Zener Card Diary Entry May 1, 2020.
There has been no entry in the Zener card diary for some time now. I decided that I would take time off from the article series to work on something else. That something else was an online diploma for parapsychology through the Centre of Excellence.
I have since completed the work for the online diploma, and I am waiting for my marks. Now, I can take some time to reflect on what I learned through the diploma program and apply it to the new data I collected.
Parapsychology
Before we get into the Zener card data I want to talk briefly about the parapsychology diploma. I had never done any online learning before and it was a great experience. The Centre of Excellence made it easy to get started and their format for the learning was easy to use.
The take away from this online diploma is skepticism. Parapsychology, as a whole, has people who are trying to explain unexplained phenomena. Skepticism and logic are important to help untangle the phenomenons you would study in this discipline.
The phenomena you will study has you close to pseudoscience, frauds, confused people, and inexplicable phenomena. To be able to tell difference is the challenge in parapsychology. The other challenge is being able to replicate these phenomena in a laboratory and provide a scientific (psychological) explanation for it.
Zener Trails
With enough time to look over the data, I can see that the effects of PSI have a form. PSI resembles an echo. I see the phenomena in the Zener cards like a sound that has a noticeable decay.
Every time something significant happens, or I find something interesting in the data, it trails off like a sound echo. It gets quieter and quieter after the initial moment of intrigue. The spike of intrigue can be a drastic change in the data, a trend, a high score, or an anomaly of some kind.
After I recognize a significant data point it seems to regress to chance.
New Zener Test
This echo like explaination, at least to me, feels likes a good metaphor for the phenomenon in the Zener cards. All the entries prior to this describe some kind of insight that trails off. Zener echos perhaps.
The new data I collected was able to match this description.
On April 6th I used a closed deck method with a high volume of cards. I used the 25 sub-elements and 50 core elements. I revealed the cards during the test because I felt the deck had enough cards to prevent sensory leak.
I scored 10 hits out of 25 guesses from a 75 card deck for a 40% hit percentage. The 40% hit percentage is significant, but it was done with a closed deck. (Having a closed deck creates the possibility of being able to use logic to count the cards and create a sensory leak. You have to reveal your answers after you make all your guesses with a closed deck. However, there is a further problem. Even then there could be sensory leak because you can track your guesses and make inferences.)
Even though the result was somewhat significant, I can’t use it because I used the seen closed deck method. I did the test the way I did because it was less time consuming. I was doing the test to see how well the sub elemental cards performed. It seems like they did make a difference.
I needed to do an open deck test with seen cards. This is where I draw a card, guess it, reveal it, record it, then shuffle the cards again. I repeat that process 25 times. It is very time consuming, but it works well, no sensory leak.
Open Deck Seen Cards
I did my first open deck seen card test on April 10th. I scored 9 hits out of 25 guesses for a 36% hit percentage. The test took about 30 minutes to perform. This is somewhat significant because it closely matched my previous high score on the 6th.
On April 15th I did the same test and got 3 hits out of 25 guesses for a 12% hit percentage. Then on April 20th, I scored 6 hits out of 25 guesses for a 24% hit percentage.
The data shows the spike in the data and a trail afterward. I scored a high hit percentage, then the results normalized to what is expected by chance.
Each test on the 10th, 15th, and the 20th was done live on Instagram. I may keep that trend going because not only does the test take a while, I can showcase this method and provide learning opportunities for people.
Time Echo
Time it seems has little to do with how the echo of data plays out. It seems that the echo will carry on regardless of how much time elapses between the events. In these cases, I allowed 5 days after each test before I would run another one. If this was done in subsequent tests on the same day, I would think the same type of results would happen, or would it?
The problem now is that having written out the echo-like phenomenon, the form of it will change. I won’t be able to replicate it again. But if and when I do see the next spike in data it should have a decline in the next observation. This is my current hypothesis. Whenever there is a spike in the data it will happen less the more I observe and test for it.
I need to collect more data on this, so look out for me live on Instagram.
There may not be another Zener card diary entry for a while so make sure to check out other articles about tarot or start again here:
Zener Card Diary Entry 1
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