ESP and altered states of consciousness: an overview of conceptual and research trends

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1998 by Carlos S. Alvarado

(a) The Association for Research on Enlightenment (A.R.E) is devoted to the study of parapsychological topics and the readings of psychic Edgar Cayce.

(b) These were mainly Puerto Ricans, but included a minority of individuals from other countries.

(c) Most of the respondents were Spanish.

A few studies have also shown positive relationships between claims of spontaneous experiences (including ESP) and cognitive variables related to a variety of alterations of consciousness, such as openness to experience, fantasy experiences (Wilson & Barber, 1983), absorption experiences (using a variant of Tellegen's Absorption Scale, Irwin, 1985), hypnotic susceptibility (Richards, 1990), dissociative experiences (Richards, 1991), and spontaneous experiences of losing a sense of time while engaged in a task in daily life (Zingrone, Alvarado, & Dalton, in press). Although interesting, it should be remembered that none of these studies used a methodology that allows us to be sure that the ESP claims referred to veridical events, or that their explanation required acceptance of an anomalous communication process.

However, most of the studies on the relationship between ESP and altered states took place in the laboratory. During the 1960s, the field started to change its emphasis on forced-choice methods of testing ESP, and there was a slow movement to return to the older free-response testing modes which took into account verbal statements of the subjects.(12) A well-known example of free-response testing that included an altered state of consciousness was the dream ESP work conducted at Maimonides Medical Center during part of the 1960s and the 1970s. In this work, subjects slept in the laboratory and the content of their dreams was inspected for evidence of information related to ESP target information sent by someone from a distant location. The impact of this approach was such that it provided a considerable boost to the whole area of internal attention states and ESP. The reports in question not only appeared in the Parapsychological literature (e.g., Krippner, 1970; Krippner, Ullman, & Honorton, 1971; Ullman & Krippner, 1970) but in psychiatry journals as well (e.g., Krippner & Ullman, 1970; Ullman, 1966; Ullman & Krippner, 1969).(13) These dream studies heralded a return of interest in the study of ESP and ASCs in the laboratory, using free-response methodology. This then "new" interest may be described as a "new" parapsychology in the sense that it constituted a break with the Rhinean approach, which had been dominant until then.

But dream-ESP was not the only line of research. As Honorton and Krippner commented in 1969, the new parapsychology included numerous studies of ESP with hypnosis in which better results were obtained in hypnosis conditions than in non-hypnosis conditions. Out of twelve studies in which such comparisons were conducted, nine (75%) obtained significant results which favored hypnosis. The authors also noted that the influence of hypnosis affected the magnitude, but not the direction, of ESP test performance (on this issue, see Palmer, 1978b, pp. 205-206). Finally, they pointed out that the administration of direct suggestions for success did not seem to be the main factor accounting for the results. Although later reviewers have analyzed these and later experiments (Schechter, 1984; Stanford, 1992; Stanford & Stein, 1994), it must be mentioned that controversies about the role or existence of altered states in hypnosis exist in hypnosis literature itself to this date (Kirsch & Lynn, 1995). Consequently, it is difficult to assess the role of hypnotic techniques on ESP performance, a problem shared with some other ASC-inducing techniques.