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Zener Cards: Sending, Receiving, Even Anticipating |
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As we discussed in Chapter 2, a great deal of hoopla surrounded the practices of channeling, spirit rapping, and seances around the turn of the 19th and into the 20th century. In the cause of giving psychic phenomena serious attention, Dr. J.B. Rhine from Duke University in North Carolina initiated the first scientific investigations into what eventually became known as parapsychologythe branch of psychology that deals with psychic phenomena. He was the person who coined the term ESP or extrasensory perception. |
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We've already defined ESP in Chapter 1 as the ability to perceive someone's thoughts, situation, or issues in life without using one of your five ordinary senses. But that encompasses a wide array of more specific skills, including telepathy, precognition, clairaudience, clairsentience, and clairvoyance. It also includes a number of closely related phenomena, such as psychokinesis (PK), materialization, and out-of-body experience (OOBE). |
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Dr. Rhine, along with his colleague Dr. Karl Zener, set out to conduct an experiment that would measure ESP and, in particular, telepathy. One of their research tools became known as Zener cards and, although other tests and procedures are also used, they remain important tools today. |
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Each Zener card is blank on one side and has a symbol printed on the other. Instead of the traditional suits, there are five Zener symbols: a red cross, a green star, a black square, an orange circle, and blue wavy lines. Each Zener card deck contains 25 cards, with five copies of the same five symbols in each deck. |
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To test telepathic transference of information, a sender shuffles the cards in preparation for turning them over one at a time. Upon turning over each individual card, the sender concentrates on sending the image on the card telepathically to the receiver, who is in another room. The receiver's task is to identify each card image as it is sent, making a note for each on a tally sheet. At the end, the results are counted up: A score of more than one in five indicates that something has occurred beyond simple chance. Dr. Rhine believed that having more correct answers than would come about simply by guessing indicated some degree of ESP. He repeated these experiments again and again to reduce any possibility of mere chance causing the outcome. |
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