Few words to say about this book

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READING PASSAGE 2 
Telepathy 
Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the issue of telepathy has divided 
the scientific community, and even today it still sparks bitter controversy among top academics
Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes around the world have risked 
the derision of sceptical colleagues by putting the various claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous 
scientific studies. The results and their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them. 
Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is genuine. Other 
parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having tried to produce definitive scientific 
proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do concur on one issue, however: that the most 
impressive evidence so far has come from the so-called 'ganzfeld' experiments, a German term that means 
'whole field'. Reports of telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to 
suspect that telepathy might involve 'signals' passing between people that were so faint that they were usually 
swamped by normal brain activity. In this case, such signals might be more easily detected by those 
experiencing meditation-like tranquillity in a relaxing 'whole field' of light, sound and warmth. 
The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting in soft reclining chairs in a 
sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their eyes are covered with special filters letting in only soft 
pink light. In early ganzfeld experiments, the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from 
a random selection of four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a person acting as a 
'sender' would attempt to beam the image over to the 'receiver' relaxing in the sealed room. 
Once the session was over, this person was asked to identify which of the four images had been 
used. Random guessing would give a hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real, however, the hit-rate would be 
higher. In 1982, the results from the first ganzfeld studies were analysed by one of its pioneers, the American 
parapsychologist Charles Honorton. They pointed to typical hit-rates of better than 30 per cent - a small effect, 
but one which statistical tests suggested could not be put down to chance. 
The implication was that the ganzfeld method had revealed real evidence for telepathy. But there was 
a crucial flaw in this argument - one routinely overlooked in more conventional areas of science. Just because 
chance had been ruled out as an explanation did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of 
getting positive results. These ranged from 'sensory leakage' - where clues about the pictures accidentally reach 
the receiver - to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued a review of all the ganzfeld studies done up 
to 1985 to show that 80 per cent had found statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that 
there were still too many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew up a 
list demanding new standards for future research. 
After this, many researchers switched to autoganzfeld tests - an automated variant of the technique which used 
computers to perform many of the key tasks such as the random selection of images. By minimising human 
involvement, the idea was to minimise the risk of flawed results. In 1987, results from hundreds of 
autoganzfeld tests were studied by Honorton in a 'meta-analysis', a statistical technique for finding 
the overall results from a set of studies. Though less compelling than before, the outcome was still impressive. 
Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between individual ganzfeld studies. 
Defenders of telepathy point out that demanding impressive evidence from every study ignores one basic 
statistical fact: it takes large samples to detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces 
hit-rates only marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it's unlikely to be detected by a typical 
ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is just not big enough. Only when many studies are 
combined in a meta-analysis will the faint signal of telepathy really become apparent. And that is what 
researchers do seem to be finding. 

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What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream scientists: most still 
totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at least in part from the lack of any 
plausible mechanism for telepathy. 
Various theories have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from theoretical physics. They 
include 'quantum entanglement', in which events affecting one group of atoms instantly affect another group, 
no matter how far apart they may be. While physicists have demonstrated entanglement with specially 
prepared atoms, no-one knows if it also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such 
questions would transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to argue that the future lies 
not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing possible mechanisms. Some work has begun 
already, with researchers trying to identify people who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trials. Early 
results show that creative and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University of 
Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these will eventually give the 
researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the case for the existence of telepathy. 

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