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Showing posts from January, 2009

Lecture on the Global Consciousness Project

This is an excellent introduction to the Global Consciousness Project by physicist Peter Bancel. It's part of a 5-part series of videos.

Collective consciousness and the inauguration

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This is a plot of odds against chance for data from the Global Consciousness Project on the evening before and day of the Obama inauguration. The red arrow points to the moment when the oath of office was being recited. This is an exploratory analysis, so it shouldn't be regarded as persuasive as a preplanned analysis would be. But still, the coincidence in time between what was arguably the single most anticipated moment by hundreds of millions of viewers during the inauguration, and the spike in odds at the same time, is quite striking. Further analyses of this event will eventually be posted at the GCP site.

The Enduring Enigma of the UFO

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Here's a pdf copy of my article on UFOs as published in the current IONS Shift magazine. "Despite significant evidence that something unusual has been going on in the skies above planet Earth, serious investigation remains taboo. The result: far more questions than answers. Like psi phenomena, the topic of UFOs provides a litmus test for what we think we know — or want to."

Quantum biology

Nice article on the Discover website on quantum biology. This article even mentions a possible quantum-consciousness link without smirking. In Entangled Minds I discussed why I believe the writing is on the wall: The more we look, the more we'll find quantum effects in biology. And not just minor hiccups, but fundamental processes that, without quantum connections, would not exist at all. Some time later we'll find these effects operating in the nervous system, and later in the brain. At that point psi will graduate from the fringe to the mainstream, and then all those strange phenomena studied for over a century, but poorly understood, will be accepted and regarded as being just slightly ahead of their time.

Water crystal replication study

Radin, D., Lund, N., Emoto, M., Kizu, T. (2008). Effects of distant intention on water crystal formation: A triple-blind replication. Journal of Scientific Exploration , 22(4), 481-493. An experiment tested the hypothesis that water exposed to distant intentions affects the aesthetic rating of ice crystals formed from that water. Over three days, 1,900 people in Austria and Germany focused their intentions towards water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. Water samples located near the target water, but unknown to the people providing intentions, acted as "proximal" controls. Other samples located outside the shielded room acted as distant controls. Ice drops formed from samples of water in the different treatment conditions were photographed by a technician, each image was assessed for aesthetic beauty by over 2,500 independent judges, and the resulting data were analyzed, all by individuals blind with respect to the underlying treatme

Thinking about telepathy

I wrote an article a few years ago for a journal published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy called Think. Someone reposted that article here . From the description of this journal: " Think is edited by Stephen Law and published three times each year. The central aim of Think is to provide to a very wide audience – including schools, colleges and the general public – highly accessible and engaging writing by philosophers pre-eminent in their fields." (I'm not a philosopher, but the publisher was kind enough to invite me to write an article, so I did.)