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In our experience, feedback is an essential ingredient for improving psi ability, although it is not necessary for psi to occur. Most people like feedback, so that they can achieve a degree of closure from the previous trial. This amazing landmark experiment achieved its dual goals: It demonstrated for the first time that increasing the distance from across the room to across the campus did not decrease the ESP scoring rate, and showed conclusively that it was not necessary for anyone to see a target card for a viewer to identify it correctly through psychic means.
Transmitting Messages with Psi
Milan Ryzl was a chemical engineer in Czechoslovakia when he started doing psychic research in the 1960s. Ryzl wanted to find a way to achieve error-free communication with psi. He felt that through the use of hypnosis, he could create a psi-conducive state in which people could greatly increase their psychic ability. Instead of "running" his subjects impersonally, which is so often done, Ryzl worked with people one at a time, on a personal basis, initially using free-response pictorial targets, and household objects. He also provided supportive feedback to help his subjects identify what it felt like to be functioning psychically.
In Ryzl's most famous experiment, a talented subject was able to determine a fifteen-digit number by psi, using an ingenious and complicated system. 5 Our government is spending billions of dollars trying to achieve this kind of accuracy in its efforts to communicate with submerged submarines that cannot be contacted by ordinary radio. To accomplish his goal of perfect message-sending, Ryzl had an assistant randomly select five groups of numbers of three digits each. The fifteen digits were then encoded into binary form (1s and 0s) and translated into a sequence of green and white cards, which were placed into opaque, sealed envelopes. Ryzl was working with an excellent hypnotic subject, Pavel Stepanek, in this experiment, which is one of the most striking in the annals of psi research because of its unparalleled accuracy.
We explain Ryzl's message-sending system in the paragraphs below for

 
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