The First Sight Model of psi holds that all of us are drawing upon an unconscious involvement with an extended world all of the time, and that many things that are beyond our ordinary bodily boundaries are being referred to implicitly in our experiences and behavioral choices.  We consult our great store of latent and normally unconscious memories the same way, and our general, but frequently un-thought-of goals as well.  And the myriad of faint, unconscious subliminal sensory impressions that impinge upon us are also available to us unconsciously to use if they feel important.  The notion of psi is just a construct labeling the fact that we also implicitly consult many other things as well, things that we think of as beyond us in the sense that they are far away, or thoroughly hidden, or latent in the future.

This assertion, along with a set of theoretical ideas about how it all works, is spelled out in detail in First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life.  To back up the assertion I look at a great deal of accumulated research in parapsychology as well as the larger field of cognitive science, and find that it is well supported in what has been found so far.

This is fine, but any decent theory needs planned research to test it as well.  At the recent conference of the Parapsychological Association I recently reported on two lines of study that colleagues and I have engaged in over the last few years to test First Sight theory.

In one study that lasted several years I tested the idea that unconscious ESP information can be drawn upon implicitly by people to shape their behavior with others when they are engaged in ordinary social interaction.  Imagine that you are talking with a couple of friends.  Perhaps the conversation is lively and cheerful, with a nice flow of topics and feelings being expressed.  We are social creatures and we need this sort of thing to stay healthy and happy.  What things do we use to choose what we say and do as the interaction flows along?

You probably will agree that whatever we use, we normally use it very rapidly and without much reflection.  We probably scan the situation for cues for the answers to some questions:  What has John just said to me?  What expression is on his face?  What went on the last time we talked?  What am I feeling right now?  What do I need from him, if anything?  What is going on with Jill, who is partly listening and partly looking off elsewhere?  And so on.  These are the kinds of things we might be attending to consciously, or semi-consciously.

Research on subliminal perception tells us that we are also making reference to stimuli that have recently occurred to us totally outside of awareness, if those things are pertinent to what is going on now.  And memories?  A certain thing happened to you with John and Jill a year ago that you are not consciously remembering at all.  And yet that memory may be impacting what you are saying in this moment and how you are saying it.  Studies on the implicit effect of memory tell us this.

First Sight says that there is another part of this quick, implicit mix of things being drawn upon.  It also includes things that can only be known by those non-local apprehensions that we call psi.

Why should we think that psi can be employed this way?  Partly we were inspired by findings from research on subliminal perception.  There it has been found that exposing someone to certain kinds of subliminal material can influence their spontaneous behavior a little later.  For example, people exposed to subliminal pictures and words with a violent theme, when they were put in an unpleasant interpersonal situation a little later, were more likely to become either belligerent or retreat than were other people who had been exposed to primes that had nothing to do with violence and anger.  In a different study, exposing people to primes that stressed positive interpersonal behavior led to people being kinder to others in a later situation.

And we were also led to this expectation by First Sight theory.  When we say that psi is always going on and always being drawn upon in our behavioral choices, we mean always.  This should include our most ordinary social situations.  If it doesn’t, the theory is badly flawed.

To test this we formed a group of friends and colleagues who all agreed to meet regularly and interact with one another for an hour or so while an ESP target-picture was being randomly selected for us by someone outside of the group.  We expected that many of these sessions could be emotionally intense, so most of our members were also experienced psychotherapists.  We made no effort to consciously “get” the targets.  That is, we didn’t try to guess what they would be, or free associate as one might do in a ganzfeld ESP test.  We just interacted spontaneously, talking about whatever we felt like, however we felt like doing it.

After our session was finished, we would then put the target out along with 3 other pictures (decoys) and rate them all in terms of how well they matched the interaction we just had.  Remember no on one in the room knew what the actual target was.  We looked for correspondences in important topics that had been raised, and what kind of mood had developed in the meeting, or perhaps distinctive acts or statements that had occurred that might resonate with the pictures.  Each member did this rating independently and then the ratings were averaged on each picture for an overall group decision.  Then we made a phone call and found out what the true target was.

Altogether, this group (with some changes in membership over the years) carried out 386 such sessions.  When our results are analyzed statistically it is clear that genuine information about the targets was being acted out by us in our sessions, and we were able to notice that later in our ratings.  We had many more hits than chance would expect, with odds of less than 3 in one thousand.

In most of our sessions we also rated the quality of the interaction that had gone on (before we saw the pictures and did the ratings).  We rated qualities that are thought of as important to many psychotherapists, such as how revealing people had been, how connected each felt to the others that day, how much they felt helped or hurt by the interaction, and so on.  When we compared these ratings of our interaction with how successful we were at expressing the target, an interesting pattern emerged.  On days when our sessions were especially lighthearted and playful and not terribly serious we tended to score very well.  However, when sessions featured a high level of emotional intensity and personal revelation scoring dropped off.  When these things were particularly intense our scoring dropped to chance.

This makes sense in terms of First Sight theory.  We should draw upon extrasensory information when it is one of the most interesting things going on.  We all had an interest in ESP and hoped to do well, so we all carried that implicit intention.  However, when something else was pressing – something more immediate than a picture being randomly selected by a computer in another town—then psi should function the way the rest of our implicit information-gathering should function.  It should focus on what is most important in the moment.  In this case, the revelations and emotions of the moment hold unconscious attention, and extraneous matters should be excluded (First Sight theory spells this out at length).  This is what we found.

We also wondered if the moods we came to the session with could influence our success.  To test this, for most of our sessions all members filled out mood scales before the session began.  Here we had two predictions based on First Sight theory:  we expected that moods of anxiety and skepticism should hinder scoring, whereas moods free of those things should permit good hitting.  We found evidence for this too, to a statistically significant extent.  This group was never very skeptical, and this may be why the relationship between scoring and anxiety was the stronger one.

How was ESP expressed in our meetings?  In many different ways.  At times some unusual event was critical.  On one occasion a young man was being urged to “do something now!” by another member.  He impulsively stood behind a bald-headed member and rubbed his head vigorously!  The target that day was of a bull in a china shop with a shiny bald-looking head that had a big check mark in the center of it.  On another day a man described a difficult interaction with his stepson that ended remarkably well.  He exclaimed that he felt “like a champ,” and the group cheered for him.  The target that day was an athlete holding a trophy being lifted up by his teammates in front of a shouting crowd.  Sometimes a general theme seemed to be expressed in many different ways.  One day a central topic was the difficulty of behaving authentically and spontaneously in many situations.  Many people reacted to this theme in different ways.  The picture that day showed a man looking in a mirror in a dismayed way and seeing himself reflected back as a mechanical robot.

In general, we did not feel that we had been influenced by a target or by anything else external to us.  We felt that we had done exactly what we felt like doing in the moment.  The good correspondences felt more as if someone had kindly selected pictures for our meetings that served as good illustrations of what we had done that day.  This implicit, inadvertent kind of connection is just how the action of subliminal primes feel, as well as post-hypnotic suggestions that are accompanied with suggestions for amnesia.  And they are what is predicted by First Sight theory.

So we are gathering evidence that psi information is implicitly used in shaping our spontaneous interpersonal behavior.  This is one of the questions we will continue to pursue in other ways as our research develops.