The Telepathy Lab
The Telepathy LabAbstract
The problem or the mission in this lab is to find out if humans really possess an extrasensory perception, or in other words, telepathy. The hypothesis in the beginning of the lab is that, humans are incapable of possessing this sixth sense. In the lab, a group of high school students whose ages were between sixteen and eighteen, that consist of eleven males and eight females, were tested. The main apparatus used in this lab are ten index cards, with ten distinct symbols on them, and a book. The experimenter held a card and the subjects were asked to jot down which “symbolled” card he/she was holding. In the end, findings proved that participants did not posses this sixth sense.
Introduction
This lab was done to clarify any doubts about humans possessing the inexplicable sixth sense, or in other words telepathy. The hypothesis formulated in the beginning of the lab was: No, humans do not have this extraordinary ability. The research strategy that was planned to use during this lab was survey. The experimenter was to survey the participants after the test to see if the hypothesis is correct. In the U.S., one of the earliest groups to become active in parapsychology was the Parapsychology Laboratory of North Carolina’s Duke University, which began publishing literature in the 1930s. There, under the direction of the American psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, methods were developed that advanced psychical investigations from the correlations of isolated and often vague anecdotal reports to a mathematical study based on statistics and the laws of probability. In the experiments dealing with ESP, Rhine and his associates used mainly a deck of 25 cards, somewhat similar to ordinary playing cards but bearing on their faces only five designs: star, circle, cross, square, and wavy lines. If a subject correctly named 5 out of the shuffled deck of 25 concealed cards, that was considered pure chance. Certain subjects, however, consistently named 6 out of 10 cards correctly; so, Rhine and his associates concluded that this demonstrated the existence of ESP. In their experiments on psycho kinesis, the group used ordinary dice that were thrown from a cup against a wall or tumbled in mechanically driven cages. In these tests, an apparent relationship was found between the mental effort of subjects to “will” particular faces of the dice to appear upward and the percentage of times the faces actually did so. The results obtained in many individual experiments and in the research as a whole, Rhine and his workers decided, could not reasonably be attributed to the fluctuations of chance. Thus, previous held experiments in...
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