Entangled Minds

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 ...

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.

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 s...

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.

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

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

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times , entitled "I n 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, implic...