To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first published psi ganzfeld experiment, I wrote a book on the subject. Usually, literature on the ganzfeld is full of statistics and debates over meta-analyses so I decided to focus more on the people involved and the things they acheived.
It's available on Kindle and paperback from Amazon.
Below, you can read the opening few pages from the chapter on Carl Sargent's work at the University of Cambridge. Hope you enjoy it.
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On a dark, cold, wet Sunday evening in late January 1977, a student got off a bus and walked towards a residential road, past the terraced houses with their front doors opening directly onto the pavement until he arrived at number 22 and knocked. Once inside, he was taken downstairs into a windowless basement room hosting a meeting of the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research.
This was Trevor Harley, in his first year at Cambridge, and here Trevor would be introduced to Hugh Ashton, who was studying philosophy. Then Trevor would inevitably meet, lounging on the couch, a student with flowing red hair and shirt open to reveal thick chest hair. Undeniably good looking and always wearing enough Aramis aftershave that it would be possible to retrace his path around a building long after he'd left, this was Carl Sargent.
Carl was an anomaly: studying for Cambridge University’s first (and only) doctorate in Parapsychology. He was as confident as his appearance suggested, hugely intelligent and with a sharp sense of humour. He also cared little for anyone he had no respect for and was quick to offer his dismissive verdicts on their works. This made him quite a lot of enemies during his short time as an active parapsychologist.
Born on 11 December 1952, he’d graduated from Churchill College, Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences before turning his attention to psi research. Despite the controversial nature of the subject, he found that two professors in the Experimental Psychology department were amenable to him completing his thesis in this field. This remarkable stroke of good luck was brushed over somewhat in an interview that Carl gave in the magazine, Omni. When asked about overcoming Cambridge University’s hostility towards psi research, Carl attributes his unlikely success entirely to his own efforts.
“I didn’t encounter any significant opposition. Quite the reverse. [...] If it’s properly conducted, if the methods are correct, then I don’t see that there can be any objections to a PhD in any subject whatsoever, let alone parapsychology.”
As a recipient of a grant, he was able to travel to New York in 1978 and took part in the ganzfeld work at the Maimonides Research Center with Charles Honorton. Although Carl and Charles didn’t get on and Sargent wasn’t keen on the experimental set-up in New York, he definitely saw potential in this new protocol.
On his return to Cambridge, he teamed up with three students from the CUSPR: Trevor Harley, Hugh Ashton and Trevor’s old school friend, then in his last year at Cambridge, Peter Dear. They built their own ganzfeld set-up using a mattress for the receiver to lie on and an angle-poise lamp above their face as a source of red light. One experimenter would sit in a neighbouring room behind a one-way mirror and write down whatever the receiver reported during the session. Further down the corridor was the office where the random choice of target was made and then the room for the sender to view the target was in an entirely different building, contactable only by telephone and only once the session was over.
If the physical layout was simple, the randomisation method was anything but. With no computers available, Sargent devised a complicated system using a random number table and an array of opaque brown envelopes. The large ones contained a set of four images (each one in its own envelope) or an identical duplicate set to be used for judging purposes. Meanwhile, the smaller ones, twenty of them, contained cards with the letters A, B, C or D which were to be randomly chosen in order to decide which item in the target set would be the specific target for that session.
Then, in the following six months, Sargent, Harley, Ashton and Dear tore through six experiments totalling 164 half-hour sessions. The ethos was mostly to keep things fun and lively although Sargent, always competitive, became frustrated on those occasions that an easy hit was spoiled by (in his eyes) an irrational focus on another picture. After a few of these, they devised a scoring system to try and make the judging method more objective. But despite these misses, the number of hits were far in excess of the one in four that you’d expect by chance. Equally, everyone was surprised at some of the successes they had.
One notable hit had Hugh Ashton as the receiver and Carl Sargent as the sender and he was focusing on an art print of a Breughel painting. After the session, Hugh viewed the set of four pictures and chose the Breughel but seemed dissatisfied.
“I keep wanting to say the Bosch, but there isn’t one,” he maintained.
After the judging, Carl burst into the room and excitedly asked “Did you get it? Did you get the Bosch?”
A little perplexed, Hugh said
“There wasn’t a Bosch. Do you mean the Breughel?”
Carl clicked his fingers in annoyance.
“I always get those two mixed up!” he berated himself. Apparently, having misidentified the artist of the piece, Sargent had spent his time as the sender thinking the name “Bosch” over and over.
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