Outracing the Evidence: The Muddled Mind Race

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Article page: https://skepticalinquirer.org/1985/01/outracing-the-evidence-the-muddled-mind-race/
Author: Ray Hyman
Published: Winter 1984-85
Publication: Skeptical Inquirer, pages 125-145
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Outracing the Evidence: The Muddled 'Mind Race'

Targ and Harary's much-publicized case for the reality of psi and the validity of remote viewing is filled with exaggerated and unsupported conclusions. Their careless scholarship leads to new deceptions.

Ray Hyman

R

USSELL TARG is a physicist with patents in optics and laser
physics. He also has devoted much of his adult life to research on
psychic abilities. In collaboration with Harold Puthoff, in 1972 he
originated the experiments on remote viewing at the Stanford Research
Institute (now SRI International). He and Puthoff also gained considerable
publicity for their experiments with Uri Geller. Targ and Puthoff summarized their earlier work on remote viewing and Uri Geller in their book
Mind Reach (1977).

In many respects Targ's new book, Mind Race: Understanding and
Using Psychic Abilities, co-authored with Keith Harary (1984), is an
updated version of the earlier book.

Harary, a psychologist, is well known both as a parapsychologist and
as an apparently successful percipient in parapsychological experiments.
He and Targ founded Delphi Associates, an organization that sells psychic
consulting services to individuals and businesses seeking advice on investments, exploration, or other important decisions.

Although Targ and Harary inform us that both the Soviet and the
American defense establishments spend millions of dollars on psychical
research, the "race" of the title does not refer to the competition for
psychic superiority between the superpowers. Instead, as the authors put
it:

Ray Hyman is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and chair-
man of CSICOP's Parapsychology Subcommittee.

Winter 1984-85 125

The Mind Race is a race to determine the future of your own consciousness
before other forces decide that future for you. We must develop our ability
to experience compassion and empathy with our fellow creatures, before
we lose contact with our own humanity and exterminate one another over
an ideological difference of opinion, or for some similarly foolish reason.
The Mind Race is not a race between nations. Though the U.S. and Soviet
governments are heavily involved in psi research, we are all in a more vital
and personal race to determine whether we will be able to wake up to our
deeper potential before we have exhausted the limited time available to us.

As a society we are in the process of making wide-ranging decisions
about our evolutionary future. This decision is in our hands right now. The
quality of future life on this planet will be determined for us by others if we
do not choose to participate actively in determining our own destiny. We
do not believe that any psychically sensitive human being would choose to
live in a future that is dominated by robots, especially if we are to be the
robots. We believe that our future must include psychic functioning if we
are to achieve our full potential as human beings. We call this requirement
the psi imperative, [p. 246]

The stakes are high. If Targ and Harary are correct, we have to enter
the Mind Race and develop our psychic powers or end up as robots
subject to the manipulation of others. But what if we lack psychic abilities?
Or, if we have them, how can we develop them? Not to worry. The
authors assure us that we all possess such powers. Furthermore, they
supply directions for developing them. "It is past time for bringing psi into
the open, where everyone can benefit from a realistic awareness of it. We
believe it is time for all of us to claim our right to function psychically.
You own your own mind. It is important not to give it away, or fail to use
it to its full potential. So get going! You have to enter the Mind Race in
order to win" (p. 246).

The authors' intentions are clear. They would like each of us to follow
their directions and develop our inherent psychic faculties. They imply
that some form of world Utopia would automatically follow once each of
us has heeded their advice.

But, as they see it, obstacles prevent many of us from making this
commitment. Gurus, superpsychics, and occultists frighten and mislead
many of us by depicting psychic functioning as special, abnormal, or
available only to the initiated. The media portray psychic powers as weird,
evil, or dangerous. Organized religion views such powers as satanic in
origin. And critics, for what the authors assert are ulterior religious and
philosophical motives, loudly proclaim that psi does not exist. "To those
who refuse to develop their psychic abilities it makes little difference
whether the force that manipulates them into repressing their human
potential is organized religion, cults, materialistic critics, or the mass media.
The end result of such repression is the same no matter where it originates"

126 T H E SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Vol. 9

WIN
THE

MIND RACE!

Develop your psychic turn
and learn how to use it.
from the Institute of No'
you shouldn't refuse.

UNDERSTANDING HMD (1ST
PSYCHIC ABILITIES

RUSSELL TARG AND KEITH I

T w o

Options to Reci
The Mind Ra<

Mail to The, Institute of Noetic Science
The Mind f)«ci
475 G»W 5 Rata. Sunt 300
Sautanto. CA 94969

Promotion for The Mind Race and interview with Harary in U.S. News and World Report

(pp. 245-246).

Targ and Harary's goals of creating a better world by helping us gain
access to our psychic powers assume the truth of a number of propositions.
1 would list them as follows:

Psychic functioning, or psi, is real.
The reality of psi has been scientifically established beyond any
reasonable doubt.
The individual reader can test the reality of psi by personal experience in demonstrations suggested by the authors.
Psi is normal. It is a natural human function and does not depend
on secret or occult rites, special states of mind, or abnormal circumstances.
Psi is universal. It is not a special gift. We all have the potential for
psychic functioning.

Winter 1984-85 127

Psi can be developed through simple exercises that help to discriminate valid psychic signals from "mental noise."
Psi can be put to practical use in any situation where decisions
must be made with inadequate information, such as gambling, investing,
finding parking spaces, etc.
It is important that we all develop and employ our psychic powers
to the fullest.

The most basic claim, of course, is that psi is real. The arguments of
the book make sense only if this claim is true. This "totally convincing
book" (according to the dust jacket) employs a number of different grounds
to convince the reader of the existence of psychic functioning. For the
scientific justification they point to the list of 28 "published formal experiments" on remote viewing that they append to the book. Even more
compelling, as far as the average reader is concerned, are the authors'
accounts of the many impressive qualitative descriptions of targets by
viewers and the successful applications of psi to predicting silver futures
and the outcome of gambling choices. Readers are also urged to follow the
directions and experience their own psychic success.

The Scientific Case for Psi

Let's look first at the scientific case they present. This is supported entirely
by the published experiments on remote viewing. The phrase "remote
viewing" was coined by Targ and Puthoff in 1972 as a neutral term to
describe the phenomenon they believed they were capturing in their experiments at the Stanford Research Institute. These experiments employed at
least three participants. A viewer, or percipient (the psychic), was isolated
with an experimenter (the interviewer) in the laboratory. A second experimenter (the out-bound experimenter, or "beacon") then drove to a randomly selected geographical location (the target site) within a 30-minute
drive from the laboratory. While the beacon was at the target site, the
viewer described his or her impressions of the scene to the interviewer, and
often made drawings as well. When the trial was over, the beacon would
return to the laboratory and then all the participants would visit the target
site to give the viewer feedback about how well the impressions had
matched the actual target.

After a series of such trials (usually 7 or 9) had been conducted with a
given viewer, the descriptions and drawings made by the viewer for each
session were given to a judge, who then visited each site and ranked all the
descriptions from best (a low score) to worst (a high score) according to
how well each matched the target. If the agreement between the viewer's
description and the actual target was simply a matter of guesswork, then,
for example, with 9 possible target sites we would expect to find that the
average rank of the descriptions would be 5. If the descriptions were

128 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

actually related to the targets (by psi or some other means) then we would
expect the rankings to be lower. In fact, this is what Targ and Harary
claim the data from their own and other experiments on remote viewing
have shown. In more than half the series the rankings have correlated
significantly with the target sites.

Targ and Harary have no doubts that the scientific case for the reality
of remote viewing has been established beyond all reasonable doubt. "In
an examination of the twenty-eight formal published reports of attempted
replications of remote viewing, Hansen, Schlitz, and Tart at the Institute
for Parapsychology found that more than half of the papers reported
successful outcomes." Part of this report is included as an appendix to the
book. Hansen et al. compiled reports of remote-viewing experiments conducted during the years 1973 through 1982. They concluded: "We have
found that more than half (fifteen out of twenty-eight) of the published
formal experiments have been successful, where only one in twenty would
be expected by chance."

To both the casual and scientifically trained reader the fact that 15 of
28 "published formal experiments have been successful" should seem rather
impressive. But a more careful study of the list of experiments suggests
that this data-base may not be as strong as implied.

The scientific literature in any given field consists of formal experiments published in scientific journals. Only those papers that survive a
rigorous screening and revision procedure make it into print. In fact, many
scientific journals reject more than half of the papers submitted to them.
Rarely does a paper get published as submitted. Manuscripts are sent to
two or more referees who are experts in the subject area of the manuscript.
These referees advise the editor about whether the paper is of sufficient
merit to be a candidate for publication. They also carefully scrutinize the
manuscript for inconsistencies, unsupported claims, adequacy of the statistical analyses, unclear arguments, and so on. Typically, before a manuscript finally is accepted for publication, it has gone through several revisions as a result of this refereeing process. Such a screening process is not
perfect and some defective papers do get published. But, for the most part,
the process ensures that scientific reports have passed a number of tests.

Only 13, or less than half, of the "published formal experiments" meet
the standards of having been published under refereed conditions. The
remaining 15 were published under conditions that fall short of scientific
acceptability. Some appeared as brief reports or abstracts of papers
delivered at Parapsychological Association meetings or some other parapsychological conference. In addition to not having undergone the standard
refereeing process, such abstracts present insufficient documentation for
scientific evaluation. The same can be said for the other studies that
appeared in print only as brief or informal reports in book chapters or
letters to the editor.

Winter 1984-85 129

The scientific case for remote viewing, then, rests upon 13 scientifically
reported experiments, 9 of which are classified as "successful." Seven of
these experiments were conducted by Targ and Puthoff. The remaining 2
came from two other laboratories. This harvest of 9 "successful" scientifically reported experiments emerging from just three different laboratories over the past 12 years hardly seems to justify the strong impression
conveyed by the authors that remote-viewing studies have been successfully
carried out in large numbers in laboratories all over the world. ("In laboratories across this country, and in many other nations as well, forty-six
experimental series have investigated remote viewing. Twenty-three of these
investigations have reported successful results and produced statistically
significant data, where three would be expected" [p. 5].)

"... Even 9 'successes' out of 13 tries

would not be bad if the successful studies met reasonable standards of adequacy. But all 9 suffer crippling

weaknesses."

But even 9 "successes" out of 13 tries would not be bad if the successful
studies met reasonable standards of adequacy. But all 9 suffer crippling
weaknesses. At least 3, and possibly more, are what I would classify as
"retrospective experiments"—experiments not explicitly planned in advance
but apparently reconstructed from separate trials that were originally conducted simply as demonstrations. According to Kennedy (1979a), remoteviewing experiments have employed the wrong statistical test. When
Kennedy applied a more appropriate statistical test he found, for example,
that only 2 of 6 experiments reported by Puthoff and Targ were significant,
whereas they had concluded that 5 were significant. This alone would
reduce the total number of successful remote-viewing experiments to 6. Of
these 6, all but one suffer from a "fatal flaw" that 1 first pointed out in
1977 (Hyman 1977b) and Kennedy (1979b) independently noted two years
later. The one experiment that escapes this "fatal flaw" unfortunately suffers
from another serious drawback. I will discuss these flaws later in this
article.

Marks and Kammann (1978) raised serious questions about the validity of the findings on the remote-viewing experiments with Pat Price
(Puthoff and Targ 1976). Marks obtained copies of the five unpublished
transcripts from the series with Price. He found a number of clues in the
transcripts to target sites without assuming the operation of psi. For example, in one transcript the interviewer mentions the nature reserve that had

130 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Vol. 9

been the target for the previous day. Such a clue obviously helps the judge
by informing him that the transcript in question should not be matched
with the nature reserve. In addition, if the judge has information on the
order of the target sites, it enables him to uniquely identify the transcript
with its intended target. Using such clues within the transcripts Marks
successfully matched each description against its intended target without
actually visiting any of the sites.

Tart, Puthoff, and Targ (1980) responded to this critique with three
rebuttals. Charles Tart, a parapsychologist who had not been involved in
the original experiments with Price, reviewed the transcripts and removed
"all phrases suggested as potential cues by Marks and Kammann" as well
as "any additional phrases for which even the most remote post hoc cue
argument could be made." The edited series was rejudged by a new and
"qualified" judge who was able to successfully match seven of the nine
transcripts. The parapsychologists argued that this successful rejudging
refuted the "cueing-artifact hypothesis" as it applies to the Price series.
Furthermore, they claimed that the hypothesis could not apply to their
subsequent successful experiments because the transcripts were carefully
edited to avoid such cues. Finally, they argued that the successful replication of their experiment in other laboratories confirms the reality of their
psychic interpretation.

There is no need here to discuss the continuation of this controversy
(Marks 1981; Puthoff and Targ 1981). Possibly this controversy as well as
the critique of the statistical analysis being applied to nonindependent
trials has helped to prevent the participants from realizing the full implications of the criticism raised by myself and Kennedy. Neither a more conservative test nor the editing out of obvious cues referring to previous
targets can overcome the defect we have pinpointed. Once the viewer and
the interviewer have been given feedback about a particular target, then
every word and phrase in the subsequent descriptions of targets has been
tainted. And it is not just the words and phrases that have been included
but also those that have been excluded that create the problem.

The problem arises from the fact that the viewer is provided immediate
feedback after each session. Say that the target for the first session was the
Hoover Tower at Stanford. This will almost certainly influence what both
the viewer and the interviewer say during the second and subsequent
sessions in the same series. Almost certainly the viewer, during the second
session, will not supply an exact description of the Hoover Tower. So,
whatever the viewer says during the second session, a judge should find it
to be a closer match to the second target site than to the first one. Now,
assume that the second target site happened to be the Palo Alto train
station. The viewer's descriptions during the third session will avoid
describing either the Hoover Tower or the Palo Alto train station. We do
not need to hypothesize something as mysterious as psi to predict that a

Winter 1984-85 131

judge should find this third description a better match to the third target
site than either of the first two. As we add sessions, this effect of immediate
feedback should continue to make the correlation between the viewer's
descriptions and the target sites better and better.

" . . . Not one of the several skeptics

who have seriously attempted to replicate the remote viewing experiment

has succeeded."

Every experiment that has followed the original SRI protocols with
immediate feedback is irrevocably flawed because there is no way of
separating out a true psychic signal from the information in the transcripts
provided by the fact that the viewer knows the previous target sites. So far
as I can tell, only one of the nine "successful" experiments does not
contain this fatal error.

This experiment (Schlitz and Gruber 1981) suffers from its own serious
problems. Gruber, who was the beacon, also translated the viewer's target
descriptions into Italian for the judging process. The translator knew which
description went with a given target. With almost an infinite number of
choices to be made in translating a description from English to Italian,
and with the translator's task of trying to capture in the new language
what the viewer "meant," it would seem inevitable that translations by the
beacon would match the intended target sites. As just one example, assume
that, as a part of her description, the viewer had mentioned "wood." One
can translate the English word "wood" into Italian in a number of ways
depending upon whether the translator believed the wood in question
referred to the trunks of trees, the logs, the finished boards, the wood in
furniture, or some other form of wood. If, in this case, the actual target
site was a forest, then it seems reasonable that the translator would be
strongly influenced to translate the English description to fit this known
feature of the target. Given this blatant violation of controls, skeptics
should not be surprised to learn that this experiment yielded the highest
degree of significance of any remote-viewing experiment.

The foregoing considerations should make it clear that the scientific
case for remote viewing rests on very shaky foundations. Further problems
could be mentioned. For example, not one of the several skeptics who
have seriously attempted to replicate the remote-viewing experiment has
succeeded. I even know of two cases, neither yet published, in which a
skeptic and a parapsychologist collaborated on a remote-viewing experiment with negative results.

132 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

Many problems involve inadequate documentation. In the early years
of science, the ideal of a scientific paper was a report that was sufficiently
complete so that any competent reader could both fully evaluate the results
and repeat the experiment. The same ideal holds today, but with journal
space costly and limited some practical compromises have to be made.
Not all the data or complicated details of procedure can be included, but
to the extent this is so the scientific community understands that the
omitted details and data are publicly available and the authors are obligated, within the constraints of expense and practicality, to make them
available to serious readers. A hallmark of scientific research is this public
availability of the data for scrutiny by all interested parties.

The problem of public availability of the data is especially critical in
the case of remote viewing. The raw data upon which the scientific case is
built consists of the protocols or individual descriptions of targets provided
by the viewers. It would take up a prohibitive amount of journal space to
publish the complete set of transcripts from an experiment that consists of
the typical nine or so trials. Without access to the original transcripts, the
reader gets to read only those one or two exceptional transcripts selected
by the authors. And, for the most part, only excerpts from the chosen
transcripts are supplied.

"The reader gets to read only those one or two exceptional transcripts selected by the authors. And . .. only excerpts."

The scientific public would never have been aware of the cues available
in the Price transcripts if David Marks, overcoming strong resistance from
Targ and Puthoff, had not obtained the original data. Because of the
controversy that had arisen about those transcripts, Dr. Christopher Scott,
an English mathematician and former parapsychologist, requested that
Puthoff and Targ send him copies of the transcripts to signal to the
scientific community that, in fact, these data were available for public
inspection by responsible and qualified scientists. When his initial written
inquiries failed to result in his getting the transcripts, Dr. Scott publicly
repeated his request to Targ and Puthoff at the Parapsychological Association meeting in Cambridge, England, in August 1982. Puthoff admitted
that Scott was entitled to inspect the transcripts and indicated that he
would make them available for this purpose. Dr. Scott happened to be
visiting California in the spring of 1983. Since, despite further requests, he
still had not received copies of the transcripts, he made a special trip to

Winter 1984-85 133

SRI International to put his request to Puthoff directly. Unfortunately,
Puthoff could not meet with Scott because of an illness in his family, but
none of his associates would allow Scott to see the transcripts. Scott has
persisted in his quest to see the data, but Puthoff and Targ, two years after
they promised to make them available, still prevent public scrutiny.

Targ and Harary depict their critics as unreasonable dogmatists. They
put all the blame for the failure of their work to gain scientific acceptance
upon the religious fanaticism of blind materialists. Tragically, Targ does
not realize how much of the blame must be attributed to his own unscientific behavior. By allowing only a small band of select initiates to inspect
their raw data, Targ and Puthoff appear more like the leaders of an occult
society who jealously guard their secrets rather than scientists who try to
make their case in the public arena.

I do not have to develop my psychic powers to anticipate Targ and
Harary's next reaction to the preceding critique. They preview their rebuttal, among other places, on pages 174 and 175 of Mind Race. Here they
describe their reactions upon listening to the critics at the meeting of the
Society for Psychical Research and the Parapsychological Association in
August 1982:

One question was repeatedly asked at this centenary conference: What has
been accomplished in a hundred years of research? An answer that most of
the scientists in the field would support is that as a result of thousands of
laboratory experiments, comprising millions of trials, any fair-minded man
or woman should be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that psi exists,
and might possibly even be important. But many people at the conference
did not share that view. Some were critics, and some were psi researchers.
. . . It became clear from listening to these critics that any experiment, no
matter how carefully carried out, may reveal a flaw in retrospect. There is
always something that could have been done better. This is true in every
field of science —and in recent years there have been many more examples
of fraud in medical research than in psi research.

Hearing what the critics have to say, we began to realize that psi may
never be accepted into the mainstream of science on the basis of laboratory
experimentation alone.

Like many other things the authors have to say, one can find circumstances and contexts in which the foregoing remarks apply. Some critics
do fit this description. And not one will deny that after the fact we can
always find in any experiment a defect or subtle variable that was overlooked. But the authors have again used an excuse that makes sense in
some other context to avoid dealing with legitimate criticism.

The "critics" who gave papers at the 1982 conference were Chris
Scott, Susan Blackmore, Piet Hein Hoebens, and myself. Scott is a former
parapsychologist who has become a critic, but he is recognized by para

134 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

psychologists and others as scrupulously fair. He maintains good relations
with psychic researchers and has written extensively for their journals.
Susan Blackmore is a practicing parapsychologist. She has become skeptical of many claims in her field as a result of a decade of research in
which she has failed to replicate many of the major findings. She remains
in the field because she feels parapsychology badly needs friendly and
constructive critics. Hoebens is a Dutch journalist who has gained an
international reputation as a skeptic who leans over backwards to give the
parapsychologists a fair hearing. All of us on the panel had agreed ahead
of time that our task was to provide constructive and responsible criticism.

"Targ and Puthoff appear more like

the leaders of an occult society who jealously guard their secrets than like

scientists...."

The flaws 1 have attributed to remote-viewing experiments in this
article are definitely not flaws that are found retrospectively as new and
better experiments emerge. They are the very same flaws I wrote about
seven years ago (Hyman 1977). Kennedy (1979a, 1979b), a parapsychologist, complained about these same flaws along with others. Unfortunately,
Targ and Puthoff, in their haste to dismiss any criticism as having ulterior
motives, have kept repeating the same mistakes. Other researchers in
remote-viewing slavishly followed their example. The tragic result is seven
more years of wasted research.

The Nonscientific Case for Psi

The bottom line is that there is no scientifically convincing case for remote
viewing. As the preceding quotations indicate, Targ and Harary, while
insisting the scientific case for remote viewing is overwhelmingly strong,
concede that they have little hope of convincing critics and the scientific
establishment with such data. Consequently, the authors employ two other
modes of argument to persuade the reader that psi is real. They supply
many qualitative and compelling accounts of psychic successes, and they
urge their readers to try experiencing psi for themselves.

Many of the qualitative accounts illustrate striking correspondences
between portions of a transcript and the actual target during a remoteviewing session. In one example, the target was the Palo Alto Airport
tower. The verbatim transcript and drawing made by the viewer, Hella
Hammid, indeed seem to match the target well beyond any forced match

Winter 1984-85 135

ing that one usually can achieve between a scenic description and a reasonably complex geographic site. But this particular session occurred after
three preceding unsuccessful sessions. A skeptic might want to study all
the transcripts in this series before jumping to conclusions about possible
psychic correspondence.

This particular transcript obviously has been selected from hundreds
available to the authors. Presumably it is presented in its entirety just
because it appears to be a striking match. The authors present a number
of other apparently striking matches between description and target, but in
most of these cases only selected portions of the transcript are given.
Again, the skeptic would want to study the entire transcript as well as all
the other transcripts in the series.

"This tendency to find meaningful and compelling matches between verbal descriptions and arbitrary targets is quite pervasive. It helps account . •. for

the success of character^readers and

astrologers.**

Marks and Kammann (1980) employ the phrase "subjective validation"
to label the subjectively compelling matches that viewers and judges discovered in their remote-viewing experiments. When they initiated their
series of experiments in an attempt to replicate the remote-viewing experiments, Marks and Kammann first thought remote viewing was, in fact,
occurring. Both they and their viewer, after getting the immediate feedback
from the visits to the target sites, found amazing correspondences between
the viewer's descriptions and the target. When the judging began, the
judges also found amazing correspondences between the transcripts and
the targets to which they matched them. Unfortunately, the judges' matchings of targets to transcripts did not correspond with the factual pairings
in the experiment. Even when told of this, the viewers did not change their
belief in the success of their remote viewing.

This tendency to find meaningful and compelling matches between
verbal descriptions and arbitrary targets is quite pervasive. It helps account,
for example, for the success of character readers and astrologers (Hyman
1977a). Furthermore, once an individual has found such a match, it is
difficult to dissuade him or her from believing in the accidental nature of
the correspondence (Nisbett and Ross 1980).

For such reasons as these, striking and "meaningful" correspondences

136 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

between target and descriptions cannot be accepted as scientific evidence.
This is why the elaborate blind-judging and complicated statistical
methodologies have been devised. The scientific enterprise aims at separating out true correlations from subjectively compelling, but spurious, ones.

Unfortunately, the lay reader as well as the uncritical scientist will
more likely be swayed by the colorful and vivid qualitative illustrations
than they will by the abstract and quantitative scientific arguments. Nisbett
and Ross (1980) cite abundant evidence to this effect. So we can anticipate
that Targ and Harary will succeed in their tactic of bypassing the scientific
case in favor of nonscientific arguments. They will succeed, that is, if their
goal is to gain the adherence of their readers to their claims rather than to
arrive at the truth.

Targ and Harary also describe successful applications of psi. An
interesting example is the successful use of remote viewing by Elisabeth
Targ to predict the winner of the sixth race at Bay Meadows. She picked a
horse named Shamgo, and students from all over her college dormitory
contributed to a betting pool. Shamgo won and paid six to one. As in
other such accounts in this book, we are not told if this was Elisabeth's
first attempt at predicting races or if she ever tried it again. Targ and
Harary also retell the story of their venture into psychically predicting the
silver-futures market. They claim to have correctly predicted both the
magnitude and the direction of the change in all nine forecasts they made
in the fall of 1982. Again they fail to tell us about any preceding or future
forecasts (although on NOVA's program on ESP, the narrator casually
mentioned that Targ and Harary's later attempt to repeat this feat failed).

The Proof of the Pudding Is Not in the Eating

Psychologists also will not be surprised if the readers who follow the
authors' recipes for developing their own psychic powers become believers
in the reality of psi. The authors write that readers can test the reality of
psi for themselves. They supply general guidelines to follow to develop
latent psychic abilities. The basic idea makes some sense in terms of
general learning principles. If we accept their argument, then at any point
in time our conscious experience consists of sensory impressions, memories,
and inferences. In addition, some of this content may be impressions that
have arrived psychically. If the viewer attempts to describe the psychic
impression, the description is often contaminated and transformed by the
viewer's expectations, memories, and current sensory impressions. The
authors refer to this contamination as "mental noise." Developing one's
psychic abilities involves learning to discriminate true psychic signals from
"mental noise." This can be achieved, according to the authors' optimistic
projections, by indulging in exercises in which immediate feedback supplies

Winter 1984-85 137

us clues as to which of our impressions were truly psychic and which were
mental noise.

One exercise involves finding a parking place. Readers are urged to
visualize a certain area of the city in which they want to find a parking
place. When they get some sort of impression of a possibility, they drive to
that spot. If the spot is occupied, they try again. They are to keep this up
until they either find a parking spot or run out of gas. By repeatedly trying
this exercise the learner, allegedly, can gradually improve the ability to
discriminate between those impressions that work and those that do not.
Exercises in playing black-jack, doing remote-viewing, anticipating traffic
jams, and so on, are similar.

Targ and Harary confidently put forth such exercises as a way for the
readers to find the truth for themselves. But we do not have to postulate
psi to predict many of those who try such exercises will end up believing
they are experiencing psi. For a sampling of just some of the enormous
amount of psychological evidence for this expectation see Nisbett and
Ross (1980). The authors do not bother to warn their readers of the traps
that await them. Instead of forearming the readers, they disarm them.
Consequently, instead of a path to the truth, they supply a recipe for
self-deception.

Several things are wrong with such exercises. For one thing, one of
them can succeed for reasons unrelated to psi. Indeed, the authors talk
about developing intuition as if it is the same thing as psychic functioning.
Some learners might actually improve their ability to find parking places.
In some shopping areas the southern boundary, for example, might tend
to have more unoccupied spaces than the other sections (because of prevailing traffic patterns). As learners practice trying to home in psychically on
a parking space, they may gradually learn to follow impressions that lead
them to the southern boundary. Such learning could take place without
any conscious awareness on the learner's part. Very likely, the learner will
attribute this increasing success to developing psychic powers. Other
unconscious cues, such as hearing a motor start up as an auto vacates a
parking place, could also become part of what the learner comes to rely
upon as psychic abilities.

But even without any actual learning taking place, several psychological mechanisms can easily contribute to the illusion that psychic abilities
are gradually leading to more and more successful outcomes. These are
well-known distortions of memory, thinking, and other cognitive processes.
And it is dismaying, especially when one of the authors claims to be an
experimental psychologist, that Targ and Harary do nothing to protect the
reader from such powerful pitfalls.

Furthermore, Targ and Harary provide no evidence that learning to
discriminate psychic signals from "mental noise" according to their directions can actually occur. They refer vaguely to their experience with

138 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

remote-viewing sessions. But they fail to hint at even one scientific experiment that suggests that such learning can take place.

Additional Problems

So far I have noted some serious weaknesses in the arguments for the
propositions being asserted in Mind Race. My notes suggest a variety of
other difficulties, but it would only make a long article much longer to try
to list them all. In this section 1 want just to point to a few inconsistencies
in the arguments of the book.

The key to developing psychic abilities, according to the authors, is
learning to discriminate "mental noise" from true psi impressions. The
authors repeatedly assert that their viewers become better and better at
this with practice. Harary gives examples from his own experience as a
viewer where he was actually able to indicate to the judge which of his
statements were "mental noise."

Such a claim would seem simple to test, but the authors supply
nothing but a few qualitative observations to back up their assertion. As a
standard procedure, for example, each viewer, immediately after each trial,
could review the transcript and indicate which statements are "mental
noise" and which are true impressions. The experimenter could easily
quantify such data and see whether the proportion of correctly identified
statements increases with practice.

Furthermore, even if their claim is only partially true, it allows for an
excellent control for the judging procedure. Each transcript could be
divided into two transcripts—one part containing all the items identified
by the viewer as "mental noise" and one part containing the items identified
as true impressions. The judges should show high accuracy in matching
the second transcripts and should be at chance in matching the first.

Nor do the authors face up to another inconsistency raised by their

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claim. It is the practice in remote-viewing experiments of employing independent judges to gauge the correspondence between target and description.
The researchers who use this paradigm claim that they cannot get adequate
results if they employ the viewers as judges because of "mental noise" that
interferes with their seeing the correspondences. One inconsistency is that
in the Ganzfeld experiments, which started at the same time as the remoteviewing paradigm, the reverse seems to be the case. In those experiments,
the percipients are used to judge the correspondence of their own descriptions against the targets. This is done because apparently the results from
independent judges do not work as well. Despite this odd reversal, the
claims for success in the Ganzfeld experiments equal those for the remoteviewing experiments.

"On almost every page [Targ and Horary] make assertions based on inadequate or nonexistent evidence."

A second inconsistency is that, if in fact the viewer is learning to
discriminate true psi signals from "mental noise," then the viewer should
be a better judge than an outsider. The independent judge, after all, has to
deal with the entire transcript and has no way of gauging which statements
should be ignored in trying to match transcript with target.

The claims for gambling successes employing psi also hint at a variety
of inconsistencies. Millions of gamblers over the years have presumably
employed hunches and intuition in making their bets. They have gained
enormous amounts of immediate feedback that should have taught them,
according to the theory advanced in this book, which of their impressions
should be trustworthy and which should be ignored. Even if such learning
is only partial and even if it occurs in only some of the gamblers, it should
raise the odds in favor of the players by some percentage. Yet the gambling
industry rests on the assumption that odds that are only slightly (one or
two percentage points) in their favor along with other restrictions upon the
betting will ensure them against serious losses. If Targ and Harary are
correct, the casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Monte Carlo. Atlantic City, and
elsewhere should have long ago gone bankrupt.

A third inconsistency arises from evolutionary theory. Targ and
Harary assert not only that we all have latent psychic abilities that can
easily be developed but that we must develop them if we are to realize our
human potential and escape becoming robots. This first of all raises the
question of the evolutionary forces that allowed such a capacity to develop
and yet remain unused. Presumably, it must have had some survival value

140 T H E SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Vol. 9

to have developed in the first place. But, then, we have to ask why it is
now latent and needs special exercises to develop.

I can imagine possible answers to these inconsistencies, but it is strange
that the authors have felt no obligation to deal with them.

Going Beyond the Data

In his review of Targ's earlier book Mind Reach, Robert Ornstein (1977)
wrote:

Throughout the book the authors state their hope that the study of parapsychology will become primarily a scientific one in which speculations are
firmly grounded in the evidence. In their own writing, however, Targ and
Puthoff almost always go beyond evidence and claim they have proven
their case when they have done nothing of the sort. In writing this book,
the authors have done more harm, perhaps, to their own position and to
their field of study than they have helped.

These words apply with equal force to the current book. Targ and
Harary's most conspicuous faults are hasty generalizations and overstated
claims. On almost every page they make assertions based on inadequate or
nonexistent evidence. I have already given samples in the preceding sections. But to back up my own assertion, I will list a sample of some of the
more blatant cases:

As already documented, the authors overstate greatly the strength
of the scientific support for remote viewing. They strongly imply that 15 of
28 "formal published experiments" from laboratories all over the world
were successful. But, if we deal with papers actually published under
accepted scientific standards, only 9 "successes" can be counted. Of these,
7 were conducted by Targ and Puthoff and only 2 come from other
laboratories. All but one of these "successful" experiments suffer a fatal
flaw that I pointed out in 1977, as did Kennedy in 1979.
On the basis of just two remote-viewing trials conducted with the
viewers in a submarine, Targ and Harary conclude that ocean water provides no barrier to the psi signal and that remote viewing is unaffected by
seasickness. There is just no way such a conclusion can be drawn on the
basis of just two data points. Even if the authors want to claim that
remote viewing took place under these circumstances, they would need
many more data points collected under the underwater conditions before
they could say that no difference existed between this and land conditions.
Targ and Harary admit that they do not know if evil psychics can
implant harmful thoughts in other people, but they do not hesitate to
suggest steps that the readers can employ for "psychic self-defense." If we
do not know if the disease exists, how in the world can we know if the

Winter 1984-85 141

cure will work or even if it may cause harmful side-effects?

As already indicated, the authors provide elaborate instructions for
developing psi but cite not one piece of scientific evidence that suggests
that such instruction works.
Targ and Harary freely accuse critics of fraud on the basis of
undocumented or unsubstantiated allegations. They try to smear Martin
Gardner by writing that he

criticized the NASA-supported ESP-teaching-machine study carried out at
SRI in 1974. He falsely alleged that the subjects in this experiment tore up
their unsuccessful data tapes, and only handed in the successful ones. He
said in his article. "I am not guessing when I say that the paper tape
records from Phase 1 were handed in to Targ in bits and pieces." We now
know the reason he could say that he "wasn't guessing." This is because he
recently confided to a fellow reporter that he had just made it up, "because
that's the way it must have happened." The reporter was so shocked at this
disclosure, that even though he is not particularly sympathetic to our work,
he felt compelled to call up the SRI researchers to pass on this remarkable
piece of news. [p. 157]

On its face this vicious slander does not stand up. First, it is based entirely
on an undocumented statement by an unnamed reporter. Second, it just
does not make sense for a journalist whose profession is based on the
integrity of its members to make such an obviously damaging admission.
When I read it, 1 could tell it was completely false, not only because I
know Martin Gardner but also because I am familiar with the circumstances of his having made the claim about the tapes. He felt he could
make this statement with confidence because he was given the information
by an informant whom he has every reason to trust. To further compound
the damage of this slanderous accusation, it was published in Fate magazine as the "Quote-of-the-Month." The "fellow reporter" to whom Martin
Gardner supposedly confided that he had deliberately lied about the ESPteaching-machine experiment turns out to be Ron McRae, the author of
the recently published book Mind Wars. McRae has written to Fate magazine that he never made such a statement to Targ or anyone else. Instead,
he did happen to mention to Hal Puthoff. who was then Targ's colleague
at SRI, that he had overheard another individual make such a claim but
did not consider it reliable. As a result of McRae's letter to Fate, that
magazine published an apology and retraction in its October issue.

Targ and Harary continue this reckless abandon by asserting that
CSICOP "was recently caught conspiring to deceive the public about some
research results that did not fit their expectations." They go on to say that
Randi and the rest of the CSICOP members "were exposed when a member of their group defected and offered documented proof of the deception.
. . . It is clear that the goal of the psi-cops is to control your ability to

142 T H E SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Vol. 9

access and interpret information and to walk a beat in your mind" (pp.
157-158). The "documented proof presumably refers to the charges made
by Dennis Rawlins in his long attack upon three members of CSICOP
published in Fate magazine. The incident refers to a controversy over the
interpretation of data from a study by Michel Gauquelin. In cooperation
with Gauquelin, three skeptics reanalyzed the original data and published
an interpretation that was challenged not only by Gauquelin, but also, on
certain obscure technical grounds, by Rawlins. All this was initiated before
CSICOP was founded, and the project was never sponsored by the
Committee. Randi, whom the authors obviously want to paint black, had
nothing to do with the Gauquelin study. In addition, the debate involved
complicated and subtle matters of how to interpret trends in the data, and
no conspiracy to deceive or any other evils that Targ and Harary so
carelessly invent were ever implicated.

The authors freely question the motives of those critics who disagree
with them. "Some of these critics have ulterior motives for not wanting the
public or the academic community to take normal psychic functioning
seriously. In that, they are like anyone else who hopes to profit by misleading the public about psychic abilities. Critics, like cultists, can sometimes live off the controversy they generate. For example, one critic, now
famous, was a minor entertainer until he began a nationwide crusade
against psi research" (p. 156).

The "critic" they are talking about in the last sentence of the quotation
is Randi, the magician. Randi was an established and well-known entertainer long before his attacks on Uri Geller. He is probably the bestknown escape artist since Harry Houdini. It would be difficult to measure
whether he profited or lost either professionally or financially from the
publicity emerging from his critiques of psychical research. I know that he
often gives up profitable engagements to attend conferences and give talks
on his views of contemporary paranormal claims. From my personal
acquaintance with Randi, I have little doubt that his motivations involve a
love of his craft and a desire to prevent conjuring from being used to
exploit scientists and the public. Motivations are of course complicated
and elusive. I have been a critic of paranormal claims for at least 35 years.
I am sure that my motivations have changed drastically over that period
of time. And they are complex. Even today I would have a difficult time
trying to give a full account of why I put so much time into it. But the
complexities and multidimensionality of motivations do not deter Targ
and Harary. Unencumbered by facts or proof, they freely and confidently
assert which motivations guide the behavior of their critics.

If the critics were fair and honest, Targ and Harary believe, they
would carefully scrutinize the parapsychological data and conclude that
psi has been proved. But the critics, without having seriously examined the
data, freely criticize the claims. This means, according to the authors, that

Winter 1984-85 143

they have ulterior motives for not wanting psi to be true and for keeping
the public from believing. In the same breath, Targ and Harary acknowledge that some critics, both within and outside the field of psychical
research, have examined the data and still debate the claims for psi. No
matter. They say that these critics, too, have religious and philosophical
motives and deliberately distort the facts so as to mislead the public.

These seem to be the kinds of rationalizations that enable the authors
to cope with the fact that many critics deny that the case for psi has been
proved. This rationalization seems to provide a protective shell. It keeps
Targ and Harary from facing the reality that the case for psi is much
shakier than they would like to believe.

". • • Their book does a disservice to the attempts of other parapsychologists to make their field into a respectable and serious branch of science."

In many ways their book does a disservice to the attempts of other
parapsychologists to make their field into a respectable and serious branch
of science. The authors boldly assert that the accumulated data are sound,
consistent, and scientifically impeccable. Only prejudice and ignorance
prevents the scientific establishment from recognizing this fact. They fail to
realize that the parapsycholgists have much work to do in order to get
their house in order before they are ready to withstand the scrutiny of
serious scientists.

Some major parapsychologists, fortunately, do recognize this problem. John Beloff (1976), a past president of the Parapsychological Association, told his colleagues: "I think that one thing we have got to recognize is
that our field is so much more erratic, anarchic and basically subversive
than we like to admit when we are engaged in our public-relations exercises.
. . ." And Martin Johnson (1976), who holds the Chair of Parapsychology
at the University of Utrecht, wrote: "1 must confess that 1 have some
difficulties in understanding the logic of some parapsycholgists when they
proclaim the standpoint that findings within our field have wide-ranging
consequences for science in general, and especially for our world picture.
It is often implied that the research findings within our field constitute a
death blow to materialism. 1 am puzzled by this claim, since 1 thought that
few people were really so unsophisticated as to mistake our concepts for
reality. . . . I believe that we should not make extravagant and, as I see it,
unwarranted claims about the wide-ranging consequences of our scattered,
undigested, indeed rather 'soft' facts, if we can speak at all about facts

144 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 9

within our field. I firmly believe that wide-ranging interpretations based on
such scanty data tend to give us, and with some justification, a bad reputation among our colleagues within the more established fields of science."

Without a doubt, Targ and Harary's careless scholarship will contribute to the "bad reputation" that parapsychology still has among many
established.scientists. Perhaps it is equally unfortunate that this book may
very well achieve the opposite of what the authors intend. They hope to
demystify psychic functioning, put their readers in touch with themselves
and the world, and to free them from false beliefs. Instead they have set
the stage for new mystifications and self-deception.

References

Beloff, J. 1976. The study of the paranormal as an educative experience. In B.

Shapiro and L. Colby (Eds.), Education in Parapsychology, 16-29. New
York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Hyman, R. 1977a. "Cold reading": How to convince strangers that you know all

about them. Zetetic (SKEPTICAL INQUIRER), (Spring/Summer): 18-37.
Hyman, R. 1979b. Psychics and scientists: A review of Targ, R., and Puthoff, H.,

Mind Reach. The Humanist, 37(May/June): 16-20.
Johnson, M. 1976. Parapsychology and education. In B. Shapiro and L. Colby

(Eds.), Education in Parapsychology, 130-151. New York: Parapsychology

Foundation.
Kennedy, J. E. 1979a. Methodological problems in free-response ESP experiments.

Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 73:1-15.
. 1979b. More on methodological issues in free-response Psi experiments.
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 73:395-401.
Marks D. 1981. Sensory cues and data selection invalidate remote viewing experiments. Nature, 292:177.
Marks, D., and Kammann, R. 1978. Information transmission in remote viewing

experiments. Nature, 21 A: 680-681.

. 1980. The Psychology of the Psychic. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
Nisbett, R., and Ross, L. 1980. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of

Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Ornstein, R. 1977. A case for parapsychology (Review of Mind Reach). New

York Times Book Review. March 13.
Puthoff, H., and Targ, R. 1981. Rebuttal of criticisms of remote viewing experiments. Nature, 292: 388.
Schlitz, M., and Gruber, E. 1980. Transcontinental remote viewing. Journal of

Parapsychology 44: 305-317.
Targ, R., and Harary, K. 1984. The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic

Abilities. New York: Villard Books.
Targ, R„ and Puthoff, H. E. 1977. Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic

Ability. New York: Delacorte.
Tart, C, Puthoff, H. E., and Targ, R. 1980. Information transmission in remote

viewing experiments. Nature, 284: 191.

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