The Marijuana ESP Experiment: Can Smoking Weed Make You Psychic?

Everyone knows of the stereotypical stoner who seems to having “psychic experiences”, but what is the validity of the link between marijuana and extrasensory perception? Not everyone believes in psychics but everyone believes (or should believe) that there is a clear scientific approach to finding out if someone is psychic in a laboratory setting. One of the simplest ways to do this is called the Zener Test. This is where the subject and the scientist go through a deck of 25 shuffled cards with 5 different symbols. The subject tries to guess the card the scientist is holding using various forms of ESP (extrasensory perception AKA psychic abilities) such as telepathy and clairvoyance. Because of the controversy of ESP and the little parapsychologists know about the phenomenon there has been little work accomplished as to the simple questions such as “where in the brain does ESP originate?” If we put our skepticism aside for a moment and have the open mind that there is some possibility that such a thing could exist, then we can try to use various methods to either prove or disprove the existence of it depending on the evidence provided. With the sudden rise of states within the United States legalizing the use of marijuana in various ways we can start to learn more about its effects on the brain through the use of it openly being used. This is where I decided to put these two ideas together in an attempt to finally answering the question of “What is ESP?” and “Does ESP exist?”

Since my trip to Michigan was not entirely to conduct this experiment, the amount of time I put into it was limited and required getting together a group of people that would be willing to participate. My group consisted of 5 people which I made sure to get in various different stages of highness. Then I gave them all the Zener test. While I didn’t have a control group I did have some of the tests done at a significantly low dose of marijuana. This proved to be very important as well as the fact that I have done many Zener tests in the past. The most common result from a zener test is a 5 out of 25 since the probability of getting one question right is 20%. Before performing the test I would ask each subject how high they were on a scale of 1 to 10. Since there is no such thing as a marijuana breathalyzer I was forced to use the judgement of the subjects, which as one knows the judgement of a person on marijuana isn’t the best. However, I feel this is accurate since I monitored the amount of the drug that was used. I will not disclose the names of the subjects just for personal reasons. I am not entirely sure how open each subject is when it comes to even having just their first name identified as a part of this experiment. I do also want to mention that I did not consume any cannabis since I don’t necessarily agree with its use on a personal level. The first stage of tests ranged from a highness scale of 2 to 4 and here are the results

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