Situations or states of consciousness in which
reality and imagination are confused appear to be especially psi conducive.
This may be either because such confusions lead people to mistake normal
events for paranormal, or because psi is facilitated in some way by
the uncertainty. On the former hypothesis we would expect experiencers
and believers in the paranormal to be more prone to such confusions.
On the latter we would expect reality-imagination confusions to be psi-conducive.
An experimental procedure was designed to induce
false memories for pictures of objects. 33 subjects were shown slides
of some objects and were asked to imagine others. Over a four week period
they were questioned about the objects and finally asked whether they
had seen them or only imagined them. To test for psi half the imagined
objects, randomly chosen for each subject, were used as targets in a
clairvoyance task.
There was no correlation between the number
of false memories and BPS score. There were significantly more false
memories on target objects than non-target objects. This suggests that
confusing reality and imagination may be psi-conducive.
We would like to thank the Perrott-Warrick Fund
for the financial support
of this project.
This work was subsequently published as:
Blackmore,S.J. and Rose,N.J. Reality and Imagination: A psi-conducive
confusion? Journal of Parapsychology, 61, 321-335
