Is it Possible to be Trained to be Psychic?

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This article originally appeared at http://www.barrytaff.net

Is it possible to take normal, healthy, emotionally stable people who do not think they’re psychic, and haven’t really had any prior experiences to their knowledge, and train them to become functionally reliable psychics?

YES and NO.

That is, it appears that everyone may have some latent psychic potential that can be developed and honed with the right type of positive feedback and reinforcement. However, it’s crucial that such feedback occur very close in time to when the person makes a correct or incorrect statement, otherwise it will have little, if any, effect.  In order for this learning paradigm to function properly, a person must slowly come to recognize what internal feelings and sensations are associated with accurate paranormal information (signal) access as opposed to inaccurate information, a.k.a. primary process distortion and fantasy (noise).

I suspect that only a very small percentage of the population, maybe between five and ten percent, possess such inherent faculties that are consistently demonstrable.
This is somewhat comparable to sports in that most people can occasionally participate in some kind of sport when young, but few have the strength, stamina, endurance, reflexes and coordination necessary to become a professional athlete in any given sport.

As I’m really into motorsports like Formula 1 and American Le Mans road racing, let’s just look at that particular event for a direct analog.

While everyone can essentially drive a car, few could tolerate the extremely high g-loading forces on the neck and arms, where your body would suddenly feel like it weighs four to five times it’s weight.  Even fewer would have the stamina, endurance, depth perception, reflexes and hand, eye, foot coordination to be competitive in such a grueling physical sport.  But this doesn’t mean that one cannot learn things to improve their driving skills on the road.

Our psi training groups were held at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) [now the Semel Institute] on Wednesday nights from 1971 through 1980.  These training groups applied positive feedback and reinforcement incorporating a free-verbal response (FVR) as opposed to forced-choice method, as a learning paradigm to enhance and train paranormal perception.

Put more simply, we were attempting to teach people how to differentiate and distinguish between normal fantasy and/or cognitively processed thoughts and informational input from sources that are non-localized from them in space and time, e.g. ESP.

In those halcyon times, these perceptions were referred to as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition, as opposed to the all-encompassing “remote viewing” nomenclature of today.  A rose by any other name.

Over the first few years, we had numerous recurring visitors from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Defense Language Institute (DLI) and the Defense Advanced Research Project’s Agency (DARPA) as they became very interested in what we were doing and had already achieved.

Initially, we had no knowledge whatsoever of who these recurring visitors were or where they were from until the sessions were completed (a single blind condition).

On one particular early visit, our group was simply given the first name of a man.  We suddenly began describing very specific details of a new nuclear ballistic missile submarine and its new, highly accurate, long-range missiles.

When the feedback part of this session was reached and the room lights we turned back on, we were witness to several men sitting there with their collective mouths hanging open with ashen white faces.  What in the hell was going on?

Of what they could reveal, our comments very accurately described many of the details for the new Trident ballistic missile submarine (a boomer) and its ten-MIRV’D, D-5 missile.   This was all highly classified, sensitive data that we could not have known or had access to.

I guess these visitors were impressed by what we did, as these military intelligence officers immediately demanded the surrender of the audio tape from that session and that we all sign national security oaths.  Needless to say, we complied.

Representatives of the various intelligence groups made repeated visits to our group over time to assure themselves that our success on that first night was not a coincidence or a trick.

After we demonstrated that what we were doing was real, demonstrable and reproducible, the various intelligence groups asked that we work with and for them in several capacities.

Sounded like an interesting and compelling proposition?

However, there was one unanticipated and insurmountable obstacle regarding this: UCLA.

Apparently, both UCLA and the NPI itself, were horrified at the thought of being formally, publicly and professionally linked to parapsychology, which was thought of at the time as pseudo-science and quackery by mainstream science, but especially by behavioral science.  Such an alliance could have been political suicide for a university dependent on public perception and regular endowments.

Isn’t it interesting that more than four decades later, nothing’s really changed, has it?  Perhaps the fact that the NPI was already associated with psycho-surgery and orbital undercutting was all the negative press it could tolerate.

Due to our unavailability dictated by university politics and damage control, the government’s focus shifted northward to Menlo Park, California.

After having conducted these groups for seven years, even the continued positive results we were achieving were now boring. You know, that been there, done that, sort of feeling.

More specifically, we now perceived as somewhat commonplace and ordinary the ability of reaching into another’s mind or observing things at a distance.  Hard to believe, I know.

However, when there is high degree of success and continuity with such extraordinary research efforts, one tends to become jaded.  I guess that this attitude is just part of being human in that we begin taking things for granted.

In an effort to make things more interesting, we decided to attempt our first precognitive effort with this group.

We turned off the lights in the NPI’s C-floor observation/conference room and went through our normal progressive muscular relaxation procedure.  Once we had attained this hypo-metabolic state, we mentally focused on the “target” person of the next week’s first session.

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Read the rest of the article here: Reality Sandwich