Memory, emotion, and the receptive psi process

In the effort to understand the receptive psi process--ESP, anomalous cognition--parapsychologists have traditionally seen it as involving two stages. In the first stage, information from a distant, sensorially isolated, or future event enters the human system. In the second stage, the information is elaborated into conscious awareness and/or elicits a behavioural response. In this conceptualization, stage one involves some form of anomalous information transfer. There is, of course, considerable debate surrounding certain models as to whether the psi process can involve information transfer; however, there is little doubt that in operational terms, the human organism at the receiving end responds as if anomalous information has been acquired. In any case, there is reason to expect that explanations of the stage one component are likely to come from the domain of physics. It is with stage two that some conceptual and experimental progress has been made within parapsychology, psychology, and neuroscience.

The two-stage model of receptive psi was first articulated by Tyrrell (1946), who drew a distinction between process and product in what he termed "paranormal cognition." The process is the "reception" of the telepathic or other paranormal information, which he notes is always unconscious. The product is the elaboration of the information into conscious awareness. Tyrrell notes "The product of the paranormal cognitive process is not paranormal ... The product of the paranormal cognitive process is always the product of cognitive and other processes which we are not in the habit of calling paranormal" (Tyrrell, 1946, p. 68, italics in original).

Tyrrell argued that paranormally acquired information was brought to conscious awareness by "mediating vehicles" such as dreams, hallucinations, or mental images. Later, Louisa Rhine adopted a similar two-stage model to understand the different types of spontaneous cases in her collection (Rhine, 1978), and to a large degree the two-stage model has become accepted as a reasonable starting point for explanatory theories. Irwin (1999) calls the stages the mediation and the experiential phases of psi. This paper will deal with the experiential phase by revisiting the existing memory model and suggesting an expansion of that model based on recent developments in neuroscience.

As Tyrrell noted, the second or experiential stage of the psi process is not paranormal. It involves quite normal cognitive and emotional processes, and various investigators have offered suggestions for key components of the process (for a review see Stokes, 1997, pp. 48 ff). Thus, half the challenge in understanding how psi works involves understanding its pathway through the normal operations of the brain and perhaps other systems of the organism.

Nearly two decades ago I suggested that if we wanted to know how psi worked, it would help to know what psi was for (Broughton, 1988). I suggested that, as a start, we should look to the same process that has shaped homo sapiens into the most successful species on the planet--evolution. Evolution has a simple answer for the purpose of psi. It should have a role in improving our fitness, our ability to survive and to pass on our genes to the next generation. In short, psi must be useful. (For an elaboration of this idea, see Broughton, 1988, 2000.)

One of evolution's distinguishing characteristics is that it makes remarkably economical use of an organism's resources. Evolution tends not to devise new systems where existing systems can be adapted and extended to serve new needs and confer new advantages. The human brain is built upon the substrate of a reptilian brain that now remains a crucial part of what it means to be human. New functions are typically "piggybacked" on existing systems that they can enhance.

An important key to the evolutionary fitness of homo sapiens has been its ability to acquire and store information, and to use it to plan future action based on the assessment of likely outcomes. Humans are essentially a future-oriented species. If evolution has endowed humans with an ability to capitalize upon anomalous information (however stage one operated), then it would be reasonable to expect that this ability would be built upon and tightly integrated with brain systems that serve this crucial fitness characteristic.

MEMORY AND ESP

One such brain system has already been identified--memory. The early SPR researchers, when faced with such vexing problems as "Why do ghosts wear clothes?" or "How can there be apparitions of living individuals?" largely agreed that these experiences were hallucinations, perhaps mediated by telepathy (Gurney, Myers, & Podmore, 1886; Myers, 1903). There was an awareness, though not a consensus, that apparitional experiences were essentially a product of the mind of the percipient--a hallucination constructed from images in the percipient's memory. Warcollier's extensive naturalistic telepathy experiments in the 1930s confirmed this for him as he concluded: