What scientific evidence is there for psi (psychic) phenomena? This question has been debated for decades in the scientific community. Although substantial psi research has been conducted by IONS and other organizations, coverage in the mainstream remains limited. To help shed some light on what has been learned since systematic psi research began in the late 1800s, Chief Scientist Dean Radin discussed the state of the evidence for the Chasing Consciousness Podcast with host Freddy Drabble.
Why explore psi phenomena
The discussion began with Dean talking about the history of how scientific methods have been used to study psi phenomena. Four categories of psi experiences were identified early on. They were given labels like telepathy for mind-to-mind connections, psychokinesis for mind-matter interactions, precognition for perceptions of future events, and clairvoyance for perceptions of events in real-time but at a distance, or otherwise isolated or shielded from the ordinary senses. He noted that these labels are sometimes assumed to imply that the phenomena are different, but for nearly a century, most researchers have agreed that psi manifests in apparently different ways. However, underlying these experiences, there is probably the same phenomenon at work — a form of deep interconnectedness among all things, including mind and matter.
Dean went on to say that although reports of psi experiences are often brushed aside in academic circles as mistaken beliefs or coincidences, phenomena like telepathy have been so persistently reported throughout history, across all cultures, and at all educational levels, that scientists began to develop rigorous ways to test if mind-to-mind connections could actually be real.
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Over time, several classes of rigorously controlled experiments were developed to test telepathy, including a technique called The Ganzfeld method. This was a sensory deprivation technique developed in the 1930s where one participant was placed into a state of unpatterned sensory stimulus to encourage the mind to become more sensitive to subtle mental impressions, while another participant attempted to mentally “send” information about a randomly selected image to the first participant. After 20 minutes passed, the receiver of the telepathic information was shown four pictures, one of which was the target image, and asked to pick which one was being sent. An experiment like this would have a chance “hit rate” of 25%. However, after 5,000 sessions conducted by two dozen labs that reported over 100 publications, the hit rate was closer to 31%. This 6% over chance may not seem very interesting, but from a statistical point of view, the odds against chance were far beyond a trillion to one. In these studies, when the participants were pre-selected because they reported strong emotional bonds or were identical twins who frequently reported telepathic experiences, the success rate was much higher, in the 40-70% range.
Dean then noted that from a statistical perspective, the ganzfeld experiments provide evidence that, with such high confidence, if the phenomena under study were more conventional, there would be no question that they were real. But those who are convinced that telepathy must be literally impossible because it violates some unspecified “laws” of physics simply dismiss these findings as flawed without bothering to look at the data.
The history and significance of mind-matter interaction
When asked to share with listeners about mind-matter interaction, Dean shared how interest in this topic goes all the way back to the very origins of empiricism. When looking at Sir Francis Bacon’s original work, you can see he wrote about testing the “force of imagination,” which was the term of the day for mind-matter interactions. Bacon suggested that one of the ways to test this would be by tossing dice, as it’s a random physical system that can be used with statistics to see if the dice behaved how you intended. Some 300 years after Bacon’s suggestion, starting in the 1930s and continuing for 50 years, dice were indeed used for mind-matter interaction experiments.
Then in the 1960s, the use of electronics led to digital random number generators (RNGs). Because these devices produced truly random sequences of bits (0s and 1s), they became the “go-to” apparatus for studying mind-matter interaction effects. Dean then mentioned a meta-analysis he and his colleague Roger Nelson published in 1989, which looked at all of the published studies using these RNGs, some 800 experiments and 200 control experiments. The analysis asked if focused intention could change the probabilistic structure of the outputs of the RNGs. The answer was a clear “yes.”
Princeton University’s Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab experimented with RNGs for many years to see if people could mentally influence these systems. Their results over a 12-year-long experiment were unambiguous — when all the data were examined cumulatively, yes, they could. As these devices are designed to exclude ordinary explanations (like electromagnetic fields, variations in temperature, magnetic fields, etc.), this outcome suggests that there are aspects of the mind or consciousness that can influence the probabilistic nature of the physical world. Many other experiments with other physical systems have also been conducted to look at the effect of intention, with target systems ranging from photon behavior to bacteria to water structure to changes in people’s moods, and so much more.
Non-local phenomena and psi
Freddy then moved the discussion onto Dean’s running theory about how psi phenomena may be compatible with other non-local phenomena, primarily those described in quantum mechanics, that have been studied for nearly a century. Dean shared that the history of science shows that odd things that people encounter, whether in life or the lab, are called anomalous, magical, or caused by spirits or supernatural forces until we eventually figure out ways of explaining the anomalies by incorporating them into the rest of the ever-expanding scientific worldview. He feels that this is eventually going to be the case for psi phenomena because the empirical evidence for these effects just keeps getting stronger and more persuasive.
Although much of the academic world has ignored or dismissed this evidence, Dean pointed out that this criticism, which has largely come from psychologists, was based on a classical physics worldview, meaning a 19th-century understanding of the physical world. He shared that the 21st-century understanding of the physical world, mainly through quantum mechanics, offers two features that are remarkably similar to psi experiences: The first is that there are non-local connections between physical systems called quantum entanglement, which can be seen on both a microscopic and macroscopic level. The other is the “quantum observer effect,” which is the phenomenon that when you observe a system at the quantum scale, its behavior changes. Although strange from an everyday perspective, the existence of these effects is well-accepted and is already being turned into technologies.
Dean connected this to psi phenomena by noting that nonlocal physical connections, which are known to transcend both time and space, are exactly the kind of reality required to support the mental connections called telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Likewise, the quantum observer effect is exactly what is required to support the reality of mind-matter interactions. He continued by saying that although these similarities do not provide adequate explanations yet, pointing out the close similarities does change the debate from “it’s impossible” to “that’s interesting.” The missing link at this point is whether the brain operates, even partially, in a quantum fashion. Based on other developments in quantum biology, this seems increasingly likely.
As the discussion continued, it’s sometimes noted that a critique of this idea is that entangled particles need to come into contact with each other. That’s actually not the case because, say, particles A and B are entangled. Particle C can then become entangled with particle A by interacting with particle B. Through that process, after billions of years everything on Earth is already entangled with everything else, and if the Big Bang cosmology is correct, then everything in the universe is already connected because it all came from the same source.
Identical twins are sometimes used as an example of “human entanglement” because the twins emerged from the same egg. Then the argument goes that any quantum entanglements would quickly disappear, but Dean disagreed and said that although entanglements among many particles may be difficult to detect, they still exist at a quantum level. In any case, relying on what we understand about entanglement today as a physical explanation for psi is probably misguided, because psi effects show up in experiments without mashing people together. This is why quantum mechanics as we know it today is not sufficient to provide a fully satisfactory explanation for psi, but it does point in the right direction.
There are still many open questions in physics, including the potential to create nonlinear or other exotic forms of quantum mechanics. Physics shall continue, and Dean anticipates that in coming years scientists will look back at past psi experiments and see those results as completely expected and predictable, rather than anomalous.
A shift towards openness with psi
Another interesting point of discussion was the perception of Dean’s work and how it’s changed over the years. Dean described his experience at Princeton in the 1980s, where he spent a fair bit of time interacting with the PEAR Lab, which was in the Engineering school. Although that lab was doing incredible work, other faculty members at the university, especially in the physics department, just dismissed their work out of hand without even bothering to visit the building next door and see what they were doing first-hand. This was a lesson learned about anyone who challenges the academic status quo — you always meet with enormous resistance. However, there has been a major positive shift in perception since that time. Dean noted there are now entire academic conferences dedicated to studying consciousness, and many of those are increasingly open to psi research. He points out that when it comes to academic interest in psi research, the mainstreaming of meditation and psychedelics is very quickly dissolving past prejudices about the study of psi, at once an ancient and yet ever-fresh intriguing aspect of human experience.
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You can enjoy the full episode of Chasing Consciousness with Dean here.
You can also hear Dean on these episodes of The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast with Kelly Chase and The Telepathy Tapes with Ky Dickens.