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shoe. It was a black leather shoe. The process was cleaning a dirty shoe. Just a man's shoe. A lace shoe. . . .
These experiments were important to psi research for two reasons: First, they were successful year after year for a decade, giving researchers a stable phenomenon to investigate. Even more important, this approach provided a valuable insight into the pictorial and non-analytic processes underlying psi functioning. In the 1960s, researchers considered psi to be a weak perceptual ability, often masked by internal and external mental and somatic sensory noise. These experiments led researchers to ask, "Can we find a way to let subjects rest in a dream-like state, but still be awake enough to tell us what they are experiencing?"
The Ganzfeld
The ganzfeld, meaning "whole field," is a controlled environment used in ESP research, in which all ordinary inputs to the psi subject are limited by sensory isolation. The ganzfeld idea came out of the 1960s, when it was thought that altered states of consciousness would lead to more effective psychic functioning. (Earlier attempts at creating a psi-conducive state had used sensory bombardment.) 15 The receiving person is located in a soundproof room that has a uniform and featureless visual field. This is accomplished in a simple manner by taping Ping-Pong ball halves over the eyes of the viewer and bathing them in uniform red light, while "white" noise is provided by earphones.
Like the dream telepathy experiments, the ganzfeld studies investigated telepathic communication between an ostensible sending person and a receiving person. This approach was pioneered and investigated for more than fifteen years by Charles Honorton, who was Krippner's successor at the Maimonides Hospital Research Center.16 Honorton was an outstanding theoretician in psi research, as well as a funny and congenial researcher. As a result of his affable rapport with subjects, he was one of the most consistently successful experimenters in the field.

 
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