Entangled Minds

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, see...

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 (...

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.

By Dan Drasin

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,...

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.

Another ganzfeld telepathy example with Gail and Tom. In this one Tom 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 Tom viewed the four images he immediately selected the correct target with high confidence. What this shows is that the words that Tom 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 corr...