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their violins and leotards behind, they brought with them to the lab a good friend or study partner, and their heart-to-heart and trusting connection is what contributed to the free flow of psi between them. We also think that the fact that the participants were creative artists made them less inhibited in sharing their psychic impressions.
In our society, psychic functioning is to some extent forbidden, or even considered as evidence of mental illness. The ganzfeld ritual of the Ping-Pong balls, the red lights, the white noise in the earphones, and the slamming of the heavy door of the electrically shielded, soundproof booth had a powerful permission-giving effect on the viewer.
The earlier Maimonides ganzfeld experiments had used "View Master" stereo slides instead of videotapes, but the results were quite similar. The viewers didn't know if the senders would be looking at Doris Day, Donald Duck, or downtown Las Vegas. For example, when the target episode was from The Flying Nun, the illustration showed a nun leaping off the roof of a two-story building. The viewer described:
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. . . the archbishop's hat. . . . Tiny people far away. . . . Floating, a lot of clouds and a skyline . . . arches. A church . . . an aerial view moving to the ground fast. A road with bridges and towers . . . a church and columns. A window up high in a stone wall, more bells, a peaked roof. 19
This segment of transcript shows how a viewer will often experience icons and associations that are related to the target material, but are not actually present in the picture. Another example of this that comes to mind took place in an experiment with Israel-born Uri Geller at SRI. I was in a shielded room with a target picture of a devil with a pitchfork; Geller, outside in the laboratory, drew a picture of The Ten Commandments tablets as his first response. After he saw the target, he objected to it, saying that there is no devil in Israeli culture, so how could he be expected to draw such a thing?
In a second trial from the Maimonides View Master series, the viewer was trying to describe a series of pictures set around the television western show, Gun Smoke. The target picture showed a cowboy holding a gun. The viewer described the following scene:

 
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