Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds

Kelly Howell: Welcome once again to "Theatre of the Mind." Your host, Kelly Howell. Is everything connected? Can you see what's happening to loved ones, thousands of miles away? Why are we sometimes certain of a caller's identity, the instinct, the phone rings? Do intuitive hunches contain information about future events? Is it possible to perceive without the use of ordinary senses? Many people believe that such psychic phenomena are rare talents or gifts. Others don't believe they exist at all but the latest scientific research revealed in Dr. Dean Radin's book, "Entangled Minds" shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled, physical reality we live in.
Today's guest, Dean Radin, Ph.D. is President of the Parapsychological Association and Senior Scientist for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Dean is going to be speaking with us about PSI, entangled minds and extrasensory experiences in the quantum field. So here we go with the interview. Dr. Dean Radin, welcome to "Theatre of the Mind" and thank you for coming on the show today.
Dean Radin: It's my pleasure.
Kelly: Let's start with your new book 'Entangled minds'. How are we entangled?
Dean: Entangled minds, the entangled part of the title refers to quantum entanglement. It also refers to the notion of being confused as in a knot of strain that's been entangled. So on the confused part is a lot of confusion in terms of understanding what do these phenomenona mean? What does psychic phenomena means and particularly in the scientific world, there's great confusion over whether these phenomena even exist in spite of the fact that people have these experiences all the time including scientists who have it all the time. So, that's the confusing part. I think what we are beginning to see now is a way out of the confusion by thinking about these effects in terms of what quantum theory tells us about the fabric of reality. So the book presents two themes, essentially. One is that if we take the quantum view of the world seriously then it means that at the very basic level of understanding the fabric of reality, we're dealing with threads of that fabric that are called nonlocal. This means there are interconnections through space and time that bind things together and we're trying to build up the fabric of reality and we start with entangled threads, is a very strange, interconnected thread. Then when we build up that fabric while the fabric may look like an ordinary piece of fabric, it actually is made up at a very strange material that causes it to actually behave as a holistic piece of fabric, the holistic medium.
If taking that as a metaphor, we don't consist our bodies and minds, our everyday experience doesn't consist simply of entangled thread and nor do we exist simply as the fabric of reality. You might think of it and more as an emergent property that sits on top of this fabric where it's built up out of the fabric and we might call it a quilt or perhaps more like a tapestry and even more or so that as you keep building up emergent properties, from a tapestry you can create like a cover of the pillow and then some cover of the pillow you can create an entire house of pillows and so on.
So this metaphor is building up yet you have more and more complex structures which are all made out of the same fabric of reality but at base, at the deep level when you look at these things, it actually is consisting of a holistic medium.
Kelly: When you say holistic medium, what do you mean?
Dean: I mean that when you look at the world with your ordinary senses, what you see is a world that consists of separate objects and the way the communication takes place between the objects is through information transfer. Otherwise, like if you think about the way a cell phone works, it works by signals which go from here to there, information transferring. Well, that's a particular type of medium. It says oh, we were a fish and fish scientists, and someone said, what's the medium in which we live? Well, most fish go about there everyday life not even thinking about that issue. So what do you mean what medium do we live in? We live where we live. But of course we can look at the fish and realize they live in water. They live in a medium which is inside them and outside them and...
Kelly: It's everywhere.
Dean: It's everywhere and it determines in many ways the way that they can communicate, the way they move, determines everything. So we live in a medium as well. We don't normally think of it. I am not talking about air; I am talking about the physical fabric of reality. So if that physical fabric of reality is the way that our common senses tell us and you refine that understanding, what you end up with is classical physics. Because classical physics is predicated on the idea that ultimately space and time are absolute, that objects are separate and that the way they communicate between them is through ordinary cause and effect, and forces and signaling, and those kinds of concepts. But as physics has developed over the last century, we learned that the common sense feel the world is not the way the world actually is. It's much more complex than that, much more interesting in many ways.
Kelly: What was it? Was it Einstein who called it spooky action at a distance?
Dean: Einstein was referring to this notion of nonlocality, the idea that the world seems to be connected in ways that are radically different in common sense and radically different from classical physics. And, so even though Einstein didn't feel very good about this prediction of quantum mechanics, it turns out as not only is it true but it has been tested in the lab for the past 20 years and we now know that the quantum predictions are actually true.
Kelly: What's the state of evidence for psyche today?
Dean: Well, that's about a third of the book.
Kelly: [laughs] I know.
Dean: A third of the book of "Entangled minds" is asking the question, given the past century of science being brought to bear these exceptional experiences the people have. What does the jury say? And the jury says that for a certain class of limited things that can be studied in the laboratory, we have very high confidence that these things do exist in principle. So, what I am talking about is that clairvoyance exists. People have the ability to perceive things that are outside the reach of the ordinary senses, not only in space but also in time. We call clairvoyance slipped in time either "precognition" if it slipped in the future or "retro cognition" if it slipped in the past.
We have very good evidence that telepathy exist. This is somehow a feeling, the experience, sometimes the content, very rarely the actual word of a person at a distance, almost always a loved one or a friend.
And then the fourth category is psychokinesis, otherwise known as mindmatter interactions. These are things like praying for the well being at somebody at a distance and that person at a distance changing in some way, that their physiology is affected in some way.
So those four categories of experiences had been reported throughout history but they've been formalized and studied under very careful conditions in the laboratory and we now have high confidence with those things do exist in principle. Now, I say in principle because in any given anecdote or story that someone tells you, you never can tell. We can't tell that much about spontaneous effects in the world because there is no control over it. But as I said, these scientific studies tell us that in principle, sometimes when people had these remarkable experiences, they're very likely to be true. So, that's the state of the evidence.
Then the next question that always comes up is, "Well and how do you explain these things?" And I go in the book, I have a chapter on the developmental of theories over the years on ways of understanding how these things might work. There are number of classes of theories. The first class of theory is skeptical theory. This theory has come about because our ordinary senses do not give us any information at all about how such things can exist. If you can't see somebody, a loved one at a distance say, that our common sense tells us there's no way you can know what's happening to that person and yet, in the laboratory and then real life, we sometimes do know what's happening to the other person.
Kelly: It happens a lot.
Dean: It happens a lot, it's true. We sometimes think of these kinds of effects having to be extremely dramatic but it's probably the case that very mundane things like the feeling of being stared at and a sense of gut feelings about a decision you're about to make, that those probably have some component of what we refer to with psychic experience, even though we don't think of it usually in those terms because they're so mundane, they're so common. And, yet we did an experiment, which I described in the book where we have two people coming to the lab, we separate the two, we provide some sort of stimulus for one of the people and then the other we look at their gut feelings, is in something called an electrogastrogram, it measures the electrical activity in the gut itself. We wanted to see whether the receiver, we use terms like "sender" and "receiver," this is a way of describing what's going on. We wanted to see whether the receiver, the distant person's emotions, whether their gut would actually behave differently and in the short story, yes it did.
So, this is in some sense recognizing that ordinarily thought of is something, which is extremely common form of intuition. Actually it does have a distant perceptual capability.
Kelly: Are you also measuring brainwave activity when you're doing these experiments?
Dean: In the one I just mentioned, no, but in many of experiments where we look at distance physiological reactions, we look simultaneously at five measures. We look at the brain, skin conductance, heart rate, blood flow in the periphery and respiration. That gives us a nice picture of what's happening in the body and the autonomic nervous system and also the central nervous system and also the balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic. It gives us a good picture of what's happening at a very subtle, in this case meaning unconscious level in the body because the receivers in these experiments are in a heavily shielded room for typically, for a 3040 minute, asked to sit in a reclining chair and simply relax and not do anything else except not fall asleep.
Kelly: Right.
Dean: And meanwhile, things are happening to their partner at a distance and they don't know when and they don't know for how long and we see it later whether the receiver's body was actually yet in moving in correlation to what was happening to the distant sender.
Kelly: So you would see a reaction in brainwave activity or...?
Dean: Typically we see a reaction in the entire body. If the person, if the receiver's brain responds, it's likely that their heart will respond and the respiration will respond. It is systemic effect. We studied a woman who specializes in psychometry, in touching an object and knowing something about that object. And, we didn't know what to expect because we had never studied anybody who had that particular talent before. And she showed effects within the body at least that were very similar to other people who were good at intuitive medical diagnosis, clairvoyance and so on. At least in terms of what we can see in the body, which is pretty crude measure, people who are talented show about the same effects. And by the way, even sometimes people who come in, who don't report that they're specially psychically talented, some of them would show the same effect.
What this says to me is that the difference between someone who is known to be psychically talented and the rest of us, is not due to the capability. It seems we all have this capability, at least most of us. It has more to do with something, some talent having to do with attention so that the people who were psychic and know it and can use it to some extent, are naturally very talented in being able to focus and refine their attention.
Kelly: So it requires an enormous amount of focus and concentration?
Dean: Seems to require not just focus but being able to focus for long periods of time. So you're right. It is, it's something like an attentional training or it's just a talent that somebody has to be able to be completely absorbed without much distraction for a long period. If you're a distant healer and we're dealing with some form of mindmatter interaction in maybe a matter of 20 minutes or 40 minutes. Extremely unusual to find somebody who hasn't had long meditation training to be able to do that for more than a matter of seconds.
Kelly: Well, what kind of training do you recommend for people that want to develop their psychic abilities?
Dean: My usual response to that is to be absolutely sure that the person really wants to do that. And the reason I say this is because if I just did a survey of the kinds of email requests that I get from people, I would say that probably 75% of them are from people who want to learn how to turn it off and not from people who want to learn to turn it on. And this says to me that a lot of people are psychic but that the form of the psychic awareness is uncontrolled. And it's frightening if it's uncontrolled because you begin to lose a sense of your own self, you get buffered about by other people's emotions and all that, you know, you're bothered by the rest of the world. And, it's simply difficult to operate high functioning if you're trying to feel the pain of the world at the same time.
Kelly: It's like having no skin.
Dean: Right, and that's not a very good condition to be in unless you happen to live in an ashram and people take care of you. So to live in the current society, I usually encourage people to first make sure they are absolutely stable and high functioning and all the rest. And then maybe people might be interested in how to improve their intuitive sense and, of course, there are plenty of methods for that sort of thing.
Kelly: It's really interesting that so many of the people you study have a background in mediation.
Dean: They meditate or they are naturally talented and being able to focus their attention and may know they think, we don't normally think of attention, focus as a kind of talent. But the humans have all kinds of talents. And, so somebody might not be particularly talented for sports or for music but they have an exceptional ability to focus. And people who have that and are naturally predisposed towards more feeling approach to the world rather than a thinking approach, they tend to be quite good in psyche.
Kelly: OK, so are there any new applications for psyche in the horizon?
Dean: Well, throughout history there've been lots of the well known applications. So I think if anything evolves in the short term it will probably be semi technological means of amplifying precognition. And the primary reason is for predicting when things like disease outbreaks occur and possibly where terrorism occurs and forecasting just, in general, given that we live in such a fast paced world these days. I see a lot of interest in business, and in government, and in medicine. I am finding ways of simply making decisions better, given that any decision which is made now on almost any front, has often times unintended consequences. And, so we need to be much cleverer about if we make decision A, well what does that mean down the line, then that's where something like precognition can be very useful.
Kelly: What is this quantum optics experiment you're working on?
Dean: One of the mysteries in quantum mechanics, which is still not resolved, is the notion of observation and measurement. When you get down to the quantum world, which by the way, just means measuring photons and which is not really, I mean you think of the quantum world as some exotic far off place but it really isn't. We are built up out of this stuff. But when you try to look at a photons behavior, the way you look at it will determine how the photon behaved, going through an interferometer, which is very similar to the classic double slit experiment. And what this allows you to do is demonstrate the way of nature of light as it goes to the interferometer and no one is looking at it. It's recorded by a camera and it goes into a computer but there are no people looking at the result. So you can consider the entire experiment then as a giant quantum system. Even though it's been looked at by a sensitive camera and being recorded on a computer, no one has looked at it yet so we don't know what the results are.
So what I do is that I ask psychics to focus their mind on one portion of this optics apparatus and if it turns out that the mind can interact directly with photons then that will change the behavior of the light inside the interferometer and will change the patterns that are seen on the camera. So, if the experiment works, it will provide a direct mind to quantum interaction and will be able to detect that.
Kelly: How far along are you with this?
Dean: I have collected about an hour's worth of data at this point. I am in the midst of the analysis now. And I will collect about 25 hours worth of data before I am finished with this experiment.
Kelly: Could you tell us a little bit about that love study and what the results were?
Dean: The love study, it was called that, by the way, because it was funded partially by a grant from the Institute for Unlimited Love. And, by the way, the first time we applied for the grant, we didn't get it. So, we thought that didn't sound like much unlimited love to us but then we did get it so then we decided yes, I guess it really is unlimited love. The experiment is a hybrid. Most of the clinical studies looking at the power of prayer have involved clinical patients in hospital situations or in other words, people who really, really need to be healed, and people who are praying, who are either professional prayers or they're loved ones who really, really want their loved ones to get better.
Those experiments, if you simply look across all possible studies, the jury is still out of that. So sometimes these experiments work and sometimes they don't. And we don't know we're not sure yet why it is that they work and they don't work. But by contrast when you take a pair of people in the lab and you look, you do the equivalent of, you take a bonded pair of people, you separate them, you poke one and you see if the other one flinches. That's an analogue of what's going on in these prayer studies because it means if we do something to one person and you can see a response in the other, then there is some kind of connection that is measurable in the physiology of the distant person.
So our hybrid study was, if you take a laboratory design which is very well controlled and also look at physiological measures rather than healing outcomes, which are hard to measure typically, but you all see is the clinical population that maybe the very high motivation of the clinical population put in the laboratory context, would show a bigger result. That was the idea.
So what we did was we worked with patients who were being treated for cancer, variety of different kinds of cancer and their partners, their spouses and friends and loved ones. And we trained the partners, the healthy partners and something called compassionate intention, this is based on the Tibetan practice of Pong Lin meditation which is the cultivation of compassion and also then to give that compassion to someone else.
So we trained them on a secular form of this kind of training for a day and then they had to practice it everyday for three months. And then the couple came into the lab, we put the patient in the shielded room, wired them up to look at their physiology and at their healthy partner at a distance, and then periodically, over the course of half an hour, at times randomly selected by the computer, the partner who was trained in the compassionate intention was asked to send the compassionate intention now and then other times we told, OK, now withdraw your attention and go back on to yourself.
What we were interested in looking at and as what was happening in the patient while this compassionate intention was being sent. And what we found was a very strong effect. I mean we've done this with people who were not in the clinical population, just friends and so on and we see effects there. But in this case, we saw an effect which was roughly five to six times bigger in the lab...
Kelly: Wow.
Dean: ...which, what this means is that the combination of very high motivation to connect with someone plus training in order and this is training primarily and how you focus your mind, your intention and attention. Those do seem to increase, the kind of response that we see in distant people.
Kelly: How are scientists reacting to this evidence?
Dean: Some scientists and some people on the medical field are very excited about that. They like the idea that there's a rigorous scientific way of testing what appears to be something very femoral, namely the effective intention. So they're really interested in it. There are also a small percentage of people who just absolutely hate this stuff, can't stand the idea that there might be some connection between mind and matter, mind and the rest of the world. Much of their anger comes from either religious convictions or what might be called scientistic conviction. And these are both ends of a spectrum where people have a very firm sense at the way that they think the world works and anything which counters that just make them very emotional.
And then there's a middle ground, the majority is the middle ground, maybe 60% of scientists and medical researchers who don't know very much about it yet. And, when they encounter it, provided that they don't have an emotional reaction as they can think about it rationally, most have been quite interested and they have the usual response in science which is, this looks interesting, let's keep pursuing that and see what way to find out.
Kelly: Hey Dean, could you share with us also what happened on your online experiments around 9/11?
Dean: This is part of... it's a twopronged answer there. One, I'll talk about is an online experiment to test a very simple test for ESP. One of which is the card guessing game, you have five cards and you have to choose one. One of them is at godsite.org; the other test is at psirk.com. They're similar games, I developed both of them. So we've been collecting data on this since middle of 2000 and we have something nearing 90 million trials and third of a million people who have done this and they do it everyday. So we have an enormous amount of collective psyche data. You can look at how psyche performance fluctuates in large numbers of people from day to day. One of the things that allows us to look at is, when you have a very unusual day, what happens to the psyche performance? So I did an analysis to look at what was happening to performance in this guessing game before, during and after 9/11, since it was such a major change in the psyche of the world on that day. And what we found was that for two weeks leading up to 9/11, we saw a very dramatic and highly significant drop in performance.
Now remember this was two weeks before anybody knew something was about to happen. The performance significantly dropped and then 9/11 occurred and it went back to more or less being normal performance. So how do we account for that? And the only thing I could think of was that people began to sense that something bad was afoot and they repressed those feelings.
Kelly: Like an automatic protection of some kind.
Dean: Right, who wants to walk around with visions of apocalypse in your head? So they repressed it. The information is still there and if you repress one form of psychic awareness and kind of makes sense that maybe you repress other forms as well. So here they are playing a silly guessing game not realizing that internally they're actually suppressing their ability to be psychic or to be overtly psychic. But their ability is still there and then they will avoid the correct answer. That's part of the repression process, avoiding the right answer. And, that in the process of avoiding it, they had a very significant drop overall for about two weeks before 9/11.
Kelly: And then what happened after 9/11?
Dean: Well, after, it went back up to its ordinary level. It did sort of fluctuate around chance, most of the time because we're dealing here with the collective performance of lots and lots of people.
Kelly: Yeah.
Dean: But it was something very dramatic that happened before 9/11.
Kelly: That's amazing. So what's the "invisible college"?
Dean: "Invisible college" is a phrase that's used to refer to people in academia who are very, very interested in these topics. These are personally or actually conducting experiments but they're not allowed to talk about it. They're talking about an academic taboo against certain topics. People are tired of academia, may not know that there are topics inside the academic world that you simply cannot talk about. If you try to talk about it and you don't have tenure, then you won't get tenure, in which case you're not in academia anymore.
Kelly: Right.
Dean: If you do have tenure then you're attacked, you are attacked either by people questioning whether you're still same and whether you should continue to have tenure and whether you should have any raises and all of that, and then lots of cases. And it doesn't just pertain to a psychic ability and people interested in these things but also to people doing research in any form, normally, including cold fusion and lots of other things. It's the equivalent of a good old boys' network. It works that way. And, so despite the fact that something like 6070% of college professors across the board, are very, very interested in these topics. There is less than one percent of universities around the world have anyone identified publicly as being interested and virtually all of them take a lot of heat for it.
So what junior faculty and students see is this is a topic you simply don't talk about and that means it doesn't, an offense doesn't exist within the academic world.
Kelly: It just seems so archaic, given it we know so much now?
Dean: It's worse than archaic because this is an active avoidance.
Kelly: Yes.
Dean: And the reason why we use it is the word, the phrase "invisible college" is because there is in fact a college. There are groups of colleagues around the world who will privately talk to each other about these things and I am a lightening rod for much of that. I talk to colleagues in academia all the time who were simply scared to talk about it, to people in their own department. And in a few cases, I was contacted by people in the same department, at the same university who were unaware that they had close colleagues who they may have worked with for 20 years. They didn't know that they're interested in these topics and I plugged them together.
So, slowly, over many years have been creating a network which is continuing to grow. And the network has expanded beyond the point where people are simply interested into some experiments actually being run now.
Kelly: Oh that's great.
Dean: So I think of this as the emperor's new clothes. We're living in the midst of the emperor's new clothes, in politics and issues of the environment, certainly in the case of psychic and mystical experience. And eventually, as the parable shows, that the emperor's is found to be naked but it takes a lot.
Kelly: It seems like it's taken a long time. I just thought we would be there by now.
Dean: Think who was it that said, maybe William James, who said that "progress in this field in particular is measured not in terms of years or even decades but half centuries" and that is true. We have perhaps two or three half centuries of scientific research in this field and we're starting roughly at the fourth half century now. I think it's in this fourth half century that we're going to start to see some significant progress but up until now it's, been mostly underground.
Kelly: What's new on the "global consciousness project"?
Dean: The "global consciousness project" is another way of looking at collective PSI. It's looking at the possibility that mind and matter interact not simply in the laboratory in very special circumstances but around the world all time. The way it works is, we have a network of about 70 random number generators around the world. These are our hardware circuits which are the equivalent of coin flippers. They're flipping coins at roughly 9,000 per second, and what we can do with the data that these generators are producing is see where the patterns appear in that data, order appears, which would not be expected by chance, and whether that order appears during times when the world is going through some remarkable change. So the change might be positive like celebrations of New Year's or might be negative like 9/11.
So we've been tracking this now since 1998 for a few hundred different kinds of worldwide events and we do see that there are significant changes in randomness, towards the direction of order appearing in the random generators when there are at least large scale of world events. And when there aren't any big events then the whole random network behaves more or less like you'd expect by chance.
So what is suggested is that there really does seem to be very large environmental physical changes that occur when the mind of the planet is changing.
Kelly: So you must have a lot of data that you started in 1998?
Dean: It's a gigantic amount of data at this point.
Kelly: Huge.
Dean: In terms just of gigabytes the number of random bits that we collected on this, it's probably about 12 or 13 gigabytes at this point.
Kelly: Well, how many people are working on this project?
Dean: We've got about a hundred people involved. Most of the people are hosts. These are people who have one of these electronic circuits attached to their PC in almost every country in the world and they're all connected to the Internet in one form or another and they're producing data continually, 24 hours a day everyday. And then every five minutes, all of the data is consolidated in each separate location and sent up to a web server at Princeton, New Jersey, that keeps the whole system running.
Kelly: Now, can anybody be part of this project by going on your website?
Dean: Anyone can look at what's going on with the project but in terms, this is really considered a monitoring service and not like an active experiment. That's something you do, it's something that we watch to see how the world is responding. So yeah, if you wanted to look at the data in the website, you'd go to a website, which is a noosphere, which is noosphere.princeton.edu. And there's no preceding www, it's just noosphere.princeton.edu and that will give you the website of this program.
Noosphere, by the way, is the word that's too hard to shut down, used to refer to the world as mind, the mind world.
Kelly: What's coming up with conferences for you this summer?
Dean: Actually the next conference is a very interesting one in June, in San Diego. It's the regional meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS, as it's known, is the largest scientific organization in the world. It publishes the journal of science which is one of the top rated journals in the world and considered to be in a sense, the umbrella organization that use this, the voice and defender if you will, of science in the world. So this as you can imagine, this society has not been very enthusiastic about things psychic yet. The Parapsychological Association, which is a scientific organization and I happen to be president of this year, has been an affiliate, an elected affiliate of the AAAS since 1969. So though, anyone never says that parapsychology is not a science, all they need to do is go to the AAAS website and look up and, sure enough, they'll find our society is, in fact, a member of the AAAS.
So anyway, we're having a regional meeting in San Diego, which is most of the west of United States and some Asian countries. And, we have a symposium on the nature of time and, in particular, evidence for reversal in time and it partially is related to research on precognition but also a few other things.
Kelly: OK, what is reversal in time?
Dean: You can take a precognition as a form of reverse time, it's retroactive effects. In physics, this is not a very surprising concept. The laws of both classical and quantum mechanics are time symmetric, that means you can't tell which direction time is moving. So physicists, they're not very disturbed by the idea that there might be something like precognition. Psychologists are very disturbed by it and some neuroscientists are disturbed as well but depending on the discipline you happen to live in and it's not so surprising. So, this is a symposium being organized by physicists, mostly consisting of physicists but also with a number of people like myself who are presenting evidence that yes, this is true in physics but it also appears to be true on human scale and that's where the parapsychological data comes in.
Kelly: If people want to find out more about what you're doing, how can they get in touch with you?
Dean: If you want to specifically go to the book, information about this book, they can go to entangledminds.com. That will bring them to my website and if they go to the home page of my website there are, they'll also see there's also a blog and the there're a bio which has my email address and all that stuff. And so, if they wanted, you want to go directly to my website, just deanradin.com. [music]
Kelly: Well, Dean, thank you so much for coming on this show.
Dean: Thanks for inviting me.