Telepathy and Clairvoyance

Here i would like to put some light on the most talked about subject in Para-Phychology, Telepathy and as well something similar by the name Clairvoyance, which we mostly talk about as 6th sense. I had been reading an article of Jane Henry, a senior lecturer at the Open University. Chairman of BPS Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section and as well as OU MBA Creative Management and Creativity, Innovation and Change programmes and the Editor of Consciousness and Experiential Psychology, recently which was named as Telepathy and Clairvoyance. This article puts across the meaning of these terms in the following ways:

TELEPATHY refers to mind-to-mind communication without the intervention of the senses, e.g knowing what somebody is about to say.
CLAIRVOYANCE refers to the mind picking up information from the environment, e.g knowing which card is about to be turned over or what horse will win a race.

They are both forms of ESP (Extra- Sensory Perception), a term which covers any communication between an organism and the environment that is essentially psychic in nature, which means that cannot be accounted for by sensory contact. ESP is well knows and very widely reported throughout history. Around the turn of the century the early psychical researchers collected numerous accounts of psychic phenomena including telepathy and clairvoyance. One common type of telepathy experience is so called CRISIS telepathy, where individuals suddenly become conscious that someone they are mentally close to has died, even though they are physically distant.

There had been a lot of different types of experiments carried on by the early phychologists and their instances and records can be found in the following books out of which Henry and Radin are particularly recommended.

Henry, J. (2000) A-Z of Parapsychology, London: Routledge
Designed to provide a reliable but accessible introduction to research in and explanations for ESP. Contains chapters describing the parapsychological phenomena in question, the research that has been done in the area and explanations for the phenomena.

Radin, D. (1997) The Conscious Universe, San Francisco: Harper Edge
Offers an introduction to parapsychology by one of the leading researchers in the field. Chapter 5 concerns telepathy. Chapters 4, 6 and 7 are also relevant.

Edge, H., Morris, R.L., Palmer, J. and Rush, J. H. (1986) Foundations of Parapsychology, London: Routledge
A text of parapsychology, more advanced reading containing further details of ESP experiments.

Honorton, C. (1985) 'Meta-analysis ofpsi Ganzfeld research: A response to Hyman.' Journal of Parapsychology, 49, p51-91
A key researcher discusses the important meta-analysis of the Ganzfeld data base and attempts to refute sceptics' criticisms and suggest a way forward.

Ullman, M., Krippner, S. and Vaughan, A. (1973) Dream Telepathy, New York: MacMillan
Describes the Maimonades dream telepathy experiments Targ, R. and Harary, K. (1984) The Mind Race, New York: Villard Books Describes the SRI remote viewing experiments.

Sinclair, U. (1962) Mental Radio, Springfield.
Charles Thomas Describes Sinclair's mental radio experiments with his wife. An easy read.

Honorton, C. and Ferrari, D. (1989) 'A meta-analysis of forced-choice pre-cognition experiments', 1935-87, Journal of Parapsychology, 53, 281-308
An analysis of precognitive ESP experiments. Rather technical.

Meta-analyses of all these telepathy and clairvoyance experiments have often shown strikingly positive results. In addition the effect found is consistently much larger in ESP than that found in psychokinesis or mind-over-matter experiments. The effect for ESP experiments is also much greater than that found in many medical experiments, for example the well-known effect of aspirin on heart attack reduction (Radin 1997). Sceptics can discount positive ESP results in less well-controlled experiments as being due to sensory leakage, inference or fraud. However where, as is normally the case now, experimenters announce in advance that they intend to do an ESP experiment and use automated target selection, coding and judging, it is hard to write off the extraordinarily significant effects found in meta-analyses of telepathy and clairvoyance experiments as nothing more than chance.