Zener Cards: What They Are And Why They Do Not Demonstrate Cases Of Telepathy
Does telepathy exist? And clairvoyance? These two questions are very old, and there are many people who have claimed to have psychic powers, although when it comes to proving it they have not been able to show it.
Faced with these questions, as surprising as it may seem, there are those who have tried to study them scientifically, building instruments with the intention of demonstrating whether a person was capable of reading another’s mind.
Among these instruments we have the famous Zener cards, cards on which there are drawings that must be guessed or mentally transmitted to other people. Let’s discover the mysterious world of extrasensory research with these cards.
Zener cards are cards or cards designed to be used in extrasensory perception or clairvoyance experiments. They were created in the early 1930s by Karl Zener (1903–1964), a perceptual psychologist, and his fellow botanist JB Rhine (1895–1980), founder of parapsychology as a branch of psychology. These letters They are one of the first supposedly “scientific” instruments to objectively study supernatural powers although its pseudoscientific nature has generated much controversy.
A normal deck of Zener cards consists of 25 cards, 5 for each of the 5 symbols that can be found on them: square (□), circle (○), star (☆), cross (+) and wavy lines (⌇ ⌇⌇). Apparently, These symbols were chosen because they were easy to represent mentally and, for this reason, Zener and Rhine deduced that they were easier to transmit telepathically Thus, it was considered that these letters were ideal for carrying out scientific experiments in which statistical methods typical of true sciences could be applied.
Experimentation with these cards
Testing people’s telekinetic and clairvoyant abilities can be done in many different ways, but, in essence, the method is usually the same. The use of these cards aims to find out if a person is able to read the mind of another who is seeing the cards. A fairly classic example to demonstrate someone’s telekinetic ability is the one we are going to see below.
Two people participate in the experiment as subjects, while one experimenter is recording any phenomena that may occur during the conduct of the study. These two people are an “agent” or “sender” and the other is the “perceiver” or “receiver.” The idea is that, if the perceiver has psychic powers, he will be able to read the agent’s mind.
The two persons They are seated at two ends of a table, preferably separated by a partition or opaque screen, since the ideal is to prevent both subjects from seeing each other. The person who will act as agent will receive a deck of 25 Zener cards, which they will have to pick up one by one. She will look at each card for about 5 or 10 seconds, trying to think only about what she is seeing. The other person, who is supposedly perceptive, will write down on a piece of paper the symbols that he believes he is reading in the agent’s mind.
Once the 25 cards of the deck have been uncovered and read, the experimenter will compare in what order the symbols of the Zener deck have been presented and which symbols the perceiver has captured. He will statistically analyze both lists to see if there has been a case of real telekinesis or if the supposed perceiver lacks any psychic power.
According to the clairvoyant community itself, this experiment should be repeated for several days, at least 5 times. Every day the same experiment will be carried out in which 25 Zener cards are revealed and the extent to which the perceiver is able to mentally read what the agent sees will be tested. Once the coincidences have been analyzed and studied, it will be possible to clarify whether or not there really is extrasensory communication.
As Zener card decks usually have 25 cards, 5 for each of the 5 symbols, if you do not have any psychic power you will not be able to match more than 20% of the cards, that is, only 5. In principle , if this percentage of correct cards were exceeded, according to the extrasensory experimenters themselves, randomness would be overcome and we would speak of a case of true mind reading.
Criticisms of Zener and Rhine
Although, without a doubt, Zener cards are an interesting instrument, their research has critics. Both claimed to have found cases of people who could read other people’s minds, but When the same experiments were replicated, this evidence vanished Even so, the New Age community and other followers of the mystical have considered the “findings” of these two researchers as firm evidence of the existence of psychic powers.
The first criticism of experiments with Zener cards is the fact that there is a risk that the cards are always presented in the same order, causing the perceiver to end up unconsciously learning it and, sooner or later, guessing the cards. It wouldn’t be mind reading or telekinesis, but memorization. It should also be said that Rhine tried to avoid this phenomenon and in his experiments he chose to shuffle the cards with a special machine.
John Sladek, science fiction writer, made his disbelief in the book known The New Apocrypha due to the fact that two supposedly rigorous researchers had opted for cards as a tool to verify the existence of extrasensory powers. Cards have been used by magicians and gamblers in casinos for a long time, having their own methods to trick them and know, without having to uncover them, what is on the other side.
If the experiment was carried out without screens or anything that would impede the vision between the two subjects, it may happen that the perceiver ends up learning what is behind the letter just by seeing a wrinkled corner or a characteristic pattern of the letter in his or her face. side without drawing. It may seem far-fetched, but in this same situation the agent can know what the agent sees not by reading her mind, but by reading her eyes. The drawing she is seeing can be reflected on the cornea, letting the perceiver know what drawing it is.
Finally, we have the case of non-verbal language. If both subjects are seeing each other and know each other a little, they are likely to communicate without needing to speak It is through unconscious microexpressions that an agent can indicate to the perceiver whether or not he is guessing the symbol that he is indicating to the experimenter. That is, if the perceiver says “star” and the agent makes a small gesture of displeasure, the perceiver will assume that he or she has made a mistake and will change his or her response.
We have an example of reading microexpressions in the 2016 case investigated by Massimo Polidoro Polidoro tested a mother and daughter who claimed to have psychic powers, with a success rate of over 90% using Zener cards. However, the researcher placed restrictions so that faces could not be seen, which reduced his success rate to simple chance. Mother and daughter did not cheat, but they knew each other so well that they could communicate unconsciously through small gestures.
What are the chances of getting the whole deck right?
Rigorously scientific evidence that clairvoyance and telekinesis exist is conspicuous by its absence. Zener cards, used in experiments in which the two experimental subjects do not see each other and the deck is heavily shuffled, They are a good method to demonstrate just the opposite of what Rhine and Zener wanted it is most likely that extrasensory powers do not exist, or at least mind reading.
The results of the tests that have been carried out with these cards follow the normal distribution, with the percentage of success not exceeding 20%, which corresponds, as we have said, to guessing only 5 cards from a deck of 25 About 79% of people will guess between 3 and 7 cards. Guessing more than 5 is possible but statistically unlikely. Let’s see below the possibilities of guessing more than that number of cards
The percentage of guessing 8 or more cards correctly is less than 10.9%. The chances of getting 15 correct answers is approximately 1 in 90,000. Guessing 20 to 24 has a probability close to 1 in 5,000,000,000 and guessing absolutely all has a probability of 1 in 300,000,000,000,000,000.
Taking into account these possibilities calculated mathematically and which correspond to what was observed in real experiments with Zener cards, What is expected from any rigorous scientific investigation would be to apply Ockham’s razor and accept the null hypothesis for null or negative results. That is to say, you cannot read the mind of someone who is seeing one of Zener’s many letters. However, parapsychology is not a science, much less will it use the scientific method itself.
This pseudoscience has invented ad hoc explanations to explain and deny the failure of its research, some of which are truly varied, such as that there are people who have “psychic antipowers” and reduce the extrasensory abilities of those who do have them. Many parapsychologists assure that it is to be expected that 99% of subjects do not have psychic powers, but 1% do have them and can “demonstrate” it. But the curious thing is that, to this day, they have not proven anything.
