Parapsychologist Doctor Andrija Puharich

Puharich used emotionally-toned pictures rather than card symbols in a clairvoyance experiment involving amanita mushrooms. His 26 participants made significantly more correct guesses under the influence of the mushrooms than before or after the session. He attributed the results to the mushrooms’ activation of participants’ parasympathetic functions (for example, slow heart rate). However, psychoactive mushrooms can also stimulate rather than calm bodily functions, and so this explanation is inconclusive. Nevertheless, Puharich reported that one of his participants perfectly matched two sets of 20 unseen pictures in three seconds. Puharich also tested four Los Angeles newspaper reporters described as “skeptical”; they obtained similar results but with numbers rather than pictures. Once again, chance results were obtained before mushroom ingestion, significant results emerged during the mushroom session, and scoring returned to chance following the conclusion of the session. Unfortunately, this innovative expexperiment was published in a popular book rather than in a refereed journal, so the quality of the controls remains a matter of speculation.