Entangled Minds

Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments

2012-01-25T19:53:00.000-08:00

Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments

Dean Radin, Leena Michel, Karla Galdamez, Paul Wendland, Robert Rickenbach, and Arnaud Delorme

Physics Essays, in press. Scheduled print publication June 2012.

Abstract

A double-slit optical system was used to test the possible role of consciousness in the collapse of the quantum wavefunction. The ratio of the interference pattern’s double-slit to single-slit spectral power was predicted to decrease when attention was focused towards the double-slit as compared to away. Each test session consisted of 40 counterbalanced attention-towards and attention-away epochs, where each epoch lasted between 15 and 30 seconds. Data contributed by 137 people in six experiments, involving a total of 250 test sessions, indicated that on average the spectral ratio decreased as predicted (z = -4.36, p = 6 x 10^-6). Another 250 control sessions conducted without observers present tested hardware, software, and analytical procedures for potential artifacts; none were identified (z = 0.43, p = 0.67).

Variables including temperature, vibration, and signal drift were also tested, and no spurious influences were identified. By contrast, factors associated with consciousness, such as meditation experience, electrocortical markers of focused attention, and psychological factors including openness and absorption significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double-slit interference pattern. The results appear to be consistent with a consciousness-related interpretation of the quantum measurement problem.

Odd jobs

2012-01-19T20:37:00.000-08:00

A blog listing six unusual psychology jobs, from the World of Psychology web site.

Talk at Aqus Cafe

2011-11-18T14:26:00.000-08:00

This is a streaming video of an informal talk I gave recently at an Irish pub and cafe located near our office in Petaluma, California. The talk itself is about 40 minutes, followed by about an hour of Q&A.

Double slit experiment online

2011-10-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

A beta version of our online double-slit experiment is now ready for testing at http://www.ionsresearch.com/. This experiment tests the role of consciousness in the "collapse" of the quantum wavefunction.

Please note that sometimes the system will not work properly, as we are continuing to work on the server. I am adding a note to the start page to inform users when the system is working or down for development. Our goal is to eventually have it working 24/7.

It takes about 15 minutes to go through the written and video instructions, another few minutes to fill out a survey, and then the test itself lasts about 12 minutes.

This test sends live data from the double-slit system in our lab directly into a Flash client in your web browser. As a result only one person can take the test at any given time. If you login for the test you may find that the server is already in use, but a message should inform you when the test will be available again.

Please note: If your browser has a firewall that prevents incoming data, and/or a java script-blocker, the test may not work properly.

The Symphony of Time - 2011 Science and Nonduality Conference

2011-08-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Video by Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo of Neti Neti Media.

Reality and the Extended Mind - Part 1

2011-08-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

A portion of a film by Adrian Nelson

And now for something completely different

2011-08-18T16:11:00.001-07:00

Handbook of Intuition Research

2011-07-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

Handbook of Intuition Research
Edited by Marta Sinclair, Griffith University, Australia

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary Handbook [soon to be released] showcases the latest intuition research, integrated in a framework that reconciles various views on what intuition is and how it works. The internationally renowned group of contributors presents their findings in five areas. Part I explores different facets of the intuiting process and its outcome, the role of consciousness and affect, and alternative ways of capturing intuition. Part II deals with its function in expertise, strategy, entrepreneurship, and ethics. Part III outlines intuitive decision making in critical occupations, the legal profession, medicine, the film and wine industries, and teaching. Part IV pushes the boundaries of our current understanding by exploring the possibility of non local intuition [my chapter in the book], based on the principles of quantum holography. Part V investigates different ways of developing intuitive skills.

This cutting-edge, comprehensive Handbook will prove essential for academics and research students of the social sciences, particularly management, psychology, sociology, entrepreneurship, leadership, team dynamics, HR and training. It will also be an invaluable resource for industry professionals searching for soft-core methods to increase productivity and creativity/innovation, to improve leadership and organizational climate, or to adopt new staff training and development method.

TO ORDER THIS TITLE, PLEASE CONTACT:
Marston Book Services Limited
160 Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxon OX14 4SD UK
Tel: + 44 1235 465500
Fax: + 44 1235 465555
direct.order@marston.co.uk

FOR FURTHER INFO,
PLEASE CONTACT:
The Sales & Marketing Dept
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham, Glos
GL50 2JA UK
Tel: + 44 1242 226934
Fax: + 44 1242 262111
www.e-elgar.com

Atlantic University Parapsychology Conference in October 2011

2011-07-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Atlantic University Parapsychology Conference

I'll be speaking at this conference along with Julie Beischel from the Windbridge Institute, Ed May of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research, Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, and other notables including Doug Richards, Carlos Alvarado, Christine Simmonds-Moore, Nancy Zingrone, Henry Reed, John Palmer, James Carpenter, Robert Van de Castle, Ginette Nachman, Frank Pasciuti, Loyd Auerbach, David McMillin, and Stephen Braude.

Windbridge Institute recruiting test participants

2011-07-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

Are you interested in receiving a psychic reading as a volunteer in a scientific research study?

The Windbridge Institute (www.windbridge.org) is seeking volunteers to act as psychic research reading recipients who will receive and score psychic readings about themselves. You must be 18 years or older, reside in the US, and have NOT experienced the death of any family members, romantic interests, or close friends during their lives. Individuals who have not lost anyone close to them are being specifically recruited to attempt to prevent deceased "drop-ins" during psychic readings for living participants.

Psychics are not being recruited for this study.

For more information and to complete an online pre-screening questionnaire, please visit:
www.windbridge.org/prrr.html

Fringe-ology

2011-07-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

Fringe-ology is journalist Steve Volk's attempt to reconcile a mysterious ghost story from his childhood with his lifelong, down to earth occupation as a journalist. His solution was to do journalism—to investigate that family ghost story, and other paranormal topics, in the high style of narrative nonfiction. What he found is a great tale that's been relegated to the fringe of our discourse for too long—a story about all of us, a story filled with ghosts, UFOs, maverick scientists, psychics, spoon-benders and the people who love and hate them. More importantly, he found common ground we can all share—a place for skeptics and believers, spiritualists and scientists, to stand together—not at the fringes, but at the heart of what it means to be human.

Live presentiment test on the Discovery Channel

2011-07-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

My colleagues and I appear on an episode of "Through the Wormhole" on the Discovery Science channel. It will be repeated a number of times on the air, it will eventually will be viewable on the Discovery website, and it is available now on YouTube. Note that on YouTube you can find all of the segments of this show, each of which is 10 minutes in length. My piece is in Part 3.

Discovery Science

AAAS Symposium on Quantum Retrocausation

2011-05-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

I just finished my article for this upcoming symposium. Here's the abstract:

Predicting the Unpredictable: 75 Years of Experimental Evidence

Abstract. From time immemorial, people have reported foreknowledge of future events. To determine whether such experiences are best understood via conventional explanations, or whether a retrocausal phenomenon might be involved in some instances, researchers have conducted hundreds of controlled laboratory experiments over the past 75 years. These studies fall into four general classes, and each class has generated repeatable evidence consistent with retrocausation. The statistical results for a class of forced-choice studies is associated with odds against chance of about 10²⁴; for a class of free-response studies, odds about 10²⁰; for psychophysiological-based studies, odds about 10¹⁷; and for implicit decision studies, odds about 10¹⁰. Effect sizes observed in the latter three classes are nearly identical, indicating replication of similar underlying effects. These effects are also in close agreement with the average effect size observed across thousands of conventional psychological experiments, suggesting that retrocausal phenomena may not be especially unique, at least not in terms of commonly observed psychological phenomena. Bayesian analyses of the most recent classes of experiments confirm that the evidence is strongly in favor of a genuine effect, with Bayes Factors ranging from 13,669 to 1 for implicit decision experiments, to 2.9 x 10¹³ to 1 for psychophysiological designs. For the two most recent classes of studies examining retrocausal effects via unconscious physiological or behavioral measures, 73 of 82 studies (89%) reported by 23 different laboratories from the United States, Italy, Spain, Holland, Austria, Sweden, England, Scotland, Iran, Japan, and Australia, have produced results in the direction predicted by a retrocausal effect (odds against chance = 1.5 x 10¹³, via a sign test). Assessment of the methodologies used in these studies has not identified plausible conventional alternatives for the observed outcomes, suggesting the existence of a genuine retrocausal phenomenon.

Psi Debate at Harvard

2011-04-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

On retrocausation, with Daryl Bem, Jonathan Schooler, and Sam Moulton.

Thanks to MickeyD for mentioning this video.

SSE Meeting June 9 - 11, 2011

2011-04-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

SOCIETY FOR SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION
30th Annual Meeting, Boulder, Colorado
9-11 June 2011
www.scientificexploration.org

Program Committee: Bill Bengston, Chair, Dick Blasband, Courtney Brown, Adam Curry, Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn, Dominique Surel. Local Arrangements: Dominique Surel

WEDNESDAY EVENING, June 8 - Millennium Hotel Gardens, Boulder, Colorado

6:00 pm - Opening Reception and Registration. Poster set-up

THURSDAY MORNING, June 9 - Ballroom
Theme I: IMPLICATIONS OF NON-LOCALITY

9:00 Welcome and Introductions

9:10 Pamela Rae Heath, Diverse Perspectives: What Distant Healing, Remote Viewing, and the Afterlife Suggest about Non-Locality

9:50 Jane Katra, After Death Communication Involving the Ongoing Work of Two Bonded Parapsychologist Healers

10:10 Walter Semkiw, Advances in Reincarnation Research: A Tribute to Ian Stevenson

10:30 Gary Schwartz, Photonic Measurement of Apparent Presence of Spirit using a Computer Automated System

10:50 BREAK

11:10 Larry Dossey, Precognition As Preventive Medicine

11:50 Julie Beischel, Michael Biuso, Mark Boccuzzi, Adam Rock, Anomalous Information Reception by Research Mediums under Quintiple-Blind Conditions: Can the Mind Exist without the Body?

12:10 Chuck Lear, The Bell Inequality and Non-Local Causality (sponsored by Dean Radin)

12:30 LUNCH BREAK - Young Investigators' Meeting

THURSDAY AFTERNOON - Ballroom
Theme II: THE SCIENCE OF THE SUBJECTIVE

2:00 Robert Jahn & Brenda Dunne, Towards a Science of the Subjective

2:40 Mark Boccuzzi, Three Methods for Examining Experimenter Effects in Investigations of Psychokinesis (sponsored by Julie Beischel)

3:00 Maria Syldona, Science of Subjectivity – Key to understanding the nature of Reality

3:20 BREAK

3:40 Dean Radin, Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments

4:20 York Dobyns, Using Parapsychology to Test Fundamental Physics

4:40 J. Kenneth Arnette, Subjectivity is Constitutive: Consciousness is to Energy as Energy is to Matter

5:00 Bernard Haisch, Is There a Consciousness Underlying the Universe?

5:20 Dan Ward, Planetary Geometry

5:40 BUSINESS MEETING

FRIDAY MORNING, June 10th - Ballroom
Theme III: CONSCIOUSNESS AND LIVING SYSTEMS

9:00 Announcements

9:10 Larissa Cheran, Beyond Quantum: Consciousness in Action

9:50 Richard Shoup, How Consciousness is Like Las Vegas - and Where the Real Focus Should Be

10:10 Igor Dolgov, Self Organized Design: The Mechanism Behind Mindless, Yet Intelligent Natural Selection

10:30 BREAK

10:50 Bill Bengston, Healing with Intent: Some Reflections on Cancer Experiments on Laboratory Mice

11:10 Samuel Sandweiss, A Case Presentation about the Nature of Consciousness

11:30 Carl Medwedeff, Chemical Biology in Radionics and Healing (sponsored by Erik Schultes)

FIELD TRIP – RED ROCKS PARK

12:30 - Bus departs at 12:30 sharp
Pre-ordered lunch to be picked-up in lobby before boarding the bus

4:00 Bus leaves Red Rocks to return to Hotel (arrive around 5pm)

5pm – 7:30 Free time for dinner

FRIDAY EVENING - Ballroom
CONSCIOUSNESS, Part II

7:30 Rollin McCraty, Coherence: Bridging Personal, Social and Global Systems Health

8:10 Roger Nelson, Similarities of Global and Individual Consciousness

8:30 Garret Moddel, Zixu, Zhu, Adam Curry, Machine Consciousness: Experimental Evidence

8:50 Glen Rein, Bio-Information and Non-Local Distant Interactions between Biological Systems

SATURDAY MORNING, JUNE 11th - Ballroom
Theme IV: PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF ANOMALIES RESEARCH

9:00 Announcements

9:10 John McMichael, Resonant Molecular Signaling: From Theory to Practice

9:50 Joie Jones, Yury Kronn, Experiments on the Effects of Subtle Energy on the Electro-Magnetic Field: Is Subtle Energy the 5th Force of the Universe?

10:10 Marsha Adams, Do Atmospheric Aberrations Precede Seismic Activity?

10:30 Dale Graff, Precognition and Synchronicity: Implications for Safety and Survival

10:50 BREAK

11:10 Francesca McCartney, Energy Medicine University: Education at the Frontier of Science

11:50 Dominique Surel, Transformational Effects of Remote Viewing

12:10 Alexis Champion, Remote Viewing Software: The Key to Profitability

12:30 LUNCH BREAK

SATURDAY AFTERNOON – Century Room 1st Floor

Theme IV: PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS (CONTINUED)

2:00 Courtney Brown, The Creation of the Asteroid Belt: Using Remote-Viewing Data to Investigate the Exploding Planet Hypothesis

2:20 John MacLean, Premonitions and other Psi in Reliability Engineering

2:40 John Alexander, Signal to Noise: A Fundamental Problem for Phenomenology

Theme V: THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION

3:00 Jonathan Schooler, The Decline Effect: Exploring Why Effects Sizes often Decline Following Repeated Replications

3:40 Henry Bauer, From Dawn to Decadence: The Evolution of Modern Science

4:00 BREAK

4:20 Ron Westrum, Closed Minds and Battered Kids: How Science Resists Knowledge of Anomalies

4:40 Claude Swanson, Dark Matter, Torsion and ESP Reception

5:00 Alexander Trofimov, Kozyrev’s “Remote Viewing” of the Universe

5:20 Walter Cruttenden, The Cosmic Influence: A Framework for Epochal Changes in Consciousness

CLOSING BANQUET
6:15 - Cocktails

7:00 – Dinner

8:00 - Panel Discussion on Future Directions for the SSE – panelists to be announced.

Then and now

2011-04-17T16:56:00.000-07:00

THEN: This video is from a TV program on the physics of mind-matter interaction, shown in the UK in the early 1980s. The interviewer's conclusion:

"I think a scientist would have to be massively ignorant, or a confirmed bigot, to deny the evidence that the mind can make connections through space, time and matter in ways which probably have nothing to do with the ordinary senses. And also that he would find it difficult to deny that these strange effects are compatible with current thinking in physics, and may in the future become part of an extended science, in which they're no longer regarded as paranormal, but as normal."

(Video uploaded by Brian Josephson.)

NOW: This is a talk by Rupert Sheldrake at Cambridge University on February 9, 2011 . (Also uploaded courtesy Brian Josephson.)

For the oi vey files

2011-03-09T11:08:00.000-08:00

Here is an example of a presumably well-meaning but in reality a horrendously ironic example of how mainstream academia regards psi research. Horrendous because it is aimed at science educators and students, so one would hope that the information is correct (it isn't), and ironic because it does indeed reveal how science really works, as their tag line proclaims, but probably not in the way that they intended.

The website "was produced by the UC Museum of Paleontology of the University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with a diverse group of scientists and teachers, and was funded by the National Science Foundation.^" It is not simply that the information is at least a half-century out of date, but to add insult to injury it cites a single article which is known to be flawed in support of its conclusion!

The unintended educational point is that the way science aspires to work is not the way it actually works, but unfortunately anyone visiting that website and just accepting the information at face value would never learn that valuable lesson.

Wagenmakers-Bem: Round 3

2011-02-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Continuing what may turn into a 12-round prize fight, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers was kind enough to send me a link to his team's response to the Bem, Utts & Johnson reply:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/ClarificationsForBemUttsJohnson.pdf

Bem et al reply to Wagenmakers et al

2011-02-14T12:01:00.000-08:00

Daryl Bem, Jessica Utts, and Wes Johnson have written a reply to the Wagenmakers et al Bayesian analysis of Bem's precognition experiments. You can download it from here. It explains why Wagenmakers et al's conclusion of a null effect is, well, just plain wrong.

Utts and Johnson are statistics professors at U C Irvine. Both are authors of popular statistics textbooks, including one on Bayesian methods.

In general, if Bayesian and frequentist methods lead to wildly different conclusions about the same underlying dataset, then something is out of whack. In most cases one likely reason is that the Bayesian enthusiast has selected impossibly low Bayesian priors. Bem, Utts and Johnson clearly show that this was the case for Wagenmaker's article, and that a more reasonable choice of priors leads to strong evidence in favor of precognition.

Telephone telepathy experiment

2011-01-30T14:03:00.000-08:00

Rupert Sheldrake's telephone telepathy experiment is now available in the US at this website.

I haven't tried it yet but I will be signing up shortly.

Psi Fi

2011-01-26T15:50:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent article. I think I've written previously about Jeff Kripal's book, Authors of the Impossible. I've thought for years that someone needed to write this book, and I was reluctantly beginning to think that I might have to do it because it didn't seem to be on the academic radar. Fortunately, Jeff beat me to it, and I'm very glad because he did a thoroughly masterful job and now I can tick this off my to-do list.

My comments on Alcock's comments on Bem's precognition article

2010-12-03T21:36:00.000-08:00

The Skeptical Inquirer (online version) has published a commentary on Daryl Bem's precognition research, written by dedicated skeptic James Alcock. The same story has also bubbled up to the attention of the mainstream media, including the New York Times and NPR. Some of the op-eds border on the hysterical. Others are more rational.

An example of the hysterical type includes Alcock's article. I will not address his critique of Bem's procedure (Bem does that calmly and effectively, hurting Alcock's feelings in the process), but I will comment on his preamble, which I reproduce here in indented blue text.

Parapsychology has long struggled unsuccessfully for acceptance in the halls of science. Could this article be the breakthrough? After all, it apparently provides evidence compelling enough to persuade the editors of that APA journal of its worthiness. However, this is hardly the first time that there has been media excitement about new "scientific" evidence of the paranormal. Over the past 80-odd years, this drama has played out a number of times, and each time, parapsychologists ultimately failed to persuade the scientific world that their phenomena actually exist. Recalling George Santayana’s now-clichéd dictum, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we should approach Bem’s work with a historical framework to guide us. Consider the following:

DR: One reason for this failure are myths about psi research that are incessantly repeated by skeptics whose Bayesian priors are so close to zero that is it virtually impossible for any new evidence to sway their original beliefs. The strategy of repeating the same talking points ad nauseum is effective because most listeners eventually absorb those words as though they are true. A genuine skeptic would wonder if the critique offered by Alcock is backed up by solid facts. After doing some homework, he or she would eventually discover that most of it isn't.

In 1934, Joseph Banks Rhine published Extra-sensory perception (Rhine & McDougall, 1934/2003), summarizing his careful efforts to bring parapsychology into the laboratory through application of modern psychological methodology and statistical analysis. Based on a long series of card-guessing experiments, he wrote: "It is independently established on the basis of this work alone that Extra-Sensory Perception is an actual and demonstrable occurrence.” (p. 210).

Elsewhere, he wrote: "We have then, for physical science, a challenging need for the discovery of the energy mode involved. Some type of energy is inferable and none is known to be acceptable….” (p.166)

Despite Rhine’s confidence that he had established the reality of extrasensory perception, he had not done so. Methodological problems eventually came to light, and as a result, parapsychologists no longer run card-guessing studies, and rarely even refer to Rhine’s work.

Is this conclusion sound? No. In Rhine's 1940 book, Extra-Sensory Perception After 60 Years, which refers to the period 1880 to 1940 (the authors were Pratt, Rhine, Smith and Stuart), Rhine et al discussed in great detail every critique their work had received and how potential design and analytical loopholes were addressed in subsequent experiments. They also listed all known replications of their card guessing method. This volume makes it clear that Rhine and his colleagues were as methodologically sophisticated and as hard nosed as their harshest critics, and that their data -- when viewed under the most critical light available at the time -- withstood those critiques.

One key reason why Rhine's work failed to sustain the initial excitement it had generated in the 1930s was the rise of behaviorism in academic psychology. Within that paradigm, not only was ESP considered to be flatly impossible, but any form of subjective experience, including conscious awareness, became forbidden topics. The reason few researchers today use ESP cards is not because the method was flawed, but because better methods were developed. Like any other area of research, methods and ideas naturally evolve and build upon the work of previous generations.

Physicist Helmut Schmidt conducted numerous studies throughout the 1970s and 1980s that putatively demonstrated that humans (and animals) could paranormally influence and/or predict the output of random event generators. Some of his claims were truly extraordinary – for example, that a cat in a cold garden shed, heated only by a lamp controlled by a random event generator, was able through psychokinetic manipulation of the random event generator to turn the lamp on more often than would be expected by chance. His claim to have put psi on a solid scientific footing garnered considerable attention, and his published research reported very impressive p-values. In my own extensive review of his work (Alcock, 1988), I concluded that Schmidt had indeed accumulated impressive evidence that something other than chance was involved. However, I found serious methodological errors throughout his work that rendered his conclusions untenable, and the “something other than chance” was attributable to methodological flaws.

As with Rhine, excitement about Schmidt's research gradually dwindled to the point that his work became virtually irrelevant, even within parapsychology itself.

Accusations of "serious methodological errors" provide an easy justification for dismissing this remarkable body of work. But is it really true that such errors made Schmidt's work irrelevant, or that other researchers did not follow up his work? No. Hundreds of studies involving random number generators were published after Schmidt's studies, and meta-analyses of those experiments have been published and debated in mainstream physics and psychology journals. Schmidt's work inspired dozens of researchers to replicate and extend his work, and it continues to do so today in research programs like the Global Consciousness Project. His work has also spawned several psi-related patents.

The 1970s gave rise to "remote viewing,” a procedure through which an individual seated in a laboratory could supposedly receive psychic impressions of a remote location being visited by someone else. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff claimed that their series of remote viewing studies demonstrated the reality of psi. This attracted huge media attention, and their dramatic findings (Targ & Puthoff, 1974) were published in Nature, one of the world's top scientific journals. At first, their methodology seemed unassailable, but years later, when more detailed information became available, it became obvious that there were fundamental flaws in their procedure that could readily account for their sensational findings. When other researchers repeated their procedure with the flaws intact, significant results were obtained; with flaws removed, outcomes were not significant (Marks & Kamman, 1978; 1980).

Add Targ and Puthoff to the list of “breakthrough” researchers whose work is now all but forgotten.

Did supposed flaws adequately account for the results of remote viewing studies? No. Were those study designs abandoned? No. Did skeptics like Ray Hyman, who reviewed a small subset of the SRI/SAIC remote viewing studies for the CIA, conclude that the studies were flawed? No. Did this research paradigm, which was an updated version of picture-drawing techniques developed a half-century earlier, disappear? No.

Targ and Puthoff, and later Ed May and colleagues, continued not only to conduct substantial research on remote viewing, but it proved to be so useful for gathering information in a unique way that it was ultimately used for thousands of operational missions by the DoD. Some portions of the history of the formerly secret Stargate program (and other projects with different code names) is in the public domain now, so it is not necessary to go into that here. Suffice it to say that those research programs were very carefully monitored by skeptical scientific oversight committees who continued to recommend funding for over two decades (as long as the program remained secret).

In 1979, Robert Jahn, then Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research unit to study putative paranormal phenomena such as psychokinesis. Like Schmidt, he was particularly interested in the possibility that people can predict and/or influence purely random subatomic processes. Given his superb academic and scientific credentials, his claims of success drew particular attention within the scientific community. When his laboratory closed in 1970, Jahn concluded that: “Over the laboratory's 28-year history, thousands of such experiments, involving many millions of trials, were performed by several hundred operators. The observed effects were usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they compounded to highly significant statistical deviations from chance expectations. ³”

However, parapsychologists themselves were amongst the most severe critics of his work, and their criticisms were in line with my own (Alcock, 1988). More important, several replication attempts have been unsuccessful (e.g., Jeffers, 2003, including a large-scale international effort led by Jahn himself (Jahn et al, 2000).

One more name for the failed-breakthrough list.

Other than the flub about a lab closing in 1970 that opened in 1979, again we see a cavalier dismissal of decades of research, implying that the work was systematically sloppy or methodologically naive or both. Nothing can be further from the truth. I was at Princeton for three years and spent enough time in the PEAR Lab to know that the research conducted there was as rigorously vetted and executed as any scientific project you will find anywhere. There weren't just "several replications." There were hundreds. The PEAR Lab's RNG research was a replication and extension of Helmut Schmidt's studies, and their remote perception research was a replication and extension of the SRI/SAIC remote viewing research. PEAR successfully and independently replicated both of those study designs. Even Jeffers, who Alcock cites to suggest that the PEAR RNG work could not be replicated, was later involved in a successful RNG experiment.

Do parapsychologists criticize each others' work? Of course they do. As in any scientific discipline, those who know the most are also the most qualified to provide critiques. This is healthy for advancing any field and for refining methods and interpretations, and such debates can be found in all areas of science and scholarship. It does not mean that colleagues are suggesting a wholesale dismissal of the evidence, as devout Skeptics are wont to do.

In the1970s, the Ganzfeld, a concept borrowed from contemporaneous psychological research into the effects of sensory deprivation, was brought into parapsychological research. Parapsychologists reasoned that psi influences may be so subtle that they are normally drowned out by information carried through normal sensory channels. Perhaps if a participant were in a situation relatively free of normal stimulation, then extrasensory information would have a better opportunity to be recognized. The late Charles Honorton carried out a large number of Ganzfeld studies, and claimed that his meta-analysis of such work substantiated the reality of psi. Hyman (1985) carried out a parallel meta-analysis which contradicted that conclusion. Hyman and Honorton (1986) subsequently published a "Joint Communiqué" in which they agreed that the Ganzfeld results were not likely to be due to chance, but that replication involving more rigorous standards was essential before final conclusions could be drawn.

Daryl Bem subsequently published an overview of Ganzfeld research in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin (Bem & Honorton, 1994), claiming that the accumulated data were clear evidence of the reality of paranormal phenomena. That effort failed to convince, in part because a number of meta-analyses have been carried out since, with contradictory results (e.g., Bem, Palmer & Broughton, 2001, Milton & Wiseman, 1999). Recently, the issue was raised again in the pages of Psychological Bulletin, with papers from Storm et al (2010) and Hyman (2010). While the former argued that their meta-analyses demonstrate paranormal influences, Hyman pointed to serious shortcomings in their analysis, and reminded us that the Ganzfeld procedure has failed to yield data that are capable of being replicated by neutral scientists.

Because of the lack of clear and replicable evidence, the Ganzfeld procedure has not lived up to the promise of providing the long-sought breakthrough that would lead to acceptance by mainstream science.

Add Honorton (and Bem first-time-around) to the list.

Yes, Honorton and Hyman agreed that the results available in 1986 were not due to chance, and that confirmations with new data would be required to be persuasive. Honorton subsequently provided this successful prospective replication, and Bem and Honorton published it in 1993. That should be the end of the skeptical story.

But now we learn that the successful replication was in fact not persuasive because of publications that appeared six years later that presented "contradictory" results. Besides the retrocausal reason for dismissing a successful replication, is it really true that the meta-analyses were contradictory, or that avowed skeptics cannot successfully replicate the effect? No. Neither claim is true. The Milton & Wiseman (1999) analysis was flawed because it used unweighted statistics. When proper methods, based on a simple hit/miss count, are employed, that meta-analysis produces a statistically significant positive outcome. In fact, of the half-dozen meta-analyses of the ganzfeld database published to date, every single one is significantly positive (this is discussed in the online journal NeuroQuantology in an article by Tressoldi, Storm and Radin [Dec 2010, Vol 8 (4]). So rather than being contradictory, the existing ganzfeld database is actually completely consistent. In addition, skeptics have successfully repeated the ganzfeld experiment (it's not obvious from that article's abstract, but it is described in the paper itself).

What is the lesson from this history? It is that one should give pause when presented with new claims of impressive evidence for psi. Early excitement is often misleading, and as Ray Hyman has pointed out, it often takes up to 10 years before the shortcomings of a new approach in parapsychological research become evident.

In other words, Alcock suggests that we don't need to pay attention to new experimental data because it will probably, eventually, be shown to be flawed in some way. If promissory dismissals were regularly applied to any other area of science, everything would come to a grinding halt. No new findings would ever appear in any domain, because research methods are evolving and today's data and analyses are never going to be as good as tomorrow's.

One must also keep in mind that even the best statistical evidence cannot speak to the causes of observed statistical departures. Statistical deviations do not favour arbitrary pet hypotheses, and statistical evidence cited in support of psi could as easily support other hypotheses as well. For example, if one conducted a parapsychological experiment while praying for above-chance scoring, statistically significant outcomes could be taken as evidence for the power of prayer just as readily as for the existence of psi.

Yes, there can be many interpretations of experimental results. It is the investigators' job to devise methods that as clearly as possible distinguish between possible explanations. In any case, it is not necessary to have an explanation for observed results. If it were necessary then science would never had advanced. The moment theory is allowed to trump observations, science will collapse into a dogmatic religion.

Another key consideration: Parapsychology’s putative phenomena are all negatively defined – to claim that psi has been detected, all possible normal influences must be ruled out. However, one can never be certain that all normal influences have been eliminated; the reader of a research report has only the experimenter’s word for it.

This brings us to a related concern. Research reports involve an implicit social contract between experimenter and audience. The reader can only evaluate what has been put into print, and must presume that the researcher has followed the best practices of good research. We assume that the participants did actually participate and that they were not allowed to use their cellular telephones during the experiment, or to chat with other participants. We assume that they were effectively shielded from cues that might have inappropriately influenced their responses. We assume that the data were as reported, that none were thrown out because they did not suit the experimenter, and that they were analyzed appropriately and in the manner indicated. We assume that equipment functioned as described, and that precautions reported in the experimental procedure were carefully followed. We take for granted that the researcher set out to test particular hypotheses, and did not choose the hypotheses after looking at the data. We must take all this on faith, for otherwise, any research publication might simply be approached as a blend of fact, fantasy, skill, and error, possibly reflecting little other than the predilections of the researcher. Obvious methodological or analytical sloppiness indicates that the implicit social contract has been violated and that we can no longer have confidence that the researcher followed best practices and minimized personal bias. As Gardner (1977) wrote, when one finds that the chemist began with dirty test tubes, one can have no confidence in the chemist's findings, and one must wonder about other, as yet undetected, contamination. So, when considering the present research, we need not only to look at the data, but, following the metaphor, we need to assess whether Bem used clean test tubes.

This implies that it is possible to devise a perfect experiment. The clean test tube metaphor is a nice ideal, but in the real world there is no such thing. Nevertheless the ideal always gives the critic a convenient reason to dismiss any result that he or she prefers to disbelieve. If no actual flaw can be found, then one can always raise suspicions, or propose implausible scenarios that never actually occurred, or if all that fails, then they can just default to the catch-all criticism, "let's wait 10 years before we accept this result because by then someone will surely find something amiss."

In sum, Alcock has been an enthusiastic and effective defender of the skeptical faith for decades. His critiques are predictable and at first blush they may even seem reasonable, especially to those who aren't familiar with the research literature in question. But when you do know that literature, the arguments fall apart.

For a recent book that goes into the proponent/skeptic debate in some detail, including more of Alcock's critiques and my responses, I recommend this book:

Survival of the Godliest

2010-11-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

Image source: here

I don't often cite articles, especially ones that are about religion, but this one I find fascinating. For those of us who pay attention to future possibilities, this could be a harbinger of a coming sea-change in the centuries-long tensions between science and religion. And in this scenario science doesn't win.

This blog article caught my eye because if we were living in a rational world one might imagine that support for the scientific study of unusual human experiences, including psi and mystical epiphanies, would be strongest among secular humanists, whose faith is in science (sort of). Unfortunately this is not the case, at least not among those who most vigorously wave the banner of secular humanism and proudly call themselves as "skeptics." They tend to view parapsychology as an illegitimate use of science to support religious beliefs. This is not true and never has been. But that's what they believe.

Religious people, by contrast, seem to split into two major groups. The ultra fundamentalists don't care about science at all, and they regard psi research as "testing" God. So they would like parapsychology, as well as many other things of the modern world, to just go away. More moderate theists are interested in seeing whether science can validate some of the tenets of their faith.

If the trend identified by the article continues, what will the world of the future look like? Mad Max? Logan's Run? The New Inquisition?

Wiseman - Bem exchange on "Feeling the Future"

2010-11-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

Skeptical psychologist Richard Wiseman posted a critique of Daryl Bem's article, "Feeling the Future," which I've mentioned before on this blog. I won't repeat Wiseman's critique here, but the upshot of it is that in two of the experiments the investigator had the opportunity to correct subjects' misspellings of recalled words, and that, according to Wiseman, "This procedure presented an opportunity for subjective bias [by the experimenter] to enter the scoring system...."

This is a valid critique. Blind judging is preferred to avoid the possibility of such bias, and readers of the journal article would not have any way of judging whether the proposed biases actually occurred.

Bem provided this response to Wiseman (slightly edited by me for clarity):

This is a response to Richard (Wiseman’s) concern about the ability of the experimenter to correct misspelled words while being able to observe which corrections will help the psi hypothesis (because the misspelled word is a practice word) or work against the psi hypothesis. This is a legitimate concern and I will modify the database so that that the category information is not available to the experimenter when he or she makes spelling corrections.

The program that runs the experiment automatically calculates the results of the session, ignoring all words it doesn’t recognize as literal copies of the test words. This analysis is also transferred to the database, which is set up so that the experimenter cannot change it or any of the original words as typed by the participant. Any changes made by the experimenter in the database are explicitly shown as changes, and a security check flags records in which the experimenter has corrected any of the original words. In other words, there is a complete record of the original data that cannot be altered. As an additional check, the critical data appear in the output file in both unencrypted and encrypted form, and only I know the encryption formula. If anything is changed in the output, the security flag in the database will read “False.”

Any experimenter who wishes can simply ignore the option to correct misspellings. It will make little difference to the results, as the following shows.

My two experiments included 150 participants, who recalled a total of 2,920 words, of which 45 (1.5%) were misspelled. 23 of those were practice words and 22 of those words were non-practice control words, for a net “gain” of one word for the psi hypothesis. Here are the results reported in my article (in which I corrected misspelled words) compared with the original program-calculated results (which ignores all unrecognized words). The score is a Differential Recall% score, which can range from -100% to +100%, with scores > 0 being in the “psi-predicted” direction.

Experiment 8:
Corrected DR% score = 2.27%, t(99) = 1.91, p = .029, d = .19
Uncorrected DR% score = 2.29%, t(99) = 1.95, p = .027, d = .20

Stimulus Seekers: Corrected DR% = 6.46%, t(42) = 3.76, p = .0003, d = .57
Uncorrected DR% = 6.50%, t(42) = 3.91, p = .0002, d = .60

Experiment 9:
Corrected DR% = 4.21%, t(49) = 2.96, p = .002, d = .42
Uncorrected DR% = 4.05%, t(49) = 2.86, p = .003, d = .40

As can be seen, Experiment 8 is trivially hurt by the corrections; Experiment 9 is trivially helped.

Additional observations: Half of the words used in this experiment are common words, as determined by “Frequency Analysis of English Usage” by Francis and Kucera (e.g., apple, doctor) and half are uncommon (e.g., gorilla, rabbi) Although Richard uses "CTT" and "CAT" as examples to illustrate the ambiguity of correcting misspellings, in fact only a few different words were misspelled by anyone, and they are among the uncommon words or commonly misspelled words in the list (e.g., potatoe for potato). So, Richard’s hypothetical example, notwithstanding, in practice the correction of misspelled words is actually very straightforward and unambiguous. “Intrusions,” i.e. words that aren’t in the original list, are also very easy to spot. (I can furnish the list to whoever wants to try a blind correction exercise, but I don’t want to publish it here lest it ruin future participants.)

We see here one of the strengths of science in action. Sometimes a potential flaw turns out to be a show-stopper. Sometimes it doesn't. In this case, it doesn't.

Recent interviews

2010-11-16T20:41:00.000-08:00

At this page you'll find a series of recorded interviews on the Essentials of Noetic Sciences, including episodes where I interview Daryl Bem about his new retrocausal experiments, Bruce Greyson on NDEs, and Rupert Sheldrake on his latest research.

I'm a skeptic video

2010-11-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

By Dan Drasin

Extrasensory Perception and Quantum Models of Cognition

2010-10-21T11:16:00.001-07:00

By Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Lance Storm, & Dean Radin.

The possibility that information can be acquired at a distance without the use of the ordinary senses, that is by “extrasensory perception” (ESP), is not easily accommodated by conventional neuroscientific assumptions or by traditional theories underlying our understanding of perception and cognition. The lack of theoretical support has marginalized the study of ESP, but experiments investigating these phenomena have been conducted since the mid‐19th century, and the empirical database has been slowly accumulating. Today, using modern experimental methods and meta‐analytical techniques, a persuasive case can be made that, neuroscience assumptions notwithstanding, ESP does exist. We justify this conclusion through discussion of one class of homogeneous experiments reported in 108 publications and conducted from 1974 through 2008 by laboratories around the world. Subsets of these data have been subjected to six meta‐analyses, and each shows significantly positive effects. The overall results now provide unambiguous evidence for an independently repeatable ESP effect. This indicates that traditional cognitive and neuroscience models, which are largely based on classical physical concepts, are incomplete. We speculate that more comprehensive models will require new principles based on a more comprehensive physics. The current candidate is quantum mechanics.

The full paper is available at the online journal NeuroQuantology.

Retrocausation in Psychology Today

2010-10-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

This article in Psychology Today reports on Daryl Bem's new experiment on retrocausal effects (available on his website), in press in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. There are a few gaffs in the PT article, but overall it's quite positive.

Ganzfeld telepathy example 3

2010-10-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

Another ganzfeld telepathy example with Gail and Ray. In this one Ray is the receiver.

Here is the transcript of what Ray said during the 10 minute sending period:

- - -
See a dark background. Colorful images. Very still. I feel outside. Air. Natural elements. Very, very clear, like sky. Something soft and football shaped. Orange-y, orange-y, light orange shape. I hear children. Maybe feathers, did I see feathers? Still see the dark background. Oval shape, oval shape. Images. Images on a background. Images on a dark background. Orange. Orange-y color. Air. Elements. Outdoors.

- - -

Can you guess the target that Gail was sending? When Ray viewed the four images he immediately selected the correct target with high confidence. What this shows is that the words that Ray chose to describe his mental impressions were accurate, but they didn't quite capture his actual experience. That experience allowed him to, as he put it, "bet money" that his selection was correct. And he would have won that bet.

Ganzfeld telepathy example 2

2010-10-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

This ganzfeld telepathy test was conducted with Gail and her friend Ray, on September 27th.

This is the target pool. One of these images was being sent by Ray, from a distance. Neither Ray nor Gail knew anything in advance about the composition of the pool, and Ray selected one of these four pictures randomly with a tossed die.

What follows is the transcript of Gail's spoken impressions during the sending period, which lasted about 10 minutes:

- - -

I see an image of Ray when he jumped off the waterfall in Hawaii. Green. Swaying. I feel like I'm swaying. Palm Trees. Motion. I keep feeling like a lot of motion. Something solid and rectangular. Alive. Kinda...Jungle-y. Now my image changed to sort of like a port, but I feel like it's an analytical overlay. We were just talking about shipping so I'm not sure, all of a sudden I felt like I was at a port,
or a busy place or... Somewhere that felt like by, with water and industry. Hot.

Ray?! [At this point Gail felt that Ray's attention was wandering.]

Continuing with images of water or when I say like a sway or a wave, or some kinda flowing in and out feeling. I feel blues and whites. I'm not sure why I'm seeing an image of a stick of butter. But just that same shape again where I'm seeing a long, oblong... Before I felt like the oblong shape was standing upward and now I'm seeing it more like a train, you know, like a long train kind of a shape.

I'm hearing flower essence in my mind, flower essence. I see sort of a green leathery leaf. I guess I would draw a shape to go with that. A happy feeling.

Now all of a sudden, I just saw, I don't know, a metal structure, you know, like intricacies of a metal structure, that you would see like in an Eiffel Tower or a bridge or some sort of intertwining metal things. Repeated design, or repeated. I'm not sure.

I just saw some horses galloping by, again, the same thing about swift. Something about just the mane blowing in the wind, or the hair. Something about the swift and swaying feeling of motion. I seem to be traveling from a tropical feeling to a sort of a farm feeling. Seems kinda busy. I still have to go back to my rectangular oblong shape. I don't know if stick-of-butter yellow has something to do with the color. Hands ... keep feeling like I'm holding something.

- - -

After the sending period, when Gail was trying to match her impressions to the target, she immediately rejected two of the pictures and kept vacillating between the actual target and one of the decoys. She first selected the target, then changed her mind, and went back and forth several times, ending up by selecting the decoy.

Can you guess which picture was the target that Ray was sending?

Ganzfeld telepathy example

2010-09-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here's an example of data collected in a ganzfeld telepathy test session. This was conducted in our lab on September 10, 2010. My friend Gail was the receiver in this test; her friend Tom was the sender. This is Gail being prepped for exposure to the ganzfeld condition.

While Gail was going through a relaxation exercise, I led Tom to a distant location a floor above the lab and on the other side of the building. Once there, I gave him four opaque black envelopes, each of which had been prepared with a color photo inside, and then the four envelopes were thoroughly shuffled. Of course, neither Tom or Gail had any idea what those images might be. I gave Tom a die and asked him to toss it to get a random number 1 through 4. He did, and the photo inside that envelope became his target.

Tom then examined the photo and attempted to send it to Gail. Here is what Gail said during the 20 minute sending period, while under the Ganzfeld stimulation and listening to white noise played over headphones. Each sentence below is a continuous statement. The breaks between sentences indicate long pauses:

Keep feeling like looking up at tall, I'm looking up at something tall.

Something about texture. Texture.

I feel like something has a rough texture.

Tall, very tall impression, looking up high.

Feel as if I'm walking around observing something, like when you would walk in an art gallery or in a museum and you would look at something.

Wow.

First I'm feeling like tall trees, and then I'm feeling like tall building.

And then I'm like a Yosemite kind of image of a tall rock or a tall, some kind of a very tall solid stone something.

Seeing browns and grays

Something like a feeling of walking around, looking up and being in awe, in awe of something.

Monolithic or I don't know what the word is.

I'm getting images of Mount Rushmore, I know you're not supposed to say things [Gail was asked to avoid naming her impressions, as naming is known to often pull impressions into word-association fantasies].

Half-dome, like just a big stone.

I sort of feel like I'm walking around in a picture, and I'm giving my hand and we're climbing up ...

or something about going up, there's ....

It seems like there's also some kind of a round tall cylinder, and, something long and gray on the right.

Water fountain.

Stone.

At first I felt very much like I was in a nature, forest type of setting, ... and now I'm feeling more

something about a, like

a plaza

These are the four images in the target pool. Can you guess which one was the target?

Told you so

2010-09-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

"A series of quantum experiments shows that measurements performed in the future can influence the present." Read the article in Discover magazine.

Those of us conducting and publishing experiments in presentiment and precognition have been empirically demonstrating varieties of retrocausation for decades.

I look forward to the day when prejudices decline to the point that we don't have to wait for a few physicists to seriously entertain a topic before popular science editors feel comfortable enough to report on well established empirical effects.

Feeling the future

2010-09-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Daryl Bem's article, "Feeling the future," is now in press in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, an American Psychological Association high impact journal. You can download a preprint of the article from here.

Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect

Daryl J. Bem

Cornell University

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was .21, and all but one of them yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of .42. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi
are also discussed.

Cover story

2010-08-27T16:43:00.001-07:00

I'm the cover story for the North Bay Bohemian (the name seems appropriate for Northern California) newspaper. If you go here you can read the entire newspaper online, but I think this link will only last for one week.

How to win a million dollars

2010-08-02T11:29:00.001-07:00

Let's say we want to win a million dollar prize for rigorously demonstrating something psychic in a scientifically acceptable way.

One of the best candidates at present is the ganzfeld telepathy experiment. In this study two people are isolated, one is given the job of the "sender," the other the "receiver." The receiver is placed into a mild, unpatterned sensory stimulation condition called the ganzfeld, which produces a dream-like, hypnagogic state. In this state the receiver is asked to verbally report any impressions which come to mind. Meanwhile the sender is shown a randomly selected target image or video clip, and asked to mentally send that material to the receiver. After a half-hour of sending, the receiver is taken out of the ganzfeld and asked to select one of four images based on his or her impressions. One of those images is the target, along with three decoys.

By chance, the receiver will choose the actual target one in four times, or a 25% chance "hit rate." Because the result of each session can only be a direct hit or a miss, there is no ambiguity and the results are clean and straightforward to evaluate.

During the test session, the experimenter and receiver are of course blind to the sender's target image, and all parties involved are sequestered under rigorous conditions designed to preclude cheating. Within this design there is no way that receivers can systematically guess the correct target by conventional means.

A session typically takes about an hour for the two participants. For the investigator it takes another hour to prepare and to close down the session.

Analysis of over 4,000 such sessions, conducted in labs around the world for four decades, indicates that, with ordinary people involved as subjects, the observed average hit rate is 32%. This is stupendously significant from a statistical point of view, and it constitutes strong, repeatable evidence for telepathy.

How could we use this effect to win the million dollar prize?

First, we do a power analysis to determine how many repeated sessions we have to run. Let's say for a million dollars we are required to achieve results associated with odds against chance of a million to one. That seems like a reasonable criterion for success. Much less than this the prize holder runs the risk of losing a million to a fluke. Much more and the test becomes impossible to achieve during any one person's lifetime, as we'll see.

We'll design an experiment that is run in three phases, where each phase has the same parameters: p(chance) = 0.25, p(hypothesis) = 0.32, alpha = 0.003, power = 0.99. This means that if we assume that telepathy gives us a hit rate of 32%, then if we run this experiment we'll have a 99% chance of getting a final p-value of 0.003 or better, i.e. good evidence for telepathy. The power analysis tells us that we need to run N = 1,147 trials to achieve this result. So now we will run this same experiment two more times, get a result each time at least as good as p = 0.003, and then the combined p-value over all three phases will be one in a million or better, or odds against chance of at least a million to one.

This requires that we run a total of 1147 x 3 = 3441 sessions.

Say we pay each sender and receiver a modest $50 to help compensate their time and costs. So we need to budget $344,100 for participant compensation. And let's say we run one session per workday, and we pay our investigator $80 per hour. That comes to 688 weeks or 14 years of effort assuming we run the experiment 48 weeks per year. For the investigator (we'll assume one investigator, which is an underestimate), at two hours per session x 3441 sessions x $80, we end up with an investigator budget of $550,560.

Now we need a testing facility that provides exceptional security against cheating and will also allow independent observers, and perhaps the general public, to witness each session from afar. (Observers interested in monitoring this experiment are not going to camp out in the laboratory for 14 years to personally observe every session.) To do this, we could use a secure digital video recording system that streams encrypted data over the web to a secure site, and is also designed to detect any interception or tampering of the video record at the source, in transmission, or at the secure site. We will need at least three video streams to cover the sender, receiver, and investigator, and perhaps one or two more to survey the larger environment. So let's say we need five tamper-proof video streaming systems, a secure server, and expert consultants to ensure that the system is not only designed correctly, but is systematically re-examined to check for proper operation. Let's say all this costs $250,000 for the 14-year life of the project, which is undoubtedly a vast underestimate.

The testing facility itself should consist of two isolated chambers that are thoroughly shielded against any possible transmission of sensory cues, including sound, light, vibration, odor, magnetic or electromagnetic signals. This might cost $100,000. The cost of running the facility itself (air conditioning, electricity) might cost say $200 per week or $137,640 in total.

The total so far is $1,382,300, not including costs for independent analysis of the video, Internet bandwidth, storage costs, data analysis, etc. So, for the mere possibility of winning a million dollars, we're already deep in the red, not to mention the investment of 14 years of dedicated effort. In addition, to optimize the likelihood of success, we would want to recruit people who we think would perform well. Based on past studies this would be creative people (artists, musicians, etc.) who believe in telepathy because they've experienced telepathic episodes in their own lives, and/or siblings, spouses or friends who frequently experience telepathic-like connections. So we need an advertising and recruitment budget, and probably a travel budget as well to compensate selected participants who must travel to the testing facility.

In sum, based on the state of the science today, and based on decades of repeated experiments that give us some confidence on what to expect, I believe we could conduct an experiment that would win a million dollar prize (assuming we need odds against chance of a million to one). But from a pragmatic perspective it wouldn't be worth it. Even if it were possible to raise over a million to run the experiment in the first place (unlikely, unless a wealthy individual or foundation is interested in backing this project), this doesn't make either financial or scientific sense. It might generate some publicity for a day or two, but most people already believe in telepathy based on their personal experiences, so this would only be news to a small percentage of scientists who would raise an eyebrow for 10 minutes. And then they'd say "cool," and some of them would start working on explanatory theories. The hardcore skeptics, like flat-earthers and creationists, aren't convinced by evidence or prizes; they'll just go on believing whatever they want to believe.

If say, the X Prize Foundation, an organization with a good track record of offering clear challenges and criteria for success, were to establish a prize to demonstrate telepathy under rigorously controlled conditions, then I believe that the design I've sketched here would do the trick. For $10 million it would be worth it.

Compassion for skeptics

2010-07-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

I occasionally receive an email from someone who challenges me to apply for one or more of the so-called "prizes" offered by professional skeptics for demonstration of a psi effect. Here's an email exchange I had on this topic recently.

Mr X. wrote:

I saw your research in a new film last night …and was impressed with the rigor with which variables were limited, i.e. through a shielded room there was a clear transference of information between loved ones. Why not duplicate this experiment under the skeptical eye of James Randi and collect the million dollars being held by Goldman Sachs for just such a possibility?

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html

If what you have created is repeatable and is as claimed in the film, you are the people to take this prize.

Please let me know your thoughts!

This sounded reasonable, so I replied:

Thanks for your feedback. The short answer to your question is that such prizes are effective for testing individuals who make claims that do not require skilled judging or statistical analyses. But they are not intended for serious scientific experiments. In addition, there is ample reason to believe that the "prize" is merely a publicity stunt. See this site for examples: http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/exam/index.htm

From the above site: A leading Fellow of CSICOP, Ray Hyman, has pointed out, this "prize" cannot be taken seriously from a scientific point of view: "Scientists don't settle issues with a single test, so even if someone does win a big cash prize in a demonstration, this isn't going to convince anyone. Proof in science happens through replication, not through single experiments."

Mr. X's reply, using his text formatting and colors:

Thank you for your response, Dean. I have followed James Randi’s career since I was a teenager. I believe that he is a true student of the scientific method, as well as a careful writer, speaker and thinker.

“Ample reason,” as you write, is meaningless jargon. Your link takes me to a silly, paranormal proponent who calls himself Peabrain. There is no intellectual honesty in his writing or in your response.

“Such prizes,” as you say, points to an imaginary category that says nothing about Randi’s challenge.

I am always struck by how, as is exemplified in your film, science, as such, is defined as the materialistic thinking of limited imaginations and then, in the next scene, a purported scientific experiment, (redefining science for your purposes, more properly, as a method rather than a philosophy), is used to show the rigor of the logic and thinking that produces the results that titillate us, the audience, with evidence of paranormal phenomena. The woman who criticized science in general was the author of “The Field.” The pseudoscience was played up in the closing and latching of the big steel door.

Your results in this experiment are truly revolutionary. Bigger than big. Please repeat them so that they can be verified. Otherwise your entire organization is nonsense. And, the lady who puts the “correct information” into her healing drops? Are we supposed to nod our heads in agreement because we would otherwise undermine the placebo effect or is an intelligent adult human being really being asked to believe she can do just that? If the energy healer, Dr. Pearl, if I remember correctly, could actually do what he says he can do, it would be very easy to set up a scientific investigation of his claims and not rely on anecdotes . You belittle yourselves by aligning with such obvious charlatans.

Just demonstrate something! Prove something! Use independent observers we know and trust and show us something! It would be wonderful!! I am not a cynic! I am an open minded adult who wants to see demonstrations of the amazing nature of the universe that challenges everything I believe! What fun!! Are you just going to hide behind more hyperbole?

What if the challenge is intended for serious scientific experiments? What if the money is real? It would be easy enough for you to find out. The money can be verified through Goldman Sachs, says Mr. Randi.

Why not verify through, “replication, not through single experiments,” to borrow your own words, with independent verification of your results? It would be incredible. I would so love to believe your results, however, you give the thing person nothing to hang one’s hat on.

“A stunt,” you say? In the words of the one and only alien life form I know of, Alf, “Isn’t that the cat rancher calling the orbit guard a hairball?”

Respectfully challenging your claims,

I replied:

As I had noted, well known skeptic Ray Hyman said "Proof in science happens through replication, not through single experiments." I agree. And so several classes of independently conducted psi studies have been examined in detail to see if replication has been achieved. They have.

E.g., an article currently in press in Psychological Bulletin examines, among other things, the question of replication of one type of psi study (telepathy in the ganzfeld). It provides unambiguous evidence that this effect has been repeated over thousands of trials, in multiple laboratories around the world, and reported in over 100 publications for over 40 years. Another meta-analysis, including one published in the British Journal of Psychology a few years ago, indicates independent, significant replication of the effect of intention on a distant person's physiological condition. In addition, to date there have been six studies of various psi effects using functional MRI. Five of the six have shown significant evidence for psi. These analyses and studies are reported in scientific journals.

I could go on, but I provide detailed discussion of these and many other studies in my 2006 book Entangled Minds and 1997 book The Conscious Universe. Or you might look here (http://www.noetic.org/publications/journal_pubs.cfm) where you can find a few of our scientific and scholarly papers. If you want to hang your hat on scientific evidence, these resources are one place to start.

Other places to look: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html. And many relevant articles can be downloaded from this site: http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/articles.html

Mr X. then sends our correspondence (without my knowledge or permission) to Randi, and copies that note to me. He writes:

Hello Amazing,
I thought you’d enjoy this little repartee I had with the “scientists” at the Institute of Noetic Studies after viewing their recent, incredibly silly, movie, The Living Matrix

[Dean's note: This is a link to the movie. This movie was not made by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It is one of many that some of our researchers appear in.]

P.S. As a lifelong rooter out of the ridiculous, I wonder if you are a regular lucid dreamer? I wonder if skeptics are more likely to question the fantastical events of their dreams than mystics.

Mr X. then adds to me:

I so much want someone to take this prize. To say it’s just a stunt and not demonstrate your field experiment a single time with the world watching and get Mr. Randi to pay or shut up is just a shame.

Here is a note from the man himself about our conversation:

Ray Hyman presumed that I had implied that a paranormal claim could be established or denied through one experiment. I had not.

However, the million-dollar prize IS awardable for one definitive success, as already clearly – and repeatedly – stated. Incidentally, it is no longer held by Goldman Sachs, but by Evercore Wealth Management, as Account #1007550. It currently stands at $1,137,082.32, though only one million is the actual prize amount. Details and certified documents are available on request.

I replied:

You would like to see a single demonstration win the prize. One experiment cannot establish anything, and thus cannot win the prize. Even Mr. Randi now admits this, as you show in your own email.

As I had noted below our work has been replicated many times and reported in peer-reviewed journals. If you choose to ignore that data and call what we do "silly," that's your prerogative, but it's neither science nor respectful.

Mr X. replied:

You are worse than silly and I am more than respectful. Randi admits nothing of the kind. He says “the million-dollar prize IS awardable for one definitive success,”
(his emphasis). Why is your experiment demonstrable for your movie but not for independent verification?

And now Randi replies to Mr. X and copies to me as well:

I find it very significant that Dean Radin imposes his own rules, ignores the generous million-dollar prize, opts to believe that it doesn’t exist, and hides away hoping that it won’t be brought up again. Since he believes that movies prove matters, he must believe in Star Wars, as well…

They will continue to ignore the JREF prize. They have to, because they do not have the evidence that proves their case, and they know it. I wonder if they also believe that The Wizard of Oz is also a documentary? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…!”

Finally, my last reply to Mr X, when it is clear that this is a waste of time:

You quote Randi as writing: "Ray Hyman presumed that I had implied that a paranormal claim could be established or denied through one experiment. I had not." (my emphasis)

Now you claim he says "the million-dollar prize IS awardable for one definitive success."

Well, which is it?

And I'll leave it at that. This exchange demonstrates why I ignore "skeptics." Genuine skeptics don't speak this way. This is the language and style of scoffers and deniers. They hold on so tightly to their preferred view of the world that they can no longer respond rationally. They do not see that their approach is no different from extreme religious fundamentalists.

All I can do is offer them compassion.

Flash Mob Opera

2010-07-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

This is not directly related to my interests in extended human capacities, but having been a concert violinist for many years I always appreciate new ways to popularize the experience of the classics (from La Traviata in this case to e.g., Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). This video is one of the most delightful ways of popularizing classic opera that I've seen.

Maybe the check is in the mail?

2010-06-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Wikipedia entry on Masaru Emoto is a good example of why no one should trust an encyclopedia written by anonymous amateurs. I know it is possible, at least in principle, to edit Wikipedia pages to make corrections. But it is also possible for pranksters to change information on any page just for fun. And I know teenagers who regularly do this to confuse their classmates.

The case in point was brought to my attention by a friend. I will correct the entry here. I've tried making corrections to Wikipedia in the past, and I'm not willing to go through that waste of time again. I'll italicize the Wikipedia entries:

In 2003, [the magician] James Randi publicly offered Emoto one million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.

I was coauthor on such a study, which was co-sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences and published in 2006. You can find it here on PubMed. As far as I know Emoto hasn't received the one million dollar check. I know I haven't.

In 2006, Emoto published a paper together with Dean Radin and others in the peer-reviewed Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (of which Radin was co-editor-in-chief).

Yes and no. Yes: I published such a paper. No: I became a co-editor-in-chief of this journal in 2009, three years after publishing that paper. I had no connection with Explore prior to that. Nor did I have any affiliation or financial interest in Emoto's work then, or now.

The paper itself was not peer-reviewed, as the journal only conducts peer reviews of articles submitted within the 'scientific' category, a label which Emoto and Radin chose not to apply to their work.

The citation attached to the above sentence refers to a photo essay about Emoto's crystals, published in Explore in 2004. I am not a coauthor of that article. I had nothing to do with it. The double-blind paper we published in 2006 was indeed peer-reviewed, and it showed a statistically significant difference between water that was "exposed" to intention vs. identical water set aside as a control. The magnitude of the observed effect was smaller than is implied in Emoto's books, but the direction of the effect was consistent with his claim.

A better-controlled "triple-blind" follow-up study published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration did not yield positive results.

No. The cited reference points to an article in a popular magazine that got it dead wrong. The abstract of the original journal article, of which I am a coauthor, reads:

An experiment tested the hypothesis that water exposed to distant intentions affects the aesthetic rating of ice crystals formed from that water. Over three days, 1,900 people in Austria and Germany focused their intentions towards water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. Water samples located near the target water, but unknown to the people providing intentions, acted as ‘‘proximal’’ controls. Other samples located outside the shielded room acted as distant controls. Ice drops formed from samples of water in the different treatment conditions were photographed by a technician, each image was assessed for aesthetic beauty by over 2,500 independent judges, and the resulting data were analyzed, all by individuals blind with respect to the underlying treatment conditions. Results suggested that crystal images in the intentionally treated condition were rated as aesthetically more beautiful than proximal control crystals (p = 0.03, one-tailed). This outcome replicates the results of an earlier pilot test.

There were, however, potential problems with the "triple-blind" follow up. As the study explains:

Yes, as I explained. Empirical studies regularly contain sections discussing the limitations of the design. No experiment is perfect.

"In any experiment involving intention, the intentions of the "investigators" cannot be cleanly isolated from those of the nominal participants and this in turn constrains how one should properly interpret the results....

All quite true. But the above snippet starts in the middle of a paragraph. The actual article begins this paragraph with the following:

"These design elements excluded obvious environmental differences and conventional subjective biases as plausible explanations for the observed results, and the combined results of the two experiments appear to exclude chance as an explanation (unweighted Stouffer Z = 3.34, p<0.0004)."

In other words, when it comes to Wikipedia, reader beware. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my prize check. Maybe it's in the mail.

Getting comfortable with stupidity

2010-04-29T16:11:00.001-07:00

This is an excellent article describing why in science it is important to feel comfortable with one's stupidity (more like ignorance than stupidity). Non-scientists may not realize that most of the time in scientific research, especially research at the edge of the known -- which is where all the excitement is -- that we really don't know what we're doing. Those few things we think we do understand are taught in elementary college textbooks.

Students who do well in school, meaning those who get all the right answers on tests based on those textbooks, come to believe that they fully grok the nature of reality. But what they are grokking is what we thought we knew 10 or 20 years ago, and oftentimes textbooks are behind the curve of knowledge the moment they are published. Professors can't admit this, of course, because then students can argue that the tests aren't fair. So academia glosses over the fact that getting comfortable with stupidity is an extremely important lesson to learn, especially for smart people who intend to devote their lives to studying the unknown.

When smart people forget that ultimately we're all rather ignorant, that's when debates about controversial topics turn into emotional turf wars, and that's when real stupidity rears its ugly head.

Thanks to Damien Broderick for bringing this to my attention.

Martin A. Schwartz
The importance of stupidity in scientific research
Journal of Cell Science 121, 1771 (2008)
First published online May 20, 2008
Accepted 9 April 2008

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years.We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason - fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and
doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I
needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid - that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at asufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

Closer to Truth

2010-04-24T22:21:00.001-07:00

Here is a new set of video interviews that I did for this PBS show.

The Psi Taboo in Action

2010-04-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

I have lectured and written about the scientific taboo that prohibits scientists from openly studying psi. One way this prejudice manifests is by being invited to give a lecture at a scientific conference, and then finding yourself disinvited after someone on the conference committee discovers that the invitee has an interest in parapsychology. The idea of psi is so troubling to this person that he or she (mostly he) insists that the committee cancel the invitation. One can imagine the hysterics that must accompany this request.

This invite-disinvite sequence happened to me a few years ago, for a talk I was invited to give at the United Nations on the frontiers of consciousness. Someone chickened out when they discovered that I actually study this topic rather than think about it, and so I found myself disinvited. I discovered this only after asking the organizers several times for more details about the venue, conference dates and speaking schedule. Apparently no one thought it necessary to inform me.

Giving the snub is probably considered easy when the individual's academic affiliation or perceived status are low. When I was at Princeton I found it easy to get almost anyone's rapid attention by simply mentioning where I worked. Assessing credibility by one's affiliation is common, and unfortunate, for the same reason that stereotyping is so popular: It's a convenient way to make a snap decision if one doesn't have time, inclination or interest in doing one's homework.

But what happens when both academic affiliation and status are extremely high? Does the snub still happen? It sure does. The case in hand is Brian Josephson. Josephson is a full professor at Cambridge University, and he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973 "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects." Full professor at a major university with a Nobel prize is the pinnacle of status within the rarefied world of high powered academia.

But Josephson is also one of a few Nobel laureates who is publicly known for having an interest in psi. There are others like him, of course, but they prefer to keep quiet because the taboo is both powerful and unkind. This is the story of a perfectly outrageous case of prejudice.

April 27, 2010: See the above link at Prof. Josephson's site for updates to this case.

April 29, 2010 (London time): Another new update, from the (London) Times Higher Education

Reported by Matthew Reisz

An extraordinary spat has broken out after a Nobel prizewinning physicist was "uninvited" from a forthcoming conference because of his interest in the paranormal.
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.
Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London, wrote to three participants to say their invitations had been withdrawn.
The physicist and science writer David Peat, biographer of David Bohm (co-founder of de Broglie-Bohm theory), was considered tainted because of his books on "Jungian synchronicity" and "connections between Native American thought and modern physics".
Brian Josephson, head of the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge, was rejected on the grounds that "one of his principal research interests is the paranormal".
Professor Josephson, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on superconductivity, has long been one of the discipline's more colourful figures.
In 2001, he attracted derision from some of his peers when he discussed telepathy in his contribution to a booklet issued to celebrate the centenary of the Nobel prizes.
Recent developments in quantum theory, theories of information and computation "may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research", he wrote.
Speaking this week, Professor Josephson said: "I was keen to attend the conference and would have concentrated on the theoretical ideas and touched on the paranormal as only one aspect. I thought it would be an interesting opportunity for cross-fertilisation."
News of the exclusions led to what Dr Towler described as a "great email storm".
Even spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller joined in, and on 24 April Dr Towler "renewed the invitation" to Dr Peat and Professor Josephson but not to the third rejected participant, American theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti. Dr Towler claimed Dr Sarfatti had "written something like 100 emails" since his invitation was withdrawn, "many ... suggesting that we are in the pay of the CIA".
Dr Peat agreed to participate while Professor Josephson was considering his position.

EdgeScience

2010-04-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the Society for Scientific Exploration's (SSE) newsletter, EdgeScience, is now available for free downloading. I have been a member of the SSE for many years because it is one of those rare scientific organizations where anomalies are recognized as being key sources of major scientific breakthroughs, rather than errors that must be quietly swept under the rug. Conservative scientists shy away from things that go "bump in the lab;" SSE members chase after them.

Psi research at the University of Colorado

2010-04-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

"Professor at University of Colorado’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering guides students through experiments demonstrating unexplainable psychic phenomena."

This is an excellent podcast (one of many) on the www.skeptiko.com site.

Fund for Research into Life after Death

2010-03-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

The Helene Reeder Memorial Fund for Research into Life after Death.

Announcement for grant 2010

The Helene Reeder Fund is pleased to announce the availability of grants for small and medium sized scientific research projects concerning the issue of Life after Death.

Grants will be awarded in the range of EUR 500 – 5000 maximum.

The topic Research into Life after Death should constitute the main objective of the project.

Applications in English to be submitted by email to the HRF c/o edgar.muller@comhem.se should include:

- detailed description of the project, including the objectives of the project,
- methodology,
- cost budget,
- timetable,
- plans to publish the results in some scientific journals,
- CV of the applicant,
- how the applicant plans to report back to the HRF about progress and result,
- any other financing than from HRF.

Applications should be received not later than 30th of October 2010. It is the intention of the HRF to evaluate the applications and to make decision regarding the grants before the end of December. Applicants will be notified by email after the decision and the grants will be payable during December.

Brain Correlation Experiments

2010-03-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

A reader asked for references to papers on EEG correlation experiments between isolated people. The following list may not be exhaustively complete, it is not in any particular order, and it includes a few fMRI studies. I am aware of at least one other published paper by Grinberg-Zilberbaum et al, but I don't have that reference handy. Study 5 is, I think, relevant but is not a psi study.

1. Achterberg, J., Cooke, K., Richards, T., Standish, L.J.,Leila Kozak, L. & Lake, J.. (2005). Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 11, 6, 965–971.

2. Duane TD, Behrendt T. Extrasensory electroencephalographic induction between identical twins. Science 1965, 150-367. 

3. Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J. & Ramos, J. (1987). Patterns of interhemispheric correlation during human communication. International Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 41-53.

4. Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J., Delaflor, M., Attie, L. & Goswami, L. (1994). The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in the brain: The transferred potential. Physics Essays, 7,422–428

5. Hasson U., Nir Y., LevyI., Fuhrmann G., & Malach R. (2004). Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science 303, 1634– 1640.

6. Hearne K. Visually evoked responses and ESP. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 1977, 49, 648-657.  

7. Hearne K. Visually evoked responses and ESP: Failure to replicate previous findings. J Society for Psychical Research 1981, 51, 145-147.  

8. Kalitzin S. & Suffczynski P. (2003). Comments on “Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects”. Neuroscience Letters 350, 193–194.

9. Kelly EF, Lenz J. EEG changes correlated with a remote stroboscopic stimulus: A preliminary study. In Morris J, Roll W, Morris R. J (eds.). Research in Parapsychology 1975, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, p. 58-63 (abstracted in Journal of Parapsychology, 1975, 39, 25) 1976.  

10. Kittenis M, Carul P, Stevens P. Distant psychophysiological interaction effects between related and unrelated participants, Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association Convention 2004, 67-76 (meeting held in Vienna, Austria, August 5-8, 2004).

11. Lloyd DH. Objective events in the brain correlating with psychic phenomena. New Horizons, 1973, 1, 69-75.  

12. May, E. C., Targ, R. & Puthoff, H. E. (2002). EEG correlates to remote light flashes under conditions of sensory shielding. In C. T. Tart, H. E. Puthoff & R. Targ (Eds.). Mind at large: IEEE symposia on the nature of extrasensory perception. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1979/2002

13. Millar B. An attempted validation of the “Lloyd effect.” In Morris JD, Roll WG, Morris RL. (eds.). Research in Parapsychology 1975, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 25-27. Millay J. Multidimensional Mind: Remote Viewing in Hyperspace. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1999.  

14. Moulton ST, Kosslyn SM. Using neuro-imaging to resolve the psi debate. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2008; 20(1): 182-192.

15. (deleted -- it was a duplicate entry)

16. Orme-Johnson, D.W., Dillbeck, M.C., Wallace, R. K.& Landrith, G. S. (1982). Intersubject EEG coherence: Is consciousness a field? International Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 203-209.

17. Radin D. Event-related electroencephalographic correlations between isolated human subjects. J Altern Complement Med 2004, 10, 315–323.

18. Rebert, C. S. & Turner, A. (1974). EEG spectrum analysis techniques applied to the problem of psi phenomena. Behavioral Neuropsychiatry, 6, 18–24

19. Richards TL, Kozak, L, Johnson LC, Standish LJ. (2005). Replicable functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of correlated brain signals between physically and sensory isolated subjects. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 11(6), 955–963.

20. Sabell, A., Clarke, C. & Fenwick, P. (2001). Inter-Subject EEG correlations at a distance—the transferred potential. In: Alvarado, CS, ed. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, New York, NY, pp. 419–422

21. Schmidt, S., Schneider, R., Utts, J., Walach, H. (2004). Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two meta-analyses. British Journal of Psychology, 95, 235–247. [Note: This describes meta-analyses of 3 dozen ANS tests, not CNS.]

22. Shealy CN, Smith T, Liss S, Borgmeyer V. EEG alterations during absent ‘healing.’ Subtle Energies 2000, 11(3), 241-248. 

23. Standish L et al. J. Electroencephalographic evidence of correlated event-related signals between the brains of spatially and sensory isolated human subjects. J. Alternative and Complementary Medicine 2004, 10(2), 307-314.

24. Standish L, Johnson LC, Richards T, Lozak L. Evidence of correlated functional MRI signals between distant human brains. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 2003, 9, 122-128.  

25. Sugano H, Uchida S, Kuramoto I. A new approach to the study of subtle energies. Subtle Energies 1994, 5(2), 143-165. 

26. Targ, R & Puthoff, H. (1974). Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding. Nature, 252, 602-607.

27. Tart, C. T. (1963). Possible physiological correlates of psi cognition. International Journal of Parapsychology, 5, 375.386.

28. Vassy, Z. (1978). Method for measuring the probability of 1 bit extrasensory information transfer between living organisms. Journal of Parapsychology, 42, 158-160;

29. Wackerman, J, Seiter, C, Keibel, Walach, H. Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects. Neuroscience Letters 2003, 336, 60-64. 

30. Wackermann J. (2003). Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects. Reply to the commentary by S. Kalitzin and P. Suffczynski. Neuroscience Letters 350, 194.

31. Wackermann, J. (2004). Dyadic correlations between brain functional states: Present facts and future perspectives. Mind and Matter, 2 (1), 105-122.

32. Walach H., Seiter C., and Keibel H. (2001). Transferred potentials – fact or artefact? Results of a pilot study. In Bridging Worlds and Filling Gaps in the Science of Healing, Ed. R. A. Chez, Samueli Institute for Information Biology, Hawaii, pp. 303–325.

33. Blake T. Dotta, Bryce P. Mulligan, Mathew D. Hunter, Michael A. Persinger (2009). Evidence of macroscopic quantum entanglement during double quantitative electroencephalographic measurements of friends vs strangers. NeuroQuantology, Vol 7, Issue 4, Page 548-551.

34. Michael A Persinger, Eric W Tsang, J Nicholas Booth, Stanley A Koren. (2008). Enhanced power within a predicted narrow band of theta activity during stimulation of another by circumcerebral weak magnetic fields after weekly spatial proximity: Evidence for macroscopic quantum entanglement? NeuroQuantology, Vol 6, No 1, Page 7-21.

Controls

2010-03-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

A reader emailed me this query:

"This is an idea that a skeptic gave:

"In ganzfeld studies, instead of 4 pictures, you start with 2 paired sets (formed randomly) of 4 pictures (8 pictures altogether) - each picture in one set is paired with a picture in the other set. One picture from one set is randomly selected as a target (both the target and set selection are random) for the sender. You go through all of the usual procedure. At the end, the receiver is randomly shown one set of 4 pictures - either the set which contained the target or the set which did not. The receiver then judges which picture was the target, as per the usual procedure. No feedback is given. It is a 'hit' if either picture in a pair was the target. Then you compare the number of hits when the same set of pictures was used for the sender and receiver vs. the number of hits when different sets of pictures were used for the sender and receiver. Everyone remains blind as to the condition throughout the entire experimental series. This design requires very little change in the procedure, yet all of a sudden it contains the most powerful tool we have in research design - a control group. In one fell swoop, it would eliminate any of the bickering and nitpicking between believers and skeptics as to what the results mean.

I am truly curious about this though. Does anyone have any inside knowledge into why control groups were never really built into the design? It seems so obvious that their absence is weird.

What do you think about the design? And why the ganzfeld studies have not controls groups?"

My reply:

The suggested method does not test for the presence of telepathy any better than the existing method. The ganzfeld technique is already controlled by protocol. That means that as long as the targets are selected at random, there is no way that any response bias can systematically guess the right target. So comparing the observed hit rate vs. the chance expected hit rate over the long run is a perfectly suitable method for inferring the presence of telepathy. The adequacy of this approach has been confirmed many times by statisticians.

What the proposed idea does is test whether a "sender" is necessary to perceive information from a distance. Such tests have been done, both within the ganzfeld paradigm and in remote viewing designs. The answer is no -- which raises an epistemological question about how one would test for "pure" telepathy. So far, no one has a good answer to that question, although the closest we've come to date are studies using physiological methods, including EEG, to look for correlations in bodily responses between isolated people. Those studies suggest some form of connectivity between people, which is in alignment with the general idea of telepathy.

I've found that confusion about experimental methods often reflects a lack of familiarity with the relevant literature. This is true in any scientific discipline. In the present case, these issues have been discussed in detail for many decades by those working in the field. In addition, a statement like "In one fell swoop, it would eliminate any of the bickering and nitpicking between believers and skeptics as to what the results mean" is admirably enthusiastic, but it's also naive. The existing evidence is already persuasive to stupendously high degrees of statistical certainty. Another new experimental design is not going to change the nature of the debate, which is focused on theoretical and ideological complaints, and not on a dispassionate evaluation of the empirical data."

I would just add to this that should an easily repeatable experiment appear, without the requirement of special subjects, then that might well overwhelm prevailing skepticism. Use of special subjects is appealing and makes much sense, but the skeptic can always reply that those people are cheating, or that they cannot be easily found so independent replications cannot be performed.

That said, participants selected on the basis of some talent will almost always do better in experiments, so if you're interested in learning something rather than in convincing skeptics, it's better to go with selection, provided you have the resources to actually do that (it's a non-trivial problem).

Alex Tanous Scholarship Award

2010-03-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

The Alex Tanous Scholarship Award of $500.00 is designed to offer assistance to a student attending an accredited college, university or who is participating in a Certificate in Parapsychological Studies program and or a Researcher who wishes to pursue the academic study and or research of the science related in the areas of physical and spiritual development including, but not limited to the development of creativity, creativity and healing and the teaching of creativity as well as research of anomalies, power of the mind/will, the elderly and developmentally challenged children and or sponsorship or co-sponsorship of a Conference/Study Group related to the areas stated above.

2010-03-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Here's information about a conference I'm speaking at in San Diego, in June:

June 3-6, 2010

San Diego California

Loews Coronado Bay Resort

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Keynotes

Dean Radin, PhD Author of the Conscious Universe

William Bengston, PhD Researcher in Energy Healing of Cancer

Norman Doige, MD Author of The Brain that Changes Itself

Donna Eden Author of Energy Medicine

David Feinstein, PhD Author of Energy Psychology Interactive

Debbie Ford Author of The Secret of the Shadow

2010-03-16T02:27:00.000-07:00

At the University of Allahabad, where I presented two talks at the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences. I also gave an interview for the Times of India newspaper. This Centre is engaged in world class cognitive science research. Impressive facilities, faculty, and research programs.

2010-03-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

Here I am after receiving a bouquet of flowers prior to giving the annual National Visiting Professor talk at the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in Lucknow, India. I gave a second talk the following day. Both presentations were followed by many good questions and comments.

2010-03-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a common site on the Delhi highways: Cars and buses whipping along at breakneck speed sharing the same lanes as a family pushing a bicycle cart loaded with something.

2010-03-08T22:54:00.000-08:00

Here I am discussing a fine point to some of the SVYASA students and faculty after a talk. We are looking at a slide from my powerpoint lecture.

2010-03-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

Posing with students after giving a talk to the philosophy department at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India.

2010-03-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

This was a pleasant coincidence. About 30 km outside of Bangalore I gave a talk on testing the siddhis, as described in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, in Patanjali Hall at SVYASA (Swami Vivekananda Yoga College). This is one of the world's leading yoga research institutions, supported by the Indian government.

2010-03-08T22:38:00.000-08:00

Here I am giving a lecture at the Asian Philosophy Conference held at JNU (Nehru University) in Delhi. This was the first time I've given a talk at a philosophy conference. I had many fine conversations with audience members afterwards.

Highway cows in Delhi

2010-02-27T05:25:00.001-08:00

This is something you don't see very often in the USA: cows roaming around the highway. But it's not uncommon in Delhi. We also saw goats and monkeys on the road. They co-exist with the traffic remarkably well. In our trips so far it seems that violent collisions between buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians (including little kids), and free roaming animals must happen all the time. But in spite of dozens of near-misses, we witnessed no accidents.

India trip - Delhi

2010-02-25T00:47:00.000-08:00

Here I am at an ancient temple in Lodhi Gardens, Delhi, India. I'm traveling in India for a few weeks, giving lectures at several universities under the auspices of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research (ICPR), an agency within India's Ministry of Human Resource Development. The ICPR selected me to be their National Visiting Professor for 2010. I'll occasionally post pictures and comments about the trip as it unfolds.

Quantum biology now. Quantum psychology next?

2010-02-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

Nature 463, 644-647 (4 February 2010)

Coherently wired light-harvesting in photosynthetic marine algae at ambient temperature

Elisabetta Collini, Cathy Y. Wong, Krystyna E. Wilk, Paul M. G. Curmi, Paul Brumer & Gregory D. Scholes"... This contrasts with the long-held view that long-range quantum coherence between molecules cannot be sustained in complex biological systems, even at low temperatures...."

As I noted in my blog last November, the evidence for quantum coherence in living systems continues to mount. This latest advancement, reported in Nature, demonstrates that coherence not only exists in living systems, but it persists at room temperature. This contradicts long-held dogma that it is not possible to have quantum effects in living bodies. That dogma was based on assumptions about entanglement as observed in simple physics experiments, ignoring what happens when elementary things combine into new emergent properties.

My thesis in Entangled Minds was that if some form of quantum entanglement exists in living systems, then the subjective experience of that entanglement may well be what we call psi, mystical experience, or noetic experience in general. In the five years since I wrote that book (published in 2006 but mostly written in 2005), the evidence leading towards quantum psychology is marching along quite a bit faster than I had expected.

The irony in all this is that by the time I get to say "I told you so," the concept of entangled minds will become so obvious that it won't be considered controversial any more. It might take a year or two for the hoopla to settle down, but in the grand scheme of things we will have advanced from a "para" discipline to the mainstream in a flash. And likewise, centuries of past objections and skepticism about the reality of psychic and mystical experiences will also vanish in a flash.

This sea-change won't mean that everyone will start levitating on Tuesday and walking through walls on Wednesday. The phenomena may still be quite capricious and hard to control. But that will be seen as a psychological issue, i.e. the instability of undisciplined minds. And not one about existence of the phenomena.

I couldn't have said it better myself

2010-01-05T14:56:00.000-08:00

So I won't.

Woo woo is a step ahead of (bad) science

It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. For those who aren't familiar with the term, "woo woo" is a derogatory reference to almost any form of unconventional thinking, aimed by professional skeptics who are self-appointed vigilantes dedicated to the suppression of curiosity. I get labeled much worse things as regularly as clockwork whenever I disagree with big fry like Richard Dawkins or smaller fry like Michael Shermer, the Scientific American columnist and editor of Skeptic magazine. The latest barrage of name-calling occurred after the two of us had a spirited exchange on Larry King Live last week. . Maybe you saw it. I was the one rolling my eyes as Shermer spoke. Sorry about that, a spontaneous reflex of the involuntary nervous system....

Click here for the full essay: An essay by Deepak Chopra, reported on www.beliefnet.com.

Rupert Sheldrake: Telephone Telepathy

2009-11-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

Rupert's genius is developing simple, scientifically sound ways of demonstrating psi phenomena. Telephone telepathy is one of my favorites, and this video is a great way of showing how the test works, and a glimpse at the results.

ESP Trainer by Russell Targ

2009-11-13T18:40:00.001-08:00

See this page for information about Russell Targ’s ESP Trainer app for the iPhone.

As it says on Russell’s webpage,

In a year long NASA program with 145 subjects (under Contract 953653 NAS7-100) many were able to significantly improve their scores. Four of the subjects improved their scores at the hundred-to-one level or better. This approach has been used with surprising success on Wall Street. But of course, past results are no guarantee of future performance.

Because you are learning a new skill, slower is better than faster.

If you find yourself frequently scoring 12 or more, write to the developer: Contact Russell Targ

Dynamic entanglement in living systems

2009-11-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

As I discussed in Entangled Minds:

From the November 3, 2009 issue of Scientific American

Wouldn’t it be nice to be an electron? Then you, too, could take advantage of the marvels of quantum mechanics, such as being in two places at once—very handy for juggling the competing demands of modern life. Alas, physicists have long spoiled the fantasy by saying that quantum mechanics applies only to microscopic things.

Yet that is a myth. In the modern view that has gained traction in the past decade, you don’t see quantum effects in everyday life not because you are big, per se, but because those effects are camouflaged by their own sheer complexity. They are there if you know how to look, and physicists have been realizing that they show up in the macroscopic world more than they thought. “The standard arguments may be too pessimistic as to the survival of quantum effects,” says Nobel laureate physicist Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois.

...

This work suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, entanglement can persist in large, warm systems—including living organisms. “This opens the door to the possibility that entanglement could play a role in, or be a resource for, biological systems,” says Mohan Sarovar of the University of California, Berkeley, who recently found that entanglement may aid photosynthesis [see “Chlorophyll Power,” by Michael Moyer; Scientific American, September 2009].

I predict, based on this trend, that eventually a mainstream neuroscience group will seriously test whether the brains, and then the minds, of identical twins or emotionally bonded couples, are entangled. And they'll find there is such evidence. And then they'll be hailed for discovering telepathy, for the first time. Or, even better (as my colleague Damien Broderick suggests) they'll be hailed for discovering a completely unexpected phenomenon.

Big Bang Theory

2009-10-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

This clip from the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, could be a documentary of my life, although as an empiricist I spend somewhat more time collecting and analyzing data, and then staring at computers, rather than staring at equations on whiteboards. But I can easily stare at an analysis for a few days too, so this scene isn't all that far off.

The Noetic Universe

2009-10-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

This is the cover of a reprint of The Conscious Universe, to be published in the UK soon. I wrote a new Preface for this book, which is aimed to ride the wave of interest in noetic science as a result of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

Publishers often look for books that accommodate the public's request for more information on certain topics, and that's what happened here. I approved the publisher's recommendation for the revised title and new book jacket (which I like much more than the original jacket with the silly floating spoon!).

Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

2009-10-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent video talk on quantum mechanics and consciousness, by astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, given at the Society for Scientific Exploration meeting in July 2009 .

Mind modulated randomness?

2009-10-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

Exploratory Evidence for Correlations Between Entrained Mental Coherence and Random Physical Systems

Journal of Scientific Exploration , Vol 23 (3), 2009

DEAN RADIN
Institute of Noetic Sciences

F. HOLMES ATWATER
The Monroe Institute

Abstract - An experiment tested whether mental coherence entrained in groups would affect sequences of data generated by truly random number generators (RNGs) in the vicinity of those groups. Coherence was entrained by having groups listen to a prescribed series of binaural-beat rhythms during a 6-day workshop. Two RNGs based on electronic noise and one on radioactive decay latencies were located in the building where the workshops took place. Random data were continually collected from these RNGs during 14 workshops. As controls, the same RNGs generated data in the same locations and times but during 8 weeks when no workshops took place. Other RNGs in two distant locations were run as additional controls.

An exploratory hypothesis predicted that fluctuations in entrained mental coherence associated with the workshop activities would modulate the random data recorded during the workshops. This was predicted to result in positive correlations between random data streams collected from one workshop to the next. Results showed that during the workshops the overall correlation was positive, as predicted (p = .008); during control periods the same RNGs produced chance results (p = .74). Random data generated in distant locations also produced results consistent with chance."

Overall, this study involved collection and analysis of 143 billion random bits from different kinds of random number generators.

The Lost Symbol, found

2009-09-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Dan Brown's (author of The DaVinci Code) new book, The Lost Symbol, was published yesterday. It immediately leapt to the top of the bestselling charts and will undoubtedly stay there a while.

Unbeknownst to us, or to practically anyone else because of the tight embargo on the plot, the heroine Katherine Solomon in the book is a "noetic scientist," and the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is cited along with a fair bit of that character's view of noetic science. The fictional Katherine appears to be a composite of several real-life noetic scientists.

I am Senior Scientist at the actual Institute of Noetic Sciences. We've added a few pages to the IONS web site to provide more information about what noetic science actually is, along with our current research portfolio, some of our journal publications, and audio and video interviews. You can find that information by going to our homepage and clicking on the "In the spotlight" image.

Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven

2009-09-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper:

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

"The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments."

Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.

He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

"If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

"But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence.

"Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence."

Thus, a prominent skeptic agrees that (1) the study of remote viewing is an area of science, which should thoroughly obviate the skeptical epithet of "pseudoscience" once and for all. And (2) that when judged against prevailing scientific standards for evaluating evidence, he agrees that remote viewing is proven. The follow-on argument that this phenomenon is so unusual that it requires more evidence refers not to evidence per se, or even to scientific methods or practice, but to assumptions about the fabric of reality.

I agree that remote viewing would be difficult to explain using 17th century ontology, which from today's perspective would be a naive, classical physics view of reality. But I suspect it will be explained through 21st century expansions of those assumptions.

The geomagnetic field and the stock market

2009-08-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Because I've written about a psi-GMF link, a reader sent me this a pointer to this interesting paper from Anna Krivelyova and Cesare Robotti of the Federal Reserve Board of Atlanta:

Playing the Field: Geomagnetic Storms and the Stock Market

Explaining movements in daily stock prices is one of the most difficult tasks in modern finance. This paper contributes to the existing literature by documenting the impact of geomagnetic storms on daily stock market returns. A large body of psychological research has shown that geomagnetic storms have a profound effect on people’s moods, and, in turn, people’s moods have been found to be related to human behavior, judgments and decisions about risk. An important finding of this literature is that people often attribute their feelings and emotions to the wrong source, leading to incorrect judgments. Specifically, people affected by geomagnetic storms may be more inclined to sell stocks on stormy days because they incorrectly attribute their bad mood to negative economic prospects rather than bad environmental conditions. Misattribution of mood and pessimistic choices can translate into a relatively higher demand for riskless assets, causing the price of risky assets to fall or to rise less quickly than otherwise.

The authors find strong empirical support in favor of a geomagnetic-storm effect in stock returns after controlling for market seasonals and other environmental and behavioral factors. Unusually high levels of geomagnetic activity have a negative, statistically and economically significant effect on the following week’s stock returns for all U.S. stock market indices. Finally, this paper provides evidence of substantially higher returns around the world during periods of quiet geomagnetic activity.

Download the paper:

http://www.frbatlanta.org/filelegacydocs/wp0305b.pdf

Something unknown

2009-08-19T11:36:00.001-07:00

This is a trailer for a new movie on psi. I'm one of the people interviewed. It has a good clip showing the eyetracking presentiment study that I blogged about earlier.

Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?

2009-08-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

My latest presentiment study, published in Explore, coauthored with Ana Borges.

Title: Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?

Objective

A great deal of human activity is involved in anticipating the future, from predicting the next influenza strain to the expectations that underlie the placebo effect. Most models of anticipation take for granted that events unfold in a unidirectional flow of time, from past to future. Two experiments were conducted to test this assumption.

Design

Pupillary dilation, spontaneous blinking, and eye movements were tracked before, during, and after participants viewed photographs with varying degrees of emotional affect. Photos were selected uniformly at random with replacement. Experiment one used 592 photos from the International Affective Picture System; experiment two used a custom-designed pool of 500 photos. Eye data before exposure to the photos were compared by using nonparametric techniques.

Outcome Measures

Eye data were predicted to show larger anticipatory responses before randomly selected emotional photos than before calm photos, under conditions that excluded sensory cues, statistical cues, and other conventional means of inferring the future.

Results

Data contributed by 74 unselected volunteers in two experiments showed that: (a) pupillary dilation and spontaneous blinking were found to increase more before emotional versus calm photos (combined P = .00009), (b) horizontal eye movements indicated a brain hemisphere asymmetry before viewing photos, appropriate to both the emotionality (P = .05) and the valence of the future images (P = .01), (c) participants selected for independently obtaining significant differential effects in pupillary dilation showed positive correlations between their eye movements before versus during exposure to randomly selected photos (P = .002), and (d) a possible “transtemporal interference” effect was observed when the probability of observing future images was varied (P = .05 [two-tailed]). Gender splits on these tests showed that overall females tended to perform better than males.

Conclusions

These studies, which replicate conceptually* similar experiments, suggest that sometimes seers do see the future. This implies that developing comprehensive models of anticipatory behavior, from understanding the nature of intuition to the placebo effect, may require consideration of transtemporal and teleological factors.

* The paper has the word "conceptual," which is a typo.

Websites of interest

2009-08-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a few interesting websites I've run across.

Stacy Horn's blog. Stacy is author of Unbelievable, an excellent book about the J B Rhine era.

Winston Wu's "debunking skeptics" site, SCEPCOP. In the spirit of the Skeptical Investigations website.

Interchange Laboratories, Inc. is developing a mind-machine interface technology.

Mark Zilberman's Intuition Tester and especially his "Artificial Intuition Device."

UC Irvine's Don Hoffman's "User interface theory of perception" and other papers and materials. Prof. Hoffman gave a very interesting lecture at the recent Parapsychological Association conference held at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Quantum theory of reincarnation

2009-08-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

On movie critic Roger Ebert's blog. A thoughtful essay.

Survival of consciousness

2009-08-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

An excellent resource (articles, course handouts, and powerpoint slides) on survival of consciousness after bodily death, from Dr. Michael Sudduth, can be found here.

Combat intuition

2009-08-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times, entitled "In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable." The theme is how the neurosciences are beginning to take soldiers' intuitions seriously, and for very pragmatic reasons: "Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do."

Learning why some soldiers survive in combat better than others is a growing priority in the Department of Defense, and so research funds are beginning to flow.

The cited article reads like an introduction to research I've been engaged in for about 15 years. Except for one difference. Conventional paradigms assume that these intuitions are entirely due to subconscious processing, forgotten knowledge, implicit learning, etc. These are the usual information-processing explanations for intuition, and some of those explanations are undoubtedly valid.

I've been looking at a more radical possibility -- that some of the truly astounding intuitions reflect our mind's ability to transcend everyday temporal boundaries, and to perceive future events directly.

I call this ability "presentiment," an unconscious, physiological reaction to events that are about to unfold. Specifically, in lab studies I am interested in events that cannot be inferred, outguessed, or anticipated, and where there are no sensory cues to provide hints about the future. The physiological measures I and my colleagues have used include skin conductance, peripheral blood flow, heart rate, EEG, and -- as illustrated in the photo above -- eye movement, blinking, and pupillary dilation.

This line of experiments has been successfully replicated by a growing number of independent investigators, and of the 20 or so studies I'm aware of, nearly all have shown effects in the predicted direction. About half of those studies report statistically significant outcomes.

The most common critique of these studies is that a form of the gambler's fallacy might explain the results that we see. This is because these studies involve sequences of repeated trials, some randomly containing calm or control trials, and some containing emotional or stimulus trials. After a few calm trials in a row, most people will start to worry that an emotional trial might appear next, and this rising anxiety might be mimicking, or as the critique suggests, might be what I've called presentiment. My colleagues and I are of course aware of this possibility, so we have looked for evidence of this sort of rising anxiety in the physiological data. So far, none of us have found any indication that such an explanation is viable, so the "presentiment effect" still stands.

My current work is focusing on understanding presentiment in the brain. We're studying how patterns of electrical brain activity are influenced by different types of future events, and how different forms of attention training modulate presentiment effects.

Witch burning

2009-06-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

The murder of eleven elderly people in Kenya, for supposedly being witches, is a stark reminder of one reason why psi remains a taboo -- a deep seated fear of supernatural and paranormal forces. We'd probably all like to believe that hysteria about witches disappeared long ago, but as the BBC news item (linked above) says, "Residents [in the town in Kenya] have been ambivalent about condemning the attacks because belief in witchcraft is widespread in the area...." This happened in 2009, not 15o9.

Fear sustains the psi taboo even in first-world countries, partially because hysteria is just as easily inflamed in educated mobs as well as uneducated ones (witness our collective response to swine flu), but also because despite our common struggle towards rationality, there seems to be a natural human tendency to first condemn any sort of anomaly, and to ask questions later (if at all). While Western scientists exploring the bleeding edge of the known are not in danger of being literally burned, there is ample evidence for a persistent societal discomfort. This is most easily seen by observing the vast majority of the general public who are vitally interested in all things psychic vs. the far fewer than 1% of academics who are known for having any interest at all in these phenomena.

Will we ever be able to set aside our collective fears and embrace both the joy and the uncertainties of exploring the unknown? I certainly hope so, but to paraphrase something William James once said, major advancements in this particular wrinkle of the social fabric may have to be measured in centuries rather than decades.

I remember

2009-06-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, the righteous arrogance of youth. I remember what it was like to feel intellectually superior to my college professors, many of whom seemed to be dullards who understood nothing. I grew out of that phase when I started to apply genuine skepticism, not just to others' beliefs, but to my own.

Here is a good example of a young person who fits the profile of adolescent certainty (some people never grow out of this stage). Once a Christian, she lost her faith, followed by a commonly observed flip-flop -- she became a fervent atheist.

Atheists, especially young ones in the midst of existential crisis, do not yet appreciate that their strong stance against religious faith is just faith of another color (i.e., scientism). They are also unable to distinguish between beliefs based on empirically testable ideas vs. beliefs based on faith. And like most true believers in scientism, they become very concerned that one might conduct experiments where the underlying mechanisms are not yet understood. I wish I could say that most students grow out of an over-reliance on the certainty of prevailing theories, but as I mentioned in my previous post, unfortunately many don't.

Her angst centered on an experiment studying precognition. Impossible! Violates natural law! Must be pseudoscience! With that attitude, any evidence offered, however obtained, can only be fraud, or worse.

Of course precognition is not prohibited by physics. The laws of classical and quantum mechanics are time symmetric, and there are many serious articles (this link has just a few examples) available on the topic of retrocausation, which is far more interesting and complicated than a superficial scan might suggest.

Besides my own books (The Conscious Universe is finally in paperback!), I recommend Larry Dossey's new book to get a feel for the art and science of precognition.

But doing one's homework can be so taxing....

I remember the sanctimonious pride that accompanies feelings of certainty, and I'm glad I outgrew it.

$2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures found

2009-06-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

"Big, government-funded studies show most work no better than placebos," so say the headlines of an MSNBC article, where the $2.5 billion refers to funding over a 10 year period by the NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

No alternative cures says the headline, but the body of the report mentions success with ginger capsules, acupuncture, yoga, massage, meditation, other relaxation methods ...

So what doesn't work? A few herbal preparations. The same could be said for dozens of pharmaceuticals. What else?

"... the government also is funding studies of purported energy fields, distance healing and other approaches that have little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence."

I've said this before, but I guess it deserves repeating: Should existing scientific models and theories, all of which are tentative, determine whether basic research should be conducted on phenomena reported throughout the ages, and for which there is indeed valid scientific evidence, if you bother to look for it?

The answer has to be yes, because otherwise science comes to a screeching halt. By implicitly accepting a quasi-religious faith that we already understand everything worth knowing, science dies a slow death.

I am repeatedly astonished at how arrogant and dangerously conservative some scientists are (and how too many science journalists are so willing to parrot this nonsense. Whatever happened to the vaunted skepticism that journalists are supposed to cultivate?).

Why is this dangerously conservative? Because the same article doesn't mention that over the same 10 year period perhaps a trillion dollars have been spent on developing conventional treatments for cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc., and mostly what the average person sees as the result of this enormous investment of our tax dollars is skyrocketing health costs.

This is not to deny that medical progress is being made. Of course it is. Excellent progress. But the point is it takes trillions of dollars to accomplish that.

In the meantime, are there alternative methods that might also be useful, and that often have little to no side effects, and that are usually quite inexpensive? Yes, and fortunately the NIH is providing piddling grants to study them (compared to conventional medicine CAM studies are receiving chump change). But this article seems to want us to drop all such studies:

"Taxpayers are bankrolling studies of whether pressing various spots on your head can help with weight loss, whether brain waves emitted from a special "master" can help break cocaine addiction, and whether wearing magnets can help the painful wrist problem, carpal tunnel syndrome."

Are such things actually impossible? What if they actually do work? Isn't that worth finding out? The alternative is that we don't find out and useless treatments continue to be provided, or that expensive drug and surgical methods continue to be provided, many of which don't work either!

Personally I'd much rather spend my tax dollars looking for simple, effective, cheap methods that work, regardless of what existing theories are comfortable with. Go back just 20 years and large swatches of what used to be taken for granted in science and medicine have radically changed. So how can anyone today possibly believe that now we finally understand everything?

Forgive my rant, but this MSNBC article is exactly what is wrong with "big science," medicine, and how research in these fields are often reported. For shame MSNBC!

"My faith was broken ..."

2009-05-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Last week the National Public Radio program "All Things Considered" mentioned one of the distant intentionality studies that my colleagues and I published last year. The study showed that in emotionally bonded couples where one was healthy and the other was being treated for cancer, that when the healthy partner sent compassionate intention thoughts towards their loved one, then the physiological state of the patient, who was isolated at a distance, responded. This is one of a few dozen similar studies conducted over the past few decades. Cumulatively they show repeatable evidence that we are connected in spooky ways that resemble on a macro scale what quantum entanglement is on the micro scale. [These studies were not designed to test whether that connection affects healing.]

It was predictable that some people would not like the NPR program. One of those comments appeared today in the Huffington Post by someone who was clearly miffed by the very concept that thoughts might influence the world. When I see such strong opinions expressed, it is almost always the case that the person offering those opinions doesn't actually know anything about the underlying empirical data. And the emotional pressure underlying that opinion, especially among scientists, very often can be traced to a deeply held anger against religion, which they imagine which is what motivates these experiments [It doesn't, at least not for me. I'm agnostic about religion.]

In this case, the author of that op-ed admits his bias: "When I was young, my faith was broken by God's apparent stony silence in the face of such [medical and other] agonies...." That same faith can be broken by discovering that Santa Claus is really your dad, or that the Tooth Fairy is really your mom. Some children never recover from the humiliation at being fooled by supposedly trustworthy adults, so like a steel trap their minds snap shut and forever after disallow certain ideas.

The problem is that in this case there is empirical evidence that has nothing to do with religious faith, or any sort of faith, that supports the idea that our thoughts actually do influence the world around us. A little bit. And not nearly to the extent that a child's imagination thinks they ought to. In addition, the quantum connection is not so easy to dismiss after all, at least for those who are willing to rationally ponder the evidence. My books and the book Quantum Enigma discuss all this in more detail.

Superpowers Symposium 2009

2009-05-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Chris Knowles provides an excellent summary of a symposium on "superpowers" I attended at Esalen Institute in Big Sur last week. I am used to attending scientific conferences, which are often heavy on details, data and statistics. By contrast, this meeting was heavy on the humanities and light on science, a challenging but very refreshing change for me. My talk was entitled "Reality 3.3," in which I attempted to show how our models of common sense have evolved over time. I identified 3 major shifts in historical worldviews, and I speculated about a 4th (Reality 4.0) that is almost on the horizon.

The most startling part of the meeting for me was when Jacques Vallee spoke in detail about a UFO flap in Brazil. I hadn't realized the extent to which the Brazilian military was involved in studying that case, which persisted for three months, or the strength of the evidence, some of which is still classified.

The Mystical Roots of Science Fiction

2009-05-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a teaser of an audio clip interview with Jeff Kripal, author of the upcoming Authors of the Impossible (due out in early 2010). I've read an advance copy of that book, and I think his take on why people have always been drawn towards the paranormal is exactly right. As the blurb about his book says on the EnlightenNext website:

[It's] about the relationship between mysticism, pop culture, and the paranormal. Weaving together an interesting combination of sources--from Philip K. Dick to the human potential movement to the UFOlogy of French astronomer Jacques Valle—he describes why he thinks that our general cultural obsession with science fiction, as seen in the popularity of TV shows like Heroes and movies like The X-Men, is a modern expression of the same spiritual impulse toward the “supernormal” that lies at the heart of all religious traditions. But as Kripal points out, these new sci-fi mythologies are distinct from the traditions in that they are oriented toward the future rather than the past, allowing us to see our present-day culture as a more primitive version of what has yet to evolve.

Unlike many scholars who dismiss our impulses towards the supernormal as mere fantasy, Kripal recognizes that these impulses reflect something that is quite palpably real, meaningful, and important.

Mind, body, environment

2009-04-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Bruce Lipton, on epigenetics.

Two recommended books

2009-04-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

This is Dr. Larry Dossey's new book on premonitions, ranging from anecdotes to scientific evidence to possible meaning and value. Written in Dossey's crystal clear style, and saturated with endnotes and references, this is an excellent overview of what we currently know about the mind-bending experience of knowing the future before it arrives. I advise caution when thinking about retrocausation, because if you try to figure it out it will make your brain hurt. Fortunately, this book goes a long way towards relieving that particular pain.

About 30 years ago, when I first became seriously interested in parapsychology, Charles Tart was one of a handful of scientists I approached who provided me with some encouragement. Most of my other colleagues and elders at the time suggested it would be better to do something else. Anything else. But Charley's approach to parapsychology, the clever experiments he conducted, and the way he framed the broader context of this topic (which evolved into the field of transpersonal psychology), convinced me that parapsychology was the most interesting of the many possible research directions I could have taken. The theme of his latest book is that scientific (or I should say, scientistic) models based solely on materalistic assumptions are wrong, and here are the reasons why. In building his case, he provides quick overviews of most of the lab-based and observational evidence (ESP to NDEs, and everything in between). He also analyzes the cognitive pathology of hyper-skepticism in some detail to show why materialism rules and why psi research remains on the scientific fringe despite the mounting evidence. While Tart does not discuss it, I strongly suspect based on his analysis that besides psi, three other topics are likely to be worth serious consideration as well: cold fusion, homeopathy, and UFOs.

IONS 2009 Conference

2009-04-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

Institute of Noetic Sciences conference, June 17-21, Tucson, Arizona

This is IONS' biennial conference. I will be giving a presentation on advances in psi research, including preliminary results of my recent experiments involving the effects of consciousness on a double-slit optical system, a workshop with Dr. Julie Beischel on the evidence for survival of bodily death, which is planned to include a demonstration session with a research medium, and an evening experiment in collective awareness and intuition.

Superstitions of modern science

2009-04-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

Two examples of unquestioned adherence to the 17th century mechanistic assumptions underlying the supposedly modern brain sciences. From Time magazine, "why we're superstitious," in which superstitions are reduced entirely to quirks of brain functioning. And from Newsweek, more on the same, both referring to a book entitled Supersense.

My problem with such efforts is not with the neuroscience, which is undeniably interesting. Rather, I'm worried that the authors of these books, and the journalists who write the articles, haven't bothered to do their homework. For example, the author of Supersense says in response to the question, "What are some examples of things that people believe science will one day explain?"

Telepathy, precognition, anything that involves the mind. Typically they will think that humans have this untapped potential for connecting with each other over large distances, which would violate the current laws of physics as we currently understand them. Of course, they always respond with, "Well, the current laws of physics are always changing, so how can you be so certain that these things aren't real?" Well, we can't prove these things don't exist, but then they never really lay themselves open for scientific investigation. That's why it's really problematic to talk about them as being real science.

Some day, perhaps a young, naive journalist will ask,"Exactly what laws of physics are violated by these beliefs?" And "why can't we study these beliefs?" And "have they in fact been studied?" And "what do the results show?" Four simple, innocent questions, which when answered with empirical evidence in a calm, rational manner, would radically challenge the whole thrust of these books and articles. And that, of course, is why older journalists don't even bother to ask the questions.

Remote viewing as applied to futures studies

2009-04-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Article by James H. Lee, published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change, vol 75 (2008) 142–153.

Abstract

Remote viewing is set of related protocols that allow a viewer to intuitively gather information regarding a specific target that is hidden from physical view and separated from the viewer by either time or distance. Research suggests that the same processes used to gather spatially non-local information can also be used to gather information that is temporally removed from the observer. This paper reviews the most common protocols for remote viewing — including Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), Associative Remote Viewing (ARV), and Extended Remote Viewing (ERV).

This remains a controversial field of study. While over 30 years of data has been gathered with statistically significant results frequently occurring under laboratory conditions, skeptics are not convinced that RV is a useful pursuit. In addition to this, some of the output from RV can be vague and subject to personal interpretation.

A number of factors have been shown to improve the success rate for remote viewing, including the use of experienced subjects, individual testing, feedback of results, and a short time-interval between the percipient response and the targeted future event. Finally, there also appears to be a relationship between the effectiveness of remote viewing efforts and sidereal time, which may be interpreted as evidence that some aspects of RV are subject to the same physical laws as are other phenomena studied by science. Remote viewing and related processes merit further exploration and study. While remote viewing may never be completely understood, it has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the professional futurist′s toolbox.

As often happens when a paper reporting some aspect of psi reaches a positive conclusion, and appears in a journal not known for entertaining this topic, the editors of the journal add a special apologetic notice to help absolve themselves from any blame (or flames). In this case the editors wrote:

Note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, with no implication of agreement by either the editors or the Advisory Board. The question it raises is whether further research into this controversial area as a technological forecasting approach is desirable, or unwarranted as being based on questionable fringe science. It is interesting to note, for example, that experimental research on instinct or intuition by Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, indicates that intuitive wisdom often outperforms the calculations of experts (see his book ʽʽGut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious" (2007); also New York Times, August 28, 2007).

Huffington Post article

2009-03-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

An article entitled "The Science of Distant Healing" by Harvard psychiatrist Srinivasan Pillay appeared in the Huffington Post blog on March 24. It mentioned an experiment my colleagues and I published a few years ago where we tested whether one person's healing intentions influenced a distant person's physiology. You can find the abstract of this article by clicking here.

Some of the comments after the article positively seethe with anger. I've always been fascinated by such apoplectic outbursts, not just because they are sparked by mere ideas, in this case the idea that our minds may have unrecognized abilities, but also because they are shouted to exhaustion by people who probably regard themselves as rational.

It's always tempting to respond to such comments, but I've found that doing so is just a waste of time. Meaningful dialog cannot occur if one side is overwhelmed by strong emotion. My primary reaction now is compassion for those who feel so threatened by ideas that they can no longer control themselves.

Shrinkrap Podcast

2009-03-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

Here's an interview I did for Shrink Rap Radio, with Dr. David Van Nuys, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Sonoma State University.