Elevated, specific temporal lobe signs in a population engaged in psychic studies.

We tested the hypothesis that a special population of people who maintain exotic beliefs and report frequent subjective psi experiences should display more frequent temporal lobe signs and symptoms. Clusters of items, that reflect various temporal lobe factors for 20 women who were actively (greater than 1 year) involved with a local psychic and spiritual development group, were compared to items for an age-matched reference group (n = 61). T-scores for the reference group did not differ from those of the normal population. Whereas the psychic group did not differ from the reference group on various control and psychiatric measures, mean T-scores on clusters that infer complex partial epileptic signs (specifically a sense of presence, olfactory experiences, and intense meaning) ranged between 65 and 70. Group affiliation explained 22 to 50% of the variance for each of these variables; with discriminant analysis, they correctly classified 95% of both groups of participants.