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            PURE CLAIRVOYANCE AND THE NECESSITY OF FEEDBACK

               Russell Targ and Charles T. Tart (note 1)

This article was originally published in the Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research, vol. 79, October 1985, pp. 485-492.

-------------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.
----------------


        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.
--------------------------

-----NOTE1-----
We wish to thank our colleagues, Hal Puthoff and Ed May, for helpful
suggestions in designing this study.
---------------

     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).

----NOTE2----
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.
--------------

        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.

        This pseudorandom sequence also decided which of the 20 trials

---NOTE3---
We want to thank Tom Crispin for programming ESPER.
-----------

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.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

-----NOTE4-----
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 I are clearly
insignificant, it was not worth the trouble to compute exact binomial
probabilities.


-----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.

---------------------

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.

        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.

-----NOTE5-----
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.
----------------

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.

REFERENCES

HUMPHREY, B. M., & PRATT, J. G. (1941). A comparison of five ESP Test
procedures. Journal of Parapsychology, 5, 267-292.

SCHMElDLER, G. (1964). An experiment on precognitive clairvoyance:
Part 1. The main results. Journal of Parapsychology, 28, 1-14.

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.

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.

TART, C. T. (1983). Information acquisition rates in forced-choice ESP
experiments: Precognition does not work as well  as present-time ESP.
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 77, 293-310.

TIMM, U. (1973). The measurement of psi. Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research, 67, 282-294.

TYRRELL, G. N. M. (1938). The Tyrrell apparatus for testing extra-
sensory perception. Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 107- 118.

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