The Conscious Universe Quotes

“When the evidence for an anomaly becomes overwhelming, and the anomaly cannot be easily accommodated by the existing scientific worldview, this is a very important sign that either our assumptions about reality are wrong or our assumptions about how we come to understand things are wrong.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“The results of these experiments also bear some resemblance to Jung’s concept of “synchronicity,” or meaningful coincidences in time.21 As with synchronicity, we seem to be witnessing meaningful relationships between mind and matter at certain times. But synchronicity, according to Jung, involves acausal relationships, and here we were able to predict synchronistic-like events. Jung believed that people could experience but not understand in causal terms how synchronicities occurred: We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a “metaphysical” mind or spirit and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium.22 We are more confident than Jung about what may be possible because it appears that with clever experimental designs, some aspects of Jung’s unus mundus (one world) are in fact responsive to experimental probes, and some forms of synchronistic events can be—paradoxically—planned. We expect that Nature will reveal to us anything we are clever enough to ask for, but we also know that the revealed information is usually shrouded in unstated (and often unexamined) assumptions. At a minimum, we’re beginning to glimpse that past assumptions about rigid separations between mind and matter were probably wrong.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“The studies described here support ideas about deep interconnectedness espoused by physicists, theologians, and mystics.19 Mind and matter may be part of what physicist Victor Mansfield describes as “a radically interconnected and interdependent world, one so essentially connected at a deep level that the interconnections are more fundamental, more real than the independent existence of the parts.”20 The common link between mind and matter, as observed in these experiments, is order. Order expressed in the mind is related to focused attention, and order in matter is related to decreases in randomness. We found that the object of the focused attention does not seem to be particularly important, only that something is sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of a group. Similarly, the exact nature of the physical system used to detect the mass-consciousness effect does not seem to be particularly important, provided that it is a system that naturally fluctuates in some way and can be measured.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“One way to avoid the design problems encountered by the transcendental meditation researchers would be to keep one of the variables fixed. This could be either the number of meditators or the “target” of consciousness-induced order. Beyond this, as philosopher Evan Fales and sociologist Barry Markovsky of the University of Iowa suggested after reviewing the Maharishi effect, “Presumably, if the material world can be influenced in purposive ways by collective meditation, inanimate detectors could be constructed and placed at varying distances from the collective meditators.”6 This is essentially the approach that we took, although our motivations were based upon a logical extension of laboratory research on mind-matter interactions using random-number generators, and not by the claims of the transcendental meditators. Properties of Consciousness Whatever else consciousness may be, let us suppose that it also has the following properties, derived from a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies.7 The first property is that consciousness extends beyond the individual and has quantum field–like properties, in that it affects the probabilities of events. Second, consciousness injects order into systems in proportion to the “strength” of consciousness present. This is a refinement of quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s observation about one of the most remarkable properties of life, namely, an “organism’s astonishing gift … of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.”8 Third, the strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment, and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. We propose that ordinary awareness has a fairly low focus of attention compared to peak states, mystical states, and other nonordinary states.9 Fourth, a group of individuals can be said to have “group consciousness.” Group consciousness strengthens when the group’s attention is focused on a common object or event, and this creates coherence among the group. If the group’s attention is scattered, then the group’s mental coherence is also scattered. Fifth, when individuals in a group are all attending to different things, then the group consciousness and group mental coherence is effectively zero, producing what amounts to background noise. We assume that the maximum degree of group coherence is related in some complicated way to the total number of individuals present in the group, the strength of their common focus of attention, and other psychological, physiological, and environmental factors. Sixth, physical systems of all kinds respond to a consciousness field by becoming more ordered. The stronger or more coherent a consciousness field, the more the order will be evident. Inanimate objects (like rocks) will respond to order induced by consciousness as well as animate ones (like people, or tossed dice), but it is only in the more labile systems that we have the tools to readily detect these changes in order. In sum, when a group is actively focused on a common object, the “group mind” momentarily has the “power to organize,” as Carl Jung put it.10 This leads us to a very simple idea: as the mind moves, so moves matter.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“The development of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s expanded the classical notion of fields in a way that would have shocked Newtonian physicists. Quantum fields do not exist physically in space-time like the classically inferred gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Instead, quantum fields specify only probabilities for strange, ghostlike particles as they manifest in space-time. Although quantum fields are mathematically similar to classical fields, they are more difficult to understand because, unlike classical fields, they exist outside the usual boundaries of space-time. This gives the quantum field a peculiar nonlocal character, meaning the field is not located in a given region of space and time. With a nonlocal phenomenon, what happens in region A instantaneously influences what occurs in region B, and vice versa, without any energy being exchanged between the two regions. Such a phenomenon would be impossible according to classical physics, and yet nonlocality has been dramatically and convincingly revealed in modern physics experiments. In fact, those experiments are independent of the present formulation of quantum mechanics, which means that any future theory of nature must also embody the principle of nonlocality. We’ll return to nonlocality again in chapter 16. Consciousness Fields Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. —Claude Levi-Strauss The idea that consciousness may be fieldlike is not new.2 William James wrote about this idea in 1898, and more recently the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a similar idea with his concept of morphogenetic fields.3 The conceptual roots of field consciousness can be traced back to Eastern philosophy, especially the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of Hinduism, which express the idea of a single underlying reality embodied in “Brahman,” the absolute Self. The idea of field consciousness suggests a continuum of nonlocal intelligence, permeating space and time. This is in contrast with the neuroscience-inspired, Newtonian view of a perceptive tissue locked inside the skull.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“The “feeling of being stared at” is the focus of a subset of distant-mental-interaction studies. This is a particularly interesting belief to investigate because it is related to one of the oldest known superstitions in the Western world, the “evil eye,” and to one of the oldest known blessings in the Eastern world, the darshan, or gaze of an enlightened master. Most ancient peoples feared the evil eye and took measures to deflect the attraction of the eye, often by wearing shiny or attractive amulets around the neck. Today, most fears about the evil eye have subsided, at least among educated peoples. And yet many people still report the “feeling of being stared at” from a distance. Is this visceral feeling what it appears to be—a distant mental influence of the nervous system—or can it be better understood in more prosaic ways? In the laboratory today, the question is studied by separating two people and monitoring the first person’s nervous system (usually electrodermal activity) while the second person stares at the first at random times over a one-way closed-circuit video system. The stared-at person has no idea when the starer is looking at him or her. Figure 9.2. Effect sizes for studies testing the “feeling of being stared at,” where 50 percent is chance expectation. Confidence intervals are 95 percent. Figure 9.2 shows the results for staring studies conducted over eight decades.34 Similar to William Braud’s electrodermal studies but conducted in a context that more closely matched common descriptions of “feeling stared at,” these studies resulted in an overall effect of 63 percent where chance expectation is 50 percent. This is remarkably robust for a phenomenon that—according to conventional scientific models—is not supposed to exist. The combined studies result in odds against chance of 3.8 million to 1. Summary Given the evidence for psi perception and mind-matter interaction effects discussed so far, we could have expected that experiments involving living systems would also be successful. The studies discussed here show that our expectations are confirmed. The implications for distant healing are clear. All the experiments discussed so far have been replicated in the laboratory dozens to hundreds of times. They demonstrate that some of the “psychic” experiences people report probably do involve genuine psi. Now we move outside the laboratory to examine a new type of experiment, one that explores mind-matter interaction effects apparently associated with the collective attention of groups.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals. There were also some gender differences. PEAR lab psychologist Brenda Dunne found that women tended to volunteer more time to the experiments, and thus they accumulated about two-thirds of the full database, compared with one-third for men. On the other hand, their effects were smaller on average than those of men, with odds of the difference being due to chance at eight hundred to one.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Die-Face Analysis In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine and his colleagues recognized and took into account the possibility that some dice studies may have been flawed because the probabilities of die faces are not equal. With some dice, it is slightly more likely that one will roll a 6 face than a 1 face because the die faces are marked by scooping out bits of material. The 6 face, for example, has six scoops removed from the surface of that side of the die, so it has slightly less mass than the other die faces. On any random toss, that tiny difference in mass will make the 6 slightly more likely to land face up, followed in decreasing probability by the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 faces. Thus, an experiment that relied exclusively upon the 6 face as the target may have been flawed because, unless there were also control tosses with no mental intention applied, we could not tell whether above-chance results were due to a mind-matter interaction or to the slightly higher probability of rolling a 6. To see whether this bias was present in these dice studies, we sifted out all reports for which the published data allowed us to calculate the effective hit rate separately for each of the six die faces used under experimental and control conditions. In fact, the suspected biases were found, as shown in figure 8.3. The hit rates for both experimental and control tosses tended to increase from die faces 1 to 6. However, most of the experimental hit rates were also larger than the corresponding control hit rates, suggested some thing interesting beyond the artifacts caused by die-face biases. For example, for die face 6 the experimental condition was significantly larger than the control with odds against chance of five thousand to one. Figure 8.3. Relationship between die face and hit rates for experimental and control conditions. The error bars are 65 percent confidence intervals. Because of the evidence that the die faces were slightly biased, we examined a subset of studies that controlled for these dice biases—studies using design protocols where die faces were equally distributed among the six targets. We referred to such studies as the “balanced-protocol subset.” Sixty-nine experiments met the balanced-protocol criteria. Our examination of those experiments resulted in three notable points: there was still highly significant evidence for mind-matter interaction, with odds against chance of greater than a trillion to one; the effects were constant across different measures of experimental quality; and the selective-reporting “file drawer” required a twenty-to-one ratio of unretrieved, nonsignificant studies for each observed study. Thus chance, quality, and selective reporting could not explain away the results. Dice Conclusions Our meta-analysis findings led us to conclude that a genuine mind-matter interaction did exist with experiments testing tossed dice. The effect had been successfully replicated in more than a hundred experiments by more than fifty investigators for more than a half-century.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8 Future Feelings In a recent series of experiments conducted in our laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we’ve explored unconscious nervous system responses to future events. Strictly speaking, such responses are a subset of precognition known as “presentiment,” a vague sense or feeling of something about to occur but without any conscious awareness of a particular event.9 The unconscious responses studied in our experiments took advantage of a well-known psychophysical reflex known as the “orienting response,” first described by Pavlov in the 1920s. The orienting response is a set of physiological changes experienced by an organism when it faces a “fight or flight” situation. For human beings, the response also appears in less dangerous contexts, such as when confronting a novel or unexpected stimulus. The classical orienting response is a series of simultaneous bodily changes that include dilation of the pupil, altered brain waves, a rise in sweat gland activity, a rise/fall pattern in heart rate, and blanching of the extremities.10 These bodily changes momentarily sharpen our perceptions, improve our decision-making abilities, increase our strength, and reduce the danger of bleeding. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because when our ancestors were challenged by a tiger, the ones who survived were suddenly able to see and hear exceptionally well, make very fast decisions, become unusually strong, and not bleed as easily as usual. It’s relatively easy to produce an orienting response on demand by showing a person an emotionally provocative photograph. Stimuli like noxious odors, meaningful words, electrical shocks, and sudden tactile stimuli are also effective. Because a person’s general level of arousal is affected cumulatively by successive stimuli, the strength of the orienting response tends to diminish after three to five emotional pictures in a row. In our study, to prevent participants from “habituating,” we randomly interspersed the photos used to produce the orienting responses within a pool of twice as many calm photos.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein In previous chapters, we saw that the perceptual forms of psi are difficult to distinguish clearly in the laboratory. Telepathy in the lab, and in life, can be explained as a form of clairvoyance, and clairvoyance is difficult to localize precisely in time. Concepts like “retrocognition,” “real-time clairvoyance,” and “precognition” have arisen, blurring the usual concepts of perception and time. It seems that we must think of psi perception as a general ability to gain information from a distance, unbound by the usual limitations of both space and time.1 As long as we are interested in demonstrating the mere existence of perceptual psi, these conceptual distinctions do not matter. But when we try to understand how these effects are possible, the differences become critical. For example, it’s important when theorizing about psi to know if it’s actually possible to directly perceive someone’s thoughts. Likewise, it’s important to know if it’s possible to perceive objects at a distance in real time. Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists. In stead, the vast majority of both anecdotal and empirical evidence for perceptual psi suggests that the evidence can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition. This may be surprising, given the temporal paradoxes presented by the notion of perception through time. But one simple way of thinking about virtually every form of perceptual psi is that we occasionally bump into our own future. That is, the only way that we personally know that something is psychic, as opposed to a pure fantasy, is because sometime in our future we get verification that our mental impressions were based on something that really did happen to us. This means that, in principle, the original psychic impression could have been a precognition from ourselves.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Sheep and Goats One way of independently checking the results suggested by the hypnosis studies is to examine another form of suggestion, one that is in some ways stronger than conventional hypnotic induction. These are the subtle suggestions induced in us by our culture, our personal experiences, and the beliefs we learned from parents and schools. Together, culture, experience, and beliefs are potent shapers of our sense of reality. They are, in effect, hidden persuaders, powerful reinforcers of our sense of what is real. Our deep beliefs determine what we view as logically reasonable and what we consider to be morally and ethically self-evident. As we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 14, the hidden “hypnosis” of belief actually determines to a greater degree than is commonly known what we can consciously perceive. The hypnosis experiments showed that a slight tweaking of these beliefs resulted in a different performance. Thus, we would expect that people who accept the existence of ESP—for reasons of culture, experience, or belief—will score higher, on average, than people who do not. This turns out to be one of the most consistent experimental effects in psi research. It was whimsically dubbed the “sheep-goat” effect by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, who in 1943 proposed that one reason that confirmed skeptics do not report psi experiences is because they subconsciously avoid them.37 People who do report such experiences Schmeidler called the “sheep,” and the skeptics she called the “goats.” These studies typically had people fill in a questionnaire asking about their degree of belief in ESP and about any psi experiences they may have had. On the basis of their responses, participants were classified as either sheep or goats. All participants then took a standardized psi test, like an ESP card test, after which the results of the sheep and goats were compared. The idea was that the performance of the sheep would be significantly better than that of the goats. In 1993, psychologist Tony Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, reported a meta-analysis of all sheep-goat forced-choice experiments conducted between 1943 and 1993. Lawrence found seventy-three published reports by thirty-seven different investigators, involving more than 685,000 guesses produced by forty-five hundred participants. The overall results were strongly in favor of the sheep-goat effect, with believers performing better than disbelievers with odds greater than a trillion to one.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Most of the classified, mission-oriented remote viewings could not be evaluated as controlled, formal experiments, because that was not their intent. In some cases, however, unexpected information obtained through remote viewing was later confirmed to be correct, and this was important because it demonstrated the pragmatic value of this technique for use in real-world missions.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Measuring replication rates across different experiments requires that research be reviewed in some fashion. Research reviews can be classified into four types. A type 1 review simply identifies and discusses recent developments in a field, usually focusing on a few exemplar experiments. Such reviews are often found in popular-science magazines such as Scientific American. They are also commonly used in skeptical reviews of psi research because one or two carefully selected exemplars can provide easy targets to pick apart. The type 2 review uses a few research results to highlight or illustrate a new theory or to propose a new theoretical framework for understanding a phenomenon. Again, the review is not designed to be comprehensive but only to illustrate a general theme. Type 3 reviews organize and synthesize knowledge from various areas of research. Such narrative reviews are not comprehensive, because the entire pool of combined studies from many disciplines is typically too large to consider individually. So again, a few exemplars of the “best” studies are used to illustrate the point of the synthesis. Type 4 is the integrative review, or meta-analysis, which is a structured technique for exhaustively analyzing a complete body of experiments. It draws generalizations from a set of observations about each experiment.1 Integration Meta-analysis has been described as “a method of statistical analysis wherein the units of analysis are the results of independent studies, rather than the responses of individual subjects.”2 In a single experiment, the raw data points are typically the participants’ individual responses. In meta-analysis, the raw data points are the results of separate experiments.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Stochastic and Reactive Effects Replication may be difficult to achieve if the phenomenon under study is inherently stochastic, that is, if it changes with time. Moreover, the phenomenon may react to the experimental situation, altering its characteristics because of the experiment. These are particularly sticky problems in the behavioral and social sciences, for it is virtually impossible to guarantee that an individual tested once will be exactly the same when tested later. In fact, when dealing with living organisms, we cannot realistically expect strict stability of behavior over time. Researchers have developed various experimental designs that attempt to counteract this problem of large fluctuations in behavior. Replication is equally problematic in medical research, for the effects of a drug as well as the symptoms of a disease change with time, confounding the observed course of the illness. Was the cure accelerated or held back by the introduction of the test drug? Often the answer can only be inferred based on what happens on average to a group of test patients compared to a group of control patients. Even attempts to keep experimenters and test participants completely blind to the experimental manipulations do not always address the stochastic and reactive elements of the phenomena under study. Besides the possibility that an effect may change over time, some phenomena may be inherently statistical; that is, they may exist only as probabilities or tendencies to occur. Experimenter Effects In a classic book entitled Pitfalls in Human Research, psychologist Theodore X. Barber discusses ten ways in which behavioral research can go wrong.11 These include such things as the “investigator paradigm effect,” in which the investigator’s conceptual framework biases the way an experiment is conducted and interpreted, and the “experimenter personal attributes effect,” where variables such as age, sex, and friendliness interact with the test participants’ responses. A third pitfall is the “experimenter unintentional expectancy effect”; that is, the experimenter’s prior expectations can influence the outcome of an experiment. Researchers’ expectations and prior beliefs affect how their experiments are conducted, how the data are interpreted, and how other investigators’ research is judged. This topic, discussed in chapter 14, is relevant to understanding the criticisms of psi experiments and how the evidence for psi phenomena has often been misinterpreted.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Like Wheeler, very few scientists would be happy about being associated in any way with the dreaded label “pseudoscience.” Besides incurring the fear and loathing of the mainstream, those conducting research on topics stamped “pseudoscience” may find that funding sources mysteriously dry up, journals refuse to publish their research, and opportunities for academic tenure vanish. The difficulty of getting scientists to attempt to replicate, or even pay attention to, psi experiments is related to what Thomas Gold of Cornell University has called the “herd effect.” This is the tendency for scientists (or any people, for that matter) to cluster together in groups where only certain ideas or techniques are acceptable. A scientific herd forms for essentially the same reason that sheep form a herd—to protect individuals. It is very risky for one’s career to stand apart from the herd, given the rapidly diminishing likelihood that one can continue to practice science outside the herd. Without exception, scientists who conduct psi research are high risk-takers, because the academic world lets them know very quickly that “we don’t take kindly to strangers in these here parts.” Psychological Factors It is well known that most scientists are “theory-driven” rather than “data-driven.” This means that scientists are uncomfortable with “facts” unless some theory can explain them. Parapsychological “facts” are uncomfortable because there are no well-accepted explanations for why the facts should exist. This does not mean that no scientific theories of psychic phenomena exist; actually, there are dozens. It is the adequacy of the theories that is in question. Being theory-driven also means that scientists fail to see data that contradict their theoretical expectations. This does not mean that they fail to understand the data, but rather that they have a strong tendency literally not to perceive the offending data. As discussed in some detail in chapter 14, a substantial body of conventional psychological research supports this strong consequence. Witnessing this effect in action is truly astonishing. It is like trying to get a dog to look at something that you know he will find interesting. “There it is! Look at the evidence there!” Where? I don’t see anything. “There I say. Look where I’m pointing, not at my hand!” Nope, I don’t see anything.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“Supernatural Supernatural has several meanings; the usual is “miraculous; ascribed to agencies or powers above or beyond nature; divine.” Because science is commonly regarded as a method of studying the natural world, a supernatural phenomenon is by this definition unexplainable by, and therefore totally incompatible with, science. Today, a few religious traditions continue to maintain that psi is supernatural and therefore not amenable to scientific study. But a few hundred years ago virtually all natural phenomena were thought to be manifestations of supernatural agencies and spirits. Through years of systematic investigation, many of these phenomena are now understood in quite ordinary terms. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to expect that so-called miracles are simply indicators of our present ignorance. Any such events may be more properly labeled first as paranormal, then as normal once we have developed an acceptable scientific explanation. As astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it: “There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural, particularly regarding relatively rare occurrences.”2 Mystical Mystical refers to the direct perception of reality; knowledge derived directly rather than indirectly. In many respects, mysticism is surprisingly similar to science in that it is a systematic method of exploring the nature of the world. Science concentrates on outer, objective phenomena, and mysticism concentrates on inner, subjective phenomena. It is interesting that numerous scientists, scholars, and sages over the years have revealed deep, underlying similarities between the goals, practices, and findings of science and mysticism. Some of the most famous scientists wrote in terms that are practically indistinguishable from the writings of mystics.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“For now, let us take paranormal to mean something like “beyond the range of phenomena presently accepted by most scientists.” Many subjects now considered perfectly legitimate areas of scientific inquiry, including hypnosis, dreams, hallucinations, and subliminal perception, were relegated to the wackiest fringes of the paranormal in the late nineteenth century. A few hundred years before that, topics like physics, astronomy, and chemistry were so far out that those who merely dabbled in them risked accusations of heresy, or worse. This simply points out that science, like most other things, is part of an evolutionary process: odd events considered paranormal eventually become normal after satisfactory scientific explanations are developed. In this sense—although some scientists would probably shudder at the analogy—virtually all cutting-edge, basic research can be viewed as the systematic practice of probing and explaining the paranormal.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“These experiences, called “psychic” or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space. For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified. Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked by scientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight. Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of “common sense.” A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive. The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn’t clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“As acceptance grows, the implications of psi will become more apparent. But we already know that these phenomena present profound challenges to many aspects of science, philosophy, and religion (chapter 17). These challenges will nudge scientists to reconsider basic assumptions about space, time, mind, and matter. Philosophers will rekindle the perennial debates over the role of consciousness in the physical world. Theologians will reconsider the concept of divine intervention, as some phenomena previously considered to be miracles will probably become subject to scientific understanding. These reconsiderations are long overdue. An exclusive focus on what might be called “the outer world” has led to a grievous split between the private world of human experience and the public world as described by science. In particular, science has provided little understanding of profoundly important human concepts like hope and meaning. The split between the objective and the subjective has in the past been dismissed as a nonproblem, or as a problem belonging to religion and not to science. But this split has also led to major technological blunders, and a rising popular antagonism toward science. This is a pity, because scientific methods are exceptionally powerful tools for overcoming personal biases and building workable models of the “truth.” There is every reason to expect that the same methods that gave us a better understanding of galaxies and genes will also shed light on experiences described by mystics throughout history.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“history amply demonstrates that science progresses mainly by funerals, not by reason and logic alone.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“As science attained unprecedented power through its ability to predict and control certain limited aspects of nature, it also began to overshadow our understanding of ethics and values. History has shown that decisions affecting millions were made on the basis of industrial expediency, technological imperatives, and economic pressures. Just as the absolute power held by the church for centuries had been seductive, the growing power of science had seduced as well.6”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

“One of the most profitable consequences of science as an “open system” of knowledge, as opposed to rigid dogma, is that the future Laws of Nature will bear as much resemblance to the “laws” we know today as the cellular telephone does to smoke signals. Both sets of laws attempt to deal with and explain the same world, but the latter set is much more sophisticated and comprehensive than the former.”
― Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena