New Experiments Show Consciousness Affects Matter ~ Dean Radin, PhD

I assume by now everybody knows a lot about the double slit experiment so I'm going to go through this very quickly if you take elementary particles quanta photons electrons and so on you send them through two slits and you look at a screen just to see what happens if you don't know which of the two slits the particle went through then you get an interference pattern and this of course works just as well if you're sending a single photon or single electron at one time the mystery is that as soon as you do know by any means which of the two slits the particle goes through then you get a pattern that looks like it's particles this is of course leads to the famous wave particle duality and in a much more practical sense it leads to this sort of thing the caption says it says the cost of the flight went up because we acknowledged its existence so there's something peculiar about observation and this is of course the quantum measurement problem which you can has been described before here but I'm going to do it in a simpler form you have some sort of a system which could be a double slit any kind of physical system some sort of measuring apparatus and the measuring apparatus does an observation of the system from a quantum perspective you take the tensor product between the two quantum systems so two physical systems and you end up with a system and the measurement apparatus no longer being independent so we can say that the two physical systems are entangled so from a quantum perspective we're just dealing with complex waves there's there's no particle-like behavior yet john bell made this sketch to illustrate the problem well where does the measurement end so if you imagine that you you have a photon and it goes through two slits and it hits a screen you might have a photo detector and then you might have a human a counter that looks at the number of times that the photo detector goes off and then the human eye and the human brain all of those are physical systems all of them they are therefore quantum well why do we see a particle why does observation make a difference so this is sometimes called the the von Neumann chain or the Heisenberg chain where is the cut made when does quantum become classical John von Neumann said that the measurement chain ends only when knowledge of the measurement is registered by what he called an extra physical factor in other words you can't use another physical system to end the chain because it just becomes more quantum so you need something extra physical by which he meant consciousness and he wasn't alone in his opinion almost all of the founders of quantum mechanics said something like this in various ways but go all the way back to Bohr and and even plunk they all said something like this and this continues to the present day as you know this is today a minority opinion within physics but nevertheless it has a pretty prominent background so I've been aware of this of course and everyone offers theories about consciousness but nobody does anything about it when it comes to this particular problem the measurement problem so what we did in the laboratory is we we built a double slit system and fortunately it's a very simple type of a system you have a laser you have a filter you have a double slit and you have a camera that looks at the result so the only new element in this experiment is that we asked people in this case like a meditator to keep the double slit in mind and to imagine in their minds eye that they could see which of the two slits that the photon went through this is as we get as far as we could tell the only way of directly testing whether consciousness is actually collapsing the wave function so this is what the apparatus looks like the tube sticking out of the long box there is the far end of the helium neon laser and the the double slit and the camera are inside the box so it's a sealed system you can't see it with your eye you can only use your mind's eye this is the camera it's called a line camera and this particular one is 3000 pixels long and a line and what the camera sees is an alternating band of light and dark this is the interference pattern when you look at this and soft where you can say well how bright is each band and you get a picture that looks something like that is that sure what yeah so you get this sort of Gaussian looking shape and that's the way of looking at the interference so if we start with that pattern and in picture a you can do a Fourier transform which is picture B and the peak in the middle is now the double slit spectral power and this is the way we initially started doing these experiments with looking at the power spectrum and this is convenient because again we ask someone who in this case in the laboratories two meters away from the sealed optical system we ask them to keep the double slit in mind and then the measurement is very simple we predict that if observation is doing something to the interference pattern that the double slit component of that interference will go away or at least it'll go down an addition because this is an abstract task the the double slit itself is about each slit is 10 microns across and if you simply hold up the double slit to somebody to have them look at it they may or may not even be able to see it so it's difficult for some people to imagine that they can in their minds I see what's going on in that space so we do a real-time analysis of the the double slit power and we use that to adjust feedback tone so if you have somebody doing the task they could look at a screen which is showing a signal where they can simply do it by listening to the tone and generally what we do is we have like a droning tone and we ask the person to make the droning tone louder make it just louder because it's a very pleasant tone and then that if they would know that they were succeeding through that tone this also provides a way to to focus their mind on the task at hand because mind-wandering is always a big problem the protocol is very simple as well we compare the doubles of power during mental observation versus no observation they get a voice message which says now concentrate and then now relax and this alternates we do the observation periods for 30 seconds and the rest periods are 30 seconds plus or minus a random five seconds for reasons I'll mention later this is repeated in a typical session 40 times so the whole session lasts 20 minutes and the measure that we're interested in is a differential measure we're asking what is the double-slit power while observing versus while resting so there are many ways of doing the statistics we generally present it in terms of a z-score or an effect size so we did our first experiment in this form this was for 35 sessions 20 minutes apiece 15 people contributed it overall you can see the the mean and one standard error we did actually pretty good meditators did a little bit better than the non meditators and the prediction was a double-slit power would drop during observation and indeed that's what we saw so when we do experiments of this type especially when they work the first time or always suspicious about the first-timers effect or everybody's very enthusiastic about what's going on so we repeat it again and again so we did four pilot studies each time adjusting things in various ways and looking at different kinds of aspects of the design and in each case each one of the four pilot studies and meditators did quite well if you just combined everybody the green dots are the overall result and in some of the experiments and non-meditators did not do very well they tend to mind wander pretty quickly so there's a remember there's a 30 second period where you're asked to do this abstract task of putting your mind in a box at a distance and they can do that for about four seconds and then they can't do it anymore so the overall result of the pilot studies was this you see again overall we've got a pretty nice effect meditators did quite well non-meditators overall got actually close to chance and we ran the same system in this by the way was 250 20-minute sessions 137 people and we ran the same system again and again as controls which are the white dots and we don't see any any artifacts within the hardware or software or analytics that would suggest that there's some kind of bias in the system so a here looks like observation was collapsing the wavefunction at least the meditators could do that and the control tests we don't see any effect so we were encouraged by this to go ahead and do a formal experiment formal in the sense that we pre specified how many sessions we would do in advance of 50 sessions so here's the result of the 50 session pre planned experiment using the same analysis that we had used in the previous experiments and this gave us a 5 Sigma result so for those of you are not used to the term Sigma it's think of it in terms of z-score it's the same thing standard normal deviate so we got a 5 Sigma result when people were observing and when nobody was doing the observing we got almost exactly chance when we do an experiment like that and we get a very strong result you keep in mind that a 5 Sigma result was able to give CERN the Nobel Prize for finding the Higgs particle which turned out not to be Higgs after all well we got a 5 Sigma result too but I haven't heard from the Nobel Prize Committee yet and even it and we were also suspicious of it because that seemed way too good so we did another formal experiment again 50 sessions we did other things I don't have time to talk about in this but one of the things I'm showing here now is this is the control results and it's lagged in time and the reason why we look at the results of lagged in time is because if you ask somebody to now concentrate and then a little while later now relax you can't switch your mind instantaneously so we expect that there should be a delay in there than the results of the experiment because it takes mind the mind to switch gears so this provides actually a nice secondary way of looking for the results that we hope to find because if there is no delay then you have to be suspicious about the results so here's the so here's x 0 which is when the instruction is given to switch your attention there's the experimental results with the lag from 0 to 15 seconds and we got a slightly better result with two second delay so I'm not going to talk about this analysis again for the remainder of the experiments but we did this sort of lag analysis and all of the studies that we've done so after doing the second formal experiment again getting over five sigma result we got suspicious so maybe this was caused simply by proximity of the human body even those two meters away from the the double set system we figured that maybe when somebody's asked to concentrate they leaned forward slightly and for those of you who have worked with interferometers you know that they're exquisitely sensitive to everything so we we thought maybe the temperature change from a body one inch closer versus one inch away would be sufficient to make this result so we decided to put the entire thing on the Internet so we'd be sure that we could rigorously separate people by distance so there's a double slip this is sitting on a rack that has a bunch of servers on it and we ran this for three solid years calendar years twenty twelve thirteen and fourteen ended up with over 5,000 sessions done by human observers and 7,000 done by robot observers and I'll explain what that means in a minute so when somebody would sign onto our website this was the public site by the way we got people from around the world to do this in a non observing condition what you would see it's this blue rectangle on the browser screen and simply saying please relax and you'd hear no sound and then it would switch you'd hear voice saying now please concentrate and then you would start seeing this line move along the screen the instructions were to make them line go up and you would hear a kind of a whistling a whistling sound that was a tone and you were the tone would go up and down as the line went up and down and we did that so again you could do this experiment with your eyes closed there are also lots of checks and balances built in here we knew for example if somebody left the experiment while it was going and we would then mark we'd restore all the data but we'd mark it as this was an experiment that was not completed by a person for the what we call the robot X Parramatta there was a Linux system which was designed to simulate a human now the beauty of this is that the everything that's exactly the same as far as a double-slit system was concerned because it didn't know we think it didn't know whether a human was looking at it or a Linux system because they both came through the internet in the same way so we have very nice control for human observation versus we don't know whether Linux system is conscious or not but if it is it probably doesn't have the same level of consciousness as a human so here's the interference pattern this is a central portion of the interference pattern the camera would see what we did and this was a simpler measure than we did before and this is called fringe visibility which looks at the a peak and a trough and it measures the relative difference between the two and this is nice because if you work with lasers you know that they're not amazingly stable some of them are more stable than others we were using a helium neon gas laser which is known to do things like mode hopping power levels will slightly change and you have to jump through some statistical hoops in order to reduce the effect of that mode hopping but for fringe visibility you don't need to worry about that so much because this is now a relative measure and takes into account that there may be fluctuations in power so it's a more sensitive measure as well so the prediction is fringe visibility while you're observing would go down so it's somewhat similar to expect expectation that double-slit power would go down in this case it's Fringe visibility so this is the result of the sessions and 2012 there 2303 sessions done by the Linux system these are the middle twenty fringes of the interference pattern and it shows in terms of z-scores where it was there's one or two of them that were around three sigma but overall it was pretty close to chance and this is what we got with human observers so some again approached five Sigma differences that was 2080 nine sessions by 689 people around the world so what's nice here is they're able to look at yet another issue which is does distance matter so this is the distribution the effect sizes from where we were in California to the farthest that you can get from our laboratory which is South Africa which is 18,000 kilometers away and so we did a linear regression turns out to be flat to six decimal places but not know yet actually that line looks like it points at zero but it's below zero that's why we end up with a significant effect so the observer effect is independent of distance we then again in every case when we do an experiment and get a result like that we don't believe it ourselves and it would have to replicate it just to convince ourselves that it's real so we did it again the calendar year 2013 and 2014 so here are 5700 sessions of the controls so this is now a cumulative deviation plot so cumulatively you should expect that the deviations that you see in this experiment should sort of hover around zero there shouldn't be any systematic deviation and there isn't it is slight positive movement in the 2013 data but not in 2014 this is the controls then we look at the experimental results so in 2013 we got a cumulative march towards fringe dropping fringe visibility dropping which is what we had seen before and what we had predicted but 2014 it just kept getting more and more positive and this was a big puzzle as far as we could tell the system was the same it's turned on and has left on for the entire year it's never turned off the program is the same everything was the same and when you do the statistics on it sure enough completely reverses so this is a big puzzle it took about a month for me to figure out what was happening here and there the reason why it reverse is this that when you think about a conventional coordinate system because remember that the way that we present the feedback here is a a squiggly line that moves on the graph and going up on the graph was linked to feedback the fringe visibility was dropping so that's the way that we had set it up in 2013-2014 we decided to slightly change it a little bit with the hopes of making the feedback a little better but we forgot something a conventional Cartesian coordinate system looks like this but in Adobe Flash it's upside-down and the we wrote the browser of the client program in flash we forgot that you have to reverse the sign well why does why does Adobe do that it's like it's backwards well it's because it goes back to the old days when we had CRTs with a raster scan and it would start from the top and go down and so they left that code in to the Adobe system and so you simply have to remember that you need to reverse signs which we forgot in 2014 so it meant that in 2014 the feedback was reversed and the results were reversed so this suggests that the observational effect we're looking at is an active effect it's not simply that that consciousness collapses the wave function but it more is that it's something like a quantum Zeno effect and it steers the direction that you're going so when you take the overall results from 2013 and 14 in Reverse the sign of the results in 2014 you get a very healthy result for people and very close to chance for the robot sessions by the way all of this data it's about 80 gigabytes of data it's it's millions of camera frames with the interference patterns will all be it's being put online as we speak and will be available eventually when all of that data is uploaded so anybody can look at it so now a skeptic could say but is this really a quantum effect given that you're dealing with a gazillion photons per second with a continuous beam laser add to whichever applied that's a good point let's do the same experiment one photon at a time so we used a commercial system it's that it's a little over a meter long and you can shoot single photon at a time and then see whether or not you get interference with through with a double set system and the right end of that long chamber is a photomultiplier and that's what detects single photons so the way to do this since you're measuring one photon at a time is you use set up what the photomultiplier looks at and then you move it a little bit you move it a little bit you move a little slide so you're only getting a little piece of the interference pattern and as you move that back and forth you can actually trace out and interference pattern and that's what you see here and it's see by the error bars on it that it's very tightly controlled so in this case we decided to have observation linked to one of the troughs now the trough exists in this case because of destructive interference so we figured that if observation is getting rid of the interference and forth photons should increase in this case at that point so we set up a system to look at that point with the prediction that when people observe the system the line would go up we had six experiments and I'm just going to mention one briefly we call this the illuminated Buddha experiment because we have a little Buddha statue and put an LED in it that would get brighter the better you did and the experiment was done in complete darkness there's also a tone associated with this so you could do it with your eyes closed but this turned out to be a very pleasant kind of thing to do because in complete darkness the LED would light up this slightly yellow colored Buddha and it would it would glow yellow and it was a very pleasant experience we found actually in all of these experiments that if you think of this simply as as physics 101 it may or may not work we spent a lot of time making sure that the individuals that we chose were comfortable and understood the design and gave them a lot of leeway in terms of how they wanted to mentally interact with the system so the psychological side of this is just as important as the physical side so this is the result with the illuminated Buddha experiment we predicted that that would go up and it went up by two and a half Sigma so that was good we published this last year and it's got a prize for the best paper in that journal so we've done 17 experiments of this type most of them 16 of them using a double slit system over eight years and you can put this into a meta analytic software or the bottom line is this the depending on whether you use a fixed effect size or a random effect size somewhere between around four to eight Sigma effects so it looks pretty robust and all of this is still predicated on the idea that we're expecting a drop in double slit power so in the case of 2014 on the online system actually the result sment in the other direction so I'm not taking into account variance effects this is simply a mean shift in a mean shift terms it's still four to eight Sigma because then also ask questions like is this due to P hacking well no it's not due to P hacking are the results due to selective reporting no they're not due to selective reporting there's lots of weight of nice software now that you can put use data that goes into a meta analysis and start asking these questions about questionable research practices and of course we knew what we were doing we knew not to do selective reporting and not to P hack and not to do a whole bunch of things but it was nice to see that the software confirmed that that was the case so we so far have two independent reanalysis of our online data from 2013 and 14 Nikolas Trembley is a PhD postdoc in physics who's in France and he came to visit us for a month and we gave him the 80 gigabytes of data and said so you see what you can get so he was able to confirm that the results that were reported in that paper which just came out this year was correct and a second analysis was done by Wolfgang bear who's a physicists in the United States and he independently verified that the results were correct as well and he did publish that result in terms of replications of the experiment there is a physicist at the University of Sao Paulo who I don't have permission yet to say who he is but he's doing a replication I actually sent him our little double slit itself it's like a two hundred dollar piece of metal so I sent him that and then two days ago I asked him well how's it going I didn't hear about any results yet so this is exactly what he wrote in an email and the last days it has been an intense mixture of feelings I'm oscillating between oh my god and wait something must be wrong and this by the way is pretty similar to the results that the same feelings that we had when we were doing these experiments because you don't often get results that are 5 Sigma in any experiment but it was showing up here so the reason we kept doing replications is exactly the same sentiment that that this physicist is saying so he's going to visit us starting next week and I'll remain for the month of May and we'll go over and find details of his analysis and his methods to see whether he should be leaning towards oh my god or something must be wrong or what are other explanations were the results that we've been seeing in this well first of all maybe there's something idiosyncratic about the apparatus that we use well we've used for double-slit systems we get that pretty much the same result in all of them vibration is always a problem when you're dealing with interferometers because it's extremely sensitive to vibration most of our experiments were conducted inside our electrum identically shielded chamber which is solid steel double walled and 2,800 pounds so normally you'd have an optical table a very heavy one that would damp out vibrations in this case it was as though we're running inside an optical table because twenty eight hundred pound table is very good at damping out vibrations another problem that may a result is that since we're using 30-second segments that if power happened to fluctuate a thirty second period you can end up with an artifact and this is why we use random timing on the on the non observation periods between 30 to 35 seconds to decouple so that in case it wasn't an external cycle eventually it would it'll wash out because we were no longer exactly at 30 seconds signal drift is always a problem as well it was very small changes in temperature will cause interferometers to change so when necessary we would de tren the data we measure temperature at the the laser itself the double slit near the human with multiple thermocouples and we didn't find any effect due to temperature the we were very careful not to use parametric statistics and this all of these stats were based on our parametric bootstrap statistics which take into account funny business that may be going on in terms of the distribution of data I mentioned that there are two independent analyses so far we know it's not P hacking we know it's not selective reporting and independent replication is underway so common questions on this that arise how do we know that the participants are actually performing the task well as in any psychology experiment you kind of have to assume that they're following instructions but you don't really know that's why you run lots of sessions with lots of people in this case though because we were also have the capability of doing neuroscience we took advantage of the fact that alpha D synchronization is associated with focused attention so we predicted while people were doing the experiment we took their EEG and we predicted a correlation between the amount of alpha D sync and changes in CC power and we in fact got a significant correlation of the type that we predicted how come no one has noticed this before well two reasons one isn't no one's look for it and the second is that the magnitude is very small the magnitude of this effect is a very small fraction of 1% so if you were not thinking that something like this could happen it would simply look like noise it's not noise in our case because this is exactly what we were looking for so what's the response to this so far the response is this and the reason is clear it's because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this case requires dozens of independent replications for people to start believing this and there aren't any replications yet except maybe the one in Sao Paulo so if there are nine replications and why should anybody believe me well as Johnny Depp tells us it's actually not true that there are no replications if you look at 1977 Abner cermony and his team of Boston University did an experiment on the same general idea to see if consciousness would collapse the wave function and they did a somewhat different design they didn't use an optical system like I did but they did four or five hundred and fifty-four trials with a 50% chance hit rate and they got exactly 50% so they kind of lost interest in it but they mentioned in their paper that somebody else did the same experiment and they got a 60% hit rate which you think might have encouraged them to actually do it again but they didn't so just out there in 1998 Stan Jeffers at York University in Canada did an experiment with a double slit system and got nothing so not significant result but my kibbutz and use the same apparatus at Princeton and he did get a significant result so what we have now were two out of four tests that were successful and that's it well it turns out no we want more we always want more so many of you may be aware that for many years people have been using electronic random number generators where the numbers the the basis of the randomness are quantum phenomena either radioactive decay times or electron tunneling or other phenomena like the one on the upper right there is using photons it hit a mirror a half-silvered mirror and either go straight through or bounce off to the side which is a random quantum random effect so people have been using these things for almost over 50 years now to give an example 1985 Bob John and Brenda done at Princeton University did an experiment with the random number generator they asked people to aim high meaning they make the generator produce more ones were lame-o Zero's or do nothing as a baseline and they report highly significant results and what was the reaction to that not good enough and it's the same suspicion you always get that it's one laboratory producing a result that is kind of outside the mainstream so people are suspicious so a couple years later Roger Nelson and I when we were both at Princeton decided to see is it really true there's just one lab showing these results well it turns out over a period of about 30 years that there wasn't just one lab there were 68 different investigators reporting this and 152 publications not just one experiment but almost 600 and 200 controls you look at the overall results and the controls you get something that's very close to chance in terms of the main shift and in terms of the experimental data almost a seven sigma result so there's replications the same kind of analysis was done again 2006 bringing it up to date but only looking at a subset a subset of about half of the studies that have been done using random number generators and again the Sigma was somewhere between 3.6 to 4 Sigma results now the authors of this study suggested that there is the reason for those results was selective reporting and they gave reasons why they believe that and I don't believe it because I'm pretty well aware of everyone who had reported this and there simply aren't enough people around to reduce the effect by selective reporting so what's the overall reaction is something like this we're saying would you look through the telescope No we don't want to and the reason is this so a lot of people have felt and I've heard explicitly people saying if this is true we need to throw away the textbooks so we can't throw away the textbooks because we know too much already that is probably correct within each band each discipline in science so what do we do with this and it present the world's fastest analysis of what's happening here so reductive materialism is predicated on a model that looks something like this physics is at the bottom chemistry biology psychology consciousness is somewhere near the top but consciousness doesn't mean anything and from this perspective that the idea that mind and matter directly interact with each other in some ways forbidden or at least it's very difficult to think of a way that it could work now Stuart Hameroff has come up with an interesting model and there are more and more models coming along that suggests that there may be a way to stick within the existing scientific paradigm and solve this problem but the other approach of course is to take exactly the same disciplinary structure but just a consciousness and stick it down there so it's a new metaphysical base on which we sit from this perspective just like in physics you have electrons that go everywhere up in the pyramid here we'd have consciousness that starts at the bottom and goes everywhere up so this is idealism pan psyche is a neutral monism use whatever your favorite term is from this perspective the real puzzle is how do we get from consciousness or awareness into physics because if you solve that problem and there are people working on that too well then all the rest of it is perfectly fine and we don't need to throw any textbooks away except we're going to throw them away every two or three years anyway because that's what happens they're not thrown away completely they're just revised so in this case mind matter interaction actually is quite easy to explain so here's my conclusions and first of all the role of consciousness in the physical world can be tested it has been tested many times in many different ways the results so far suggests a consciousness plays some sort of an active participation in reality so we have lots of collaborators that worked with us over the years and of different funders I'm going to leave this up for a bit if you want references to all of the studies that are published including many more studies you go to tiny Earl calm and that that spot and you can find it it may be that this is the one that Newton missed and I thank you for your kind attention I switch it over yeah let's take one or two well Stu Coffman get gets ready okay I'll leave that up excellent excellent work Dean would you be interested in if there was some grant money available in doing a meta study that covers all the work that's been done because it seems that this is missing because the only meta study was in part it was not complete you're asking a scientist if you'd be interested in funding exactly okay good yes so let's talk hi excellent talk I have just two questions one is the role of the feedback you gave always feedback as a tone if you don't give it it what happens and the second one is that you found the correlation between alpha D Co synchronization and the effect size which seems really reasonable but you also found the effect with the Internet right and I I really can't imagine what kind of you know mechanism can cause the effect over the Internet what's the you arterial explanation did you understand pretty same the first one is the role of the feedback the role of the what feedback be bad right so we use feedbacks in feedback in almost every study mainly as a way to focus people's minds on the task at hand but also because of transactional interpretations of quantum mechanics so it was simply an easier way of imagining how a human could interact with the system at a distance through the interaction itself so the feedback then became the way that the two were connected but is it possible to feedback itself is causing this effort would the feedback cause the effect so when we do a control study we have it exactly the same so the feedback is running during the control as well so if it was an artifact that was caused by the feedback then it would have shown up in the control studies and they don't understa the question was that how it's possible that you know even if al-hadi synchronization is the cause of this effect when you are doing it in a two meter away what's possible to produce the same kind of effect through the internet through the through the internet yeah well we don't know but of course it suggests that whatever's going on in terms of consciousness is not it's it's non-local you don't have to be in proximity to the system two more questions it will run deep lovely talk of course but you mentioned the quantum Zeno effect somehow guiding so with the middle of your talk could you just expand on that I thought you were going to expand on that I thought you were going to talk about the quantum Zeno open I will talk about the quad-cam yeah sorry but but how does it guide in your well how does a guide I don't know and in this particular case though it is a well-known quantum phenomena that the means by which you're observing a system can push it in different directions so in this case we had feedback that basically reversed what we originally had seen okay which caused the reversal thank you yes so I am I'm a dressing these interpretations of quantum mechanics where consciousness collapses the wavefunction but I guess it's just obvious to me how this kind of anomalous effect provides any evidence for those interpretations over and above evidence for example you really boring evidence we already have like if you look at what's going on in the double slit you get collapsed results and remove interference patterns and so on you might think that's prime offici evidence but it turns out all the other interpretations of quantum mechanics can accommodate that evidence pretty well it seems to be that what you have here is if the evidence holds up evidence for some kind of mechanism of interaction between brains human observers and what's going on in the in the double slit but that's internet independent of the question of interpretation I would think that all the interpretations of quantum mechanics will agree that if there is some such mechanism of interaction between human observer and what's going on in the double slit then you'd get various you know collapse style results so it seems to me that it's not clear to me this actually gives direct evidence for this kind of interpretation much as I'd like it to well remember that the the motivation for this was explicitly looking at von neumann said about an extra physical factor so we use the extra factor and as best the way that we could think of doing it and in fact was confirming at least to a small degree of what vine Norman was basically saying that it was beginning to cut the chain now why didn't complete completely collapse my guess is because well we did see better result with meditators versus non meditators so there's something about focused attention that is a critical element and it's a very difficult task even the long-term meditators found it difficult because of the abstraction of the task but we're looking at other ways of making it easier for people to interact with these kinds of systems in which case maybe we'll get stronger results I'll bet if I normally meant extra material because entanglement is physical one please be quick I'm just curious about the effect of conscious and unconscious processes on on this type of experiments so if you were able to design a paradigm where you could suppress the interaction from consciousness because the unconscious processes are in place while awareness is rising or is there let's say what would be your expectation so if we manage to suppress it from conscious unconscious process is equally interact or if we were able to suppress unconscious now if you were able to suppress the interaction from consciousness using there are various techniques to do that well we could use things like distraction we use the simplest possible method that we could think of initially which is simply to withdraw your attention from the system the way we do that in terms of the feedback is you don't get any feedback so that portion of it is cut but we have thought of other things too like we'd have somebody read something on a screen or other forms the problem with doing strong distraction of attention is that it takes a lot longer to switch back into the task and we didn't want to do that all right let's give Dina a round of applause okay

Channel: Institute of Noetic Sciences

Views: 1,454,764

Rating: 4.6975474 out of 5

Keywords: Institute, of, Noetic, Sciences, IONS, consciousness, human, potential, psychic, ESP, Paradigm, Shift, quantum, psi, physics, transpersonal, mystical, experience, telepathy, skeptical, science, double slit, double, slit, experiment, Tuscon, Hameroff, David Chalmers, double-slit

Id: nRSBaq3vAeY

Length: 41min 5sec (2465 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Wow.

They should do an experiment with a hundred meditators simultaneously focusing on the same slit to see if the effect goes up. They could call it the /r/gonewild-experiment.