"Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association," No. 8, 1971, PP 69-70

Symposium: Recent Research with Lalsingh Harribance

Further Examination of the Relationship between ESP Scoring Rate and the Alpha Rhythm

Geoffrey Wheeler, Psychical Research Foundation


At the 1970 Parapsychological Association convention a study with L.H. was reported in which his EEG was recorded while he was attempting to guess the order of 10 cards placed in a row in an adjoining room. The cards were pictures of either men or women, five of each. They were shuffled before each run. L.H. attempted to guess the sex of each picture; he wrote his responses on a standard ESP scoresheet. EEG recording was bipolar, left occipital to right occipital. His scoring rate was very high (63.6 percent where chance was 50 percent: P<10-12). A comparison of his EEG patterns during high-scoring runs (8, 9, or 10 hits) versus chance runs (4, 5, or 6) showed that he tended to increase his alpha rhythm abundance (percent-time alpha) from prerun to run during high-scoring runs but not during chance runs (P<.05, two-tailed). There was also a tendency for the abundance of alpha during the run itself to be higher during high-scoring than during chance runs (P<.05, two-tailed). These two measures are not statistically independent, and may serve mainly as two separate ways to describe a similar phenomenon.

A second study has since been done with slight procedural modifications. Monopolar rather than bipolar EEG recordings were taken. In addition, standard decks of 25 ESP cards were used instead of male-female cards. The decks were composed from a random number table the night before the session and kept in a locked building overnight. After L.H. had his electrodes attached the next day, the card decks, enclosed in opaque containers, were brought to him. He was then allowed to choose the containers he wished to work with that day. The containers were then removed to the adjoining room for the duration of the testing session.

At the start of the run, L.H. was electronically signaled by the experimenter that one of the containers had been placed in the center of the experimenter’s table. L.H. responded by dialing with a telephone dialer the digits 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 (each representing a different ESP symbol) directly onto the EEG record, on a special channel. When L.H. had dialed 25 such digits, the EEG operator signaled him to stop. After each run of 25 calls, there was a brief rest period. On eight occasions five runs were done; a ninth session lasted for 10 runs, for a total of 50 runs in the study.

Forty runs produced usable records in terms of alpha recording. Of these, 18 had chance scores (4, 5, or 6) and eight had high scores (10 or above). Examination of the EEG record for alpha abundance had been done by eye inspection during the first study; during the present study, a filter constructed by Mr. Fritz Klein was used which showed presence or absence of alpha directly on the EEG record. A comparison of chance runs with high-scoring runs showed no differences in prerun to run shift in alpha abundance. However, there was a significant difference in the abundance of alpha during the run itself (P<.05, two-tailed, Mann-Whitney U Test), in the same direction as in the previous experiment.

During the first study, high scores were scattered through-out the sessions. During the second study, six of the nine sessions had all their runs usable in terms of EEG analysis. Four of these six sessions contained high scores and one of these contained an unusual number of high scores. When the six sessions were ranked according to mean deviation from chance, this ranking correlated significantly with a similar ranking according to mean alpha abundance during the run (Spearman rho = +1.00; P<.05, two-tailed). The relationship between high alpha abundance and high ESP scoring may therefore exist at least in part as a between-session phenomenon.