Superpowers and the Stubborn Illusion of Separation; Dean Radin (Energies, Vol 19 No 1)

7/30/2019 Superpowers and the Stubborn Illusion of Separation; Dean Radin (Energies, Vol 19 No 1)

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Community Address

SUPERPOWERS AND THESTUBBORN ILLUSION OFSEPARATIONby Dean Radin, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

Since the dawn of humanity, people have investigated the relationship between intention andthe physical world through practices like prayer and meditation. Starting a half-century ago,science began to systematically explore these relationships in the laboratory. After brieflyreviewing the history of this scientific exploration, I will discuss two recent experiments. Bothwere conducted to explore the nature of the mind's eye and its interaction with physical systems

distant in space or time. In one, an eyetracking system was used to test whether seers couldactually "see" future events. In another, meditators and non-meditators were asked to use theirmind's eye to "see" a beam of photons in a light-tight optical apparatus. Both experimentsprovided intriguing glimpses of the role of the human mind in weaving the fabric of reality. Iwill also discuss an experiment that examined the effect of highly focused intention appliedtoward food by measuring the foods influence on people who consumed it. Finally, I willtouch on the predicatable stages of acceptance of new ideas.

KEYWORDS: illusion, authority, quantum mechanics, consciousness, superpowers, telepathy, presenti-ment, meditation, intuition, space and time

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine Volume 19 Number 1 Page 29


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This talk is about the stubborn illusionof separation. What I mean by thisphrase is illustrated visually in Figure 1.

When most people look at this image, whatthey see is a dark spot in the middle, a

slightly lighter ring surrounding that, aneven lighter ring surround that, and so onto the outside. But if I start covering upthe boundaries between the rings, what youfind is that the background is actually allthe same illumination level (Figure 2). Thisimage is called the Craik-CornsweetIllusion, named after the two psychologists

who studied this effect in detail. The reason

the illusion works is because in real lifewhen you see objects with this type ofshading, youve learned through experiencethat the objects are probably at differentheights, like steps. This illusion is a simplebut effective way of illustrating that ourexpectations drive what we perceive. Wedont see the world as it is we see what

we expect to see.

What else drives our expectations? One ofthe strongest drivers is authority. Ill use asan example what might well be the longest-standing scientific mistake in history, based on

Aristotles writings. For two millennia,Aristotle was the voice of authority when itcame to understanding the natural world.

Among many other things, Aristotle wrotethat the day-fly [or house fly], as it is called,

uses four feet and four wings, and this washis image of what a fly looked like (Figure 3).

Does this look like an ordinary house fly toyou? To most people it kind of looks like afly, except that 2,000 years after Aristotle

wrote this, the Dutch scholar Jan


Figure 1. Craik-Cornsweet Illusion

Figure 2. Craik-Cornsweet Illusion withboundaries filled in.


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Swammerdam risked heresy by saying, ineffect, With all due respect to Aristotle, ifyou actually look at a fly, youll see that ithas six legs and two wings. In other words,for over 2,000 years people were swatting at

flies, and thinking, Hmm, Aristotle saidthese things had four legs, but this one Imlooking at has six legs, so I suppose it mustbe a mutant, or maybe two legs fell off. Iguess I wont tell anyone about it. This isa case where authority reigned supremeuntil someone was courageous, or stupid,enough to point out a problem. The moralof the story is that its exceptionally difficult

to see beyond our expectations, andespecially what authority leads us to believe.

What does authority tell us today? In theform of the scientific mainstream, authoritytells us that (a) quantum effects are irrele-vant in understanding human experience,(b) for all practical purposes objects at thehuman scale are completely separate, (c)consciousness emerges from brain activity,(d) intention acts only inside the headbecause it, like consciousness, is an illusiongenerated by the brain, and (e) theres noevidence to the contrary. Taken together,such assertions help explain why authorita-tive assertions tend to persist, sometimes forgenerations. Our collective expectationslead us to ignore evidence that wouldcontradict what authority has told us must

be true.

Before we go any further, I have to confessthat by virtue of being a speaker at thisconference, Im placed into the role of anauthority, which makes me uncomfortable.

As Einstein once said, he distrusted

authority so much that the universepunished him by making him one. Thatshow I feel; most of the time I really dontfeel like I understand anything, but I dohave some ideas and the opportunity to talkabout them. I might be completely wrong,but I dont think so.

Contrary to prevailing authority, I believethat quantum mechanics is intimatelyconnected to consciousness. A very goodbook on this issue is Quantum Enigma, byBruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, bothphysics professors at the University ofCalifornia at Santa Cruz. They describe

what they call the skeleton in the closet of

mainstream physics the idea that as muchas youd like to try to extract consciousnessfrom quantum theory, it just isnt possible.Now, a lot of working physicists dont paymuch attention to that aspect of quantummechanics, because you dont need it formost practical purposes. But when it comes


Figure 3. Aristotles fly


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psychic is a very tiny class of coincidencesthat are just plain weird but because those

weird things are the very stories that arerepeated so often, thats why the media givesthe impression that the paranormal is

everywhere. But beyond that explanation,there are plenty of other valid reasons why

we can dismiss all those amazing tales of theparanormal, as portrayed on television andin the movies. They include illusions,delusions, wishful thinking, cognitive biases,and fraud these things cannot bedismissed lightly.

So when Im talking about superpowers, Imnot talking about the comic book hero,because Superman is not even human. ButI am talking about something likeSpiderman, because Spiderman is ahuman slightly mutated but neverthelesshuman who has certain enhanced skills.In particular, Im talking about Star Wars

Jedis and the kinds of things that Jedis areportrayed to be able to do. The evidencethat some of those skills are real is surpris-ingly good. Im going to go through a bitof that evidence, and Ill return specificallyto Alec Guinness (who played the JediMaster Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars) a bitlater.

My first claim is that objects are not asseparate as they appear to be. Thats what

physics has learned through the verificationof quantum entanglement in themicroscopic world. But what about minds?

Are minds as separate as they appear to be?Well, if the mind is identical to the brain,then minds must be isolatedand Jedipowers must be pure fantasy. But what do

down to the real essence of how quantumtheory works, it turns out that you cannotremove consciousness. Eugene Wigner, theNobel Laureate physicist who was one ofthe founders of quantum mechanics, stated

it most simply: It was not possible toformulate the laws of quantum mechanicsin a fully consistent way without referenceto consciousness. There are many otherstatements like this by quantum theorists,because they realized that a comprehensivedescription of any physical systemintimately includes the observer.

I would also propose, as an alternative toorthodox authority, that objects are notentirely separate. This is not only true atthe quantum level via quantum entangle-ment; its probably also true at themacroscopic level. Further, mind is notcompletely identical to brain, intention doesact at a distance, and there is substantialevidence even extraordinary evidence infavor of these claims.

The title of my talk includes the wordsuperpowers. Popular culture is saturated

with images and concepts of superpowers.These stories are part of the zeitgeist, andthey always have been. There is emotivepower underlying these stories, somethingthat most of us resonate with. You couldsay that maybe these superstitious beliefs

reflect wishful thinking in uncertain times.But maybe not maybe theres somethingmore. The usual skeptical response tosuperpowers is: Well, there are billions ofpeople out there having trillions of experi-ences, and so all we hear the weird stuff.

What people claim to be paranormal or


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skeptics who will actually go ahead andchallenge their fears by conducting anexperiment. Fortunately, there are a fewexceptions. One was described in an articlepublished in the journal, Humanistic

Psychologist, in 2005, by two psychologyprofessors, one at the University of Georgiaand the other at the University of NotreDame. They clearly did not believe intelepathy. But to their credit, theynevertheless conducted the same kind ofexperiment that I just described, and theyfound that after a series of eight studies,they obtained an overall [statically signifi-

cant] hit rate of 32% which is exactly thesame overall average result found in theprevious studies. But then they went on tosay that this result was precariously closeto demonstrating humans do have psychicpowers. So they conducted one additionalstudy based on an ad hoc psychic theorythey came up with, and that study obtaineda significantly negative result, so theyconcluded that telepathy wasnt real after all.

I cant think of a more dramatic way ofillustrating the power of wishful thinking.

If telepathy is real in experiments where youask somebody to report somethingconsciously, then it ought to existunconsciously as well. It turns out thatmany experiments have looked atunconscious, psychophysiological analogs of

telepathy. To give just one example, say youtake a couple, isolate them both in dimlylit rooms, and then ask them to think aboutor feel the presence of the other person.Then at random times you flash a light inthe eyes of one person (the sender) andsee what happens in the brain of the other

controlled experiments say? Well, laborato-ries that have studied telepathy in a system-atic way, starting from about the 1920s,including such places as City University ofNew York, McGill University in Montreal,

Harvard, Duke, Cornell, Stanford,Cambridge, and the Universities ofLeningrad, Gotenberg, Edinburgh, and

Amsterdam.

Without going through the details of theexperiment, its basically a test where youhave to choose one out of four correcttargets and so youd expect to get a 25%

hit rate by chance. After some 3,145 testsessions conducted in 25 different laborato-ries over about four decades, the overall hitrate result is 32%, not 25%. The partici-pants in these tests are typically collegesophomores, not people who make specialclaims about telepathic ability. Thisresearch has been reported in mainstreampsychology journals, and repeatedlydiscussed, and the overall odds againstchance of this effect after 88 experi-ments is 29 quintillion to 1 (that is, 29million trillion to 1). Surely that counts asextraordinary evidence. So we know that

whatevers going on in these experimentsabsolutely isnt chance. We also know thatits not due to a long list of possible designflaws, or selective reporting, or fraud.

What do confirmed skeptics report whenthey try the same experiment? First, a few

words about skepticism. It is a vital andnecessary part of science. But you oftenencounter people who are so skeptical thatthe very concept of telepathy is exceedinglythreatening to them. So its unusual to find


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no longer in a linear realm when we starttalking about effects through time butnevertheless, we can do experiments on it.

Remember that I mentioned Obi Wan

Kenobi from Star Wars? Some of the Jedisabilities involved premonitions. And as itturns out, the actor who played Obi WanKenobi had an actual Jedi-moment of hisown. Here is a video with Sir AlecGuinness:

Interviewer: You also met Dean, didnt you James Dean?

Guinness: Well, my very first night inHollywood I met James Dean. It was a veryvery odd occurrence. Id arrived off the plane,and you know, it took a long time in thosedays about 16 hours for a flight and Idbeen met by Grace Kelly and various people,but then I found that I was alone with myself

for the evening, and a woman I knew, Iphoned her up and said, Let me take you outto dinner, and we went to various places andshe was wearing trousers, and they wouldntlet her in any of the smart Hollywood restau-rants. Think of it you know, it was 1952or 54 something like that. However, we

finally went to a little Italian dive and thatwas full, and so we got turned away. I saidall I want is a hamburger anyway I washungry by then. Then I heard feet runningdown the street, and it was James Dean and

he said, I was in that restaurant and youcouldnt get a table my name is JamesDean, he said, Would you come and joinme? So we said yes, it was very kind of him. Then, going back into the restaurant,he said, Oh, before we go in, I must show

you something Ive just got a new car. And

person (the receiver). The receivers in thisexperiment have no idea when the lightflashes will occur. Theyre sitting alone ina dark room just having their EEGrecorded. So if telepathy is real, and one

person sees a light flash, then the otherpersons brain should react. This type ofexperiment has been repeatedly conductedin a half-dozen different laboratoriesstarting in the 1960s, and the overallevidence is very clear: there is an EEGbrain correlation effect that shows up inthese studies. More recently, my colleagueshave conducted the same type of experi-

ment using functional MRI to find outwhere in the brain these effects areoccurring. For light-flashing type experi-ments, the effects appear in the visualcortex, with highly significant results.

So does telepathy exist? If you were to aska court of scientific opinion charged withlooking at all of the previous studiesinvolving waking states, altered states,correlations in the autonomic and thecentral nervous system, and confirmed infunctional MRI, the jurys answer wouldvery l ike ly be yes with very highcertainty that telepathy exists.

What this implies is that like quantumentanglements among elementary particles,minds too are not as separate as they appear

to be: they are connected nonlocally. Ifthese nonlocal connections genuinelyresemble quantum interconnections, thenminds should also not be as separate in timeas they appear to be. This can becomedifficult to think about because ourlanguage is sequential and linear, and we are


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then, when the participant is ready, he orshe presses a button. The screen remainsblank for five seconds, and then thecomputer randomly selects one picture outof a large pool of pictures and presents it.

The picture remains on the screen for threeseconds, then it goes away. The screenremains blank for ten seconds and then theparticipant can repeat this at will. In atypical test session, 30 to 40 trials like thisare run in a row. The pictures come froman international standard pool of about 800pictures, which was developed for theNational Institutes for Mental Health for

laboratory studies of emotion. Each picturehas a standardized rating of the degree towhich it is emotional (to most people), andits valence (positive or negative emotion).

When the session ends, we average all ofthe emotional trials the participant saw, andseparately average all of the calm trials.Then we look at the difference in physio-logical measurements before the stimuluspicture appeared. The prediction is thatbefore the emotional pictures, physiology

will show more activation than before thecalm pictures.

Ive conducted four studies of this type withover a hundred participants, using skinconductance measures. The results indicatethat people can unconsciously feel what

theyre about to experience. The overallodds against chance in favor of presenti-ment were 33,000 to 1.

This same type of experiment has beenrepeated now many times. My colleagueDick Bierman, from the University of

there in the courtyard of this little restaurantwas I dont know what the car was somelittle silver, very smart thing, all done up incellophane, with a bunch of roses tied to itsbonnet. And I said, How fast can you drive

it? And he said, Oh, I can do 150. AndI said, Have you driven it? He said, No,Ive never been in it at all. And some strangething came over me, and in some almostdifferent voice I said, I wont join your tableunless you want me to, but I must saysomething: please do notget into that car,because if you do, and I looked at my watch I said, If you get into that car at all, its now

Thursday 10:00 at night, and by 10:00at night next Thursday youll be dead if youget into that car. He waved it off as nonsense.So we went off and had dinner we had acharming dinner and he was dead the

following Thursday afternoon in that car. Itwas one of the oddest things.Interviewer (shocked): Had this everhappened to you before?Guinness: No, Im glad to say. It was partof a very very odd, spooky experience. Hewas I liked him very much I wouldveloved to have known him more.

I think this is an excellent example wherefact and fiction blur. Heres an actor whoplayed a Jedi with superpowers, and heactually had that experience in real life!

Now heres how we test for these curioustime slips in the laboratory. I call it a

presentimenttest, a feeling about an event inthe future. You sit a person down in frontof a blank computer screen, and you recordsome aspect of their physiology skinconductance is a convenient measure and


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a long list of conventional explanations.Weve looked at poss ible ar ti fact s likesensory cues, nonrandom target sequences,protocol flaws, physiological artifacts,selective reporting, multiple analyses,

programming errors, statistical violations,subject fraud, and anticipatory effects, andnone of them are able to explain the results.

What we end up with is very good evidencefor short-term precognition a matter ofthree to five seconds in advance of astimulus. There have been nineteen of thesestudies conducted to date, of whichseventeen had results in the predicted

direction and ten were statistically signifi-cant. This is an impressive replication ratefor a new kind of experimental paradigm.

The most recent experiment I conductedinvestigated presentiment in pupillarydilation. The pupil is an interesting objectof study because it provides a very sensitivemeasure of emotional response. You canalso see where the eye is looking, whichprovides information about the real-timeallocation of attention. We predicted, andfound, that before emotional trials the pupil

was dilated more than before calm trials.

We were able to infer which side of the brainwas more active during presentiment. Weknow, for example, that right-handed peopletend to look to the left when answering

questions having to do with affect. So nowwe could also ask, did they also look to theleft beforeseeing an affective picture? If theydid, then it suggests that we not only get asense of what is about to occur, but we alsoknow something about its degree of emotion-ality. So we looked at this data and found

Amsterdam, got almost exactly the sameresults that I did in this experiment. Hedid this initially thinking that I must havemade a mistake, because the results lookedtoo good but he was quickly able to

replicate the same result. Then RollinMcCraty at the Institute of Heartmathreplicated the effect, using heart ratevariability as the principal measure andagain, he found that peoples heart rateschanged in accordance with what theirfuture was about to be.

Ive conducted similar studies using a simple

light flash as the stimulus, to see whetherthe brain responded before seeing a lightflash as opposed to before no flash. In thistest you press a button and four seconds lateryou either see a flash or no flash, determinedrandomly. When you later analyze the EEGsignals, you find a difference in slow corticalpotentials that is consistent with a presenti-ment effect. The difference is in whatscalled a readiness wave, and what it meansis that people are unconsciously behavingdifferently just before a light flash thanbefore no light flash.

This experiment has also been conducted ina functional MRI, to find out where in thebrain this effect was occurring. Mycolleague Dick Bierman did this, and hefound that it occurred primarily in the

amygdalae, the emotional processing centersof the brain. This makes sense, because thestimuli in most of these experimentsinvolves emotional responses.

To make sure that these presentiment effectsare what they appear to be, we go through


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photon went through, then the interferencepattern will disappear, and youll see a partic-ulate pattern instead. Physicists call thisdisappearance a collapse of the quantum

wave function, and the reason it disappears

is because you gained information aboutwhich path that the photon took. Knowledgealoneis sufficient to collapse the system fromindeterminant waves into determinantparticles. And here is where consciousnessenters the quantum world. Your knowledgeof whats happening changes the way that thequantum system behaves.

What if you asked someone to gain thisinformation purely mentally? That is, whatif you asked a person to imagine that theycould see which slit the photon was goingthrough, not with their eye, but with theirminds eye would you get an interferencepattern? If the minds eye is only a fantasyinside your head, then it doesnt doanything out in the real world, and youllget an interference pattern. But if theminds eye is causal in some way, and cangain knowledge at a distance, then theinterference pattern should collapse.

This is very similar to the idea ofSchrdingers cat that famous paradox

where you take a unfortunate kitty and youput it in a box, and at some probabilistictime in the future a radioactive particle

causes a flask to be broken with poison init, causing the cat to be killed. Before youlook at this system, you dont knowwhetherthe cat is alive or dead. From a quantumperspective, before observation, the cat issimultaneously both alive and dead.Schrdinger presented this paradox as an

that for the calm trials, the eye was notlooking significantly to the left or the right.But before the emotional pictures, the eye

was indeed looking significantly to the left.

From these experiments we can infer thatseparations in space and time are, asEinstein showed, stubborn illusions. Fromother experiments, there is growing evidencethat separations between mind and matteralso are illusions. One way to demonstratethis is with Youngs double-slit apparatus.This is one of the most elementary and yetfundamental demonstrations in physics,

because it captures the essential mystery ofquantum mechanics.

The way it works is this: If you shine a lightthrough a single optical slit, the light thatcomes out resembles (in its most elemen-tary form) a pattern consistent with whatyoud expect if light behaved as a particle.But if you shine a light through a doubleslit, you get an interference pattern, whichis consistent with light behaving as a wave.This is the classical way to demonstrate thatlight behaves as a particle or a wavedepending on how you look at it.

One of the surprises about light is that ifyou send single photons through a doubleslit, you end up not with a particulatepattern, which you might expect given that

you were shooting individual objectsthrough the slits, but rather you end up

with an interference pattern. This wouldnot be expected if particles of light werebehaving like separate objects.

Whats more remarkable is that if you use adetector to see which of the two slits the


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outside the shielded room by a computer.We ran 18 experimental sessions, halfperformed by advanced meditators and halfby non-meditators. The overall results, withall participants combined, significantly

deviated from chance. We also ran a seriesof calibration trials to check out theequipment, and those results were notsignificant, indicating that the results of theexperiment were not due to an artifact.Then, when we separated the results of themeditators from the non-meditators, wefound that all of the experimental effects

were due to the mediators. It was an

extremely significant result: odds of106,000 to 1 for the mediators.

The reason we used meditators and non-meditators in the test was because the taskrequires, in essence, that you place your mindover there for 30 seconds, and then youput it over here, alternating back and forthaccording to the instructions. A trainedmeditator can do that task for 30 seconds,but a non-meditator can do it for maybe twoseconds, and then they start thinking aboutlunch. I expected that if this experiment wasgoing to work at all, it would probably workbest with people who are disciplined at doingthings with their minds. In this case, thatsexactly what happened, so were planning afollow-up series of similar studies, again withvery advanced meditators.

What weve seen so far is that separation inspace and time, and between mind andmatter, are illusions. Were not talking aboutillusions at the macroscopic level, rather at adeeper level of reality. So one might ask

whether these microscopic effects influence

absurdity, where he was actually arguingthat this couldnt possibly be true. Butactually, it turns out that it is true, at leastat the quantum scale, and maybe even inthe macroscopic world.

To test this idea, we used an optical devicecalled a Michelson interferometer. Itsbasically the same as a double slit apparatus,but easier to work with when trying toexplain to someone what they should do

with their mind. With this device, incomingphotons hit a half-silvered mirror; half ofthem go through it and half bounce off.

The resulting two beams then bounce offtwo solid mirrors, the beams reconnect, andin the process they form an interferencepattern. A very sensitive digital camera isthen used to record this interference pattern.

People in this experiment were asked to puttheir minds eye into one of the two photonbeams in the interferometer, so as to seethe incoming photons, or cause them to bedeflected, or to gain knowledge about thephotons. Or they were asked to withdrawtheir minds eye from the photon beam.These instructions were alternated in arandomly counterbalanced way. Then weexamined the results to see if there was achange in the interference pattern under thetwo conditions. If there was, it wouldsuggest that the act of putting your minds

eye in the box causes a measurable effect atthe quantum level.

The Michelson interferometer was placedinside a light-tight, shielded room, and wehad the participants sit quietly outside thatroom. The camera was controlled from


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twenty minutes doing the intention. Theyhad a large batch of chocolate in front ofthem that we then divvied up for the experi-ment. The Mongolian shaman spent aboutan hour doing a ritual involving a lot of

chanting and beating of drums. This studywas published in the journal Explore: TheJournal of Science and Healing last year(2007). And by the way, the experiment Imentioned earlier on the effects of intuitionat the quantum level was published in thesame journal, this past January (2008).

We recruited 62 people and assigned them

into four groups. The groups were matchedon age and degree of neuroticism. We usedthe Neo-PI scale to measure neuroticism,because since our main measure was mood,it turns out that the more neurotic you are,the more your mood will fluctuate. So weused neuroticism as a covariate in ouranalysis. We also asked people how muchchocolate they tended to eat on average. Thereason is that if somebody eats a pound ofchocolate a day, by asking them to eat a littlebit more for this experiment, we wouldntexpect to see much of an effect because theydlikely be saturated with chocolate already. So

we predicted that for people who only ate alittle chocolate on average, they would showa bigger intentional effect than people whotended to eat lots of chocolate.

One thing youd expect to find in an experi-ment of this type is that on the first day ofthe experiment, most people would reportsome improvement in mood because of thenovelty of being forced to eat chocolate.But typically, mood enhancement as a resultof eating chocolate lasts only about twenty

the everyday world in practical terms.To find out, we conducted an experiment tosee whether the act of intention alone wouldaffect food. Why food? Well, thebackground of this story is that I always felt

that something about eating Moms chickensoup made me feel better, even though it

was the exact same ingredients that I couldget out of a can. So I wondered whetherthe act of intention in cooking the lovethat goes into the food could be consid-ered a kind of ingredient. In the experi-ment we conducted, we used chocolateinstead of chicken soup because if youve

ever conducted clinical trials, you know howdifficult it can be to recruit people. In thiscase, the experiment involved asking peopleif they would be willing to eat chocolate. Infact, not only would they be willing to, theyhadto as part of the experiment. So it wasvery easy to recruit people for this study.

We used the gold-standard, double-blind,randomized, placebo-controlled design inour study, the same type of design you

would use to test the efficacy of a new drug.Some of the chocolate was exposed to themeditative intentions of Venerable GesheSopa and his senior monks. Geshe Sopa isa Tibetan Buddhist monk and was the tutorof the Dalai Lama. We also askedMongolian shaman Banzar Zorigtbaatar toapply his intention toward the treated

chocolate. They were both asked tointentionally impress into the chocolate theintention that anyone who ate the chocolate

would experience an enhanced sense ofenergy, vigor and well-being.

Geshe Sopa and two senior monks spent


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a surprising 1,000% improvement. Thisproof of principle experiment showed thathighly focused intentions influenced moodstates associated with consuming food.Previously reported experiments looking at

conceptually similar effects of intention onvarious target substances have reportedsimilar outcomes.

When faced with a new idea, there are severalpredictable stages of acceptance. These ideasare not new to this audience, but from themainstream perspective, they are very new.The first stage of acceptance is: Its

impossible, because theres no evidence.What this means is, Ive not seen theevidence not that there is literally noevidence. Stage two is: Well, maybe itspossible, but its not very interesting, orperhaps, Its so weak maybe it will go away.Stage three is: Its real and important, sopatent it. Stage four is: Critics claim thatthey thought of it first. Stage five is: Noone remembers it was controversial. Stagesix is: Insurance covers it.

So where are we now in terms of these kindsof phenomena? I think that for what Illrefer to as the scientific superpowers stageone was roughly from the 1500s to about1950. Stage two was approximately the lasthalf of the last century. Stage three is, I think,emerging now. One piece of evidence

supporting that idea is the appearance ofpatents. In the patents pending arena, youcan presently find applications for enhancingthe efficiency of electrochemical processes withintention; electronic circuits that influence youat a distance, programmed by intention; novelforms of communication systems related to

minutes; then the effects of the caffeine andother mood-enhancing biochemicals wouldbegin to fade. What we were hoping tofind is that intention would sustain theshort-term mood enhancement effect

normally produced by chocolate. Ourprimary outcome measure was change inmood, as measured with the Profile ofMood States, a well-known mood measure-ment scale.

We asked participants to record their mooddaily over the course of a one-week period.On the middle three days of the week, we

asked them to eat chocolate. We actuallygave a prescription: at 10 a.m. you must eathalf an ounce, and at 3 p.m. you must eathalf an ounce. They had little packets ofprepared chocolate, blindly labeled so theycouldnt tell (and neither could we) whetherthey were eating the regular or the identi-cally-looking intentionally treated chocolate.

What we found was that on the first day ofeating chocolate, overall all subjects moodimproved. On the second day, moodbounced back in the control condition, butit remained improved in the intentionalcondition. By the third day we saw a signif-icant difference between the two conditions.People eating the intentional chocolatereported a 67% improvement as comparedto the control chocolate. The people

involved in this test were matched so thedifferences we saw were not due tomundane differences among the partici-pants. When we looked at the subset ofpeople who ate less than the average amountof chocolate per week (3.2 ounces for thispopulation), the intentional group showed


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mind/matter interaction effects; and a processthat predicts lotteries based on a precognitioneffect. Patents that have already been issuedinclude means of achieving directmind/machine control, an intuition training

system, and an ESP testing system.

I predicted about twenty years ago thatbecause the stages of acceptance of new ideasare so predictable, that when you reach stagethree you should start to see a trickle ofpatents. This is because at that point,entrepreneurs will see beyond the stage whereeffects are considered weak and uninter-

esting, and they will recognize that theresmoney to be made. So they will begin toprotect intellectual property, just in case.

Were presently up to seven patents or patentspending, and I may have missed a few. Thefirst patent was issued in 1998. Between2000 and now were beginning to see a steadytrickle. And so I predict that in anothertwenty years, well see a flood. By then theseeffects will no longer be seen as weak anduninteresting, but robust and important.

In conclusion, experiments of the type Ivediscussed, plus a large and growingsupporting literature, suggest that allobjects, including mind and matter, areconnected though space and time. Thismay be the source of real superpowers.

This paper is based on Dean Radins Address,presented at the Eighteenth Annual ISSSEEMConference, Energy, Intent, and Healing (June 19-26, 2008).

CORRESPONDENCE: Dean Radin [email protected]


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Superpowers and the Stubborn Illusion of Separation; Dean Radin (Energies, Vol 19 No 1)

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