Tag Archives: Dean Radin

The Scientific Evidence for Psychokinesis: Psi Phenomena, Part 4

Posted on June 10, 2011 | 7 comments

Psychokinesis, telekinesis, move things with your mind, mind over matter, Part 1: The Scientific Evidence for Telepathy
Part 2: The Scientific Evidence for Clairvoyance
Part 3: The Scientific Evidence for Precognition

In today’s post, Part 4 of the series, I will recount the scientific evidence for psychokinesis, which is also referred to as telekinesis. These terms refer to one being able to move a physical object with one’s mind. In short, this particular term accounts for the “mind over matter” that people often refer to.

Much of the early research on psychokinesis involved one’s ability to influence the roll of a die. In these studies, a die face is chosen in advance, then the participant wishes for that face to land up. It’s probably one of the simpler studies one can conduct with regard to parapsychological research. Dean Radin and Diane Ferrari conducted a meta-analysis of all the experiments that had been done on die research from 1935 to 1987 and came to this conclusion:

The estimated effect  size for the full database lies more than 19 standard deviations from chance while the effect size for the subset of balanced, homogeneous studies lies 2.6 standard deviations from chance. We conclude that this database provides weak cumulative evidence for a genuine relationship between mental intention and the fall of dice.

Psychokinesis, telekinesis, move things with your mind, mind over matter, While the evidence from these earlier studies are not overwhelming, they at least lean towards support for the evidence and possibility of psychokinesis. Nowadays, the majority of research in this area is done with random-number generators (RNGs). These RNGs do exactly what it sounds like they do – generate a sequence of random numbers. In these RNG experiments, participants are usually asked to attempt to influence the outcome of the RNG to be higher than expected or lower than expected. With a random set of numbers, you can accurately predict what the dataset should look like, if there were no influences on it. The participants try to alter this by intending that the numbers are higher or intending that the numbers are lower. If you’ve read most of my posts in this series, then you know I have an affinity for meta-analyses.

In a meta-analysis conducted by Dean Radin and Roger Nelson of all of the RNG experiments conducted between 1959 (the first RNG experiment) and the mid-2000s:

Meta-analysis of 515 RNG experiments conducted by 91 researchers over a span of 41 years indicates the presence of a small magnitude, but statistically highly significant and repeatable mind-matter interaction effect.  The overall results cannot be attributed to chance, or selective reporting problems, or variations in design quality.  These studies indicate that there are ways in which mind and matter interact that support the plausibility of distant intentional healing.  Because modern RNG experiments can be conducted under tightly controlled laboratory conditions at relatively low cost, they may serve as a convenient model to help us better understand the relevant conditions and mechanisms of distant healing. [emphasis added]

Most research studies I’ve read about psychokinesis come to the same conclusion – it’s possible and it happens. While you won’t often see many accounts like this one, it seems that psychokinesis is a very real and present phenomenon. As I wrote in other The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the Worldposts about the power of words (Your words and thoughts have power; Words are more important than you may have thought; With love and gratitude), it seems that intention really has an effect on our reality. Since the body is made up of “physical” things, we could say that the evidence for the power of words could be used to support the evidence of psychokinesis. I understand that the studies I cited in those posts weren’t directly measure psychokinesis, but in a way, I think they were. More than that, there’s the work of Lynne McTaggart and her accompanying book The Intention Experiment.

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With Love and Gratitude

Posted on April 27, 2011 | 3 comments

Dr. Emoto, love and gratitude, water crystal, healing intention, power of wordsAnytime I write something to another person, I nearly always end the message with: With Love and Gratitude. I’ve been asked on a number of occasions why it is that I do this. I usually give people the abridged version (spreading joy) or something like that. I thought it would be good to have a post here explaining why it is that I use these four words to sign off on what I’ve said. Initially, I will refer you to two posts I have already written here having to do with the importance of our words & thoughts (for ourselves and for others).

Sometime during the summer of 2005, I had the chance to see the documentary, What The Bleep Do We Know!? Much of what was offered in the film was not new to me (given my unique exposure to many esoteric influences while growing up), but there was something that I found uniquely interesting about one of the clips from the movie that I’ve included here.

Dr. Emoto, Masaru Emoto, Hidden messages in water, water messages, healing intentionAfter watching the documentary, I was so happy that there was science being done to “back-up” the sorts of things that I already thought to be true. During the Fall of that same year, I was able to get a copy of Dr. Emoto‘s book: “The Hidden Messages in Water.” I didn’t want to take what the movie was telling me at face value, so I wanted to read his book. After reading his book, I was confident that there had to be something to the experiments he was doing. So this is half the story. The other half involves a piece of synchronicity.

At the same time I was reading about Emoto’s work, I happened upon an email (or maybe I stumbled onto the site, I really don’t remember exactly how it happened) regarding “The Go Gratitude Experiment.”Go Gratitude Logo The ‘experiment’ was all about Gratitude. I really enjoyed getting the “42 knew views on Gratitude” [spelling intended] and I still have the emails they came in. Some of the work by the Go Gratitude folks has shifted over to a new website (Blooming Humans), but from what I can tell, it’s essentially the same message: Gratitude matters.

After reading Emoto’s book and pairing it with the knowledge from the “Gratitude Experiment,” I was so pleased that I printed off a document containing the words “Love & Gratitude” filling the page in size 80 font and taped the words in different parts of my room. I put one on each wall, I put one on the face of the shelf just above where my computer monitor was and I even put some in my closet and drawers (why shouldn’t my clothes radiate Love & Gratitude, right?)

At first, I was a little shy signing off emails to people “With Love and Gratitude.” It didn’t necessarily feel appropriate to have the word “love” in certain kinds of emails. That word can be quite ‘charged’ for some folks, and I didn’t necessarily want to invoke those sorts of feelings when they were reading my email. Eventually, as I got into the habit of signing off emails “With Love and Gratitude” to people, it would sometimes just slip out when signing off emails that were of a more business-like nature. As this started to happen more and more,Emoto, Masaru Emoto, hidden messages in water, water crystals, love and gratitude I began to realize that my initial trepidation was unnecessary. In fact, I began to relish sending emails to people as it allowed me the chance to say what I needed to say, with love and gratitude.

Since Emoto’s work was published, there have been a number of critics, which I suppose is to be expected, and some of them even raise important points. The clincher for me is Dean Radin. I’ve spoken about Dean Radin before a number of times on here. He is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is the “author or coauthor of over 200 technical and popular articles, a dozen book chapters, and several books.” In 2006, Dean Radin (along with Emoto and other researchers) sought out to test the effects if distant intention on water crystal formation. They used a double-blind method (an experiment in which the experimenters and the participants both do not know which group is experimental and which is the control) and their results:

Results indicated that crystals from the treated water were given higher scores for aesthetic appeal than those from the control water (P = .001, one-tailed), lending support to the hypothesis.

A couple of years later, Radin set out to replicate the findings — again. This time, it was a triple-blind study. A triple-blind study is when the experimenters, the participants, and the evaluators, all, do not know who is receiving treatment and who is not receiving treatment. And again, their results:

Results suggested that crystal images in the intentionally treated condition were rated as aesthetically more beautiful than proximal control crystals (p = 0.03, one-tailed).

I had already believed the water crystal experiments to be true, but after reading the papers published by Radin, now I can be much more sure that they are true. So there you have it. Now you know why I sign-off my emails and comments with:

With Love and Gratitude


Dr. Emoto, love and gratitude, water crystal, healing intention, power of words

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The Scientific Evidence for Telepathy: Psi Phenomena, Part 1

Posted on April 26, 2011 | 10 comments

telepathy, esp, psychic, fortune teller, psi, I’ve touched on psi phenomena in a couple of other posts (What if we were all telepathic? and Would you take a pill to make you smarter?), but I didn’t really go into the details of what Charles Tart calls, “The Big Five.” In doing research for an upcoming series of posts on my thoughts of American public policy (which I briefly touched on here), I thought it might be good to also do a series of posts covering ‘the big 5,’ which are: telepathy, clairvoyance or remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing. I thought because I’d already touched on telepathy back in January, it would be best to start with it.

Let’s start with a definition. Telepathy is the scientific term for what some may call “mind-reading.” It is being able to pick up information from someone else’s mind. Some of the first scientific studies done in order to measure telepathy (in the 1930s) were done by J.B. Rhine, who is considered to be the father of modern parapsychology. He would have participants “read his mind” and guess the shape that was on the card he was holding (known as Zener cards). Rhine’s studies produced statistically significant results, time and time again. The one downfall to this method of experimenting is that it’s hard to know whether or not Rhine was measuring telepathy or clairvoyance (it is possible that the participants were divining the future [what card will turn up next?])

The second set of experiments conducted (starting in the mid-70s and still going on today) to test for telepathy are known as the Ganzfeld experiments. In these experiments, the participant would be subjected to sensory deprivation. To do this, the participant sits in a relaxing chair in a sound-proof room. The participant wears ping-pong balls that have been halved (and there is a red light that is shone on them). Ganzfeld Experiment, sensory deprivation, The participant also puts on a pair of headphones that play white noise. While in this state of sensory deprivation, another participant (the sender), will be shown random images that they will then try to mentally send to said participant. During the sensory deprivation period, the (receiver) speaks out loud and describes what they see. At the conclusion of the experiment, the participant is removed from the  sensory deprivation state and is then shown a number of random images and asked to identify the image that they were being sent. To insure internal validity, the two participants have no way of physically contacting each other during the experiment. Meaning, the sender can’t hear what the receiver is saying out loud. The results from these Ganzfeld experiments have, like the Zener cards before them, produced statistically significant results.

One of the more recent (and different) studies being conducted on telepathy is being done by Rupert Sheldrake. It is affectionately known as telephone telepathy. A common lay-person example of telepathy is knowing who is on the phone before you answer the phone. Sheldrake took this idea and made it into an experiment. In fact, you can even sign-up and do this experiment yourself! The experiment works like this:

  1. Register as an experimenter.
  2. Add friends.
  3. Call to initiate the experiment.
  4. A random friend is selected.
  5. Friend calls the experiment system.
  6. System calls the experimenter.
  7. Experimenter enters a guess.
  8. Call is connected.

Sheldrake says that the average success rate is 42%, “which is hugely significant statistically.” And he’s right. By sheer chance, in the way that Sheldrake has organized the experiment, you’d expect a success rate of 25%.

Sheldrake on Telepathy:

My research on telepathy in animals (summarized in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home and published in detail in a series of papers (listed here) led me to see telepathy as a normal. . . aspect of communication between members of animal social groups. The same principles apply to human telepathy.

Rupert SheldrakeSheldrake also provides links to opportunities to contribute to the research of telepathy with both online and offline experiments (one of the offline experiments I mentioned above, telephone telepathy).

Because of the sheer volume of skepticism towards the field of parapsychology, the field has been subjected to extremely high standards. In all that I have read about telepathy (both from supporters and skeptics), it is clear to me that telepathy is not a fluke or a one-time event. Telepathy is a very real phenomenon. More than that, I believe, we all possess the ability to be telepathic.

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What if we were all Telepathic?

Posted on January 30, 2011 | 1 comment

Consider for a moment that everyone on the planet is . No, really, I want you to consider what it would be like living in a planet where everyone was able to know everyone else’s thoughts. Walking down a crowded street, people no longer have the feeling of anonymity. Every other person walking near them would be able to ‘hear’ their thoughts. Having a conversation with a significant other and ‘leaving out’ details would no longer work as the significant other would just ‘hear’ those miscellaneous details that weren’t mentioned.

If we think about how this human ability has been reflected in film, we needn’t look any farther than the 2000 film, . In it, our protagonist, played by Mel Gibson, is electrocuted and as a result, has the ability to hear the thoughts of women around him. Initially, he uses this skill to his advantage. He unwittingly manipulates his co-worker and boss, in an effort to get ahead at work. Eventually, he gets what he thought he wanted – a promotion. When he does get what he thought he wanted, the promotion, he realized that he had been treating his co-worker very poorly and he regretted his actions.

While this is just a film, I think that it shows an interesting perspective on what it might be like if we were all telepathic. Yes, in the movie, Mel Gibson’s character was the only one that was telepathic, so he could use it to his advantage, but I think initially, that’s what many of us would attempt to do if we were telepathic. We would use this skill, just as we would any other skill, to help us get what we want. It’s not that we’re not thinking about other people, it’s just in our nature to be concerned with the well-being of ourselves.

So, if you could read my thoughts and I could read your thoughts, that would change some things on the planet, don’t you think? No longer would there be ‘idle’ chit-chat among people. Awkward hello’s and goodbye’s could be infinitely more awkward. Keeping secrets from people would become increasingly difficult. Business transactions would have a whole other minefield to navigate. It’s an interesting possibility to think about, isn’t it?

Telepathy isn’t really a skill that’s altogether ‘out there’ either. I’m sure you or someone you know has had an experience where they were talking to someone and they had a thought, an impression, or an idea about what the person they were talking to was thinking. Quickly revealing this to the other person, they confirm that their inkling was true. I know I’ve had more than a couple of these instances and I’m sure you have, too. These instances are not random.

Statistically speaking, skeptics will tell you that these times in your life where you had ‘telepathic experiences’ are random. They’ll tell you that, by chance, eventually, one will be able to ‘fluke’ their way into having a telepathic experience. While at some point, yes, there are times when these experiences are fluky, I can’t help but be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence presented by Dean Radin in and . In these books, Dean Radin addresses many parapsychological phenomena from an objective standpoint – presenting the research from both sides – and leaving the reader left to decide for themselves. After picking up one of these books and seeing the countless studies conducted that support the evidence for telepathy, it’s hard to disagree with him.

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