Mystic Board

The concept of lability proposed by Braud (1981) apparently includes both the a priori probability and redundancy aspects of information processing.  According to Braud, a system with high lability easily changes state, while a system with low lability resists change.  Thus, a system with ...

May et al. (1985) proposed using similar strategies as an elegant means to investigate the old question of whether PK operates with a force-like mechanism that biases the random process or with a precognitive timing mechanism that selects favorable random fluctuations of the random process.  If...

Efforts to use precognitive timing tasks to investigate task complexity and goal-oriented psi are primarily investigating the a priori probability of a hit factor.  In precognitive timing tasks, a pseudorandom number generator generates numbers at a rate much faster than human reaction time. A ...

The quantitative amount of information transmitted on a psi task is closely related to the resulting chi-square value (Schmidt, 1970; Timm, 1973), and therefore, is monotonically related to the statistical significance level of the outcome and to other common statistics such as (absolute value of) z...

In the quantitative, mathematical use of the term, information refers to the reduction of uncertainty.  A task with six equally likely outcomes has a greater amount of uncertainty than a task with two equally likely outcomes.  A priori probability is a key aspect of information processing ...

Blind PK and blind matching are cases where the amount of information to achieve a psi task appears to vary if measured relative to normal sensory information processing for the task.  These are special cases of the general principle that success on PK tasks does not depend on the degree to whi...

The presence of repeated or redundant opportunities for psi to operate is a form of information processing that is a key assumption for majority-vote procedures and for statistical experimental methodology.  Normal statistical methods are based on the assumption that the aggregation of data fro...

This appendix was prepared in response to a request by a reviewer that I discuss the relationship between goal-oriented psi as described in this paper and other writings on task complexity and information processing.  This discussion is presented as an appendix because it is a technical digress...

Several researchers have suggested that internal patterns in majority-vote studies may indicate the efficient operation of psi (Cox, 1974; Kennedy, 1979; Radin, 1990-1991).  The concept of efficient psi operation implies that psi is goal oriented because efficiency is only meaningful when evaluated ...

Virtually all experimental research involves a hierarchy of goals.  As shown in Figure 1, experimenters and participants may focus on successful outcomes for: (a) individual trials or RNG events, (b) groups of trials for within subjects designs, (c) individual subjects, (d) groups of subjects f...

EVIDENCE FOR GOAL-ORIENTED PSI Reviews of the literature have concluded that the data as a whole support the goal-oriented psi hypothesis for the trials in psi experiments (Kennedy, 1978; 1979; Stanford, 1977). Similar conclusions have appeared throughout the history of parapsychology.  Early experi...

Parapsychologists may be skeptical of these proposals because they believe that psi is not sufficiently reliable to carry out this type of research program.  Attempts to apply power analyses to a phenomenon that has the experimenter differences and declines found in psi research bring these rel...

I expect that many of the more extreme skeptics will be hesitant to participate, or more likely, simply never be able to agree prospectively that a protocol is adequate.  These skeptics appear happy to devote many hours to after-the-fact speculations and listing deficiencies in past experiments...

Given that the research processes described above are my standard of reference now, I do not expect that the current meta-analysis approaches in parapsychology will provide convincing evidence for even mild skeptics.  The meta-analysis strategy in parapsychology seems to be to take a group of s...

A company that wants to provide convincing evidence that a new product is effective begins by doing a few or several small exploratory or pilot studies. These are called Phase 1 and Phase 2 studies and are used to develop the methods of administering the product and effective dose as well as providi...