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Psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern

Dean Radin,   Leena Michel,   James Johnston,  and  Arnaud Delorme (2013).  Psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern.  Physics Essays , Volume 26: p. 553-566 This is the third publication describing our ongoing research program on mind-matter interactions. This line of research focuses on experimentally testing John von Neumann's (and others) interpretation of the quantum measurement problem (QMP). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good description of the QMP. So far we've conducted 15 experiments and have reported the results of 10 of them. Overall the evidence is consistent with von Neumann's proposal that consciousness is involved in the behavior of quantum systems. Note that consistency doesn't necessarily mean that von Neumann's approach is the only valid interpretation.   Abstract Previously reported experiments suggested that interference patterns generated by a double-slit optical system were pert...

Was Buddha just a nice guy?

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This is a talk I gave at the Science and Nonduality Conference in 2013. It's a shortened version of a presentation I've given a number of times about my latest book, Supernormal .

"Predicting the unpredictable" in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

I conducted my first presentiment experiment in 1996. As of today this type of experiment has been repeated something like 40 times by a dozen labs. In this article, Julia Mossbridge, Patrizio Tressoldi, Jessica Utts, John Ives, Wayne Jonas and I discuss implications and  potential   applications of this phenomenon. The meta-analysis mentioned in this article considers only a clearly defined subset of the published studies.  Predicting the unpredictable: Critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity  A recent meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories (n=26) published since 1978 indicates that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 seconds in the future. The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral images or sound vs. silence. This p...

Facts are not allowed in Wikipedia

In Wikipedia (as of February 28, 2014), the entry on psychic Eileen Garrett includes the following: Garrett took part in "clairvoyance" tests. One of the tests was organised by Joseph Rhine at Duke University in 1933 which involved cards with certain symbols that were placed in a sealed envelope and participants were asked to guess their contents. Garrett scored 2,433 correct hits in 10,900 cards .  She performed poorly and later criticised the tests by claiming that the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance to order. J. B. Rhine's ESP experiments involved the use of card decks with 5 symbols, so the probability of a correct guess was 1 in 5 or 0.2. That means with 10,900 cards guessed the chance expected number of correct guesses was 2,180. The exact cumulative binomial probability of Garrett's 2,433 hits out of 10,900 guesses in a standard ESP card test is associated with a probability of p...

Popular science media and ESP

The popular science media often gets things wrong about psi research. But today I saw a news post that establishes a new threshold for journalistic nonsense. In its "Weird" news section,  National Geographics ' website carried an article entitled "ESP Is Put to the Test—Can You Foretell the Results? It's just hokum, say researchers, who offer a new experiment as proof." The news post goes on to report that a study published January 13 in PLOS ONE , an online peer-reviewed journal, provides this proof in an experiment described as:"Can people use ESP to figure out what's on the face of a card?" Seriously? In fact the paper doesn't mention ESP, the reported study wasn't a test of ESP, and the references in the article don't cite any articles that are even tangentially relevant to ESP. It had nothing whatsoever to do with ESP. So what was the source of this silly mistake, blaring proof of ESP as "hokum"?  The ma...

Call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness

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This opinion article, in a mainstream journal, is signed by academics hailing from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Duke, Cornell, University of California, University of Washington, University of Colorado, Rice University, Penn State College of Medicine, University of San Francisco, University of Sao Paulo, Università di Padova, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, University of Adelaide, University of Lisbon, University of Munich, Granada University, University of London, Edinburgh University, University of Tolouse, Lund University, etc.. " ... we would like to stress the following: 1) Research on parapsychological phenomena (psi) is being carried out in various accredited universities and research centers throughout the world by academics in different disciplines trained in the scientific method (e.g., circa 80 Ph.D.s have been awarded in psi-related topics in the UK in recent years). This research has continued for over a century despite the taboo against...

Chinese translation of The Conscious Universe

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My book  The Conscious Universe was just published in Chinese.  With this latest publication  The Conscious Universe ,  Entangled Minds  and  Supernormal have collectively been translated into Chinese, French,  Portuguese,   Italian,  Russian,   Korean, Japanese, Turkish and Arabic, with (I've heard) German,  Finnish, Czech, Greek, and  Bulgarian possibly  in the works .