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WD_222/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0222 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Why did Kubrick want to make The Shining ? - Interview with Michel Ciment.
"I've always been interested in ESP (1) and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I'm sure we've all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we're looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn't originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. The manuscript of the novel was sent to me by John Calley, (2) of Warner Bros. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: "Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy". This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing.
I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave." - Stanley Kubrick
Notes:
(1) The Oxford Book Of The Mind notes, ESP or Extra Sensory Perception is the phrase coined by J.B. Rein the head of the first university parapsychology department to describe any mental faculty which allows a person to acquire information about the world without the use of known senses.
(2) John Calley was the production chief at Warner Brothers during the 1970's, now CEO of Sony Entertainment.
-www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/html/shining/shining.html
Extra-sensory perception:
Extra-sensory perception, or ESP, is the name given to any ability to acquire information by means other than the five canonical senses (taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing), or any other sense well-known to science (balance, proprioception, etc).
Because the definition of sense is vague, the precise definition of extra-sensory is as well, but the term is generally used in reference to humans, to imply sources of information unknown to modern science.
Types of ESP -
Specific types of extra-sensory perception include:
* Perception of events in other places (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience) and in other times (precognition, retrocognition, second sight)
* Perception of aspects of others not perceivable by most people (aura reading)
* The ability to sense communications from, and communicate with, people far away (telepathy), beyond the grave (medium-hood and séancing, spirit walking), or in other dimensions (astral projection)
There are many other names for such powers of perception, from different cultures and different eras. It was first discovered by the Hindu tribe, Maanui.[citation needed]
The study of these abilities is called parapsychology, which also addresses other abilities, similarly outside the explanation of current science and sometimes associated with ESP (e.g., psychometry and psychokinesis).
The word "psychic" is sometimes used as both a noun and adjective to denote a person capable of using ESP in any of its forms. Many who believe in ESP maintain that it is a power innate to only a relatively small percentage of the population; yet some believe that everyone is psychic, and that most people have just not learned to tap into their innate extrasensory potential.
History of ESP:
The notion of extra-sensory perception is a very old one, and in many ancient cultures it was taken for granted that certain people had such powers of perception, be it second sight, or the power to communicate with deities, ancestors, or spirits. However, in recent centuries this idea has been widely classified as superstition and denounced as fictitious, or at best unprovable and unscientific.
* in ancient culture: the Delphic Oracle, shamans, soothsayers, ...
Extra-sensory perception and hypnosis:
When Franz Anton Mesmer and Grigori Rasputin were first popularizing hypnosis, the legend came about that a person who was hypnotized would be able to demonstrate ESP. Carl Sargent, a psychology major at the University of Cambridge, heard about the early claims of a hypnosis-ESP link, and designed an experiment to test whether they had merit. He recruited forty fellow college students, none of whom identified him- or herself as having ESP, and then divided them into a group that would be hypnotized before being tested with a pack of 25 Zener cards, and a control group that would be tested with the same Zener cards. The control subjects averaged a score of 5 out of 25 right, exactly what chance would indicate. The subjects who were hypnotized did more than twice as well, averaging a score of 11.9 out of 25 right. Sargent's own interpretation of the experiment is that ESP is associated with a relaxed state of mind and a freer, more atavistic level of consciousness. Other scientists, using normal experimental controls, have been unable to reproduce Sargent's results.
Extra-sensory perception and technology:
In the early days of radio and electronics, the technology seemed magical to most people, including the engineers working on it. It was suggested that it might be used to unleash previously impossible feats of mental ability. This included communication with dead people, who were considered to have moved on to another world or "plane". Alec Reeves, one of the pioneers of digital communications, considered ESP a perfectly reasonable proposition. He believed that many of his inventions were prompted by the dead pioneer Michael Faraday, and spent much of his earlier years trying to perfect spiritualist telecommunication devices. Some of his experiments are available as ActiveX pages on his website.
Ongoing debates about the existence of ESP:
Proponents of the existence of ESP point to numerous scientific studies that appear to offer evidence of the phenomenon's existence: the work of J. B. Rhine, a botanist at Duke University in the 1930s, and of Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, physicists at SRI International in the 1970s, are often cited in arguments that ESP exists.
Those who believe ESP does not exist point to methodological flaws in such studies, and point to numerous other ESP studies which have failed to find any evidence of the phenomenon. Many modern scientists and skeptics do not take ESP seriously enough to find it warrants study. Believers consider the widespread disbelief in the "taboo" subject of ESP among the scientific and rationalist communities as a sociological phenomenon, not a scientific one.
Difficulties testing ESP:
Among the difficulties having to do with proving the existence or non-existence of extra-sensory perception are that, if ESP exists, it may have a subtle rather than an overt effect, and that the ability to perceive may be altered by the nature of the event being perceived. For example, some proponents of ESP put forward that predicting whether a loved one was just involved in a car crash might have a stronger effect than sensing which playing card was drawn from a deck, even though the latter is better suited for scientific studies. This, in part, is why scientists remain skeptical; there are no consistent and agreed-upon standards by which ESP powers may be tested, in the way one might test for, say, electrical current or the chemical composition of a substance. Often, when self-proclaimed psychics are challenged by skeptics and fail to prove their alleged powers, they assign all sorts of reasons for their failure, such as that the skeptic is tainting the environment with "negative energy." This, and the widespread practice of charlatanry in ESP and psychic circles, causes most scientists and rationalists to dismiss ESP claims out of hand.
There is some dispute over the interpretation of results obtained in scientific studies of ESP, as the most compelling and repeatable results are all small to moderate statistical results. Critics of ESP argue that the results are too small to be significant, while proponents of ESP argue that the results are consistent in numerous studies, and that the combined significance is large. That an inordinately large number of trials must be conducted to obtain statistically significant results is seen as a problem for verifying the legitimacy of ESP claims.
A few large prizes have been offered in the hopes of bringing people with strong ESP into formal laboratories for rigorous testing, most recently the International Zetetic Challenge.
The Randi Prize:
James Randi made his name and fortune as a stage magician, and later became a skeptic devoted to debunking the claims of performers who pretended to offer more than a good show. In 1996, he set up the James Randi Educational Foundation to debunk paranormal phenomena and educate the public about them. The foundation has famously made a standing offer of a $1 million prize to anyone who could demonstrate ESP or any psychic phenomenon.
The prerequisites for trying to claim the "Randi Prize" are non-trivial, however; as of 2005, no would-be claimants have passed Randi's preliminary test (which has a lower significance level than the formal test), and no offers to conduct a formal test have been extended by the Foundation.
There are those who believe that Randi is not an honest broker and who consider his offer of a prize nothing more than a PR game. Randi's response to these criticisms has been to point out that they are commonly made by believers in the paranormal who wish to discredit him, and that as a tax-exempt organization, his foundation is obliged to provide proof of their financial accountability. While some of Randi's enemies, like Sylvia Browne, have openly claimed that Randi does not actually have the money, other critics say they don't question whether the prize money exists, but rather whether someone quoted as saying "I always have an out" with regards to the prize, is going to pay up to a legitimate claimant with a demonstrable ability. However, this criticism is tantamount to an accusation of fraud, for which Randi has no recorded history. And the aforementioned quote comes secondhand from Dennis Rawlins, who claims Randi said this in an article Rawlins wrote for Fate, a pro-paranormal magazine in 1981, in which Rawlins also accused the organization CSICOP (of which Rawlins was formerly a Fellow) of numerous misdeeds and dishonest practices. There is no direct way to confirm Randi indeed made the quote attributed to him by Rawlins, and the quote appears in none of Randi's books or other writings. Regarding the mistrust that paranormal believers have concerning Randi's fairness, he has pointed out that to fail to pay the prize money to a claimant who successfully and legitimately passes the test would open up the JREF to criminal prosecution.
The Zetetic challenge:
The zetetics laboratory at France's University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis conducts research into paranormal phenomena. From 1987 to 2002, they offered an International Zetetic Challenge in an attempt to prove or disprove the existence of, or demonstrate events related to, the paranormal. This was a €200,000 prize offered to "any person who could prove any paranormal phenomenon."
While there were a number of attempts at the prize, and a number of investigations were made, the prize went unclaimed.
General criticism:
Claims of extra-sensory perception have been subjected to repeated criticism by mainstream scientists. Most of the criticism hinges on two major contentions: first, that studies which have shown evidence of ESP are almost always either anecdotal or plagued with methodological flaws which allowed cheating, and second, that those few studies which do not appear flawed methodologically do not produce reproducible results.
An example of the first case is that of an allegedly psychic dog in England named Jaytee, who his owners claim has a supernatural ability to sense when one of them was leaving work to come home (which he allegedly displayed by running out to the porch at that time). Biologist Rupert Sheldrake tested JayTee extensively, including more than 50 videotaped trials, and claimed that his tests had shown that the dog had ESP ability. Two skeptical scientists from the University of Hertfordshire, Richard Wiseman and Matthew Smith, then used Sheldrake's video camera setup, conducted 4 trials of their own, and claimed that the dog had no such ability. Wiseman and Smith concluded that while Jaytee made several trips to the window during the day, the action was more in response to having heard some kind of noise outside. However, Sheldrake believes the data they collected actually matched his own convincingly, despite Wiseman's declarations to the contrary.
According to social psychologist David Myers, in his book Psychology, "a reproducible ESP phenomenon has never been discovered, nor has anyone produced any individual who can convincingly demonstrate psychic ability." The unclaimed prizes offered by Randi and the IZC are often pointed to as strong evidence against ESP, while others point out that science is not conducted via PR stunts. PR stunts or no, the lack of serious avenues of ESP research currently being conducted either in academia or other scientific venues, and the lack of papers on the subject in peer-reviewed journals, is a stronger indicator of where science currently stands on the subject of the paranormal.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-sensory_perception
Anomalous phenomenon (Redirected from Paranormal):
An anomalous phenomenon is an observed phenomenon for which there is no suitable explanation in the context of a specific body of scientific knowledge (for example, astronomy or biology).
Introduction:
Out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, extrasensory perception, ghosts, demonic encounters, poltergeists, as well as sightings of UFOs and reports of alien abductions are phenomena, most of which are not widely accepted as real by mainstream scientists, some of whom go as far as calling the study of them pseudoscience. Sometimes the phenomenon is acknowledged as being real, and is the way it should be interpreted what makes the controversy.
As the body of knowledge available expands, some anomalies are incorporated into an explanatory framework and lose their standing as unexplained phenomena. For instance, while the idea of stones falling from the sky was long ridiculed, meteorites are now acknowledged and well understood.
Often used as a synonym, but actually a subclass, are the paranormal phenomena studied by parapsychology.
Paranormal phenomena can be divided into three main classes:
* Mental phenomena: unusual mental states or abilities, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition
* Physical phenomena: unusual physical occurrences that may be controlled by a consciousness, such as psychokinesis, poltergeists, stigmata or materializations
* Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs)
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal
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