INTERANAL AUDITING - BODY,MIND AND BEYOND -Cultivating ESP - Series - 16

 

Cultivating ESP: Dr. Charles Tart's Pioneering Research on Feedback and Learning

For over six decades, Dr. Charles Tart has navigated the challenging terrain of parapsychology research while maintaining academic respectability—a feat that might itself require extrasensory perception. In a revealing interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Tart discusses one of his most significant contributions to the field: the application of feedback principles to ESP development.

The Missing Element: Feedback in ESP Research

Imagine being asked to "read someone's mind" without any instructions on how to do so. Should you squint? Relax? Pray? As Tart points out, traditional ESP research operated under the flawed assumption that participants already possessed functioning ESP abilities that merely needed to be measured.

"Almost all the tests of ESP that have been done have been based on a model that somebody already has a certain level of ESP, and you just tell them to use it in your test," explains Tart. This approach, he argues, fundamentally misunderstands how human learning works.

Drawing parallels with the biofeedback research emerging in the 1960s—which demonstrated that people could learn to control typically unconscious physiological processes when given immediate feedback—Tart proposed a revolutionary concept: What if ESP could be cultivated through similar feedback mechanisms?

The Decline Effect and the Extinction Paradigm

One of the most consistent findings in parapsychology has been the "decline effect"—the tendency for ESP performance to deteriorate over repeated trials. Skeptics often cite this as evidence that initial positive results stem from statistical flukes rather than genuine psychic phenomena.

Tart offered a different interpretation. "In Psychology, [repeated testing without feedback] is known as an Extinction Paradigm," he explains. "You can take any skill a person actually has and by making them do it over and over without feedback, they'll get worse and worse at it, gradually lose their skill altogether."

This perspective suggests the decline effect might actually provide evidence for the existence of ESP rather than against it—after all, "chance doesn't get tired."

Testing the Theory: The ESP Learning Experiment

To test his hypothesis, Tart designed a groundbreaking study using his undergraduate experimental psychology class. Students screened approximately 2,000 participants through preliminary ESP tests, identifying those who showed potential talent.

These promising candidates were then invited to participate in training sessions using specially designed ESP training machines—either a four-choice or ten-choice trainer—that provided immediate feedback. When participants made a correct guess, a bell would ring; when incorrect, the correct target would light up.

The results were compelling. Five participants scored significantly above chance, with some achieving odds of "millions to one against chance." Perhaps most notably, none exhibited the decline effect that had plagued traditional ESP research.

Psychological Resistance to Psychic Ability

The experiment revealed fascinating psychological dimensions to ESP development. One high-performing participant began consistently achieving 30-50% accuracy on the ten-choice machine (where chance would predict 10%)—and promptly burst into tears, refusing to continue the experiment.

"When you're hitting 40-50% on something that hard," Tart explains, "you have a gut-level conviction you know something's going on, and she was having to face up to the fact that she was being psychic. And that's frightening sometimes."

Years later, Tart learned this participant had become a doctor—perhaps putting her intuitive abilities to use in diagnosis, whether consciously acknowledging them or not.

Other participants demonstrated unconscious resistance through "psi-missing"—consistently scoring significantly below chance, which is statistically as improbable as scoring above it. When researchers began tracking this pattern, these participants drifted even further from correct answers.

"It's not that long in human history that we burned people at the stake that we thought were psychic," Tart notes, suggesting cultural and psychological barriers to acknowledging psychic ability run deep.

The Mystery of Unconscious Knowledge

The research yielded other intriguing observations. Video recordings showed participants' hands often hovering over the correct target before moving away to select an incorrect one—suggesting their bodies somehow "knew" the right answer before conscious awareness interfered.

Further analysis revealed participants who approached the task logically, using strategies like tracking patterns, performed worse than those who maintained an open, receptive mental state.

A Legacy Overlooked?

Despite these promising results, Tart's learning paradigm wasn't widely adopted within parapsychology. The few researchers who did attempt to replicate it often ignored a crucial aspect of his methodology—the need to pre-screen for participants with some initial ESP ability.

"If you're going to train [ESP], you need people with some talent to begin with," Tart emphasizes. When researchers used unselected participants showing no initial ability, feedback predictably failed to improve performance—a result "perfectly correct prediction from the theory, but trivial."

Additionally, the field's attention shifted toward remote viewing—a free-response approach to ESP where participants describe mental imagery associated with distant targets rather than making forced-choice selections.

Remote Viewing and the Feedback Connection

Interestingly, remote viewing protocols incorporated immediate feedback as a standard procedure. After completing a remote viewing session, participants would typically be taken directly to the target location, providing clear, memorable feedback without intervening distractions.

This immediate feedback loop may explain why remote viewing hasn't shown the same decline effects that plagued earlier ESP research. Though Tart notes exceptional remote viewers like Joseph McMonegle report that feedback doesn't affect their performance, he suggests this may be true only for the unusually gifted few.

The Lessons for Science

Tart's work underscores a fundamental principle often overlooked in controversial research areas: the methods used to study phenomena can profoundly impact whether those phenomena appear at all. By treating ESP as a learnable skill rather than a fixed trait, he opened new possibilities for understanding psychic functioning.

That this methodological breakthrough hasn't been more widely embraced reflects broader challenges in parapsychology—a field where theoretical innovations often face resistance regardless of their empirical merit.

"Ordinarily in science when you figure out how to do something better, colleagues want to come around and see how you do it," Tart observes. "When lasers were first being developed... Russell Targ learned to build lasers that would drill a hole through a brick. A lot of people came to see how's he build them, how's that work. You would think that everybody would have run off to see how are these remote viewing researchers doing it to get such good results."

His wry conclusion? "We're kind of crazy."

As parapsychology continues its slow integration into mainstream science, Tart's pioneering work on ESP and feedback stands as a testament to the importance of questioning methodological assumptions—and the potential rewards of treating even the most controversial human capacities with the same rigorous learning principles we apply to other skills.

---