The Straight Dope On ESP.

I was actually inspired to ask this question by Star Trek: TOS. In the original series, ESP was apparently so mainstream (at that time at least), that they included it as part of their story line. Characters even had routine tests for their ESP aptitude. This story element featured prominently in the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before. By the time TNG came along, it was so intrinsically part of the series, they just had to include it again, like with the Betazoid race, for example.

Anyways, this is not the Cafe section. So I will no longer discuss the Star Trek connection. But as I said, it does bring up one question: What is the straight dope on ESP? Telekinesis, clairvoyance, and mind reading, for example? Where does it stand now in modern science? Is it at all in the mainstream? Or is it relegated to the fringe of science? And could there be any validity to its claims?

Remember, my question is what is the straight dope. So I am asking you, the members, of this board, for information. Please don’t ask me to provide support and evidence:).

:):):slight_smile:

The straight dope in a nutshell: Is is all complete and total bullshit.

It ranges from fringe science to pseudoscience. There’s no reason to believe any previous or current claim isn’t better explained by the multitude of ordinary psychological findings that have been solidly documented by people studying these claims with a more open mind. Eg. clairvoyance isn’t about seeing the future, it’s about remembering the hits and ignoring the misses, combined with changing the memory of a prediction to fit better with actual events after the fact, combined with overemphasising personal experience in the face of evidence your remarkable precognition is indistinguishable from what’s expected from random chance in a population, and so on and so forth.

That’s what I was gonna say. Eerie isn’t it?

This.

A friend once remarked how, on many evenings, his wife would bring him a cup of tea just as he was thinking to himself that a cup of tea would be nice right about now! He was suggesting ESP was involved somehow, but knowing of Occam’s razor, I offered a much more plausible alternative: that after having been married to each other for decades, she had constructed a pretty good mental model of him in her head and knew what he liked and when he liked it. No Ethernet link between their brains was required; her model of him was accurate enough so that nine times out of ten, when she brought him a cup of tea, he actually wanted it.

And that’s usually the case. Any time you think there’s something extraordinary going on, it’s far more likely that there’s something ordinary going on. Some individuals have amazing ability to extract subtle-but-useful information from the usual streams of data coming into their brain – vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch – but I’m not aware of any repeatable clinical tests in which these ordinary data streams were verifiably interrupted and someone was still able to collect information from a truly extrasensory input.

To my knowledge, the 52-year-old One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge has still not been won.

“The 150-year history of research on extrasensory perception (ESP) has been plagued by what might be termed a consistent inconsistency. As University of Oregon psychologist Ray Hyman points out, this body of literature has followed an all-too-familiar pattern. Seemingly promising and potentially exciting effects using a novel experimental paradigm are reported, only to fizzle out upon closer scrutiny. Each round of replication failures engenders a brief period of disillusionment and disenchantment, which sets the stage for concerted attempts to find a new and improved paradigm.”

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/new_analyses_raise_doubts_about_replicability_of_esp_findings

The sad thing is, humans really are capable of some very interesting things, which all too often get overlooked behind the murky cloud of paranormal BS. For instance, some people are very good at reading facial expressions, posture, microgestures, and the like, which leads them to be very good at interpreting others’ moods and thought processes. This is all perfectly natural, and won’t win you the Randi prize or anything… but it can look an awful lot like telepathy, which makes it impossible to study.

If someone thinks it might be telepathy, then why would it be so hard to study? If you block off all the senses, then the only remaining source of data transmission is extrasensory. If someone with a demonstrated ability to read the emotional state of another person can still reliably read the emotional state of another person under such conditions, then wow, we’ve really got something. If they can’t, well then it seems clear that their perception was sensory, not extrasensory.

But that may also be Self Fulfilling prophecy.
See, he may not have actually wanted a cup of tea, but the since his wife has actually providing it , ala Pavlov and all, then he changes his mind that to wanting it.
Its hard to note down these things, so “selective memory” also comes into the anecdote.
If the government , eg Treasurer , says “I think there will be the start of a depression tommow, there will be a big crash!”, it may well happen, just for no other reason than it was prophesised…

In the former case, a rigorous study would require documenting his mental state before the tea was presented so there can be no reporting bias after the fact.

In the latter case, the Treasurer could privately document his prediction without making it public until after the prediction has been shown to be true/false, this preventing it (the prediction itself) from influencing the outcome.

In either case, yes, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for what’s happening; no need to resort to claims of ESP.

Thus illustrating my point exactly. If the ability disappears when the person is blindfolded and earplugged, but works when they have all their senses, then wow, we’ve still really got something. That kind of ability is really cool and interesting and absolutely worthy of more study. But when you set the stage with “this might be telepathy”, then once people inevitably discover it’s not telepathy, they lose interest.

And that is really the crux of it. There is no credible scientific evidence that any form of ESP exists. Following up on Machine Elf’s cite, read some of James Randi’s material. He has virtually made a career of debunking paranormal claims. Michael Shermer writes the Skeptic column for Scientific American and also touches on ESP although he covers a broad range of pseudo science and non-science bullshit.

I knew you’d say that … and I didn’t have to use any of my five senses to perceive that you would. I understand it was completely obvious, but what’s conformational bias without throwing some chicken bones?

I’m surprised that the OP didn’t include this in his question, so allow me…

Was there more, shall we say, open mindedness about ESP in the 60s among actual scientists or was it just the hippy-dippy atmosphere of the time? Age of Aquarius, etc. I was a kid in the 60s, but it did seem like at least there were more experiments going on, and perhaps that was the era of debunking…?

Good quick history of ESP.

For those that don’t want to click, here’s my two cents. The British Society for Psychical Research pioneered “serious” study in the 19th century. They wanted to be fooled, in reality, and hiring a failed magician as investigator didn’t help. J. B. Rhine at Duke did highly publicized work in the 1920s and 1930s. His testing conditions were ridiculously sloppy and were exposed in the 1940s. Just about that time the f&sf community picked up on it as the study of “psionics” and it appears with numbing frequency even in “hard science” stories for two decades, with John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, driving off most of his writers by the end of the 50s by his insistence on every story revolving around it.

It’s hard to say whether that had an influence on the revival in the 1960s. The advent of psychotropic drugs certainly did and the CIA notably did testing on the subject. Lots of experimenters went after phenomena in different ways. Nothing stuck, because the problem was the same as it was a century earlier: bad test design, the bias of testers toward finding positive results, the easiness with which they were fooled, the difficulty of repeatable and reliable results, and the total lack of a scientific model for transmission.

It’s complete and total bullshit. If you find someone who disagrees, ask them for an answer couched in physics, chemistry, or biology.

An awful lot of both medical and physical science progressed rapidly after World War 2. We were discovering new stuff all the time, and the idea of doing real studies of things – particularly in psychology – was catching on. If any of these extrasensory things had actually panned out, the discoverer would have been famous for finding whatever the underlying new mechanism turned out to be. A lot of folks believed there was “something there,” and going to look for it furthered the ideals of science. And it was successful, in a very real sense – all of those studies and investigations gave us much of the large body of evidence we have today that these telepathic channels aren’t real. A valid, evidence-supported conclusion, even if it’s not the one folks wanted to find.

I agree, that at least in the 40s and 50s there was a feeling that we were finally getting a handle on all sorts of scientific problems that had been unanswered since the dawn of history. What is a human mind really about? For centuries people have been telling stories about people with unexplainable abilities, how about we really get in there and figure it out?

And so early science fiction is littered with psychic powers, treated seriously as just another sort of super science, like atomic energy and robots and rockets.

And when you look at the social and technological changes that had taken place between, say, 1900 and 1950, it’s not surprising that people expected further radical transformations. Like psychology becoming a hard science with equations and stuff.

While I agree, ESP as we currently image it to manifest, has been well debunked. I don’t find it too hard to imagine that there are, or might yet prove to be, ‘extra senses’ we have simply yet to uncover.

If dogs can predict seizures and detect cancer, I don’t see it as impossible that we too have some subtle senses at work that we aren’t currently aware of. Remain to be detected.

(Not ESP as you were thinking perhaps, yet still ‘extra’ sensory!)

Exactly. They would be rich, famous, etc. The motivational factors driving discovery and use of any legitimate phenomena are immense. Yet nothing valid could ever be reproduced.

There would also be huge intelligence and military applications – it would not be limited to parlor tricks. The U.S. alone spends $80 billion per year on intelligence: United States intelligence budget - Wikipedia

It would be pretty handy if they could use a technique like “remote viewing”, unlike a reconnaissance satellite which cost up to $4 billion each, yet can’t even see inside a building.

The CIA and apparently the Soviet Union both investigated this, and it did not work:

“They lose interest” (AKA “they withdrew funding”) is not the same as “impossible to study.”