Dean Radin on Global Consciousness, Parapsychology, and Psychic Research
For centuries, science has turned a blind eye to the paranormal, but daring experiments like the Global Consciousness Project hope to change that. We’re joined by Dr. Dean Radin, the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, to discuss how statistical analysis & scientific rigor may finally bring credibility to the subject of human psychic abilities.
Dean, thank you and welcome! You have an impressive background in the sciences, including a stellar career in the discipline of parapsychology, in addition to publishing several best-selling books. I think you’re best known for your work with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the non-profit that presently funds the Global Consciousness Project, so let me start by asking you what exactly it is and how you became involved?
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was started in 1973 by the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and on the way back from the moon to the earth, when Edgar was looking out of the window, he had a full-blown mystical experience. He described it as a palpable feeling of unity with the universe.
As you can imagine, that’s a little bit unexpected for an MIT trained scientist, jet pilot and astronaut. All his training & experience were completely dependent on science and technology, and yet he had a classical mystical experience. Not surprisingly, he became curious about what the experience was, and how we could understand it from a scientific perspective.
Our Institute was founded to study the limits of outer limits of inner space, because Edgar discovered during his mystical experience that what’s deep inside us is just as mysterious as outer space. We use the tools of science and technology to understand unusual or unexplained experiences related to consciousness. I learned about IONS, as we call it, back in the early ’80s, and what attracted me to it at the time was that the motto of the Institute, “exploring the frontiers of consciousness”.
I thought the idea of exploring the frontiers of human consciousness sounded like great fun — who couldn’t like that? So, I kept track of IONS for many years, and then in 2001, there was an opening made at IONS to build an in-house laboratory. I was asked if I wanted to do that, the timing was perfect, and they said yes — and I’ve been there ever since.
The Global Consciousness Project itself is quite well known online — I believe this is also called the Princeton Egg experiment. Can you describe this a little for me?
The Global Consciousness Project started at Princeton University by psychologist Roger Nelson, who’s still working on that project, although now we’re in the process of developing GCP 2.0. The original GCP project started around 1997, went online in 1998, and it continued until 500 formal events were registered. Now, years after meeting its goals, the GCP is still running & collecting data .
Back before the GCP began, there were many experiments using electronic random number generators in the laboratory (we call them RNGs), typically with one person trying to mentally influence the generator’s output. It’s become a classic way of studying mind-matter interactions in the laboratory.
These experiments involve focused intention: sometimes direct intention where you try to mentally influence an RNG itself, and where you get feedback about your performance through a graph being drawn on a screen, and sometimes indirectly, like trying to influence how an RNG controls how a photo on a computer screen morphs into a different photograph. There are many different ways of providing feedback in these experiments, but they’re all based on intention.
Roger wondered what would happen if you took an RNG to an event where there was a huge amount of coherent attention in a group. So he went to things like choruses, plays, movies and meditations, to see if the act of a bunch of people simply paying attention to the same thing at the same time would change the randomness — and the short answer is yes, it did.
What we see in those kinds of experiments, which were called field consciousness experiments, is that the randomness produced by a RNG began to deviate away from chance and more towards a patterned output. He identified this effect in the mid-nineties, and it didn’t take long before a bunch us of started doing our own experiments & confirmed his results.
In late ’97 we started asking how we could test this on a larger scale. At that time, Princess Diana in the UK had recently died in a car accident, and we knew that her funeral was coming up and would be viewed live on TV by millions of people, so we asked about a dozen colleagues around the world to run their own RNGs to see what would happen during the funeral.
We found that collectively there was a statistically significant deviation from chance.
The next step after that was to build a version of the experiment that would run 24/7 without human intervention, and then place RNGs in major cities to cover the entire world. I coined the term “electrogaiagram” because the idea was like an electroencephalogram, where you put electrodes around the head — except in our case we were monitoring the “head” of Gaia — the planet itself.
That’s where the term Princeton Egg came from — it all started at Roger’s lab in Princeton, and EGG is an acronym for electrogaiagram.
As I understand things, the results of this project over time have been pretty significant in predicting deviations away from chance relating to significant world events. Can you describe that a bit?
The experiment ran for 500 formal events, where a formal event could be either something planned or predicted, like Diana’s funeral, or spontaneous and unpredicted — like a terrorist attack. We have 20 years of continual data now, but the events we were interested in were typically a few hours or sometimes a day or two in length. We were careful to define these events before we looked at the data. This prevented us from being tempted to shoehorn the data to fit world events: it’s all set up in advance.
The experiment ended after 500 major events with over a seven Sigma result. That means odds against chance of about 3 trillion to one — so it’s very clear that something interesting was going on. The beauty of this experiment is it’s all in the public domain and has been since the beginning. Somebody’s who sufficiently motivated can still download all of the data, redo the analysis, and end up with the same results that we saw.
In fact, a physicist in France named Peter Bancel did exactly that: he independently downloaded all the data, redid the complete analysis, and confirmed that our seven Sigma result is indeed seven Sigma.
You published your first book, “The Conscious Universe”, back in 1997 — right around the time when the Global Consciousness Project was making headlines. Are these focus areas in that book, and what are some of the other topics in it?
I actually wrote most of The Conscious Universe in 1986 when I was at Princeton, but at the time nobody wanted to publish it. Several years went by, and then in 1996 I was featured in a New York Times magazine article. The very next day, four publishers called and asked if I’d ever thought about writing a book and I said, “Oh yes! In fact, I do have an idea for a book,” and the next year, The Conscious Universe was published by Harper Collins.
That book was designed to introduce people to parapsychology in a new way, by describing the idea of meta-analysis, which is the analysis of analyses. It works by reviewing lots of already published experiments focused on the same topic, and then making a statistical assessment based on the preponderance of the evidence.
One of the nice things about parapsychology is that because the phenomena are considered so strange from a conventional scientific perspective, many independent researchers have tried to repeat the effects. The reason this is important is because we shouldn’t believe the results of say, one telepathy experiment that is reported by only one laboratory. Maybe that lab made a mistake. However, if 10 laboratories do the same experiment, unless they’re all making exactly the same mistake, it’s likely that they’re corroborating the same results.
In meta-analysis, we aggregate and calculate all of the evidence for a given effect, average out the mistakes & deviations, and what’s left is a way to assess if the claimed effect is in fact repeatable. In the case of certain types of controlled telepathy experiments that have been conducted hundreds of times, with thousands of individual sessions, it’s very clear that there’s a real effect going on there.
This independent experimental replication & corroboration is why we’re very confident that telepathy as seen in the laboratory is a real phenomenon. My colleagues and I all knew this by the mid 1980s, but back then hardly anybody else knew. I mean, you’d still find scientists who would just dismiss the existence of telepathy because they’d say “there’s no evidence” — but it was frustrating, because we knew there was a ton of evidence. And by the time I wrote the book, there was much more.
The focus of The Conscious Universe was really about saying, “from a scientific perspective, and using the best tools of scientific evidence, like the requirement of independent replication, how do we know that these phenomena are real?”
So the first book is really about the fundamentals: now in your second book, “Entangled Minds”, you moved more into the realm of quantum mechanics with a description of phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis from a quantum perspective, right?
Right. That’s because after publication of The Conscious Universe, the most common feedback I got was, “okay, maybe these things are real, but how are they real? It looks like these effects violate the basic principles of science”.
These criticisms are like memes that take on a life of their own, and they’re simply not true. So I decided to write about the two most mysterious aspects of psychic phenomena, and how they are related to ideas in physics. One of those aspects is the observer effect — the idea is that quantum systems change their behavior when they’re observed. This is something that doesn’t exist in classical physics.
The other thing I wanted to explore was the notion of action at a distance, which again is a central concept in quantum mechanics. Classical physics is like a billiard ball model of the universe. You can’t create any kind of effect on another body in space unless you impact it in some way — and that’s what people typically see in our everyday reality.
Quantum mechanics is very different from our everyday classical ideas of reality because both observer independence and local interactions are no longer absolutely true. Now we have instead the observer effect and non-locality. The observer-effect says that if you measure a quantum system, it changes, and non-locality means that systems distant in space-time can interact (actually, in technical terms they show correlated behavior).
We have mathematical explanations for these quantum effects, but we don’t understand them in fundamental ways. In Entangled Minds, I wanted to point out that psychic phenomena are considered weird because they exhibit both of these strange quantum phenomena. That is, psychic effects involve both nonlocal connections (like telepathy) and observer dependence (like mind-matter interaction effects). Some critics said that I was trying to explain one mystery with another, but I disagree: I think these are actually the same mystery viewed from different perspectives.
It sounds like you’re almost talking about Quantum Consciousness — so perhaps this is related to Penrose & Hameroff’s idea that microtubules in our body incorporate quantum effects. Do you think something like that might provide an explanation for how quantum mechanics could be connected to these phenomena?
Well, I didn’t use quantum mechanics to explain consciousness or psychic phenomena — I just pointed out that this model of reality is compatible with these phenomena, and this is an important distinction. It’s a little bit like I’m pointing at the solution, but you keep staring at my hand instead of where I’m pointing. The distinction is important because quantum mechanics today describes a world that actually is not compatible yet with something like telepathy because while there are non-local effects that occur in quantum mechanics, they’re not signals, they’re correlations.
However, telepathy looks a lot like more than simply a correlation. In the case of two people in different locations & environments, where they’re not thinking about the same thing, and then one person starts thinking about another person and then the second person somehow receives that, that seems like signal passing, but quantum mechanics doesn’t allow that.
On the other hand, quantum mechanics is not the end of physics. There are people looking at sub-quantum and super-quantum models, and when you get out of the current linear formulation of quantum mechanics and start looking at nonlinear models, then you can have transmission of information.
So I strongly suspect that quantum mechanics is telling us there will be another form of even more advanced physics that will incorporate classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, but it will also give a bigger picture of the way that reality works, which will be even closer to actual psychic phenomenon.
You made a big jump from cutting edge physics in your second book to exploring ancient wisdom in your third book, Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities. What inspired you to change perspectives so radically for this one?
The feedback from Entangled Minds was that quantum mechanics could be pointing in the right direction, but it was a very mechanistic view of these phenomena. This raises the topic of science as a philosophy, which is something that most people, including scientists, don’t think about much.
All of mainstream science is based on a set of assumptions — and these assumptions actually changed the world during the European enlightenment. The notion of empirically testing reality by doing experiments and using analytical methods gave rise to the materialist & physicalist worldviews, which assume that all events have a basis in either matter or energy, which on the surface seems to make sense.
This philosophy of science has been very successful, and it accounts for practically everything we see in the physical world except one big thing: the nature of consciousness itself. I’m talking here about the concepts of awareness, self-awareness and also subjectivity in general.
Some people argue that the brain gives rise to consciousness and gives us the sense of self, but that’s not really the case. Brain activity is correlated with some aspects of self-awareness and cognition, but it doesn’t actually explain awareness. This has been a long-standing debate in philosophy, but more recently it’s come into the scientific domain as neuroscience has advanced.
I was thinking about whether materialism can actually explain psychic phenomena, but it turns out to be very difficult to do that. This has created a lot of scientific resistance against the existence of psychic effects, despite having a ton of supportive empirical data along with the majority of people reporting these experiences.
I started asking myself what was wrong about this picture, and why these phenomena aren’t studied in the academic mainstream — and the reason is really that our materialistic worldview is incompatible with psychic effects. I decided to focus on other worldviews, and this book focused on the Eastern esoteric worldview, which is about 20,000 years old, compared to only 500 years for Western science.
Thus, my book Supernormal is about science and yoga, because when you look at classical yoga, especially Patanjali’s famous Yoga Sutras, it’s largely devoted to the Siddhis, which are ancient Sanskrit terms for what we would call psychic phenomena today.
Now we have modern scientific evidence that some psychic phenomena are real, and also a book written 2,000 years ago by a Yogi in a very different culture & language describing same kind of phenomena. To me it suggests that there’s something in that ancient worldview that offers hope to explain these phenomena in a non-materialistic way that we can experimentally test.
From a larger perspective, Supernormal gives us a clue that materialism alone is incomplete — and the same is true for idealism, the esoteric worldview at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. We need an integration of both philosophies to create a new kind of worldview that allows subjectivity to be just as important as objectivity.
What are some of the psychic phenomenon or abilities that are described in these Yoga Sutras? Are these something anyone can develop?
Well, if you take stories about the Buddha or look at the Yoga Sutras, the most elementary Siddhi that would arise is precognition, although it’s usually described as ‘becoming aware of past, present and future, all at once.’ It’s somewhere between clairvoyance and precognition, being able to see beyond the constraints of ordinary space time, and it spontaneously happens in people who are doing meditation.
We know that this happens through surveys of both beginning and advanced meditators, that they will sometimes describe experience of as spontaneous telepathy or knowing things at a distance, and other times as “crazy synchronicities”. These are very common for people who are engaged in diligent meditation practice.
Meditators don’t need much talent to get glimpses of clairvoyance, telepathy and that sort of thing. But at the far end, where people have high natural talent, we’re talking about powers like levitation, bi-location, and invisibility. Those effects, at this point, we cannot verify in the laboratory because if they in fact exist, they are also extremely rare. There are the stories of people who are able to do that, but at this point they remain stories.
If there are people out there who can do these things, they’re either not willing to come into the laboratory to have it tested, or they come from a tradition where you’re not supposed to pay much attention to these kinds of effects, because they distract you from the goal of enlightenment.
Oh, I see what you mean. Now meditation, mindfulness and the question for enlightenment is becoming more popular in Western culture — especially mindfulness, which has just exploded in popularity. Are there lessons that practitioners of this could take from your research to make their meditation more effective?
It depends on what your goal is. Meditation as taught in the West includes all kinds of techniques. Mindfulness, for example, is basically a vanilla form of Vipassanā, but there are lots of other techniques. Meditation is discussed almost entirely in terms of on stress reduction, and mental and physical health — and while that is part of classical yoga, the real goal of meditation was to attain enlightenment, and recognize who you truly are.
If you wanted to develop psychic abilities, and people ask me all the time how they can do this, then the time honored approach is simply to meditate using any method at all. You can do sitting meditation, walking meditation, or many other methods — but you have to quiet the mind and focus. That’s basically it. Once you begin to do that, you transcend the everyday world and reach deeper levels of consciousness, which is where these phenomena reside.
OK, so you’ve explored the Eastern esoteric worldview in Supernormal — and then looked at the Western esotericism in your fourth book, Real Magic. Now Western culture & concepts are obviously different than the yogic model, but is the worldview itself similar in how it describes these phenomena?
It’s similar in the sense that Western esotericism comes out of the same origin as Eastern esotericism. If you go back far enough, there was no East or West — it’s all the same place. At some point there was a split, and eventually that led to Western approaches like the Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and so on.
The ideas in these practices were shaped by language and culture, but they all devolve back into the same general idea, which is a worldview where consciousness is fundamental, as opposed to the scientific worldview where matter and energy are fundamental. They’re like two ends of a spectrum.
It’s important to mention that virtually every religion accepts the reality of consciousness as being fundamental. Yoga has the Siddhis, Catholicism has charisms, etc. However, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, these kinds of special abilities are prohibited — typically because they threaten the authority of the church.
I wrote Real Magic because after writing Supernormal, which is all about Eastern esotericism, naturally people asked, “well, what about Western esotericism?” The only reason why it’s called esoteric is because it was pushed underground by the church — not just the Catholics, but also the Jewish religion, Islam and others, who saw that people with special abilities would deflect attention from the church. Ultimately this meant that the use of any kind of magical practices, even if used for healing, were strictly off limits.
It became a sin to use magic, except for priests who have permission to do these things. For instance, the ceremony of the Eucharist is explicitly a magical practice. In Catholicism, it’s not simply a symbolic practice — the core belief is that wine & bread literally turn into body & blood. What the church was worried about was that people would start to ask why they should listen to the church if they could do these magical effects themselves.
Esoteric essentially means hidden, just as the word occult does. These practices have been pushed underground so they’re not in the light of day — but they never went away. There are many contemporary magicians who follow the same practices that people have done for thousands of years, and the point of Real Magic was to point out that these practices are exactly what is studied in parapsychology — hence the title, Real Magic.
So what comes next? Is Real Magic the conclusion of a series, or are you contemplating writing another book, and if so, what would the likely focus be for it?
My motivation for writing a book comes from feedback from the previous book. And after writing Real Magic, people started asking me how to develop these abilities themselves — they wanted a book on practical magic.
I’m working on a book on practical magic, but I didn’t want to do what hundreds of others have already done. Instead, I want to ask people who are actively practicing magic what they do and how they feel, or know, that it works. I’d like to also do experimental tests to objectively test whether their beliefs about magical practice are actually true.
Part of the idea here is to create an evidence-based magic, and another part is to test people’s ideas about magic. I think it would be interesting to find out what works and what doesn’t — and then turn that into an evidence-based book on magick.
Dean, thank you again. I look forward to reading the new book, and hopefully your continued focus on evidence will help to keep the skeptics at bay. The work you’ve done with GCP is already incredible, and if you’re able to cross-correlate practical techniques that actually produce results, it may truly change how science regards this topic.
Skepticism can be healthy, but there are professional, determined skeptics who fail to realize that they’re just as closed-minded & dogmatic as religious fundamentalists can be. In other words, they’re buying into a belief structure unquestioningly, and that’s not healthy — and it’s also not science.
You know, I’m not bashing science here. After all, I’m a scientist myself, but there is a kind of scientific dogmatism that reaches a point of being a belief system that you cannot question. That of course is antithetical to science itself, but it happens, and you have to continually remind everyone that in science we’re always working with a set of provisional ideas. Unless you want science to stop in its tracks and never learn anything new, you cannot allow that to happen.
About Our Guest
Dr. Dean Radin is the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Radin has given over 500 talks and interviews worldwide and is author or coauthor of hundreds of scientific and popular articles, four dozen book chapters, two technical books, and four popular books translated into 15 foreign languages.
Dr. Radin is also the former President of the Parapsychological Association, and is currently the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Learn more at his website: http://www.deanradin.org/
