Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe by Dean Radin

Author:Dean Radin [Radin, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Got Psi?

Psi effects observed in most laboratory studies are small in magnitude because of the artificial nature of experimental designs, the requirement to “be psychic” on demand, and the use of unselected participants who may not have any psi talent. And if those factors weren’t enough of a problem, it’s rare to have enough resources to collect the amount of data required to detect small effects. To overcome these challenges, a number of strategies have been explored to increase the amount of data one can gather at lower cost. They include conducting the same test for many years in the same lab, conducting tests over the radio, via TV, or in magazines, or performing meta-analyses where the results of many similar experiments are statistically combined.

All of these methods have enjoyed some success. Long-term experiments, such as RNG tests reported by Princeton University’s PEAR Laboratory from 1979 to 2007, or the ESP card tests reported by J. B. Rhine’s laboratory from the 1930s to the 1960s, have each provided sound evidence for psi. But persuasion in science rests on independent replications, so critics have been suspicious of the evidence produced by those individual long-term efforts. They imagine that those labs just kept making the same mistakes over and over again, or maybe that they were cheating, or maybe…You get the picture.

With the rise of the Internet, a new approach has been used to inexpensively collect lots of psi data: online tests. In 1977, I conducted what may have been the first computer-networked psi experiment.51 I used a large-scale computer network at the University of Illinois to provide a public-access precognition test.52 The study outcome was interesting and suggestive of precognition, but I was a graduate student at the time and heavily involved in my doctoral work, so I didn’t get around to publishing the results.

In 2000, I launched a suite of psi tests on the Internet that are still accessible at the website www.GotPsi.org. From then through mid-2017 the site had collected more than 225 million trials from some 350,000 people around the world. Over the years, the programming infrastructure was revised a number of times, but from the user’s point of view the tests have remained the same. This has provided many years of continuous data collection on several kinds of simple psi tests.

When a person signs up for the GotPsi.org tests, they select a nickname and fill out a few short questionnaires. What we’ll focus on here is the user’s response to a question on “the degree to which you believe in psychic phenomena,” which ranges in five levels from none to certain. From that answer we can see if belief modulated the average user’s performance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.