Monday 13 May 2013

Psychic Definition

(Source.Google.com.pk)
Psychic Definition Biography

Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind".

Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.[1][2] The term was coined in the 1970s by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute, to distinguish it from clairvoyance.[3] [4]

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the US government starting from 1975 in order to try to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any useful intelligence information.[5][6]
The study of psychic phenomena by major scientists started in the mid-nineteenth century. Early researchers included Michael Faraday, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rufus Osgood Mason, and William Crookes. Their work predominantly involved carrying out focused experimental tests on specific individuals who were thought to be psychically gifted. Reports of apparently successful tests were met with much skepticism from the scientific community.

In the 1930s J. B. Rhine expanded the study of paranormal performance into larger populations, by using standard experimental protocols with unselected human subjects. But, as with the earlier studies, Rhine was reluctant to publicize this work too early because of the fear of criticism from mainstream scientists.[7]

This continuing skepticism, with its consequences for peer review and research funding, ensured that paranormal studies remained a fringe area of scientific exploration. However, by the 1960s, the prevailing counterculture attitudes muted some of the prior hostility. The emergence of New Age thinking and the popularity of the Human Potential Movement provoked a mini-renaissance that renewed public interest in consciousness studies and psychic phenomena and helped to make financial support more available for research into such topics.[8]

In the early 1970s Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).[9] In addition to their mainstream scientific research work on quantum mechanics and laser physics, they initiated several studies of the paranormal. These were initially supported with funding from the Parapsychology Foundation, and the newly-formed Institute of Noetic Sciences.

One of the early experiments, lauded by proponents as having improved the methodology of remote viewing testing and as raising future experimental standards, was criticized as leaking information to the participants by inadvertently leaving clues.[10] Some later experiments had negative results when these clues were eliminated.[11]
US government-funded research

From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research, it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)

In 1972 Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann at SRI, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996[12], Smith 2005) As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature,[13] in Proceedings of the IEEE (Puthoff & Targ, 1976),[14] and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Puthoff, et al., 1981[15]).

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials, including John N. McMahon (then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director) became strong supporters of the program.

In the mid 1970s sponsorship by the CIA was terminated and picked up by the Air Force. In 1979 the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer General Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Atwater 2001)

In 1984 remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle was awarded a legion of merit for determining "150 essential elements of information...producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source".[16]

Unfortunately, the viewers' advice in the "Stargate project" was always so unclear and non-detailed that it has never been used in any intelligence operation.[3][5][6] Despite this, SRI scientists and remote viewers have claimed that a number of "natural" psychics were crucial in a number of intelligence operations. The most famous claimed results from these years were the description of "a big crane" at a Soviet nuclear research facility by Joseph McMoneagle,[17] a description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine by a team of three viewers which included McMoneagle,(Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and Rosemary Smith's location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa.[18] By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics, (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005) but the collaboration never resulted in useful intelligence information.[3][5][6][4]
Decline and termination

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster appointed Army Colonel William Johnson to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. Funding dissipated in late 1994 and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995.

In 1995 the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the Stargate Project. Reviewers included Ray Hyman and Jessica Utts. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect,[19] with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.[5] Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, "is premature, to say the least."[20] Hyman said the findings had yet to be replicated independently, and that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning."[20] Based upon both of their studies, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995.[6] Time magazine stated in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down.[6]

The AIR report concluded that no usable intelligence data was produced in the program.[5] David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."[6]
UK government research

In 2001–2002 the UK Government performed a study on 18 untrained subjects. The experimenters recorded the E field and H field around each viewer to see if the cerebral activity of successful viewings caused higher-than-usual fields to be emitted from the brain. However, the experimenters did not find any evidence that the viewers had accessed the targets in the data collection phase, the project was abandoned, and the data was never analyzed since no RV activity had happened. Some "narrow-band" E-fields were detected during the viewings, but they were attributed to external causes. The experiment was disclosed in 2007 after a UK Freedom of Information request.[21]
PEAR's Remote Perception program

Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the AIR report, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They created an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process that was criticized in past experiments, and they released a report in 1996. They felt the results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments.[22]

In 2007 the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab laboratory was closed, in part due to lack of funding.[23]
Scientific studies and claims

Scientific studies have been conducted; some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results but they had invalidating flaws,[24] and none of the newer experiments had positive results when under properly controlled conditions.[3][5][6][21][11] The scientific community rejects remote viewing due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.[25] It is also considered a pseudoscience.[26]

According to psychologist David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.[24][27]

Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly.[28] Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.[29][30]

The information from the Stargate Project remote viewing sessions was vague and included a lot of irrelevant and erroneous data, it was never useful in any intelligence operation, and project managers changed the reports so they would fit background cues.[5]

According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.[11]

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for outlandish claims that will revolutionize the world, and thus he remains unconvinced:[31]

    I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. (...) if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionize [sic] the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence.
    —Richard Wiseman Daily Mail, January 28, 2008, pp 28–29 [31]

Wiseman also pointed at several problems with one of the early experiments at SAIC, like information leakage. However, he indicated the importance of its process-oriented approach and of its refining of remote viewing methodology, which meant that researchers replicating their work could avoid these problems.[25] Wiseman later insisted there were multiple opportunities for participants on that experiment to be influenced by inadvertent cues and that these cues can influence the results when they appear.[10]

Psychologist Ray Hyman says that, even if the results were reproduced under specified conditions, they would still not be a conclusive demonstration of the existence of psychic functioning. He blames this on the reliance on a negative outcome—the claims on ESP are based on the results of experiments not being explained by normal means. He says that the experiments lack a positive theory that guides as to what to control on them and what to ignore, and that "Parapsychologists have not come close to (having a positive theory) as yet".[32] Ray Hyman also says that the amount and quality of the experiments on RV are way too low to convince the scientific community to "abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles", due to its findings still not having been replicated successfully under careful scrutiny.[33]

Science writer Martin Gardner and others describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience.[26][34] Gardner says that founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system Scientology from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology."[26] Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim in the book Occult Chemistry that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.[26]

Various skeptic organizations have conducted experiments for remote viewing and other alleged paranormal abilities, with no positive results under properly controlled conditions.[citation needed]
Recent research

In 2002, Michael Persinger, cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Laurentian University, published a study into remote viewing which suggests positive results.[35][36] He studied the remote viewing accuracy of remote viewer Ingo Swann, as measured by a group of ratings of congruence (between Swann's drawings and the locale being 'viewed') by 40 experimentally blind participants[35] during stimulation with complex magnetic fields using a circumcerebral (around the head) eight-channel system. In 2010, Persinger (et al.) published a report of his work with the psychic Sean Harribance, reporting that blind-rated accuracies in his psychic insights correlated with specific Quantitative Electroencephalography profiles; specifically, congruence between activity over the left temporal lobe of those being 'read' by Mr. Harribance and his right temporal lobe.[36] "The results indicate even exceptional skills previously attributed to aberrant sources are variations of normal cerebral dynamics associated with intuition and may involve small but discrete changes in proximal energy."
Selected RV study participants

    Ingo Swann, one of the prominent research participants of remote viewing. He wrote a book about his experience:

        Kiss the Earth Good-bye: Adventures and Discoveries in the Nonmaterial, Recounted by the Man who has Astounded Physicists and Parapsychologists Throughout the World by Ingo Swann, Hawthorne Books, 1975

    Pat Price, one of the early remote viewers
    Russell Targ, cofounder of the investigation at Stanford Research Institute[9] into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s
    Joseph McMoneagle, one of the early remote viewers.[37] See: Stargate Project
    Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute
    David Marks, the critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues and editing in the original transcripts generated by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s
Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

Psychic Definition

1 comment: