would be incomplete if we did not indicate certain aspects of the current state of research in the USSR. It is clear from translated documents and other sources [35] that many laboratories in the USSR are engaged in paranormal research. Since the 1930’s, in the laboratory of L. Vasiliev (Leningrad Institute for Brain Research), there has been an interest in the use of telepathy as a method of influencing the behavior of a person at a distance. In Vasiliev’s book Experiments in Mental Suggestion, he makes it very clear that the bulk of his labora- tory’s experiments were aimed at long-distance communica- tion combined with a form of behavior modification; for example, putting people at a distance to sleep through hyp- nosis [36], Similar behavior modification types of experiments have been carried out in recent times by I. M. Kogan, Chairman of the Bioinformation Section of the Moscow Board of the Popov Society. He is a Soviet engineer who, until 1969, published extensively on the theory of telepathic communication [37]- [40]. He was concerned with three principal kinds of experi- ments: mental suggestion without hypnosis over short dis- tances, in which the percipient attempts to identify an object; mental awakening over short distances, in which a subject is awakened from a hypnotic sleep at the “beamed” suggestion from the hypnotist; and long-range (intercity) telepathic com- munication. Kogan’s main interest has been to quantify the channel capacity of the paranormal channel. He finds that the bit rate decreases from 0.1 bit/s for laboratory experiments to 0.005 bit/s for his 1000-km intercity experiments. In the USSR, serious consideration is given to the hypothesis that telepathy is mediated by extremely low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic propagation. (The pros and cons of this hypothesis are discussed in Section V of this paper.) In general, the entire field of paranormal research in the USSR is part of a larger one concerned with the interaction between electromagnetic fields and living organisms [41], [42]. At the First International Congress on Parapsychology and Psychotronics in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1973, for example, Kholodov spoke at length about the susceptibility of living systems to extremely low-level ac and dc fields. He described conditioning effects on the behavior of fish resulting from the application of 10 to 100 pW of RF to their tank [43]. The USSR take these data seriously in that the Soviet safety re- quirements for steady-state microwave exposure set limits at 10 pWi/em? , whereas the United States has set a steady-state limit of 10 mW/cm? [44]. Kholodov spoke also about the nonthermal effects of microwaves on animals’ central nervous systems. His experiments were very carefully carried out and are characteristic of a new dimension in paranormal research. The increasing importance of this area in Soviet research was indicated recently when the Soviet Psychological Association issued an unprecedented position paper calling on the Soviet Academy of Sciences to step up efforts in this area [45]. They recommended that the newly formed Psychological Institute within the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Psychological Institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences review the area and consider the creation of a new laboratory within one of the institutes to study persons with unusual abilities. They also recommended a comprehensive evaluation of experiments and theory by the Academy of Sciences’ Insti- tute of Biophysics and Institute for the Problems of Informa- tion Transmission. The Soviet research, along with other behavioristically oriented work, suggests that in addition to obtaining overt responses such as verbalizations or key presses from a subject, it should be possible to obtain objective evidence of informa- tion transfer by direct measurement of physiological parame- ters of a subject. Kamiya, Lindsley, Pribram, Silverman, Walter, and others brought together to discuss physiological methods to detect ESP functioning, have suggested that a whole range of electroencephalogram (EEG) responses such as evoked potentials (EP’s), spontaneous EEG, and the contingent negative variation (CNV) might be sensitive indicators of the detection of: remote stimuli not mediated by usual sensory processes [46]. Early experimentation of this type was carried out by Douglas Dean at the Newark College of Engineering. In his roved For Release 2000/08/09 ; CIA-RDP96-00792R000600310001-7