IONS Discovery Lab

The foundational paper found that people who reported a stronger sense of interconnectedness — with themselves, with other people, and with nature — also reported higher overall well-being, more positive emotion, and more compassion, along with less sleep disturbance and less pain. The relationships were consistent across every measure of connection used.

Performance on the extended perception tasks, by contrast, was unrelated to either interconnectedness or well-being — an early signal that would become important later.

Wahbeh H, Yount G, Vieten C, Radin D, Delorme A. Exploring personal development workshops’ effect on well-being and interconnectedness. Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine. 2022;28(1):87–95. doi:10.1089/jicm.2021.0043

Looking across all workshops together, participants came out with improved well-being, interconnectedness, positive emotion, and compassion, and with reduced negative emotion, sleep disturbance, and pain. Workshops that included meditation were the most consistent predictor of positive change. More participatory formats appeared to do better than lecture-based ones.

Because the pilot had no comparison group, these results could not establish that the workshops themselves caused the improvements — but they were strong enough to justify a much larger and more rigorous test.

A companion analysis looked at what participants actually reported experiencing during their workshops. Seventy-four percent described a moment of clarity or profound insight. Sixty-six percent reported at least one noetic experience — most commonly a sense that consciousness is not confined to the brain and body, a sense of receiving information beyond the five senses, or a hunch that turned out to be correct. Eighty-four percent reported at least one transpersonal or deeply relational experience.

These experiences occurred across workshop types, not only in those explicitly designed to evoke them. For a general reader, this may be the pilot’s most striking result: the kinds of experiences often treated as rare or fringe were reported by most people in the room.

Wahbeh H, Vieten C, Yount G, et al. Transformative, noetic, and transpersonal experiences during personal development workshops. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. 2022;41:20–50. 

A further analysis examined synchronicity — meaningful coincidence. People who meditated more frequently reported more synchronistic experiences, more noetic experiences, and stronger noetic beliefs. Meditation-focused workshops produced more reported synchronicity than other workshops.

Notably, the link ran through participants’ subjective experiences rather than through their scores on the objective tasks: meditators and non-meditators performed the same on the extended-capacity tasks. What differed was what people noticed and how they interpreted it.

Butzer B, Kriegsman M, Yount G, Wahbeh H. An exploration of the associations between meditation, extended human capacities and synchronistic experiences. World Futures. 2024;80(2):133–152. doi:10.1080/02604027.2024.2330289  

Because innovation is one of the three outcomes IONS studies, the pilot included a creativity task. Comparing a single-item measure of creative self-belief against a standard creativity task in 1,179 participants, the study found that how creative people believed themselves to be barely predicted how creative they tested. Self-belief tracked closely with personality — especially openness — rather than with creative output.

The paper also validated an AI-based scoring method for creativity tasks, which is a practical contribution to a field where scoring by hand is slow and expensive.

Wahbeh H, Cannard C, Yount G, Delorme A, Radin D. Creative self-belief responses versus manual and automated alternate use task scoring: a cross-sectional study. Journal of Creativity. 2024;34(3):100088. doi:10.1016/j.yjoc.2024.100088

Participants attending workshops on the IONS campus were invited to provide two minutes of resting brain and heart recordings using inexpensive, portable equipment. Two papers came out of that work. Both found measurable physiological correlates of self-reported well-being — and both found them in places the existing literature did not predict, in posterior rather than frontal brain regions, with heart-rate variability tracking a sense of purpose and brain measures tracking physical well-being.

The practical implication is significant: meaningful data about well-being may be obtainable in two minutes with equipment costing a few hundred dollars, rather than in a laboratory session costing thousands.

Cannard C, Wahbeh H, Delorme A. Electroencephalography correlates of well-being using a low-cost wearable system. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2021;15:745135. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.745135

Cannard C, Delorme A, Wahbeh H. HRV and EEG correlates of well-being using ultra-short, portable, and low-cost measurements. Progress in Brain Research. 2024:91–109. doi:10.1016/bs.pbr.2024.04.004 

The pilot did exactly what a pilot should do. It established that these constructs could be measured and we could capture the data we had aimed for, produced the first estimates of how large the effects were, showed which measures earned their place and which did not, and generated the statistical power calculations needed to design a definitive study. Then IONS committed to running that study — and, crucially, to declaring in advance what it expected to find.

Preregistration is a commitment made in public and in advance: it outlines what scientists predict, exactly how they will test it, and what would count as being within or outside the hypothesis. It removes the possibility of adjusting the question after seeing the answer. It is the standard that separates confirmation from exploration, and it is uncommon in this field. IONS chose to hold itself to it.

Data collection ran from November 2020 to July 2026. After careful clean up to ensure data quality, the analysis drew on more than 7,400 unique participants across 89 distinct workshops. These workshops were held in person, online, and in hybrid formats, with over 3,000 people completing both a before and an after survey. Participants took part from more than thirty countries.

To the best of our knowledge, this makes IDL 2.0 the largest prospective study of personal development workshops ever conducted, and one of the largest datasets ever assembled on the relationship between interconnectedness and well-being.

The central preregistered hypothesis was confirmed. A person’s subjective sense of interconnectedness was strongly and positively associated with their well-being — a substantial relationship, replicating the pilot finding in a sample many times larger and using a more rigorous analytic approach. Of everything the Discovery Lab set out to test, this is the result that held up under the strictest conditions we could impose on it.

While participants reported modest improvements in both interconnectedness and well-being, there were more notable positive shifts in interconnectedness. Because the study had no control group, these improvements are associations rather than proof of cause — a limitation we state plainly.

What was surprising to find was the factors that did not influence change. The type of workshop — its stated goal, its format, its content — explained very little of who improved and by how much. The benefit appeared to be broadly shared rather than specific to any one modality, consistent with common ingredients such as group support, positive expectancy, shared intention, and dedicated time for self-reflection.

For anyone choosing a practice, that is a genuinely practical finding: the value may lie less in finding the right practice than in engaging one that resonates with you.

One individual characteristic did predict change consistently: older participants tended to gain less than younger ones, in both interconnectedness and well-being.

The second research question — concerning extended human capacities — could not be adequately tested. The three brief online tasks used to measure intuition, remote viewing, and mind–matter interaction did not hold together as a reliable measure of a single underlying capacity, so the hypothesis about how these capacities relate to interconnectedness and well-being remains open rather than answered.

This is a real result, and it points somewhere specific. Short, constrained laboratory-style tasks may simply be the wrong instrument for capturing how people encounter these experiences in daily life. The pilot pointed in the same direction: throughout both phases, what participants reported experiencing was far more informative than how they scored on the tasks. Reliable measurement has to come before the question can be properly asked — and the more promising path forward runs through naturalistic, experience-based approaches such as the Noetic Signature Inventory, which IONS is continuing to develop.

The IDL 2.0 confirmatory findings are currently under peer-review. This page will be updated with the full paper once it is published.

Wahbeh H, Taddeo S, Yount G, Radin D, Delorme A. Interconnectedness, extended human capacities, and well-being during personal development workshops: a preregistered confirmatory study. Manuscript in preparation. Preregistration: KPU Study Registry No. 1057.