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Factors That Inhibit Remote Viewing
A prior knowledge of target possibilities, absence of feedback, and use of mental analysis all inhibit remote viewing. Any visual or audio distractions, or anything novel in the working environment will tend to show up in the viewer's pictures in the remote-viewing session. Numbers are much more difficult to perceive than pictorial targets. For example, it is much more difficult to guess a number from one to ten than it is to describe a location chosen from an infinitude of planetary locations that you have never seen before. In looking for the geographical target, you apparently search your interior mental landscape for a surprise, and that will usually be the correct answer. With a number target, there are no surprises, since you are already familiar with all the possibilities, and so you are apt to use analysis to rule out the various choices.
Factors That Enhance Remote Viewing
Seriousness of purpose, feedback, heart-to-heart trust among participants, and acceptance of psi all enhance remote viewing. So does the pressure of performing in front of television cameras, as we saw earlier in the Moscow-to-San Francisco experiment. Experienced viewers learn to improve their performance by becoming aware of their mental noise from memory and imagination, and filtering it out; and by writing down their impressions, and drawing their mental pictures. Drawing is especially important because it gives you direct access to your unconscious processes.
Multiple Viewers to Improve Performance
The use of several remote viewers can sometimes bring additional information or different points of view. However, it is more likely that the viewers will all describe the same wrong target. If individual viewers each have their own target set, this problem can very likely be overcome. The experiment we describe in Chapter 5 successfully demonstrates this.

 
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