ZENER CARDS

a standardized group of stimulant materials, alike to a deck of playing cards, modeled for utilization in experiments on extrasensory comprehension and other parapsychological phenomena. The group contains 25 cards, each of which has one of 5 symbols, with 5 cards in each category. In the average test of telepathy, the cards are mixed up and a chosen sender turns the cards over one at a time to analyze the symbol, while a receiver tries to guess the symbol by reading the thoughts of the sender. In a clairvoyant experiment, the receiver may try to determine the arrangement of the shuffled cards without any analysis of cards by the sender. In an experiment on psychokinesis, the involved party would try to control the result of the shuffle directly.