Citation

In this study we were concerned to evaluate whether the sender plays any active role in successful ganzfeld GESP experiments by comparing sender and no-sender conditions. In a replication of Roe, Holt, & Simmonds’ (2003) novel method, during the sending period receivers generated a mentation based on their experiences in ganzfeld and simultaneously a random number generator (RNG) acted as a proxy receiver by “selecting” statements from among a pool of 768 to give a 20-item “RNG mentation.” Forty ganzfeld trials were conducted with novice sender-receiver pairs, of which 23 involved senders and 17 did not. Receivers registered a 25% overall hit rate, equal to mean chance expectation, with slightly better performance in sender trials than no-sender trials (26.1% versus 23.5%). Two independent judges used the RNG mentation to rank order the clips in each target set and produced hit rates of 30.6% and 16.7%. Both independent judges gave higher hit rates for the sender trials than for the no-sender trials (42.1% versus 17.6%, 26.3% versus 5.9%), though these differences were not significant. None of a number of individual differences measures significantly predicted receiver performance, and indeed none were suggestive (p < .1).