Breathing with the Earth
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exist, mainstream science has dismissed psychic phenomena as delusions
or hoaxes simply because they're rarer than sleep, dreams, memory,
growth, pain, or consciousness, which are all inexplicable in traditional
terms but are too common to be denied. Fifty years ago, when J. B.
Rhine of Duke University first published results of his card-guessing
experiments, scientists eagerly debated and tested the subject for a few
years. Then, although at least 60 percent of the attempts to confirm
Rhine's work also got better-than-chance results (a replication rate better
than that in most other areas of psychology), the openness somehow
disappeared. Ever since World War II, serious parapsychologists have
been hounded out of the forum of science. In the 1950s, for example,
Science and Nature both published attacks on certain results of Rhine and
S. G. Soal, an early psi researcher at London University. Today this
attitude may be waning. G. R. Price, the author of one of the diatribes,
apologized in Science in 1972, and both journals have begun accepting
occasional reports on psychic research, although still confining them-
selves mainly to negative findings. As the climate has begun to change,
a few researchers have looked for electromagnetic fields as a possible basis
for extrasensory perception.
The results so far have been as inconclusive as those from any other
approach. In 1978 E. Balanovski and J. G. Taylor used a variety of
antennae, skin electrodes, and magnetometers to monitor a number of
people claiming paranormal powers. They found no electric or magnetic
fields associated with successes in telepathy experiments. In 1982, Rob-
ert G. Jahn, dean of engineering at Princeton, assembled the most im-
pressive battery of electronic equipment ever brought to bear on the
subject. He found definite effects by mental forces on interferometer
displays and strain-gauge readings, along with positive results in re-
mote-viewing experiments. The tests couldn't be reliably repeated, how-
ever, and seemed to vary with the moods of researcher and subject, and
perhaps with other immeasurable environmental factors. The same de-
pendence on attitude—experiments seem to work more often for believ-
ers than doubters—has bedeviled psychic research from its beginning.
Although Jahn came up with no clear-cut findings on electromagnetic
factors, he was forced to the sublimely understated conclusion that
". . . once the illegitimate research and invalid criticism have been set
aside, the remaining accumulated evidence of psychic phenomena com-
prises an array of experimental observations . . . which compound to a
philosophical dilemma."
We must remember that our study of biofields is still in its infancy.
It's only a decade since the SQUID first enabled us to find the magnetic