| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
In the 1960’s, Zoltán Vssay measured skin conductance and used classical conditioning techniques to demonstrate that subjects produce a conditioned response to a telepathic conditioning stimulus in advance
of, but associated with, an unconditioned electroshock stimulus. Given the more recent significant results of the presentiment experiments which did not use a telepathic component, Vassy’s conditioning interpretation may be incorrect. That is, subjects may be responding in advance of startle or photographic stimuli instead. We tested the necessity of a sender in two ways. In the first, in our skin conductance experiment, we replaced the complex visual stimuli used in the presentiment experiments with startle acoustic stimuli with no sender. Using simple counting statistics, we found a highly significant effect, which we now call prestimulus response, (N = 1000 stimuli, Z = 5.08, ES = 0.161 ± 0.032, p = 1.8 _ 10-7); thus, a sender is not a necessary condition to observe significant prestimulus responses. In the second approach, we replicated Vassy’s earlier experiment with electroshock stimuli with senders, but with more modern equipment. In the direct replication attempt, Vassy also observed significant evidence for a conditioned response to a telepathic conditioning stimulus (N = 50 subjects, p = 0.05 to 0.01 depending upon detection
threshold). Yet a later series in which subjects were blind to whether a sender was present or not did not produced significant results in either condition. In a post hoc analysis, however, Vassy showed that subjects’
reaction times to physical stimuli correlated significantly with their reaction times to putative telepathic stimuli. This result supports that idea that a sender may be a participant in such studies but our results with acoustic stimuli indicate a sender is not necessary for success.
|
Prestimulus response with and without a Sender: Physiological evidence for precognition