Entangled Minds

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 importa...

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

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 ne...

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.