First Sight: A Model and a Theory of Psi

This last departure in assumption is especially important, although it may seem rather subtle and not immediately easy to appreciate. At least since J. B. Rhine and his colleagues founded a laboratory science of parapsychology, it has been understood that research was “about” a little family of rare abilities: ESP, psychokinesis, precognition.

This implicit assumption led to a certain way of thinking about the meaning of research on psi. From this point of view, a study is an attempt to call up and demonstrate a rare ability. Since the ability is rare, the stage must be set carefully to find it and evoke it. Persons with the right ability (the “gifted subjects”) and the appropriate “psi-conducive” conditions must all be provided for the rare demonstration to occur. Somewhat like those experiments in physics in which elaborate situations are provided to try to produce very rare and transient subatomic particles, the rare psi event is ardently courted but may still be fickle and withhold its presence. Some researchers have gone so far as to personify these presumed qualities of psi, calling it a trickster or saying that it is innately elusive and non-replicable by its nature.

For First Sight, psi is not an ability. Instead it is a universal characteristic of living organisms, a basic feature of their being-in-the-world. It is the fact that we are all unconsciously and perpetually engaged in a universe of meaning that extends far beyond our physical boundaries in space and time. It is not an ability, stronger in some than in others, called up sometimes and not other times. It is always going on for all of us. It is less like riding a bicycle or discriminating red from green, and more like being perpetually engaged as physical bodies with the reality of gravity, or as social beings with an interpersonal world of others. It is an unconscious and ubiquitous but still largely unmapped aspect of our nature.

For First Sight, research is not understood as an attempt to coax a rarely-used ability into action and measure it. Instead, it is an effort to design situations in which the ongoing psi activity can be discerned in the context of everyday actions and experiences where it always is. Research will not try to catch psi, it will try to reveal it.

In fact, a shift in research perspective toward this point of view has been going on in parapsychology recently, although its full implications have not been spelled out. The time is ripe for First Sight theory. A new generation of studies has begun to demonstrate the unconscious expression of non-local information and influence in the course of ordinary experiences and behaviors. Consider these examples:

Radin (1997, 2004) and others have shown that one’s subtle electrodermal responses to emotional pictures include an element that precedes the exposure to the picture alongside the larger, well-understood responses that follow it. Carpenter (2002) has demonstrated that spontaneous social behavior is a function not only of the unfolding stimulation that group members are providing for each other in the room, but also reflects the content of a distant ESP target being chosen randomly by a computer in another city. Palmer (2006) has shown that in the course of efforts to discern subtle order in strings of numbers, people are showing an influence not only of the numbers that they are seeing, but also of the numbers that they will be seeing shortly. Bem (2005) has shown that people who are expressing emotional evaluations of pictures are showing not only the influence of the picture facing them in the moment but are also affected by whether or not they will be exposed to that picture in the future.

In each of these cases, the psychic feature of the experiment may have been mentioned to the participants but they were not being asked to “show ESP or PK.” They were simply responding to events viscerally, or trying to discern the patterns hidden in a situation, or developing a social encounter with a group of friends, or evaluating the attractiveness of something. In other words, they were doing entirely ordinary things on entirely conscious and immediate grounds, so far as they knew. But in the process of doing these things they were also implicitly expressing an ongoing engagement with reality that was unconscious and beyond their immediate sensory boundaries.

No rare ability was coaxed and caught. An ongoing implicit process was revealed. The experimenters managed to design and control the situation in such a way that these ordinarily invisible elements of psychic participation in everyday experience could be exposed. First Sight theory provides a way of thinking about the fact that psi is not an occasional ability but is instead an unconscious, ongoing engagement with reality that constantly expresses itself implicitly.