So I'm looking for people who can not only meditate, but who are used to meditating together and can, in some way, act as a coherent whole. We have some methods of detecting that, but at this point it's more of an art than a science.
WTB - Sir Francis Bacon first proposed the possibility that tasks involving meaningful targets might be more effective than those less meaningful. And apparently psi research bears this out: meaning does sometimes amplify psi effects in the lab. Could you explain why more meaningful tasks apparently have greater psi result than just doing more mundane card tests and that sort of thing?
Radin - The answer is that psi phenomena are not simply physical phenomena. We talk about mind-matter interaction. Some people imagine that this interaction is a problem for physics, and yes it is a physics problem to some extent. … but it's not just a physics problem. And nor is it just a psychological problem. Mind-matter interaction involves both mind stuff and matter stuff, so it's the middle ground between psychology and physics.
The reason why motivation assists in producing larger effects in the lab - and probably in life - is because of the psychological component. When we are highly motivated to perceive information, to perceive something, to do something, to wish something… we have much more that we bring to bear, in terms of our attention and intention, towards that goal. I think the name of the game, at least from the mind side of this equation, is attention. The more attention that can be brought to bear for a longer period of time on a goal, the larger or more precise ore achievable the result. That's why motivation is important. Motivation is a natural way of focusing attention.
WTB – You wrote that “in controlled lab experiments we are forced to deal with measurement noise, and a pale reflection of how psi appears spontaneously in real life.” What do you mean by measurement noise?
Radin – Take someone who is a world expert in their domain, say in sports, an Olympic-level athlete, or a baseball Hall of Famer. The only reason they are interesting to watch is because they're not perfect. The best in the world baseball players will get a base hit rate of around 300, or one third of the time. Well, what's happening the other percent of the time? 70% of the time they're not even getting a base hit. That's the “not perfect” part – in other words human performance is highly variable. All that variation means that when you take measurements of any kind of human performance, whether physical or mental, you always end up with an enormous amount of variance. And on top of that, the ways that we measure human performance aren’t perfect either. So we have both performance variance and inaccuracies in our measurements. This is why human performance studies (and many other kinds of studies) have to rely on statistics. The noise level increases as you look at people with average ability, rather than world-class skills, and also as you move into more subtle domains. Continued on page 6
