Consciousness: The Conscious Universe, part II - Shifting opinions

By Dean Radin

The most important indication of a shift from Stage 1 to Stage 2 can be seen in the gradually changing attitudes of prominent skeptics. In a 1995 book saturated with piercing skepticism, the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University maintained his life-long mission of educating the public about science, in this case by debunking popular hysteria over alien abductions, channelers, faith-healers, the "face" on Mars, and practically everything else found in the New Age section of most bookstores. Then, in one paragraph amongst 450 pages, we find an astonishing admission:

At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.

Other signs of shifting opinions are cropping up with increasing frequency in the scientific literature. Starting in the 1980s, well-known scientific journals like Foundations of Physics, American Psychologist, and Statistical Science published articles favorably reviewing the scientific evidence for psychic phenomena. The Proceedings of the IEEE, the flagship journal of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, has published major debates on psi research. Invited articles have appeared in the prestigious journal, Brain and Behavioral Sciences. A favorable article on telepathy research appeared in 1994 in Psychological Bulletin, one of the top-ranked journals in academic psychology. And an article presenting a theoretical model for precognition appeared in 1994 in Physical Review, a prominent physics journal.

In the 1990s alone, seminars on psi research were part of the regular programs at the annual conferences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Statistical Association. Invited lectures on the status of psi research were presented for diplomats at the United Nations, for academics at Harvard University, and for scientists at Bell Laboratories.

NEW (not in the book): The first US patent for a psi effect was granted to Princeton University researchers on November 3, 1998.  Patent "US 5830064" is entitled: Apparatus and method for distinguishing events which collectively exceed chance expectations and thereby controlling an output.   This patent specifically covers distant mental control of electronic random number generator outputs.

The Pentagon has not overlooked these activities.

From 1981 to 1995, five different US government-sponsored scientific review committees were given the task of reviewing the evidence for psi effects. The reviews were prompted by concerns that if psi was genuine, it might be important for national security reasons. We would have to assume that foreign governments would exploit psi if they could.

Reports were prepared by the Congressional Research Service, the Army Research Institute, the National Research Council, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the American Institutes for Research (the latter commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency). While disagreeing over fine points of interpretation, all five of the reviews concluded that the experimental evidence for certain forms of psychic phenomena merited serious scientific study.

For example, in 1981, the Congressional Research Service concluded that "Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an "interconnectiveness" of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion." The report concluded with suggestions of possible applications for health care, investigative work, and "the ability of the human mind to obtain information as an important factor in successful decision making by executives."

In 1985, a report prepared for the Army Research Institute concluded that "The bottom line is that the data reviewed in [this] report constitute genuine scientific anomalies for which no one has an adequate explanation or set of explanations.... If they are what they appear to be, their theoretical (and, eventually, their practical) implications are enormous."

In 1987, the National Research Council reviewed parapsychology (the scientific discipline that studies of psi) at the request of the US Army. The committee recommended that the Army monitor parapsychological research being conducted in the former Soviet Union and in the United States, they recommended that the Army consider funding specific experiments, and most significantly, they admitted that they could not propose plausible alternatives to the "psi hypothesis" for some classes of psi experiments. Dr. Ray Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and long-term skeptic of psi phenomena, was chairman of the National Research Council’s review committee on parapsychology. He stated in a 1988 interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, that "Parapsychologists should be rejoicing. This was the first government committee that said their work should be taken seriously."

In early 1989, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report of a workshop on the status of parapsychology. The end of the report stated that "It is clear that parapsychology continues to face strong resistance from the scientific establishment. The question is – how can the field improve its chances of obtaining a fair hearing across a broader spectrum of the scientific community, so that emotionality does not impede objective assessment of the experimental results? Whether the final result of such an assessment is positive, negative, or something in between, the field appears to merit such consideration."

In 1995, the American Institutes for Research reviewed formerly classified government-sponsored psi research for the CIA at the request of the U. S. Congress. Statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis, one of the two principal reviewers, concluded that "The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research … have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud…. It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof….."

Surprisingly, the other principal reviewer, skeptic Ray Hyman, agreed: "The statistical departures from chance appear to be too large and consistent to attribute to statistical flukes of any sort…. I tend to agree with Professor Utts that real effects are occurring in these experiments. Something other than chance departures from the null hypothesis has occurred in these experiments."

These opinions are even being reflected in the staid realm of college textbooks. One of the most popular books in the history of college publishing is Introduction to Psychology by Richard L. Atkinson and three co-authors. A portion of the preface in the 1990 edition of this textbook reads: "Readers should take note of a new section in Chapter 6 entitled ‘Psi Phenomena.’ We have discussed parapsychology in previous editions but have been very critical of the research and skeptical of the claims made in the field. And although we still have strong reservations about most of the research in parapsychology, we find the recent work on telepathy worthy of careful consideration."

The popular "serious" media haven’t overlooked this opinion shift. The May, 1993, issue of New Scientist, a popular British science magazine, carried a five-page cover story on telepathy research. It opened with the line, "Psychic research has long been written off as the stuff of cranks and frauds. But there’s now one telepathy experiment that leaves even the sceptics scratching their heads." And in the last few years, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Psychology Today, ABC TV’s Nightline, national news programs, and television and print media around the world have begun to moderate previously held Stage 1 opinions. They’re now beginning to publish and broadcast Stage 2-type stories taking scientific psi research seriously.

If all this is true, then a thousand other questions immediately bubble up. Why hasn’t everyone heard about this on the nightly news? Why is this topic so controversial? Who has psi? How does it work? What are its implications and applications? These are all good questions, and this book will attempt to answer them through four general themes: Motivation, Evidence, Understanding and Implications.