From: Richard Loosemore (rpwl@lightlink.com)
Date: Fri Dec 30 2005 - 14:13:16 MST
I agree, the most robust stuff is precognitive. That was the design of
the one experiment of mine that came out with an extremely significant
result.
It used to drive me crazy, with my physics background. I did all the
work to collect the "guesses" of my subjects, but what I knew was that
the targets that they were trying to guess at would not be determined
until after all the data was collected and the pieces of paper were in
my sweaty palms.
Then I generated the random seed from a previously specified set of
global weather statistics, used it to dive into the RAND Corporation
Book of One Million Random Digits (the world's most enthralling book) at
my start point, then compared about 12,000 binary digits in the tables
and in my subjects' responses.
A lot of pain later (didn't have a computer in 1984, had to do it all by
hand), out pops the predicted correlation between run score variance and
self-reported motivation, at the 0.005 confidence level.
To those of you not well versed in experimental design, that means I
predicted the correlation ahead of time, and the first time I did the
experiment, it turned up and if the effect was pure fluke, then it was a
1 in 200 chance.
But what a bitchin' result! All those guesses matching up with some
predetermined random numbers in a book, with the only degree of freedom
being the seed point into the book!
Darned if I can make sense of it.
Richard Loosemore
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 03:19 PM 12/30/2005 -0500, micah glasser wrote:
>
>> someone might be in surgery and have a flat EEG for 10 minutes, when
>> resuscitated he may claim to have been observing the entire surgery
>> while 'dead' and be able to recount everything that happened in detail.
>> I think this kind of evidence is intriguing because it plays havoc
>> with the accepted materialist paradigm
>
>
> Possibly, but far more likely it suggests (if the evidence holds up
> under extreme scrutiny) that EEG is not a very good index of complex
> brain states.
>
> I'd suggest that the place to look for indefeasible psi phenomena is
> precognition of in-principle-unpredictable events--the cumulative curve
> of a true random number generator output (although this is so boring
> it's almost a classic extinction paradigm), or "presentiment" spikes in
> brain or other scans where shocking stimuli register *in advance of
> presentation* as well as shortly after, while control banal stimuli fail
> to. There is an increasing amount of this work being done, some of the
> most intriguing being reanalyses by Radin and Bierman and others of
> non-parapsych databases built by neuroscientists interested in tracking
> which part of the brain responds to what kinds of stimuli. No urls I
> know of, sorry, but look for Radin's book sometime next year. (I know
> it's coming because of my precognitive powers.)
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>
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