Discovery Science program, June 15

On the Discovery Science TV channel on Sunday June 15 , at 9 PM eastern, 6 PM pacific in the US, a show with the peculiar title "Foolproof Equations for a Perfect Life" will be aired. This was originally aired as a BBC Horizon program on decision-making. It included a segment describing the presentiment experiment. I don't know whether that bit survived the editing for the US version, but if it does you'll see yours truly run a demo of a presentiment experiment.

Comments

Tor said…
If they edit away that part then the media in the US must be much more biased on such topics than what is the case here in Europe.

In the version I saw the presentiment experiment was presented in a neutral/mildly positive manner.

When the main Horizon program ended, the host of the main show (that this broadcast was part of) had gotten hold of a scientist with a background in psychology to comment on it. It was no surprise that she didn't mention the presentiment part at all, even though this was the most interesting and mind boggling phenomena introduced (my guess is that she hadn't even heard of it before).

And Dean, I had to smile when I saw the numberplate on your car! Was it staged or is it for real?
Unknown said…
Interestingly, psychologists here in the UK have increasingly made a move towards parapsychology, I even heard one mention Dean's presentiment the other day! So the climate isn't too bad, I can give further details if anyone wants.

Also, here's a video from the early '80s regarding the connection between modern physics and psi, Brian Josephson, Geoffrey Chew, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra etc. are all interviewed:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6881025804063213848

Oh, yeah, and nice number plate, Dean! :)
Dean Radin said…
Yep, PRECOG is my actual license plate.
David Bailey said…
I am sorry to put a bit of a dampener on this, but I saw the Horizon program, and other parts of it were fairly cringe-making. The equation for life stuff seemed to have minimal scientific content - it was just an example of the 'cranky scientist' media stereotype!

Bharat's comment re UK psychologists sounds interesting. If only we can see presentiment get actually discussed in normal academic circles, its significance will be obvious!
Unknown said…
David Bailey, remember the incident with Prof Josephson and the Royal Mail stamps? Well, there were some interesting responses by some interesting people, one of whom was the influential Prof Bernard Carr, a cosmologist and a former President of the Society for Psychical Research as well as a former student of Stephen Hawking, he details the rise in credibility of parapsychology in the UK within psychology circles:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/stamps/more_responses.html

This was in 2001, so maybe things have got better.

The discussion I had was with someone who was scared regarding the issue of free will that arises. My take is that it's based on probabilities: when you're partaking in an experiment and a pic is about to come up, there's not much you can do to avoid seeing it so a visible response occurs and your mind and body prepare you for it. If it was something more open-ended, we might not see such striking results translating from the mind to the body but you might possibly get a psychical/mental response with something less predictable like driving down a motorway. Does this seem plausible, Dean?

Actual discussion might be a problem but apparently Rupert Sheldrake made a very succesful keynote at the Consciousness Conference so perhaps minds might be changed.
Dean Radin said…
Bharat said ... when you're partaking in an experiment and a pic is about to come up, there's not much you can do to avoid seeing it so a visible response occurs and your mind and body prepare you for it.

Yes, but the picture you're about to see is unpredictably emotional or calm, and the body prepares differently depending on what the future holds. My guess is that in the everyday world presentiment effects are stronger than what we see in the lab, because there's more meaning, and thus greater impact, in real-world emotional events.
Dave Smith said…
Dean said,

My guess is that in the everyday world presentiment effects are stronger than what we see in the lab, because there's more meaning, and thus greater impact, in real-world emotional events.



It may also be the case that normal cognitive influences reduce the effect in an experimental situation, such as expectation and the participant's awareness of the experimental procedure. In a real world situation, events tend to be much more unpredictable in a conventional sense. That's difficult to reproduce in the lab I imagine.

If I remember correctly, Dick Bierman performed a presentiment experiment where participants thought they were about to perform a calibration run with a series of 10 or so calm pictures. However, without telling the participants, he included an emotional picture in the dummy calibration run to introduce the element of surprise. It would be interesting to try this again if someone can manage to get enough participants...
Unknown said…
Dave Smith: Interesting, do you know where I can get Bierman's paper or even the abstract? That would be quite interesting to read.

Slightly off-topic and I apologise but if anyone's been following the entanglement ideas/quantum consciousness especially with regard to the Hameroff/Penrose theories, just a couple of bits of info:

Hameroff gave a talk at the Beyond Belief conference and was attacked very violently by Lawrence Krauss in particular who appeared to be making the argument that coherence requires low temperatures. As Dean showed in the Theosophy talk, this is piffle. Hameroff has a page devoted to resources on bioentanglement on ever higher scales that includes ever higher temperatures:

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/qbupdate.htm

Also, he replied to Shermer with a short summation (it's a few years old):

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/New/Debates/Hameroff_Shermer.html

And Stapp uses the Quantum Zeno effect in his ideas, here's one example of macroscopic QZ:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2646

Sorry guys but since there isn't a forum here, I didn't know where else to post this stuff. It's interesting that Hameroff's ideas are attacked so violently, was this what Bell had to put up with? Or Planck?
Dean Radin said…
I don't have a thread on quantum entanglement yet. Perhaps I should start one, but in the meantime:

June 6, 2008, reported in Science: "Multipartite Entanglement Among Single Spins in Diamond."

ABSTRACT: Robust entanglement at room temperature is a necessary requirement for practical applications in quantum technology. We demonstrate the creation of bipartite- and tripartite-entangled quantum states in a small quantum register consisting of individual 13C nuclei in a diamond lattice. Individual nuclear spins are controlled via their hyperfine coupling to a single electron at a nitrogen-vacancy defect center. Quantum correlations are of high quality and persist on a millisecond time scale even at room temperature, which is adequate for sophisticated quantum operations.

In other words, persistent multiple-particle entanglement at room temperature.

Will someone eventually demonstrate persistent entanglement in biological systems? I think it is inevitable.

I also think it's inevitable that some skeptics will continue to sputter that it's impossible, just like the newspaper editors who were declaring that the Wright Brothers were crackpots even while the brothers were flying their airplanes in plain sight!
Dave Smith said…
bharat,

The paper can be found here:

http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications/1998/retrocausal_tucson3.pdf

See study 2. The effect was not actually significant but, due to the experimental design, each participant only contributed one trial each so that's quite low statistical power. It would be interesting to conduct a large scale experiment of this type to compare effect sizes with a "conventional" presentimant design.
Unknown said…
Dean, that's brilliant. I hadn't seen that. Hameroff also mentioned somewhere that quantum effects (perhaps not specifically entangelement) is actually *enhanced* at higher temperatures. Any idea about that particular gem?

I think you're right about the inevitability. I was recently re-reading Josephson's paper on Biological Utilisation of Quantum Nonlocality. It seems that to accept the premise, one has to accept that the mind can influence RNGs which is tricky - I think Stapp was strongly condemned when he made reference to the paper that showed martial students affecting RNGs back in time - but it seems that people might be persuaded from the outside as bioentaglement gets bigger. Perhaps this might be the way.

I'm always wondering where the next step for psi will be: physics, concsciousness studies but I never expected that potential could arise from that narrowest of all fields: biology. Interesting times.
Unknown said…
Hold on, following from the Hameroff and enhanced temperatures thingy...I just had a thought. Lynne McTaggart documents a study on monks meditating and said that when they do so, they brain starts moving faster and thus...the temperature increases. Taking this with Stu's statement that entanglement is enhanced by higher temperatures...quite a few things make sense now especially the nonlocal observation by meditators causing collapse experiment you did.

Dear God, please tell me I made this link first. If so, you can take it off me, Dean, just send me some money from your Nobel. ;)
Dean Radin said…
It's not the brain that literally starts heating up, it's the amplitude of higher frequencies (gamma band) that increases. That's different than temperature. In any case, it's not increased temperature that does the trick. To sustain quantum coherence in most types of matter requires extremely low temperatures. Diamond is different than most other substances because its internal structure is so stable (which among other things leads to its extreme hardness) that even room temperature doesn't affect it much.
Unknown said…
Aaah, I see. But as I understand it, Hameroff appears to be making the case that quantum effects appear to be *enhanced* by higher temperatures (I don't know because he hasn't given a citation yet) and I don't know whether this depends on the structures e.g. quantum effects in diamonds might be enahnced by higher temperatures.

Also, what I gather (and you seem to hint at this, though this might be a misinterpretation on my part) is that temperature is a correlative effect that can work both ways depending on the structure of the element/organism. So again, it's a slightly more holistic and context-dependant view on *how* temperature affects quantum effects. This is not in opposition to what Krauss appears to be saying but is an expansion of the initial idea that higher temperature washes out quantum effects. Am I totally on the wrong track here?
Blue Mystic said…
Dean,

Has Brian Josephson conducted a presentiment experiment himself?
Dean Radin said…
Not to my knowledge.
Unknown said…
QUANTUM - ENTANGLEMENT & TELEPATHY& VIRTUAL REALITY
frontiers on transdisciplinary science & art
Paolo Manzelli , pmanzelli@gmail.com , www.egocreanet.it , www.wbabin.net

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/12/does-dna-have-t.html
Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize in physics in 1935 wrotes about quantum entanglement:
"When two systems ... enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them … they can no longer be described in the same manner as before … by the interaction the two representatives (or wave functions) have become entangled" ( What is Life p. 18).

It’s possible to link together two quantum particles – photons of light or phonons of sound and also atoms , ions or DNA's genes , in an entanglig way , that makes them over the same space-time matrix . The entangling overposition carry out an Quantum state of dense coding, that become identical for all the particles remaining intrigued to the same resonant field. .
Therefore Entanglement generates a no-local dense coding state that would be useful to undestand “entanglement -communication” (or telepathy) through the recent research quantum communication and teleportation. (1) In fact in classical coding, a single photon will convey only one of two messages, or , one bit of information, while in dense coding, a single photon can convey one of four messages, or two Q.bits of information. Besides multi-photons and multi-photons entanglement can produce an new hyper- no-localized space-time and this complex procedure is producing a bidimensional “information energy” (2) ,(3),(4)
Entanglement act to change the traditional structure of spacetime, contracting and expanding distances between objects as the wave passes through the previous locality to a no-local flat system characterizred by two vectors of space an two reverse vectors of time.
Therefore telepathic or simultaneity in communication between two separated particles, is one of the fundamental concepts of entanglement in Quantum Bio-Physics .Then in this line of reasoning it is possible to understand DNA's telepathy (5)

More in general “telepathy”, and “empathy” , respectively are derived from the Greek “tele = distant", and “en = interior” , and “patheia = feeling or phatos” , and are the claimed innate ability of brains to communicate information and emotions from one individual to another in simultaneity, e.g. without the use of extra tools so that without consuming energy. Recent studies on mirror neurons discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma (It) , which confirm the hypothesis that empathy is part to an activity of coupling between genes . (6)
The possible application of telepathy as one kind on entangled mind communication find today the skepticism of the reductionistic mechamical science; in spite of this the ON—NS&A //EGOCREANET reseatch group (www.egocreanet.it) would be discuss and investigate “telepathic phenomena” as a possible aspect of communication between members of insects animal social groups .

Entanglement – at Biological Scale

BIBLIO ON LINE
(1)http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/071404/Teleport_lifts_quantum_computing_071404.html ;
(2) http://www.wbabin.net/science/manzelli11.pdf ;
(3)http://www.wbabin.net/science/manzelli43.pdf
(4)http://www.biosemiotics2006.org/media/pdf/pdf83.pdf,
(5)http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp7112297
(6)http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7189/full/452814a.html

SEARCH FOR PARTNERS

Paolo Manzelli pmanzelli@gmail.com
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