Dean Radin, IONS Chief Scientist, will speak virtually on November 7th about Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality at the 2020 Psychology and the Mind Workshop hosted by the Louisiana Psychological Association. Dr. Radin will review the current state of research findings regarding extrasensory phenomena (psi research) as well as relevant controversies and new areas of investigation related to quantum theory.
Before joining the IONS research staff almost 20 years ago, Dr. Radin worked at AT&T Bell Labs, where he says, “I began to publish some of my psi experiments. Then I discovered the Parapsychological Association and the Society for Scientific Exploration. I was delighted to find groups of scientists who were as interested in these phenomena as I was, and the contacts I made eventually led to an appointment at SRI International, where I was a scientist on a classified US government project conducting research on psychic phenomena and espionage,” now commonly known as StarGate.
Dr. Radin adds, “I’ve spent the majority of my professional career doing what the four-year-old Dean described as being jet propelled — probing the far reaches of human consciousness using the tools and techniques of science. Very few scientists are publicly engaged in research on this perennially interesting topic. This is not because of a lack of interest, as skeptics sometimes suggest,” he explains. “The vast majority of scientists I’ve spoken to are fascinated with psi, and national surveys we’ve conducted show that over 90% of scientists and engineers have personally experienced one or more psi phenomena. But science, like any social enterprise, has strictly enforced rules of what is and is not acceptable to talk about. Despite the aspirations of academic freedom, the reality is that it’s not safe for one’s scientific career to publicly pursue controversial topics (in any domain, not just psi).”
In his book Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, Dr. Radin summarizes the evidence for different categories of ESP. He explains that after a century of increasingly sophisticated investigations and more than 1000 controlled studies with the combined odds against chance, there is now strong evidence that some psi phenomena exist.
Psi research attracts an unusually passionate group of skeptics and Radin deals with this in his writings by careful scientific designs and corrections for various biases.
To learn more about Dean Radin’s work at IONS click here. To learn more about his presentation on November 7th — Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality — go to 2020 Psychology and the Mind Workshop.
