Entangled Minds

Do scientists pay attention to psi research? Some skeptics would have you believe that this topic is so far from the mainstream that no one takes it seriously. What do article impact metrics indicate? For the article  Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: A meta-analysis , which examines experiments studying what I've called "presentiment,"  Altmetric reports that this is "one of the highest ever scores" in the journal Frontiers in Psychology  (ranked #3 of 1,714 articles). The average v iew of a journal article is typically a few hundred, and that's for a very popular paper. This paper has 47,765 views so far.  For the article  Predicting the unpredictable: Critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity , Altmetric reports that this article "is amongst the highest ever scored" in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,  with 10,584 views. For the article  A call for an op...

As I've previously mentioned , Wikipedia has a problem with topics that fall outside a tightly constrained, naive view of reality. That there are different opinions about such topics as homeopathy, parapsychology, or energy medicine, is not surprising. But it is disappointing (and on the verge of abetting libel when it comes to biographies of living persons) when an otherwise useful encyclopedia maintains a policy of presenting such topics with a systematic negative bias. Attempts to edit these articles to provide more balance are summarily ignored, and even neutral, well-intentioned editors have been banned. Articles with citations only from unreliable, uninformed, or cynical sources might be useful for promoting favored ideologies, but only in an Orwellian world could such an encyclopedia be considered anything but a work of fiction. Indeed, this very blog was labeled an "unreliable source" when I've simply pointed out an easily demonstrable  mathematical fact ....

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...

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 .

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...

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...

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...