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Scrying works on the principles of the Ganzfeld effect.
The German word Ganzfeld means "whole field". Since the 1970s one of the most popular kinds of ESP experiment among parapsychologists has been the ganzfeld procedure. In these experiments subjects are placed in conditions of mild sensory deprivation, sitting in a comfortable reclining chair, listening to white noise played through headphones, and wearing translucent hemispheres over the eyes - halved ping-pong balls - while red light shines on the face. Meanwhile, a "sender" in another room looks at photos or video clips, and the subject speaks about any feelings or images that come to mind. At the end of the session the subject is shown four different stimuli, only one of which was shown to the "sender", and ranks them. There is a 1 in 4 or 25% chance of scoring a hit by chance, by ranking the actual image first.
In many such trials subjects have scored very significantly above chance levels, and several meta-analyses have shown a very significant overall effect. According to Bem and Honorton (1994) the term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. However, they take care to add that the term neither implies that such anomalous phenomena (psi) are paranormal, nor does it connote anything about their underlying mechanisms.
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