Pure Clairvoyance and the Necessity of Feedback

Russell Targ
Bay Research Institute
1550 California St.
San Francisco, California 94109
Charles T. Tart
Department of Psychology
University of California
Davis, California 95616

(1985, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.)

Published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 79, October 1985, pp. 485-492. The contents of this
document are Copyright © 1985 by the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. (see detail)

Abstract

An alternative explanation of ostensible clairvoyance has been that percipients precognize the future state of their brain when they receive
feedback about the target order. Older studies of pure clairvoyance, where this possibility is eliminated, suggest that clairvoyance exists, but
these studies have some methodological problems. In this investigation, a computer tested clairvoyance (guessing numbers 1-10) with and
without feedback. Totals were recorded in the pure clairvoyance condition only, so there could be no future inspection of target orders by
anyone. Percipients with no previous history of success in laboratory psi tasks showed no results, but three talented percipients showed success
in the pure clairvoyance task in accordance with their known beliefs, viz., significant psi-hitting by the percipient who accepted pure clairvoyance
and significant psi-missing by the two who did not accept it.

Article

A substantial number of psi experiments in the last decade have been

based on various observational theories" of psi functioning, theories
derived from considerations of quantum physics. We will not attempt to
review these theories here except to note that they share a common
premise that there will be eventual feedback of the target data of a psi
test, either to the percipient or to some other human. The possibility of
"pure clairvoyance" is ruled out insofar as these theories claim to offer
total explanations of psi effects.

By clairvoyance we use the generally accepted definition that it is the

direct psychic perception of information about the physical state of a
sensorily shielded object, place, or event by a percipient, when no living
individual knows that information at the time of the clairvoyant
perception. Apparent clairvoyance can be theoretically explained away,
however, by alternatively postulating that the information is obtained by
precognitive perception of the later feedback about the nature of the
target. This later event can be direct feedback to the percipient and/or
telepathically mediated feedback wherein the percipient reads the mind"
of an experimenter or observer who later observes the target set.

The target, for example, might be a shuffled deck of ESP cards. In a

clairvoyance model, successful scoring occurs because the mind of the
percipient somehow reaches out" and inspects the physical
characteristics of enough of the cards to allow significant scoring. In the
alternative precognitive feedback model, no clairvoyance occurs, no
information passes across space" at the time the percipient makes his or
her responses. Instead, the percipient precognizes his or her own future
state of mind when he or she is later shown the order of the target cards
and uses this information to correctly guess now. A variant of this
theory, which assumes the existence of telepathy, proposes that the
percipient precognitively reads the mind of an experimenter who
observes the order of the target deck at some future time as part of
scoring the experiment.

These alternative explanations can be ruled out by automation of an

experiment such that the apparently clairvoyant perceptions of the
percipient can be machine scored for correctness and the target material
then destroyed, so that there is no possibility of future human
observation of it by anyone. This is a pure clairvoyance experiment.
Significant psi results under pure clairvoyance conditions would falsify
those aspects of observational theories which assert that feedback to
someone is absolutely necessary. It does not rule out the possibility that
precognition of future feedback may be the mechanism for psi under
some experimental conditions, or that it may be a useful auxiliary
information channel in addition to present-time clairvoyance.

Establishment of the reality of pure clairvoyance is, then, of theoretical

interest in and of itself, as well as pertinent to the observational theories
of psi. It is also of practical significance. Suppose, for example, that you
wished to use clairvoyance to determine whether or not to drill an oil
well. In the observational theory framework, it would make sense to drill
if the clairvoyant answer were Yes," as feedback would later occur that
would provide a basis for making the decision. If the answer were No,
do not drill," and the well was not drilled on that basis, a potentially
productive oil well might be skipped, for there would be no future
feedback information for a valid psychic prediction to be based upon. If
pure clairvoyance exists, however, no" predictions would be of as much
practical value as "yes" predictions.

Previous Studies

The existence of pure clairvoyance as a distinct form of psi not

explainable by telepathy or precognition was an issue for J. B. Rhine and
others in the late l930s and the l940s. Initial support for pure
clairvoyance was provided by Tyrrell's (1938) study which used an
automatic testing apparatus. The exploratory nature of Tyrrell's studies,
coupled with the destruction of the apparatus and detailed records in
World War II, makes us reluctant to put much weight on these results,
however.

Humphrey and Pratt (1941) carried out a "chute" series of ESP card tests
that provided evidence for clairvoyance in a way they believed excluded
precognitive telepathy as an alternative explanation. The percipient
would drop his call cards through five different openings, each marked
with a different ESP card symbol. The cards fell through chutes into
disarranged piles so that the order they were called in by the percipient
was largely obliterated. The experimenters were to pay no particular
attention to the organization of the disarranged piles as they picked
them up for scoring. Although it is pushing ideas about unconscious
observation to considerable limits, one could conceive, however, that
the unconscious minds of the experimenters could contain partial
information about call order that could be compared with target order,
and this information might have been accessible to precognitive
telepathy. Exact details of the experimental procedure, which might help
resolve this issue, are no longer available.

Schmeidler (1964) carried out a thoughtful series of experiments that

involved a pure precognitive clairvoyance condition. In her first study,
percipients tried to identify colors and ESP card symbols to match
targets that would later be generated by a random process-In a
computer. In one condition, the targets and responses were printed out
by the computer and inspected by the experimenter. In a second
condition, they were inspected by both the experimenter and the
percipient. In the pure precognitive clairvoyance condition, only the
responses and the total score of each run were printed out, and the
target data were destroyed. Schmeidler, as experimenter, knew which
conditions were which in her first study, and reports that she was most
interested in results in the pure clairvoyance condition.

Due to a computer malfunction, data from 34 of the 50 percipients had

to be rerun in ways that make interpretation of their results very
ambiguous, so we deal only with the data of the 16 percipients who
were properly run. In the pure precognitive clairvoyance condition, 199
hits were obtained when 160 would be expected by chance in 800 trials.
This is significantly above chance (p = .0006, two-tailed) and shows a psi
quotient of +.06 (Timm,1973) and an average information-rate of 0.14
bits per trial (tart, 1983).
[Note 2]

In a second study, Schmeidler kept herself blind as to in which

experimental condition she was running a percipient. She noted that her
ignorance of which condition the subject was calling seemed to take
some of the sparkle out of the research; that it made the whole
procedure more uniform, flat, and stale" (Schmeidler, 1964, p. 6).
Results for the pure precognitive clairvoyance condition in this second
study were positive but did not reach statistical significance.

These are the only published studies of pure clairvoyance of which we

know. Considering the theoretical and practical importance of the
question of whether pure clairvoyance exists, we conducted a brief
study that overcame the methodological flaws of the past ones. This
work was carried out at SRI International in the summer of 1978. We
describe its results here.
Note that we are not considering the role of feedback in learning to use
psychic abilities in this article. We consider feedback essential for
improving psi performance but not essential for manifesting psi
abilities. We needed visual feedback about where our hand was in
reaching for something to initially learn eye-hand coordination, for
example, but once we have learned that skill we can easily close our
eyes and still reach out with great precision.

Method

The ESPER Program

In this experiment, a Polymorphic Systems model 8813 8-bit computer

with floppy disk memory storage was programmed3 to carry out 20-trial
runs of a 10-choice number guessing test. A percipient turned on the
machine and started the "ESPER" program. For each trial, 10 boxes were
presented on the screen, and percipients pressed a number key
corresponding to their call as to the identity of the stored target.

The target for each trial was selected by a pseudorandom generator

subroutine. For greater randomness, the seed number for the routine
was selected on a random basis, namely by the computer reading an
internal clock sampled by a key stroke initializing the program, but
before the first trial. Because the computer clock ran much faster than
human response times, the exact moment of sampling the clock in its
precision digits was random. [Note 3]

This pseudorandom sequence also decided which of the 20 trials in a

run were to be feedback or nonfeedback trials, with these random
decisions subjected to the restriction that 10 trials were to be feedback
and 10 nonfeedback in each run. On feedback trials, within a few tenths
of a second after the percipient entered his or her response, a message,
"The target was a 7," for example, was displayed. A tone also sounded if
the response was a hit. On nonfeedback trials, the message "No
Feedback" was displayed.

After 20 trials, the ESPER program then recorded the total hits in both
feedback and nonfeedback conditions for each run on a protected file
on the floppy disk under the percipient's name, but the trial-by-trial data
were permanently erased to preclude any possibility of future
observation of target identity information.

Percipients

Percipients were of two groups. Eight were SRI International personnel

who showed enough interest in our experiment to put some time in on
it but were otherwise naive to psi experimentation and had not been
tested before. These percipients were run out of general curiosity as to
how people would do on this new test program. The three percipients in
the second group were selected because of extensive experience with
psi testing, previous personal psi experience, and, for two of them, well-
established track records of producing psi under laboratory conditions.
We intended to examine the scores of the three talented percipients
separately because of the very different attitudes they brought to the
experimental task.

Ideally, the number of runs in an experiment such as this should be

fixed ahead of time to avoid the possibility of arbitrarily stopping the
experiment when the results met our expectations. Practical
considerations precluded this. The number of runs done by each
percipient was determined by the time he or she was able to volunteer
from his or her other duties during the experiment. The length of the
experiment was determined by the recall of the computer by the
manufacturer. Thus, we had little control over when to stop data
collection. The number of runs for each percipient ranged from a low of
2 to a high of 50.

Results

Table 1 presents the results, grouped by feedback and nonfeedback

conditions for the unselected percipients. The unselected percipients
showed no evidence of psi performance. In the feedback condition, they
scored only 225 hits, when 216 would be expected by chance. In the
nonfeedback condition, they scored only 220 hits, when 216 are
expected by chance. They showed no individually significant scoring
patterns. [Note 4]

Table 1

Results of Unselected Percipients

Feedback Condition Nonfeedback Condition
Percipient Hits Trials Z-Score Hits Trials Z-Score
1 49 500 - .15 46 500 .60
2 54 500 .60 57 500 1.04
3 23 200 .71 21 200 .24
4 24 210 .69 21 210 .00
5 22 230 - .22 19 230 .88
6 28 250 .63 29 250 .84
7 23 250 - .42 25 250 .00
8 2 20 .00 2 20 .00

Table 2 shows the scoring patterns for the three talented percipients.
The two-tailed p-value shown for each condition for each percipient is
the exact binomial probability of making a score as or more extreme
from mean chance expectation as the one obtained. We do not present a
combined p-value for these three percipients, as their different attitudes
toward the experiment made us consider them as three separate case
studies.

Percipient A was an SRI policy analyst, Duane Elgin. In 1974, he

participated in a NASA-sponsored study of feedback training on a four-
choice electronic ESP tester and trainer, the Aquarius machine (Targ,
Cole, & Puthoff, 1974). He was outstandingly successful, scoring at a
significance level of p < 10 over 2,800 trials.

That earlier experience had convinced him that immediate feedback on

every trial was essential for ESP success, and he wrote an appendix to
the NASA report on the earlier study based on that conviction. His
results, in the present experiment, tend to confirm his convictions, as he
scored significantly above chance in the feedback condition and poorly
in the nonfeedback condition. Note that this is the case even though he
did not know, at the beginning of most trials,5 whether that particular
trial would be a feedback or a nonfeedback trial. A closer look at his
scores in the nonfeedback condition shows only 11 hits, when 19 were
expected by chance. This indicates significant psi-missing, which could
only have occurred through the operation of pure clairvoyance. Of his
total of 40 hits, 73% were obtained in the preferred feedback condition.
[Note 4]

Table 2

Results of Talented Percipients

Feedback Condition Nonfeedback Condition
Percipient Hits Trials (two-tailed p) Hits Trials (two-tailed p)
A 29 190 .02* 11 190 .05*
B 11 110 1.00 18 110 .03*
C 7 60 .67 1 60 .04*
* Indicates p < .05, two-tailed.

Percipient B was one of the authors, C.T.T. He had not done any
extensive laboratory series as a percipient to set up a track record but
he had had numerous personal psi experiences and occasional, informal
laboratory successes. He strongly believed that the observational
theories were incorrect in holding that feedback was essential for psi to
manifest. He undertook this experiment to prove that pure clairvoyance
was possible. His scores were significantly above chance in the
nonfeedback condition, in accordance with his expectations and
interest.

Percipient C, Ingo Swann, had been extensively involved and

exceptionally successful as a remote viewer for some years. Although he
had done some successful work with multiple-choice type ESP tests, he
regarded the present experiment as a trivialization of his talents and
participated out of courtesy, rather than willingly. He showed a
negligible rate of hitting in the feedback condition and significant psi-
missing in the nonfeedback condition (only 1 hit in 60 trials, when 6
would be expected by chance). The significant psi-missing could, again,
only come about through pure clairvoyance, and served to demonstrate
his expressed feeling about the experiment .[Note 5]

Discussion and Conclusions

We have heard an argument that there is some feedback in this kind of

experiment, namely the global feedback that there were X hits in Y
trials. It is unclear to us, however, how this information, if precognitively
perceived, could be useful. If a percipient could precognize that at some
future date he was to be shown a target order for the run he is currently
doing, and that order is, say, 2, 4, 6, unknown, 9...... etc., then clearly
he should respond with 2, 4, 6, any guess, 9, etc. On the other hand, it
is not clear that the precognitive information that he would get, say, "3
hits in these 10 trials," would be at all useful in deciding what response
to give on trial 1, trial 2, etc. Until someone can spell out specific
strategies that would make use of such global feedback to increase
scoring, we do not find the concept of global feedback meaningful in
this context.

We would like to see more extensive studies on pure clairvoyance, but

the present results, coupled with the earlier work cited and the recent
work of Targ, Targ, and Lichtarge (1985), provide a strong case for the
existence of pure clairvoyance. Psi, it appears, can manifest when there
is no feedback of target information.

End Notes

1. We wish to thank our colleagues, Hal Puthoff and Ed May, for helpful suggestions in designing this study.
2. Schmeidler does not provide any details on how the computer she used generated random sequences, but we have now learned
(Schmeidler, personal communication, 1984) that it was a pseudorandom algorithm. She did test it for equal frequency of all target
possibilities, with satisfactory results.
3. We want to thank Tom Crispin for programming ESPER.
4. The Z-scores shown for individual percipients in Table 1 are based on the normal approximation to the binomial,
H - NP
Z = ------
Square root of NPQ
for computational ease. They are not completely accurate for some small Ns, but because the results in Table 1 are clearly
insignificant, it was not worth the trouble to compute exact binomial probabilities.
5. Note that this statement is generally, but not completely, true. If a percipient keeps track of how many feedback and nonfeedback
trials have already occurred in a run, such that one type has had all 10 trials used, he or she would know which type the last few
would be.

References

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2. SCHMElDLER, G. (1964). An experiment on precognitive clairvoyance: Part 1. The main results. Journal of Parapsychology, 28, 1-14.
3. TARG, E., TARG, R., & LICHTARGE, 0. (1985). Realtime clairvoyance: A study of remote viewing without feedback. Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research. 79, 493-500.
4. TARG, R., COLE, P., & PUTHOFF, H. (1974, June). Development of Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communication. Final report,
SRI International contract 953653 under NASA 7-100.
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time ESP. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 77, 293-310.
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