Speaking of the Dead's esoteric interests, I knew I'd seen this little gem somwhere:
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/ar ... r_esp.html
The Grateful Dead's Acid Test for ESP
Andy Roberts tells the story behind the world’s biggest telepathy experiment – a heady cocktail of parapsychology, hallucinogens and the loud, ecstatic music of the Grateful Dead.
By Andy Roberts February 2004
In December 2000 parapsychologist Richard Wiseman announced he was going to conduct the “world’s largest telepathy experiment” in London [FT143:24]. Unfortunately Wiseman’s experiment, using up to 100 telepathic ‘senders’, fell well short of the far more fortean approach taken by a group of parapsychologists and musicians towards the end of the psychedelic era in America.
The real ‘world’s largest telepathy experiment’ actually took place in February 1971 at Port Chester in New York State. Far from being conducted in the psychically arid test conditions of a laboratory, it was hosted by the world’s strangest rock and roll band, The Grateful Dead. The Dead themselves are no strangers to fortean phenomena, and the synchronicities surrounding their gigs at the Great Pyramid of Giza and percussionist Micky Hart’s encounter with a cursed human skull drum are the stuff of legend [see FT88:34-38, FT164:24-25]. Unarguably at the cutting edge of genuinely psychedelic music, and all that entails, the Grateful Dead were forged in the crucible of 1960s American West Coast acid culture, playing to huge crowds where band and audience were under the influence of the strongest psychedelics. Their music to this day both encompasses and surpasses all contemporary and historical forms, leading one critic to define their œuvre as “music beyond idiom”. Accounts of the sheer power generated at a Grateful Dead gig are legion, band and followers believing that when they are playing at full throttle a temporary psychedelic psychic ‘church’ is created in which musicians and celebrants are joined in a sort of ‘wholly communion’, becoming a single entity with one mind.
Micky Hart puts this succinctly: “Our main focus was the idea of group mind. We saw the Grateful Dead as a group mind and one in which we were able to share with the audience. We were able to take an image and project it into the audience and send it to receptive receivers.” With this kind of belief it was only a matter of time before the parapsychological fraternity became seriously interested in the Grateful Dead.
The link came in the form of parapsychologist and author Stanley Krippner, at that time director of the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York. Krippner had been working at the far edges of parapsychology for several years and since 1964 had been involved in testing the hypothesis “that sleeping subjects are able to incorporate aspects of randomly selected target stimuli into their dreams”. Krippner was also a Dead fan and had used their music in previous ESP experiments. The Grateful Dead’s biographer, Dennis McNally, described, in A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Bantam, NY, 2002), Krippner’s entry into the Dead’s world: “Krippner was yet another of the fascinating people the Dead had attracted, a distinguished psychologist who was comfortable with the rational study of ‘fuzzy’ things like ESP, or psychedelics, or both together.”
Gerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist, and Micky Hart first met Stanley Krippner at a party in 1970. McNally recalls, “Eventually Krippner found himself in conversation with Garcia, who wondered about the potential interaction of various altered states of consciousness, for instance sleep and the psychedelic state, and whether or not that could aid sensitivity to ESP. Their conversation yielded the Dream Experiment, which was deemed worthy of publication in a formal, academically refereed journal of psychology.”
Krippner initially conducted a smaller version of the Port Chester experiments, in which ESP, hundreds of people, rock music and psychedelics were brought together. This took place at a Holy Modal Rounders concert on 15 March 1970 where five volunteer telepathy ‘receivers’ were selected for the experiment. Each receiver was told the geographical location of the concert and asked to ‘tune in’ at midnight, when certain images would be telepathically projected by the audience. The receivers were situated at random locations within a 100-mile (160km) radius of the concert venue. The target image chosen to be projected was ‘birds’, and a sequence of appropriate moving images and transparencies was prepared by the psychedelic light show operator Jean Mayo. These consisted of a film about eagles and a number of slides depicting photographs of various birds, together with key symbols such as the Egyptian hieroglyph for bird and phrases such as ‘Think birds’ and ‘fly high’. One crucial slide sequence showed a mythological phœnix appearing and disappearing in flames.
The audience were informed verbally that when these images appeared they were to concentrate on them and ‘send’ them telepathically. To create the strongest link between the target images, the power of the music and the audience, the images were projected during the band’s performance of ‘If You Want to Be a Bird’. This song was already fixed in the audience’s minds as it had been featured in the 1969 cult film Easy Rider, during a sequence in which Jack Nicholson looned around on the back of a motorcycle.
Midnight duly passed and the audience, high on music and drugs and open to the potential of telepathic contact, did their best to project the chosen images into the collective unconscious. The five receivers reported variously, ‘something mythological, like a Griffin or a Phoenix’, ‘a snake’, ‘grapes’, ‘an embryo in flames growing into a tree’. The fifth receiver was singer Richie Havens, who also reported seeing a mythological creature like a phœnix.
Was this experiment successful? Maybe. Interpreting a telepathy experiment can be difficult because, unless the images received are exactly the same as the ones sent, the results are open to scepticism at best, ridicule at worst. However, at least two of the images received appeared to be within acceptable parameters and Krippner felt that with some important changes to the methodology of the experiment he could improve the results.
Buoyed up by the apparent success of the Holy Modal Rounders experiment, Krippner planned something much more ambitious involving the Grateful Dead. This was to take place at each gig of the Dead’s six-night run at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York State, during February 1971. The Port Chester shows themselves have become legendary in ‘Deadhead’ circles as being fantastic examples of the transformative and redemptive power of music. Listening to them you are aware of a music being created which is truly ‘out there’, an ideal backdrop against which to conduct a telepathy experiment.
Contrary to the somewhat shambolic psychedelic milieu in which the Grateful Dead existed, the Port Chester experiments were planned in some detail. In attempting to refine the methodology used at the Holy Modal Rounders experiment, Krippner’s team made some radical changes. It was decided to make the instructions to the senders (the audience) much more specific, and also to make them aware of the physical location of one of the receivers. To insure against the possibility of the target images being leaked, either consciously or unconsciously, they were to be selected at random immediately prior to being shown to the senders.
For the Port Chester experiments just two receivers, Malcolm Bessent and Felicia Parise, were chosen. Both were experienced ‘psychic sensitives’. For the duration of the experiment Bessent was to be observed whilst under laboratory conditions, sleeping at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory, 45 miles (72km) away. Parise was to sleep in her flat where she would be telephoned several times during the night and asked to describe the content of her dreams.
The audiences on each night were told only about Bessent’s involvement in the experiment. This was so that the Dream Laboratory staff could monitor ‘intentionality’, i.e. whether or not the senders’ knowledge of who was taking part and where they were could affect results. In this case, if intentionality was relevant it would be expected that Bessent would have more success in receiving the images than Parise. Conversely, if it were the receiver whose subconscious mind reached out and located the target images, both senders could be expected to score equally well.
Krippner’s assistant, Ronnie Mastrian, was in the audience at the Capitol Theatre and immediately prior to each gig selected one of two envelopes by the flipping of a coin. Each envelope contained a series of slides containing images which were to be the focus of the evening’s experiment. The selected transparencies were loaded into a projector and shown on the stage backdrop. At 11.30pm when the concert was well under way, the bemused and excited audience read the instruction slides; “1) You are about to participate in an ESP experiment, 2) In a few seconds you will see a picture, 3) Try using your ESP to ‘send’ this picture to Malcolm Bessent, 4) He will try to dream about the picture. Try to send it to him, 5) Malcolm Bessent is now at the Maimonides dream laboratory in Brooklyn”.
One of six randomly selected pictures was then projected onto the stage backdrop for 15 minutes whilst the Grateful Dead played. Unusually for the Dead, there was no psychedelic light show at any of the Port Chester gigs, thus making the projected images the visual focus of the concert.
When Malcolm Bessent had been observed to be engaged in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) activity for 10 minutes, he was woken and asked what he was dreaming. This took place several times throughout the night. Felicia Parise was contacted by ’phone at 90 minute intervals and her dreams recorded. On the following morning, both subjects were asked to add any details they had missed, together with any associations they attached to their dreams. Their recollections were tape-recorded and transcribed for use by the evaluators.
At the end of the six-show run, the two evaluators were each given the full receivers’ transcripts together with copies of the images used. The evaluators, working independently of each other, the telepathy receivers or Dream Laboratory staff, were asked to read the tape transcripts. They then recorded on a 100-point scale any correspondences between the dream recollections and the images projected during the experiment.
As with the Holy Modal Rounders experiment, the results were encouraging but open to wide interpretation. One example of this dichotomy comes from the 19 February gig where a painting called ‘The Seven Spinal Chakras’ was projected. This showed a male in the yogic full lotus position, deep in meditation, each chakra vividly illuminated. When Bessent was awakened during this particular experiment he remembered dreaming he was, “very interested in… using natural energy… thinking about rocket ships… an energy box and… a spinal column”. This correspondence was classed as a success, although sceptics will have their doubts.
Another debatable success came from the night of 20 February when the surrealist painter Magritte’s ‘Philosophy in the Boudoir’ was selected and projected. The painting is of a headless woman in a transparent robe. This time Bessent dreamed about a “little girl’s doll” which Krippner believed demonstrated “a degree of correspondence”.
The Dream Laboratory’s report on the experiment noted: “The average evaluation of the two judges was computed for each pair of dream transcripts and target pictures. If coincidence, rather than ESP, had been operating, the judges’ evaluation of the correct transcript/target pairs would have been higher than all other pairs one time out of six. For Miss Parise, one correct pair obtained the highest rating. In the case of Mr Bessent, the judges gave the highest score to the correct pairs four times out of six… Thus, for Mr Bessent, the ESP hypothesis is supported. Further, some support is given to the position that the agents must know who the target is to be transmitted to and where he is located for telepathy to occur.”
So, were the experiments a success? Krippner and his team certainly thought so, although sceptics and debunkers will snort derisively at the lack of rigour in parts of the experiment’s design. And, of course, the results were open to interpretation and raised many questions, such as: how clearly and exactly does a received image have to correspond with the image projected? Does the whole dream have to correspond with the target image? – and so on. No-one said parapsychology was easy!
Other rock commentators doubted the psychedelic component of the experiment. Former band manager (and not entirely reliable commentator) Rock Scully, in his book Living With The Dead (Little, Brown, 1995), expressed a jaundiced view of the event; “The results turned out to be shady… the Port Chester audience is 18- and 19-year-old kids who’ve hopped over the border from Connecticut to get drunk and are all screwed up on beer and hard liquor.” Hardly the blissed out psychonauts of mid-60s San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury who were the Dead’s original constituency.
In both design and organisational terms, the Holy Modal Rounders and Grateful Dead telepathy experiments probably weren’t as rigorous as the parapsychological establishment would have liked. But from a fortean angle the results are not really the point. No, the point is that all concerned had the courage of their convictions and strength of belief to attempt the manifestation of a wild talent, involving over 6,000 people. These experiments were, to date, the largest telepathy tests conducted outside of laboratory conditions, with over 2,000 people being involved at each concert. They reflected a zeitgeist, rapidly fading from our memories, in which it was believed the human subconscious had limitless potential and could be accessed and directed by drugs, music and intent. Contrast that with the general drabness of psychical research in the early 21st century! Now largely forgotten, the world’s biggest telepathy experiment has become just another footnote in the annals of both parapsychology and rock and roll. Ah well, I guess you had to be there!�