The origin of extra sensory perception

According to B.R. Gilsky's report, extra sensory perception phenomenon aroused people's interest as early as the end of19th century and the beginning of 20th century. At that time, people saw that some individuals could order an object to move without touching it, or they could predict the exact time of an event before it happened, so they attributed these phenomena to "brain power beyond matter." Some mass media in Europe even pay a lot of money to hire these people as prophets to publish annual forecasts. Although these predictions were denounced as the compilation of charlatans or fortune tellers in the scientific field at that time, there were still many people who believed in the authenticity of ESP, especially those scholars who devoted themselves to the study of extra sensory perception. They broke through many obstacles and developed a branch of psychology, namely psychology. In order to gain scientific recognition from psychology, they conducted experimental research on these phenomena and similar phenomena. The first experiment was to blindfold people with this ability, show them various colors of paper, and then let them tell the colors of these cards; Or show them various fabrics and ask about the quality and name of these fabrics. The results show that the subjects do have this ability. Therefore, it immediately attracted the attention of some physicists and psychologists. In the late 1920s, J.B. Laing used large-scale card testing for research. This kind of playing card is called Zener, and there are five cards in each deck. Each card has a simple geometric figure, which is a swastika, an asterisk, three ripples, a circle and a square. Five pairs of cards were used in the experiment, a total of 25 cards. Without the control group, the subjects were not allowed to look at the cards, but were asked to guess the patterns on the cards. If the correct rate of guessing cards is much higher than pure chance, it can be considered as evidence of the existence of ESP. For example, in the telepathic experiment, the sender takes out a card from the washed card and pays attention to it when sending the signal. At that time, the recipient was in another room (unable to see the other party), trying to form the impression of conveying the content and pointing out the pattern shape of this card; In the inspiration experiment, subjects were asked to guess the patterns and shapes of some cards in a pair of washed cards; In the prediction experiment, subjects were asked to predict the pattern shape of a card before it was drawn out; In the mind-driven experiment, the experimented mind is required to control one side of the dice. These experiments generally use statistical methods to determine whether the subjects' guesses exceed the level expected by opportunities. The results show that the guesses of the subjects are higher than the probability of a series of attempts, and these high guesses are regarded as evidence that the subjects did not use their normal senses to obtain information. Because any kind of guess may lead to high and low scores, the scores are averaged into a series of trends, and any average greater than 6 or 7 is the support for ESP.