A Soviet circus clown tried to prove that dogs can be psychic

The guy was a professional animal trainer. The soviets had dogs trained for war. Who knows what other side benefits he might uncover in animal behaviour?

Clowns are taken very seriously in some cultures as licenced lords of misrule. Soviet circus acts toured the world in my childhood in the sixties. Projecting modern aesthetic on what he did before this work would be counter-productive. The British employed Maskelyne, a well known illusionist in their camouflage unit in the middle east. He made inflated claims about some mirror and light trick defending Cairo, but searchlights absolutely were used in wartime for offensive and non AA reasons.

Personally, i have never believed PSI and assume almost all animal communication is "clever hans" but non communication animal intelligence research has confounded much of what I think about animal reasoning. Just not what I think about PSI.

[1] https://royalsociety.org/blog/2022/01/powders-of-sympathy/

[2] http://www.creative-science.org.uk/hollywood21.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_the_Day_Before

I have a dog that will lay around in a dead sleep, and the moment I shift my weight to get off the couch to go to another room he's right there next to me. I suspect this has less to do with psychic power and more to do with the fact that he's descended from a long line of the dogs that didn't get left behind when the tribe had to pack up and leave.

https://youtu.be/jhnKBKZvb_U?t=3731

My friend left her puppy in the car, while she went to run an errand. I remained in the car, keeping the dog company. She was licking and biting me, and shifted around a few times, but was generally sedate.

When my friend emerged from a building at least a hundred meters away, the dog sat bolt upright, ears erect, searching. There was no way she could have seen or heard my friend - the puppy was below window level, and the car window facing the distant building was closed. My friend wore sneakers, and there was plenty of ambient noise.

Not only that: the dog became very excited, and continued that way until my friend returned to the car.

I considered that the tone of my voice could have been a trigger - but I'd used many different tones while we were waiting, and this puppy doesn't know me well enough yet to associate tones with events.

I have no explanation for this, other than ‚unscientific‘ ones...

Read about the rat experiments in mazes for an example of how research on this subject would have been done, if it was done properly.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180728054156/http://www.dtic.m...

Edit: There are some gems in this summary (the text matches, but the page numbers do not):

https://techpeterburg.wixsite.com/mysite/post/biological-rad...

I will point out that while he may not have proven dogs can be psychic, he didn't disprove it either.

Psi is not an initialism, so all the letters of the word "psi" should not be capitalized to prevent confusing it with an initialism such as pound per square inch, except when used at the beginning of a sentence and then only capitalizing the first letter.

Until we won't do many more experiments and use as much scientific methods as possible for conducting experiments and gathering evidences, the field will sit at the border of imposture.

This page is about how the CIA initiated its Remote Viewing program, and how Ingo Swann helped convince the Spooks that it was worthwhile: https://www.newdualism.org/papers/H.Puthoff/CIA-Initiated%20...

I met Ingo Swann at one of his talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587071

Swann covered Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinskiy's formative experience in the opening pages of his posthumously-published book, Psychic Literacy [1] (Kazhinskiy is the subject of this Atlas Obscura submission.):

> I. The Psychic Renaissance Begins

> In 1923, IN THE NEWLY-formed Soviet Union, a psychic Event took place in a most unlikely situation. Yet, insofar as anything that affects human affairs can be said to have beginnings, it commenced a new epoch regarding what we in the United States call psychical or parapsychological research.

> For forty-six years the meaning of this Event remained almost completely unappreciated in the United States -- until, in 1969, its implications began to be grasped within an aura of disbelief. What this Event was, along with its enormous impact, takes some explaining. But in a precise sense, it cracked open a special door to a different kind of future -- a door whose existence had long been suspected by some, but hotly debated by the many.

> This first Event, and others analogous to it that were to follow, eventually came to have what we like to call "great implications." The vista of these implications is now widening. They have begun to change our human image, our conception of our collective potential, and the nature of our immediate and distant future.

> In retrospect, why the 1923 Soviet Event remained cloaked in obscurity as far as American comprehensions are concerned is understandable. Frankly speaking, Americans were not at all prepared to expect that psychic matters would ever take on anything other than fringe meaning. Thus, at the time, it certainly would not have been possible to assess this obscure Event as one that was destined to aim world society toward a future in which psychic matters woud take on fundamental importance. But unquestionably it did so, and thus it is of great interest to understand the how and why.

> The Tiflis Event

> In 1919, IN THE CITY of Tiflis (later called Tbilisi) in the Georgian S.S.R., there lived a man named Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinski During August of that year, his best friend fell ill of a fatal disease diagnosed as typhus. One night during the death crisis Kazhinski, was suddenly awakened out of a deep sleep by a noise that sounded like a silver spoon striking glass. In vain he looked for what might have caused this sound.

> The next afternoon, he learned his friend had died during the night. Arriving at the dead man's house to pay his respects, he noticed a glass with a silver spoon in it on the night table next to the bed in which the corpse was laid out. Seeing him studying these objects the dead man's mother burst anew into tears. She explained that she had been about to give her son his medicine, but at the very moment she put the spoon to his lips he died, and she had dropped the spoon into the empty glass. When the mother demonstrated just how she had done this Kazhinski heard the exact sound that had awakened him at the very moment his friend had died -- even though their mutual homes were a mile apart.

> Kazhinski was very moved and excited. How was it possible that the tone had communicated itself to him across such a distance and awakened him from a deep sleep? Kazhinski, a confirmed materialist, had no time for "superstition", but, apparently, he was a man who could acknowledge a strange fact drawn from his own experience. So, on that August day he vowed he would solve the mystery of what had linked his own mind with that of the mother and the dying friend.

> In order to fulfill his vow, Kazhinski began to study the human nervous system under the famous scientist Alexander Vassilievitch Leontivich and became an electro-technologist specializing in studying the electrical nature of the human nervous system. By 1923 he had collected facts and had concluded that the human nervous system can react, by means unknown, to stimuli not accessible to the normal five senses. In 1923 he published his findings in a book entitled Thought Transference. The book interested a number of Soviet scientists -- and, in this way, a new epoch in psychic research began.

> [...]

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Psychic_Literacy_the_Co... (77 page preview)

(edit: rewording, fixed link)