Psychology

Paranormal Cognition

Paranormal Cognition

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Paranormal Cognition:

This refers to the perception of objects o events without any of the known senses being involved (i.e. seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching etc). As a result, this is often referred to as extrasensory perception (or ESP) because perception occurs outside of the known senses. ESP includes telepathy (ESP between two minds), clairvoyance (ESP at a distance with no other mind involved) and precognition (knowing about events in the future).

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The Ganzfeld (German for 'entire field') procedure is based on the assumption that if ESP does exist, then  the ESP signal is probably very weak and usually drowned out by the input from our normal sensory channels (e.g. drowned out by everyday noise and other distractions). Therefore the aim of the Ganzfeld procedure is to induce mild sensory deprivation to allow is to receive extrasensory information that we would not normally receive due to interference from out other senses.

During the Ganzfeld procedure, the participant or 'receiver' is made to lie down with halves of ping-pong balls taped over their eyes, headphones playing white noise at a comfortable level over their ears and a red floodlight placed directly towards the receiver's eyes. While the receiver is in the ganzfeld, a 'sender' sits in a separate soundproof room and concentrated on the 'target' - this could be a randomly selected image or video sequence etc.

For 30 minutes, the receiver thinks out loud, providing a continuous report on all the thoughts, feeling and images that pass through their mind. At the end, the receiver is presented with several stimuli and is asked to rate the degree to which each matches their thoughts and images experienced during the ganzfeld period. If the receiver assigns the highest rating to the target, it's scored a hit.

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Research Into Paranormal Cognition:

Sargent et al aimed to test paranormal cognition (or ESP) in a group of participants, the experiment consisted of a 'receiver', who was the participant, a 'sender' who is the person who tries to transmit an image to the receiver and an 'experimenter' to oversee the experiment.

Each participant (or receiver) was placed alone in a room with half ping-pong balls taped over their eyes and a red light shone over them as well as a comfortable level of white noise being playing in headphones on their ears to reduce sensory leakage. The sender was placed in a separate room where they would then have to try and 'send' a series of target images to the receiver using their mind alone. Each target image was randomly chosen (i.e. they were not chosen by the sender)

At the end of the ganzfeld session, the participant (receiver) was taken to a different room and give four pictures to rate where one was the first target image they had seen and the other three were decoys. The participant was asked to rate (on a scale of 1-100) each of the four picture from the set in terms of how closely they matched t the image they thought they had 'received'. If the participant gave the target image the highest score out of the four, this was classed as a hit. This process was then repeated for each the target images to see how many hits they could achieve.

It was found that 6/12 sessions conducted resulted in direct hits. The success rates was therefore 50% which much higher than the 25% (1/4) that would be expected by chance alone. It was concluded that this proves scientific evidence for the existence of ESP (paranormal cognition)

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Again, short and repetitive but hey, what can you do...

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