Entangled Minds

Electrocortical activity associated with subjective communication with the deceased Arnaud Delorme (1,2), Julie Beischel (3), Leena Michel (1), Mark Boccuzzi (3), Dean Radin (1) and Paul J. Mills (4) 1  Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, CA, USA 2  Institute of Neural Computation, SCCN, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA 3  Windbridge Institute, Tucson, AZ, USA 4  Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA During advanced meditative practices, unusual perceptions can arise including the sense of receiving information about unknown people who are deceased. As with meditation, this mental state of communication with the deceased involves calming mental chatter and becoming receptive to subtle feelings and sensations. Psychometric and brain electrophysiology data were collected from six individuals who had previously reported accurate information about deceased individuals u...

I've posted a few more articles on my evidence page , including this one: Metaphysics of the tea ceremony : A randomized trial investigating the roles of intention and belief on mood while drinking tea, by Yung-Jong Shiah and myself.  Our objective was to test, under double-blind, randomized conditions, whether drinking tea "treated" solely with good intentions would enhance mood more than drinking the same tea. We used oolong tea. This was a follow-up to an earlier, similar study testing whether intentionally "treated" chocolate would result in improved mood, also under double-blind conditions. Both studies showed that the treated substance resulted in better mood. The latest study also studied the role of expectation to see if it modulated this intentional effect. It did, to a highly significant degree. The bottom line is that if you believe/expect that you are consuming a specially treated substance, that belief alone will strongly influence your mood. B...

Critics are fond of saying that there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student  might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet). In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on  virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast. So I've created a SHOW ME  page with downloadable articles on psi a...

Another reply, April 19, again on the Huffington Post . The latest (April 18, 2013) reaction, an excellent one, on the Huffington Post . The bottom line is that TED has made a tragic strategic mistake. --- Brought to my attention by Craig Weiler. "In this case, the brouhaha started when apparently skeptics by the names of Jerry Coyne and PZ Meyer tried to have a video by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake removed from TED talks because they felt he was unscientific...." See Craig's blog for the full story:  The psi wars come to TED Or here for the TED site discussion , which shows the furor evoked by TED's censorship. Or here for a discussion about this topic on the Daily Grail . Or here for a "big picture" opinion by Craig Weiler . This episode is just another shameful example of the psi taboo at work. It is promulgated by small-minded, loud-mouthed "skeptics" who intimidate editors with bullying tactics. And now this, wh...

My talk at the Electric Universe conference in January 2013

This is an excerpt of an interview I did at the Electric Universe conference in January.

Talk on the paranormal by Prof. Simon Thorpe on January 15, 2013.  Thorpe is the CNRS (French National Research Center) Director of Research for the Brain and Cognition Research Center at the University of Toulouse, France. The material he discusses will not be particularly new for most readers of this blog, but he does an excellent job summarizing some of the psi data.