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

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

Myers (1886) wrote about a visit SPR members made to France to participate in telepathic hypnosis experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Pierre Janet with his famous subject Leonie. In these studies, Janet attempted to induce trance at a distance, a phenomenon reported in the literature by other researchers as well.(4) Leonie was also studied by Charles Richet (1888, 1889), who not only tested her for ESP under hypnosis, but also tested her secondary personality Leontine with card guessing methods.

Other interesting reports published in the SPR Proceedings included Giovanni Battista Ermacora's (1895) studies of ESP in dreams, and Alfred Backman's (1891) studies of hypnotically-induced traveling clairoyance, a phenomenon in which a person feels he or she travels to and is located in a distant place in which he or she is capable of veridical perceptions.

There was also much interest within the SPR and elsewhere on trance mediumship, an interest that continued well into the twentieth century. The mediumship of Leonora Piper received much attention (e.g., Hodgson, 1892, 1898; Hyslop, 1901; Myers, Lodge, Leaf, &James, 1890) because researchers associated her trances with veridical verbal statements about deceased individuals and other matters. The psychology of mediumship and the phenomenology of its trance states was discussed by Janet (1889), Flournoy (1899/1900), Myers (1903), and many others (e.g., Alrutz, 1924; Balfour, 1935; Hyslop, 1925; Troubridge, 1922). Two major studies were Theodore Flournoy's (1899/1900) explorations of the genesis and development of medium Helene Smith's mediumistic fantasies about previous lives and life on the planet Mars, and Eleanor Sidgwick's (1915) psychological and phenomenological analysis of Mrs. Piper's trances.(5)

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In France, hypnosis was used to attempt to "project" the sensibility or sensory processes out of the body (Boirac, 1908), to "project" the "astral body" (Durville, 1909; De Rochas, 1906), to induce traveling clairvoyance (Cornillier, 1920 /1921), and to have access to claimed memories of previous lives (De Rochas, 1911).

In later literature, we find many discussions about particular introspective and internal attention factors related to the manifestation of ESP. Geley (1919/1920) referred to a process of "decentralization sufficient to break for the moment the cerebral limitation of the individual" (p. 261). According to Osty (1922/1923):

In the second state of metagnomic subjects the directing functions of thought,

attention, and will ... no longer directs and controls the formation of ideas

.... Hysterical somnambulism occasionally brings this about, and for this

reason it sometimes shows supernormal cognition. Similarly natural sleep,

somnolence, absorbing preoccupation, physical and mental fatigue, may bring

about that dissociation.... (p. 119)

Many other researchers have described the state of mind of psychics while ESP was occurring. The most important of the early experiments was the work conducted by Brugmans, Heyman, and Weinberg in the Netherlands with a subject named Van Dam. When Van Dam had ingested alcohol he produced more ESP hits (22 hits out of 29 trials) than when he had not had alcohol (22 hits out of 104 trials).(6) Brugmans (1922) speculated that alcohol lowered Van Dam's inhibitions and possibly quieted down Van Dam's internal mental activity, allowing him to be more open or sensitive to other impressions, such as telepathic ones. In a later paper, Brugmans (1924) stated that good telepathic experimental results depended on a "passive state" that Van Dam could achieve at will. In Brugman's (1924) words: "Regarding the sensation of passivity, we have found ... that this sensation actually coincides with a change in the state of consciousness.... " [my translation] (p. 98). A passive state was evidenced by declines in the chart tracings' of the galvanic skin response. According to Brugmans, these declines indicated a "rapport" between telepathic reception and the passive state.