Word: esp.
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...Body) predicted a drastic drop in the use of medication and the number of hospitals within a decade. Among other heady predictions: biofeedback would eliminate the need for psychotherapy, provide a foolproof birth control method (by teaching males to lower their scrotal temperatures), produce superathletes, prove the reality of ESP and enable mankind to solve problems during sleep by "programming dreams...
...tour, there are obligatory stops: Esalen, ESP and the elusive Carlos Castaneda, whom Goodman traps briefly in a stair well. "I'm Carlos' double," the gentleman insists before scooting off. Indeed, many people are not what they seem to be. Swami Hal, for example, is a 260-lb. mystic who runs a kind of Boys' Town ashram in the Northwest wilderness and talks like a dead...
...Science and Mathematics Analyst Martin Gardner (Relativity for the Million, Ambidextrous Universe), announcements of psychic phenomena belong not to the march of science but to the pageant of publicity. "Uri Geller, The Secret Life of Plants, telepathy, ESP, the incomplete conclusions of Koestler ?all seem part of a new uncritical enthusiasm for pseudo science," says Gardner. "The claims are immense, the proof nonexistent. The researchers, almost without exception, are emotionally committed to finding phenomena. And few are aware of the controls necessary in a field in which deception, conscious or unconscious, is all too familiar...
...psychic tested by S.R.I., also practices. William Targ, a Putnam executive, recently contracted to publish Astronaut Ed Mitchell's forthcoming book, Psychic Exploration, A Challenge for Science. At the signing, Targ stated that "the real race now between the Russians and us is in the area of sciences like ESP." Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences helped to fund S.R.I.'s Geller research, which was conducted largely by Puthoff and Russell Targ, who happens to be Editor Targ...
From the start, Rhine was criticized for juggling numbers. (Subsequent researchers have also used questionable procedures, citing "negative ESP" when the number of correct guesses fall below average and "displacement" when subjects call the card before or after the one they are trying to guess.) H.L. Mencken summarized the early views of the dubious when he wrote, "In plain language, Professor Rhine segregates all those persons who, in guessing the cards, enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then adduces those noteworthy runs of luck as proof that they must possess mysterious powers." Rhine tightened his laboratory conditions in the 1930s...