Clairvoyance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
This article is about the alleged extrasensory ability. For the 1986 album, see
Clairvoyance (album). For the 1899 book, see Charles Webster Leadbeater.
"Clairvoyant" redirects here. For other uses, see Clairvoyant (disambiguation).
Part of a series on the
Paranormal
Main articles
Astral projectionAstrologyAuraBilocationBreatharianismClairvoyanceClose
encounterCold spotCrystal gazingConjurationCryptozoologyDemonic
possessionDemonologyEctoplasmElectronic voice phenomenonExorcismExtrasensory
perceptionForteanaFortune tellingGhost huntingIndigo
childrenMagicMediumshipMiracleOccultOrbOuijaParanormal fictionParanormal
televisionPrecognitionPreternaturalPsychicPsychic
readingPsychokinesisPsychometryReincarnationRemote viewingRetrocognitionSpirit
photographySpirit possessionSpirit worldSpiritualismStone
TapeSupernaturalTelepathyTable-turningUfology
Reportedly haunted locations:

IndiaUnited KingdomUnited StatesWorld

Skepticism
Related
Parapsychology
vte

Diagram by the French esotericist Paul Sédir to explain clairvoyance[1]

Clairvoyance (/klɛərˈvɔɪəns/; from French clair meaning "clear" and voyance meaning
"vision") is the claimed ability to gain information about an object, person,
location, or physical event through extrasensory perception.[2][3] Any person who
is claimed to have such ability is said accordingly to be a clairvoyant (/klɛər
ˈvɔɪənt/)[4] ("one who sees clearly").

Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance
have not been supported by scientific evidence.[5] Parapsychology explores this
possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific
community.[6] The scientific community widely considers parapsychology, including
the study of clairvoyance, a pseudoscience.[7][8][9][10][11][12]

Contents
1 Usage
2 In history and religion
2.1 Christianity
2.2 Jainism
2.3 Anthroposophy
3 Parapsychology
3.1 Early research
3.2 Remote viewing
4 Scientific reception
5 See also
6 References
7 Bibliography
8 Further reading
9 External links
Usage
Pertaining to the ability of clear-sightedness, clairvoyance refers to the
paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space. It
can be divided into roughly three classes: precognition, the ability to perceive or
predict future events, retrocognition, the ability to see past events, and remote
viewing, the perception of contemporary events happening outside of the range of
normal perception.[13]

In history and religion

Throughout history, there have been numerous places and times in which people have
claimed themselves or others to be clairvoyant.

In several religions, stories of certain individuals being able to see things far
removed from their immediate sensory perception are commonplace, especially within
pagan religions where oracles were used. Prophecy often involved some degree of
clairvoyance, especially when future events were predicted. In most of these cases,
however, the ability to see things was attributed to a higher power and not thought
of as an ability that lay within the person himself.[citation needed]

Christianity
A number of Christian saints were said to be able to see or know things that were
far removed from their immediate sensory perception as a kind of gift from God,
including Columba of Iona, Padre Pio and Anne Catherine Emmerich. Jesus Christ in
the Gospels is also recorded as being able to know things that were far removed
from his immediate human perception.

Jainism
Main article: Jain epistemology
In Jainism, clairvoyance is regarded as one of the five kinds of knowledge. The
beings of hell and heaven (devas) are said to possess clairvoyance by birth.
According to Jain text Sarvārthasiddhi, "this kind of knowledge has been called
avadhi as it ascertains matter in downward range or knows objects within limits".
[14]

Anthroposophy
Rudolf Steiner, famous as a clairvoyant himself,[15][16] claimed that for a
clairvoyant, it is easy to confuse his own emotional and spiritual being with the
objective spiritual world.[17][18]

Parapsychology
Early research
The earliest record of somnambulistic clairvoyance is credited to the Marquis de
Puységur, a follower of Franz Mesmer, who in 1784 was treating a local dull-witted
peasant named Victor Race. During treatment, Race reportedly would go into trance
and undergo a personality change, becoming fluent and articulate, and giving
diagnosis and prescription for his own disease as well as those of others.[19]
Clairvoyance was a reported ability of some mediums during the spiritualist period
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and psychics of many descriptions have
claimed clairvoyant ability up to the present day.[20]

Character reader and clairvoyant in a British travelling show of the 1940s,

collected by Arthur James Fenwick (1878–1957)
Early researchers of clairvoyance included William Gregory, Gustav Pagenstecher,
and Rudolf Tischner.[21] Clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles
Richet. Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes and a subject put under hypnosis
attempted to identify them. The subject was reported to have been successful in a
series of 133 trials but the results dropped to chance level when performed before
a group of scientists in Cambridge. J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a
similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials which did
not obtain above chance scores.[22]

Ivor Lloyd Tuckett (1911) and Joseph McCabe (1920) analyzed early cases of
clairvoyance and came to the conclusion they were best explained by coincidence or
fraud.[23][24] In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his own flat
in Bloomsbury. The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle attended the séance and declared
the clairvoyance manifestations to be genuine.[25][26]

A significant development in clairvoyance research came when J. B. Rhine, a

parapsychologist at Duke University, introduced a standard methodology, with a
standard statistical approach to analyzing data, as part of his research into
extrasensory perception. A number of psychological departments attempted to repeat
Rhine's experiments with failure. W. S. Cox (1936) from Princeton University with
132 subjects produced 25,064 trials in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded
"There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the 'average man' or of
the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The
discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to
uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the
subjects."[27] Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's
results.[28][29] It was revealed that Rhine's experiments contained methodological
flaws and procedural errors.[30][31][32]

Eileen Garrett was tested by Rhine at Duke University in 1933 with Zener cards.
Certain symbols that were placed on the cards and sealed in an envelope, and she
was asked to guess their contents. She performed poorly and later criticized the
tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and
that she could not perform clairvoyance to order.[33] The parapsychologist Samuel
Soal and his colleagues tested Garrett in May, 1937. Most of the experiments were
carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at the University College London. A
total of over 12,000 guesses were recorded but Garrett failed to produce above
chance level.[34] In his report Soal wrote "In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we
fail to find the slightest confirmation of Dr. J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims
relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail
when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally when four other
carefully trained experimenters took my place."[35]

Remote viewing
Remote viewing, also known as remote sensing, remote perception, telesthesia and
travelling clairvoyance is the alleged paranormal ability to perceive a remote or
hidden target without support of the senses.[36]

A well known study of remote viewing in recent times has been the US government-
funded project at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1970s through the mid-
1990s. In 1972, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ initiated a series of human subject
studies to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could
reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations or
targets. In the early studies, a human sender was typically present at the remote
location, as part of the experiment protocol. A three-step process was used, the
first step being to randomly select the target conditions to be experienced by the
senders. Secondly, in the viewing step, participants were asked to verbally express
or sketch their impressions of the remote scene. Thirdly, in the judging step,
these descriptions were matched by separate judges, as closely as possible, with
the intended targets. The term remote viewing was coined to describe this overall
process. The first paper by Puthoff and Targ on remote viewing was published in
Nature in March 1974; in it, the team reported some degree of remote viewing
success.[37] After the publication of these findings, other attempts to replicate
the experiments were carried out [38][39] with remotely linked groups using
computer conferencing.[40]

The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and
Puthoff's remote viewing experiments that were carried out in the 1970s at the
Stanford Research Institute. In a series of 35 studies, they were unable to
replicate the results so investigated the procedure of the original experiments.
Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and
Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such
as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session
written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for
the experiment's high hit rates.[41][42] Marks was able to achieve 100 per cent
accuracy without visiting any of the sites himself but by using cues.[43] James
Randi has written controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating
several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests,
produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's
locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.
[44]

In 1980, Charles Tart claimed that a rejudging of the transcripts from one of Targ
and Puthoff's experiments revealed an above-chance result.[45] Targ and Puthoff
again refused to provide copies of the transcripts and it was not until July 1985
that they were made available for study when it was discovered they still contained
sensory cues.[46] Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote "considering the
importance for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart's
failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension. As previously
concluded, remote viewing has not been demonstrated in the experiments conducted by
Puthoff and Targ, only the repeated failure of the investigators to remove sensory
cues."[47]

In 1982 Robert Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton University
wrote a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective.
His paper included numerous references to remote viewing studies at the time.[48]
Statistical flaws in his work have been proposed by others in the parapsychological
community and within the general scientific community.[49][50]

Scientific reception
According to scientific research, clairvoyance is generally explained as the result
of confirmation bias, expectancy bias, fraud, hallucination, self-delusion, sensory
leakage, subjective validation, wishful thinking or failures to appreciate the base
rate of chance occurrences and not as a paranormal power.[5][51][52][53]
Parapsychology is regarded by the scientific community as a pseudoscience.[54][55]
In 1988, the US National Research Council concluded "The committee finds no
scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years, for
the existence of parapsychological phenomena."[56]

Skeptics say that if clairvoyance were a reality it would have become abundantly
clear. They also contend that those who believe in paranormal phenomena do so for
merely psychological reasons.[57] According to David G. Myers (Psychology, 8th
ed.):

The search for a valid and reliable test of clairvoyance has resulted in thousands
of experiments. One controlled procedure has invited 'senders' to telepathically
transmit one of four visual images to 'receivers' deprived of sensation in a nearby
chamber (Bem & Honorton, 1994). The result? A reported 32 percent accurate response
rate, surpassing the chance rate of 25 percent. But follow-up studies have
(depending on who was summarizing the results) failed to replicate the phenomenon
or produced mixed results (Bem & others, 2001; Milton & Wiseman, 2002; Storm, 2000,
2003).

One skeptic, magician James Randi, has a longstanding offer—now U.S. $1 million—"to
anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions"
(Randi, 1999). French, Australian, and Indian groups have parallel offers of up to
200,000 euros to anyone with demonstrable paranormal abilities (CFI, 2003). Large
as these sums are, the scientific seal of approval would be worth far more to
anyone whose claims could be authenticated. To refute those who say there is no
ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single,
reproducible ESP phenomenon. So far, no such person has emerged. Randi's offer has
been publicized for three decades and dozens of people have been tested, sometimes
under the scrutiny of an independent panel of judges. Still, nothing. "People's
desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does
not exist." Susan Blackmore, "Blackmore's first law", 2004.[58]

Clairvoyance is considered hallucination by mainstream psychiatry.[59]