When Hypnotized Minds Read Minds

It has long been reported that a hypnotized person may be more prone to telepathy or clairvoyance than a person in normal consciousness.  Such a result was definitely suggested by a series of experiments with hypnotized subjects conducted by a German group called the Society for Scientific Psychology. 

Mentioning the report of the group's leader (Albert von Schrenck-Notzing), a summary of the experiments mentions some good experimental methods:

"He states that in all experiments in mental suggestion and the transmission of ideas the witnesses were told to write down their wishes or mental commands immediately before the investigation and in another room or at a distance so far removed from the subject and behind her back that any sensory perception was absolutely excluded. Also, not a word was spoken either by Schrenck-Notzing or by any of the witnesses which might betray the purpose of the experiment."

As described here, the third and fourth experiment seemed to show a hypnotized person named Lina responding to pin pricks occurring on the body of the person who hypnotized her, unseen behind her. The fifth and sixth experiments seemed to show Lina responding to food or drink consumed by the person who hypnotized her, as if she had tasted the food or drink herself. The seventh and eighth and ninth experiments produced similar results, with Lina responding to things such as turpentine or pepper placed on the hypnotist's tongue, just as if she had tasted such things herself. 

In the thirteenth experiment, we read of a remarkable success in a telepathy experiment:

"In experiment thirteen, while behind the back of the subject and seated to one side of her, Baron Du Prel wrote down the mental order, 'Lina must get up, go up to Mr. Müller senior, pull the handkerchief out of his pocket and put it into the outer breast pocket of Mr. Müller junior. ' As soon as Schrenck-Notzing had read the order not a word was spoken, as was the case in most of these experiments. After he had seated himself at such a distance from Lina that all bodily contact was excluded and had concentrated his thoughts on this order, Lina stood up and like a blind person began groping through the studio with dragging steps. She went up to Mr. Müller senior, searching around in his coat until she found the pocket and then, slowly drawing the handkerchief out, she went to Mr. Müller junior, again looked for the pocket that she wanted, put her hand inside and reluctantly threw the objects she found inside it on the floor. Then she put the crumpled handkerchief inside the pocket, repeated as if automatically the same thing several times and again made sure that the handkerchief was securely in the pocket. As in this experiment every hint of what she was to do was carefully avoided, the witnesses considered that it gave evidence so convincing that any further similar experiments in the second sitting were unnecessary."

The fourteenth experiment was as successful as the thirteenth experiment. Schrenck-Notzing mentally commanded Lina to pull out a particular book from his bookcase, and put the book in a pocket of his coat in another room.  We are told Lina "took the suggested book and then went slowly with staggering steps up to the cloak and put it into the intended pocket." The fifteenth experiment was equally impressive, with Lina finding an exact book and an exact page number that had been suggested only mentally. 

There were then experiments that occurred "in the waking state," apparently with Lina not being hypnotized. Schrenck-Notzing made drawings which Lina could not see, and Lina was asked to reproduce. The result of the sixteenth experiment was not impressive, but the result of the seventeenth experiment was the exact match shown below:

The twentieth experiment occurred with Lina in a hypnotized state. On the third attempt to produce a drawing that Schrenck-Notzing had made which Lina could not see, Lina matched the drawing, as shown below.

The twenty-first experiment was equally successful. In a waking state, Lina tried to reproduce a drawing made by someone in another room. She successfully produced the drawing on the third try, as shown below. 

The thirty-third experiment was a very impressive result, demonstrating the strange effect called transposition of the senses, in which vision may seem to be transferred from the eyes to a different part of the body.  Such an effect has often been reported as something arising during hypnosis.  In the experiment Lina was hypnotized and blindfolded with a thick cloth, and observers "took care that no shifting of the cloth took place and that peering out of it was impossible." A book was then opened and placed on top of her head. Lina successfully read from the book. To rule out the extremely remote possibility that such a result could have been produced by a hyper-sensitivity allowing someone to feel ink impressions, a similar test was done using photographs of the text in a book. The blindfolded Lina was just as successful reading from such photographs placed on top of her head. 

The experiments above suggest a possibility about ESP that is also suggested by my own recent experience. The possibility is that someone trying to read someone's else mind may fail on the first attempt, but succeed very well on the second, third or fourth attempt. 

I will give some very recent examples seeming to suggest such a thing. About two weeks ago I said to one of my daughters, "You'll never guess what I saw down the street." I gave no clues, but asked her to guess. After a wrong guess of an orange cat, her second guess was "a raccoon," which is just what I saw. No one in our family has seen such a thing on our street before. Later in the day I asked her what I saw in a weird dream I recently had, mentioning only that it involved something odd in our front yard. After a wrong first guess of a snowman, she asked, "Was it a wild animal?" I said yes. Then she asked, "Was it an elephant?" I said yes. The dream I had was of two baby elephants in our front yard. These were the only two times that day she tried to guess what was in my mind. 

One or two times during the 13 days after this event I asked the same daughter to guess what I was thinking, without success. Then on the 13th day I asked her to guess what I had dreamed about, without giving any clues. I thought of a dream involving my father playing baseball catch with my sister. My daughter's first guess was wrong. Then she asked whether it was something that happened in my childhood. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was something happening in my back yard. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was some kind of sport. I said yes. Then she asked whether it was playing catch or some kind of baseball. I said yes. This was the same performance level noted above: one wrong guess, followed by all other guesses correct. On a test with my other daughter (the only telepathy test I can recall doing with her), I simply asked her to guess a thing I saw today, telling her only it was something that I hadn't seen in years. On her fourth guess, she got the correct answer: a grasshopper. 

The examples with my daughters suggest a possibility also suggested by the visuals shown above: that someone attempting ESP or reading someone's mind may tend to fail on the first attempt, but succeed very well (against all odds) on the second, third or fourth attempt. The examples given here suggest a kind of "warming up" effect. There is a failure to account for such a possibility in almost all laboratory testing of ESP.  No baseball team brings in a relief pitcher into a baseball game without letting the pitcher throw at least ten  "warm up" throws in the bullpen. So why is it that experimenters test ESP without accounting for the possibility of some "warm up" effect in which success may occur on the second, third or fourth try?

If I were given some grant money to test ESP, I would use the money to test ESP in a way that accounted for the possibility of such a "warm up" effect. Instead of only recording first guesses using Zener cards with five possible symbols, I would do tests in which subjects were given four chances to succeed in each trial in which ESP was tested, being tested with test targets that had a thousand possible appearances or a million possible appearances. Using a binomial probability calculator, there is a way to precisely calculate the odds of getting a certain degree of success, even if the person being tested is allowed four different tries for success. 

In a paper that can be read on the Cornell University physics paper server, the authors (Stuart Kauffman and Dean Radin) discuss  laboratory evidence for ESP gathered in recent decades, such as evidence from what is called the ganzfeld technique, a technique for testing ESP in subjects in a rather drowsy state of sensory deprivation. The evidence produced using this technique (which originated a few decades ago) is very good, but much better evidence was gathered in earlier decades by researchers such as Joseph Rhine of Duke University, and many doctors reporting dramatic clairvoyance in hypnotized subjects.   Kauffman and Radin give this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. So the ganzfeld experiments got results with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.  Given a 30% hit rate (5% above what was expected by chance), this very low probability should surprise no one familiar with what is called the law of large numbers.  This is the law that the more trials, the more unlikely it is that a result will differ from the result expected by chance. So given a deck of cards with four suits (clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds), you might guess by chance the suit of a randomly selected card at a rate much higher than 25% if you make only a few guesses. But the more guesses you make, the closer your  hit rate will be to the rate expected by chance. For example, with 1000 guesses your success rate by chance would be something close to 25%, and it would be incredibly unlikely that by chance you would get as high as 30%. 

I already knew about the results of the ganzfeld experiments being in excess of 30%. But I learned something very interesting from the Kauffman and Radin paper I did not know, that a certain subgroup of subjects scored at a rate of 40% (in these experiments with an expected chance result of 25%).  We read the following, mentioning a probability (p) of less than 1 in a  10 billion:

"The modest 5% advantage over chance expectation in the ganzfeld telepathy studies suggests that rudimentary forms of telepathy are widely distributed among the general population. We know this because the majority of participants in these studies were unselected, often just college students participating in an experiment to gain credit for their psychology courses. By contrast, in a subset of these studies where participants were selected based on their prior reports of telepathic experiences, maintaining an active meditative practice, engaged in creative pursuits, and/or having strong belief in psi, the hit rate was a more robust 40.1%, some 6.2 sigma above chance expectation (p = 2.8 x 10^-10)."

Based on results in the nineteenth century and results discussed in this post, I strongly suspect a much higher rate of success in telepathy experiments would be achieved in the present if either subjects were tested in a hypnotized state, or subjects were tested using a protocol allowing for up to five guesses with targets having 1000 or more possible values.