Charles Tart’s Contributions to Parapsychology: A Scientific Career Sparked by the Cabbage Patch Kid 1

: In this Festschrift in honor of Charles Tart, I originally intended to focus on how Charley – as his friends call him – influenced the discipline of parapsychology from his entry into the field in the 1960s to the present day. That turned out to be an overly ambitious goal because Charley has made so many influential contributions, and in so many facets of parapsychology, that it is not possible to cover them all without writing a lengthy monograph. So instead, I offer a few words about how Charley influenced my own involvement in the field, then I mention four topics that continue to shape the way I think about and approach the study of psi phenomena, and I finish my tribute with an edited transcript of a delightful chat I had with him in preparation for writing this article.


Innovations
Regarding Charley's contributions to parapsychology, besides popularizing the term "altered states of consciousness" in the scientific and popular lexicons (Tart, 1972a), co-founding the discipline of transpersonal psychology (Tart, 1975), advancing the idea of post-materialist sciences (Tart, 2009), publishing some 210 journal papers, including influential articles in Science (Tart, 1972b) and Nature (Tart, 1980), and authoring or coauthoring some 14 books, Charley initiated a host of innovative concepts in parapsychology that influenced how I think about and approach the study of psi phenomena (see https://blog.paradigm-sys.com/articles-library/ for a full list of Charley's articles). I will briefly mention four such ideas.
First, Charley proposed that it was important to recruit participants for experiments who were pretested and selected for talent, and then to provide them with immediate trial-by-trial performance feedback to avoid "extinction" effects (Tart, 1966(Tart, , 1976(Tart, , 1977. I found these arguments to be persuasive, and I have tried to implement them when resources allowed. Fortunately, both of these recommendations are simpler to follow today, as compared to methods typically used five or six decades ago, with the rise of fully automated online experiments. Second was Charley's discovery of an unconscious strategy apparently used to sharpen psi perception in forced-choice precognition tasks, which he dubbed transtemporal inhibition (Tart, 1978(Tart, , 2017. That term was a play on "temporal inhibition," which refers to an effect observed in many sensory modalities, whereby presentation of one stimulus can suppress the response to a second stimulus (Cohen, 2011). Charley's neologism highlighted that transtemporal inhibition appeared to act even for perception of future targets. 2023, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 248-266 I am personally grateful to Charley, because if it were not for him there is a good chance that I would not have devoted my professional career to parapsychology. I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois in the 1970s. One day, in a sub-sub-basement of the campus library, I found a large section of books and journals on parapsychology. I spent a fair amount of time reading that literature, and at one point through a friend I obtained some vibhuti ash that was said to be miraculously manifested by the Indian guru, Sai Baba. After conducting a materials analysis of the ash (which turned out to be finely crushed sand), I described my efforts in an article that I submitted to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. About six months later, I received a rejection notice from the journal. For reasons I still do not understand, I expressed my disappointment in a letter I wrote to Charley, whom I had not met in person, but whose work I admired from afar. To my surprise and delight, he replied in a letter that changed my life.
I had graduated by then and was working at AT&T Bell Labs, which at the time was one of the premier industrial laboratories in the world.. I could see a path ahead whereby it would be easy to spend one's entire working career there. But a part of me was not satisfied with that comfortable potential because making better telephones did not feel sufficiently meaningful. By contrast, after reading Charley's books I felt it would be more exciting to scientifically explore the frontiers of consciousness.
In his letter to me, Charley patiently explained that sometimes the topic of an article falls outside the scope of a journal, so perhaps my analysis of vibhuti ash fell into that category. However, he continued, it was important to keep up my interests in parapsychology because it was one of the most interesting areas of research that a newly minted scientist could pursue. If I had not received those simple words of encouragement, I could have easily dropped psi research from my list of possible futures. I am glad I did not.

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Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX) be ignored (e. g., Reber & Alcock, 2019). (3) Psi is damned by association, whereby psi experiences (and those who investigate it) are assumed to be identical to every crackpot anecdote lumped into the catch-all term, paranormal. From that perspective, claims about the scientific evidence for psi are regarded as identical to amazing tabloid yarns about the Bermuda Triangle's hyperdimensional portal and politicians who are actually alien-Sasquatch hybrids. Incidentally, such yarns used to include UFOs, until government officials in the United States (and elsewhere) finally admitted that there really were some genuinely strange unidentified objects flying in our skies (Kean & Blumenthal, 2022). (4) The critic claims that even if psi were real, it is trivial because it has no practical applications, or (5) the exact opposite whereby if real, then psi would be so revolutionary that all of the hard-won scientific advances of the past centuries would have to be thrown away. And (6) some psychics and mediums have been found to be frauds, so ipso facto all psi research is also fraudulent. While these nonrational reactions to scientific studies are annoying, analyses of the underlying reasons can be useful in developing less triggering ways of presenting and discussing this line of research.

A Chat with Charley
In May 2023, I interviewed Charley about his career and background (which will help explain the title of this article). In the edited transcript below, I am DR and Charley is CT. DR: When you think back on the many years working in parapsychology, first from experimental and theoretical perspectives, and then from a transpersonal perspective, what things come to mind as being the most influential?
CT: Before I got involved in parapsychology, I was into electronics. I was a ham radio operator. I taught myself enough electronics to get a commercial radio telephone license, which helped work my way through college, since my main job would be to be in the transmitter room ready to fix it if it broke. But otherwise my time was free. 2023, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 248-266 I believe that the study of such unconscious strategies is important and will continue to play a central role in future process-oriented psi research. Such methods are also significant because they offer a way to test if feedback is necessary. That is, if psi can be shown to operate without feedback, and to be influenced by "hidden" features of the target, then it implies that quasi-physical models based on precognition, which some have proposed to account for all forms of psi, may be insufficient (Marwaha & May, 2019;Targ, 2023).
The third innovation was the use of psychophysiological methods to study psi (Tart, 1963(Tart, , 1968. As physiological instrumentation continues to shrink in size, drop in cost, and enable noninvasive, portable measurements, and as the analytical methods used to study these data continue to advance, I believe this topic too will become increasingly important in revealing how unconscious information processing affects psi performance. Fourth, Charley wrote extensively about why psi is such a chronically and hotly contested topic (Tart, 1982). I imagine that anyone who becomes deeply involved in parapsychology will eventually encounter people who react in unexpectedly emotional ways when this topic is broached. Like Charley and many others, I witnessed intelligent, presumably rational scientists and scholars act as though they were being physically attacked when I merely mentioned my interest in psi. Such behavior is antithetical to the open-minded aspirations of science and academic freedom, and as such, I was puzzled by these reactions. I was thus captivated by Charley's analysis of this surprising phenomenon, and I found that his analysis helped me to better understand it. He identified six typical causes: (1) The critic has a tightly held, possibly unconscious belief that is not based on reason; it is literally a prejudice fueled by and similar to a faith-based religious position. (2) The critic insists that psi is impossible because it violates one or more unspecified laws of science, which they then use as justification for why the evidence is impossible and must

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Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX) a day. You took the person to the target afterwards. So maybe it was 15 minutes or half an hour before you got the feedback of actually seeing the target. But you didn't have other calls in between to create confusion. I think it's one of the reasons that remote viewing has worked so well, and that the remote viewing experimenters almost never talk about decline effects. They're not extinguishing the talents. That was my start.
DR: That work turned into a book on training ESP.
CT: Yes. I was teaching experimental psychology, so I told the students, this is going to be a hard course, because I'm going to expect a lot of work from you, but we're not going to just do exercises where you read the answer in the book. We're going to do a real experiment that can have practical consequences. I screened a thousand or more students at the end of class periods on an ESP test and picked the ones who showed signs of individual significance. And then, of course, some would be false positives. So we did further individual testing and narrowed it down to maybe 20 people who looked like they definitely had some psi talent. They'd been individually significant in two tests in a row.
Then they trained with immediate feedback on either a ten-choice machine that I had built (see Fig. 1) , and sure enough, we saw no decline effects. Some of the people even started to climb in their performance, and then the academic quarter was over and everything had to stop. I expected lots of colleagues to pick up on this, but, as I said, only two or three did, and they completely ignored the warning that you had to have people with some talent to begin with. It's one of the things that also led me into my thinking later on, and other stuff that I don't think people like to hear. And that is that at some level maybe most of us might be afraid of ESP. 2023, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 248-266 I gained a perspective on communication through electronics, and particularly AM radio. You were often trying to communicate over long distances where things were very noisy. And so when I read about the [ESP] card guessing tests and the very low level of results usually obtained, to me this was obviously a matter of very poor signal to noise ratio. Instead of arguing over whether there really was any ESP or not, people needed to do things to get that signal to noise ratio much higher.
Then in graduate school I had to take an early morning course on classical approaches to learning, most of which I found boring. But I applied what I knew to the card guessing test, and it struck me that the way they're carried out they are classical extinction paradigms: You make people give responses, but you don't give them any immediate feedback, and sure enough, even the very best soon lose their abilities.
And if I thought of it from what it's like from the inside, you start out with some idea of when you're hot and should make a call, and when you really should wait or relax. But now you get confused with the lack of feedback and start losing your motivation.
And sure enough, scores would decline. So, the obvious moral was if you want to get the signal to noise ratio up, you need to train people by giving them immediate feedback.
And there were many ways to improve on that very basic paradigm. Of course, I was aware that what I was also saying to all the old timers in the field was "you've been killing off the very phenomena you want to study," which I'm sure was not a welcome message.
There was very little appropriate response to my article on the need for feedback. There were two or three studies that did exactly what I said wouldn't work, and that is to take people with no pre-selection that they had any talent to begin with, you don't give immediate feedback, and they don't improve. Well, that's perfectly in line with my theory, but it' a trivial finding. Over the years I've noticed that the remote viewing paradigm incorporated not immediate feedback, but fast feedback. You did one target in P A G E 2 5 5 P A G E 2 5 6 Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX) being held? What's happening out in the desert in China? What are they testing out there that requires so much equipment? And it got up to the point where they were repeatedly asked by various intelligence agencies to do practical tasks. I was very impressed. But then, of course, politics came in and the publicity let the naysayers denounce everything.
And that effort pretty much stopped.
But I thought that's the way our field should have gone to begin with. Rather than being stuck over and over on trying to prove it to people who are totally biased against it, move right into the application stage. Of course, you needed a better signal to noise ratio than you've got in the classical paradigm.
At first I thought, like a lot of our colleagues have thought, that if you just produced better evidence, of course the skeptics will be convinced. And then I realized they're pseudo-skeptics. They're not interested in a better understanding of the truth. They already know the truth and they've got to get rid of this competition.
It wasn't just the practical applications that interested me. I was also very interested in what it meant, in terms of a spiritual view of the universe. I was raised as a Lutheran. My parents weren't particularly religious, but my grandmother was, and she lived in the apartment below ours. She took me to Sunday school, and then on to church, and so forth.
And grandparents, hey! Those are the unconditional love people. What was good enough for them when you were a kid was good enough for you, so I believed everything they told me in church. I didn't understand most of it, but I believed it. And then gradually, as I got older I got skeptical and I saw that there was a view that claimed science had disproved anything connected with religion or spirituality. It is all nonsense, I thought.
I will give you an example that really affected me as a student at MIT. I was browsing in the bookstore one day for something to read, and I went to a book table they were So a major theme that went through a lot of the rest of my research was that we have to study the experimenter too. That is, experiments are not just a testing procedure, they're also a social procedure. Probably there's psi between experimenter and percipients, but we're pretending that this is like a physics experiment where you can ignore the influence of the experimenter. Well, that ain't gonna work. But, again, my calls for more study of the experimenter have been almost totally ignored.
Let me give you an example of something that almost actually happened. It illustrates how useful it would be to have a better signal to noise ratio, and that is in the practical application of remote viewing. The StarGate program of psychic espionage went from a few experiments whose main purpose was to demonstrate that psi manifests in the remote viewing procedure, to trying to put it to practical use. Like where is that drug boat that we think is in the Gulf of Mexico right now? Where is this high value hostage P A G E 2 5 7 P A G E 2 5 8

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So this was one of the beginnings of my really seeing that parapsychological findings were relevant to the question of is there anything to spirituality other than programming your bio-computer, as it were. Or to think or believe certain things that may not have any basis in reality. Of course, I've now mentioned this theme many times in my writings, that anyone who says science has shown that all spirituality is nonsense doesn't know what they're talking about.
People can reach out to others at a distance. Does that make the idea of other kind of entities totally ridiculous? Not for me. It says this is really interesting.  And I thought, oh, boy. Here's more sophisticated discussions from people who know a lot about hypnosis. And sure enough, I recognized the names of most of the contributors as leading authorities on the nature of hypnosis. I read that book with great interest. But I came away very puzzled, because they constantly said that this guy Bernstein, the one who wrote the book on Bridey Murphy, claimed such and such, which was clearly ridiculous.
I kept thinking I don't remember him claiming that, so I went back and reread The Search for Bridey Murphy and I found out that these leading scientific authorities were basically making up stuff. They were criticizing this guy for things he didn't say. And that told me, boy, there is a crazy sort of thing going on here. If people either deliberately lie or have their perception so distorted that that they do something like that, well, being an idealistic teenager that really angered me because I believed that science is based on total honesty. So anyway, I met Morey Bernstein that summer, and he was a nice guy. He was only claiming that there ought to be more research.

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Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX) the bedside table so it was visible from the ceiling, but not from the bed. If she happened to float up near the ceiling, then memorize the number, check it out in the morning, and get back to me later.
When she called me a few weeks later and said she tried this test so far 10 times, and she was always right, I became interested. And although she was moving away from that part of the country, I was able to get her into my sleep laboratory several times, and I found that she had a unique EEG pattern when she was having her out the body experience, and in one case did correctly identify a 5 digit target number written in a piece of paper that was on a shelf up near the ceiling.
And then I worked with Bob Monroe later, who became a good friend, and he was a very fine man. He was trying to understand what was happening to him when he had an OBE. Of course, he had years of experiences and ended up writing several books and founding an organization to try to teach people to have out of the body experiences.
DR: One of your other experiments that influenced the way I think about forcedchoice tests is the probabilistic predictor experiments. How did those come about? CT: One of the criticisms that's been made of the early and even ongoing ESP studies has been that we don't understand the statistics, or that the target sequence wasn't really random. So if you think they're guessing at random targets, and if the sequence isn't random, then your experiment is shot. Well, I bought into that for years.
Everybody seemed to think that way.
And then I thought, Wait a minute. You can't think all or none here. It's a matter of how much a target sequence differs from purely random. You could have tiny biases that might be too small to be useful. So I devised a program that basically, after every trial, took the feedback of the previous target and recalculated the probabilities of single digit targets (i. e. 1, 2, 3 …), and then the probabilities of doublets (1-2, 1-3, … 9-1, 9-2, …). Would 2023, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 248-266 Another important thing that I still haven't gotten through to people is that if they want to work with altered states, say the effects of hypnosis on ESP performance, or the effects of the ganzfeld on telepathy, did they test to see if the desired altered state was actually produced? We may have a lot of people trying a method that doesn't really work.
It seems elementary to me that if you're asking how running faster affects performance on some task, then you have to test people who are running, and not just talk about it.
DR: Let us talk about your studies of out of body experiences (OBE), because very few experiments have ever been done on that topic. The ones you did are the studies that people usually point to as among the first that tried to experimentally test if there was a real OBE state.
CT: You know. I was just very lucky. I'd always been interested in out of body reports and their really important implications for spirituality. There is the concept of a spiritual body, and maybe that's what out of the body experiences involved. Of course, that's a big jump, but I'm speculating here. But given the question of whether we're just a meat machine, or whether we have a spiritual self, I think it is an awfully important question.
We should really be researching that stuff now. I was able to research it out of pure luck. Years ago, our babysitter happened to notice that in our house it was okay to talk about unusual experiences. We didn't dismiss people's unusual experiences. She reported that she had had out of the body experiences. She asked me what they were. I told her, to simplify it, that there's two theories. One is it's just a dream. You imagine that you're out of your body. The other theory is that in some real sense your sensing abilities are located at a different locale, not where your physical body is.
So she asked me, well, how would she know which theory is correct? That's when I suggested a basic test. I asked her to number some sheets of paper, one to 10. Then scramble them up so she couldn't see the papers after she was in bed. Then put one on P A G E 2 6 1 P A G E 2 6 2

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But his basic electrical finding was that if you take a Faraday cage, something that shields all outside electromagnetic radiation so it doesn't penetrate inside, and if you connect the cage to an Earth ground, then the ESP results go up strongly. If you then disconnect from ground and let the cage electrically float, that is let it pick up electrical effects from ions in the air and so charges would go up and down, then you knock down ESP scoring to chance. I thought, wow, you've got an amplifier and an off switch. That's very, very interesting.
So, when I got a grant for dream research, later I made sure that I had the money in there to build a Faraday cage because it was actually useful for getting clean EEG signals for the dream work. Then at some later date I would be able to either ground or not ground the cage.
Then in one of my experimental psychology classes, years later, I again told the students, you're going to work extra hard in this class because we're going to do a real experiment as part of learning how to do experiments. So, join with me in this adventure as more of an apprentice sort of thing, rather than just me dispensing wisdom from the pulpit.
We had to use ordinary college students, but still I found that letting the Faraday cage electrically float tended to produce chance results, while the grounded condition produced results somewhat above chance. It's been a while since I looked at the numbers, but I think it was a significant difference.
So basically, one of the most important experiments and findings in the whole parapsychological field has been totally ignored. It may have found the way to help bring ESP under control, a way to turn it off. What I found was that the human beings did way better than the computer could do. I was glad to find that there was still psi appearing in this data. So I suspect a lot of old experiments were thrown out without even really being analyzed because --oh, heavens! --the sequence was not completely random. If this test were applied to other tests, it would be really interesting to see how human beings did as compared to the computer analyses.
DR. : One of the other things that I always thought was interesting was the effects of electrical shielding on ESP performance.
CT: When I was a student at MIT, I helped found a Psychic Research Club, and we had various speakers in. We heard about Andrija Puharich using electrical techniques to increase psi ability (Puharich, 1962). Whoa! That was the kind of thing we wanted to hear about. So I spent a summer working for Puharich because I wanted to see the apparatus up close and see what he was like, because it was a big claim he was making, and some people were just dismissing him as a fraud or charlatan because he was getting such strong ESP results. But I went away thinking that he did some solid experiments on his various ideas. After he got into contacting people from other planets, that's when  12032023 DR: On another topic, I think anybody who goes back and looks at the parapsychological articles published in Science or Nature, that they cannot possibly come away from that, assuming they are able to maintain a neutral perspective, with anything other than admiration. And also, surely they would imagine how exciting it must be to study such effects.
CT: Well, that's certainly how I looked at it. And I would have to say, as I approach the end of my life, there's been a lot of struggles because of those pseudo-skeptics attacks, but by and large it's been really exciting and challenging and fun.
I will give you an interesting anecdote that you might want to put in your article. I'm hoping that I can do one more book before I find out for myself whether there's any survival or not. And it'll be something that's technical in some ways, but very personal and anecdotal. And I was going to start with an anecdote of how I was curious from a very early age. I was 4 or 5 years old, and one day I got curious and I asked my mother, where did I come from? My mother said: Oh, we were driving out in the country, and we looked in this cabbage patch, and there was this cute little baby in the cabbage patch, and he was so cute we brought him home. That's you.
So I said, well, okay. My mother was very smart. She was the big authority in my life, so I guess that must be true. But it didn't compute. There was something really funny going on here, so I needed to look more closely at what the authorities said. So maybe that laid the foundations for my interests in science, curiosity, and an ability to question the authorities.
DR: Perhaps another interpretation is that your mother was precognitive, because years later, in 1982, the soft sculptured dolls called the "Cabbage Patch Kids" became the P A G E 2 6 5 P A G E 2 6 6 Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX)