ESP and altered states of consciousness: an overview of conceptual and research trends

Others noticed changes of states of consciousness in their subjects during the apparent production of ESP. Tischner (1921/1925) wrote that his subject, Miss von B., "loses the synthetic faculty of our normal consciousness" (p. 218), while French psychic Pascal Forthuny was noticed to enter a state in which he showed "fixedness of the eyes and the absence of blinking" (Sudre, 1926, p. 69).(7)

In Italy, William Mackenzie argued that there was no clear relationship between ESP and dissociation, but he hinted at the possibility of a relationship between degrees of consciousness and ESP when he wrote about the "simultaneity of various psychic states in the same individual, at a particular moment" [my translation] (Mackenzie, 1923, p. 168 [footnote]). Writing before Mackenzie, Walter Franklin Prince (1915, 1916) discussed the dissociative phenomenology of the Doris Fischer multiple personality case, in which there were several incidents suggestive of ESP. However, like the mediumship literature, such observations indicated that perhaps ESP could take place in dissociated states, but that dissociative states were not necessarily conducive to the manifestation of ESP.

Rene Warcollier (1938) also had something to say on these issues because he conducted considerable research on the cognitive aspects of ESP, particularly on the characteristics of its reception. In his view,

one must create in oneself a void of thought, keeping the attention solely

upon the one idea of visualization... But this analysis of the psychic

process in the ordinary person is difficult.... The power of abstraction,

instinctive with gifted subjects, is what distinguishes them from the

average person. (p. 20)

Although J. B. Rhine paid some attention to internal attention states in his classic monograph Extra-Sensory Perception (1934a), his emphasis was on operationalizing the phenomena and relating it to such variables ;as motivation, distance, and varieties of targets. After all, he was operating from a university psychology department at a time when a variety of behavioral approaches based on learning theory and physiological models of behavior were dominant in American psychology. This trend was clear in the influential work of such researchers as Guthrie (1935), Hull (1943), Skinner (1938), and, of course, in Watson's (1913) behaviorism.

Rhine and his associates did not pay much attention to consciousness or introspection. A brief overview of the first ten years of the Journal of Parapsychology (1937-1946) shows that most of the research efforts were concentrated on clearly observable variables such as the types of individuals associated with ESP experiences, as seen in studies of blind subjects (Price & Pegram, 1937), psychotics (Shulman, 1938), and children (L. E. Rhine, 1937). In addition, there were studies on the effect of varied target stimuli on ESP (Pratt & Woodruff, 1939), comparisons of different test procedures on performance (Russell & Rhine, 1942), distance (Rhine & Humphrey, 1942), displacement (Russell, 1943), and personality variables (Humphrey, 1945). There was also much interest in what J. B. Rhine (1944) called "the curve of performance--that is, the patterning of hits in the test," an effect that seemed to be similar to "those of other cognitive processes such as memory, sensory perception and learning" (p. 90; see also Pratt, Humphrey, & Rhine, 1942). Furthermore, as L. E. Rhine (1971) pointed out, the 1930s and the 1940s (particularly in the United States) were a period in which researchers attempted to refine the study of clearly measurable and observable correlates of ESP, as well as to refine distinctions between phenomena studied by trying to empirically address the question of whether telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition were separate phenomena. Such worries had little to do with the study of states of consciousness.