Transcript for Dean Radin, Ph.D. on Double Slit Experiments, Consciousness & Parapsychology

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so in these counts field experiments you have a relatively small effect but we know with high confidence that telepathy as demonstrated in these experiments occurs if the topic of psychic phenomena. ever comes up in standard science it’s completely dismissed as somewhere out in the fringe or the lunatic fringe and so you learn very quickly you don’t talk. about this stuff and one of them picks up his gun points a point blank in the face of the other person and is pulling the trigger what’s up guys.

Xavier Kazan here and this is our episode with dr. Dean Radin this is doctor reading his second time on hxp and I really wanted to get into some of. the double-slit experiments he’s conducted and just the quantum mechanics of what we’re talking about when we talk about parapsychology and influencing things with your mind and then measuring. it who else to bring on then dr. Aden to talk about such things and you know dr.

Aden is not making any assumptions with this he is very much a hardcore scientist and that’s what I love about speaking to him he’s great at that so. thank you guys so much for listening the human experiences in session my guest for today’s dr. Dean Radin dr. Aden welcome back to hxp thanks very much I want to bounce right into experiments that you’ve done just because we’ve done all the intro questions you’ve conducted a number of.

different experiences around the idea of using a double-slit device to test the influence of consciousness with regards to the observer effect found in quantum physics. what is the observer effect and how does the double slit experiment traditionally show the experimenter the wave particle duality of photons okay so this is actually something? that’s moderately new I suppose not that the experiments are new been doing this for about eight years now but last year it was April of 2016 I gave a summary.

talk on all of the experiments we’ve done so far 17 of which have been published all involving double-slit or other optical interference systems and all looking at the this notion of an. observer effect so I just mentioned that that YouTube talk has been seen now over 430,000 times so that’s a little unusual or talk on parapsychology and it means.

that people are interested in this topic so the observer effect means that a major difference between classical physics and quantum physics is that in the classical physical world we assume. that object objects are completely separate and that observation it doesn’t make any difference on the system assume that objects are independent of being observed and the quantum domain it’s. known that measurement or observation changes the behavior of the system and one of the easiest ways of demonstrating that is with an optical system called double slit and it the double slit.

literally refers to a very tiny slit with two little slits each about ten millionths of a meter that are next to each other typically about 200 millionths of a. meter apart so those are the two slits you shine photons or electrons or small elementary particles through those two slits and you have a camera on the other. side and if the if you imagine that a photon or an electron is a particle like a BB you would expect that when you look at the pattern that is produced on the.

screen as as it passes through the double slit would be two bars it would be like one bright bar behind each one of the slits and that is in fact what you get if you. send something as large as a BB through through slits but when you send elementary particles through which are at the quantum domain you don’t see that anymore you see a pattern of light.

that’s called an interference pattern which is very much what like what you would get if you were passing waves through the two slits just like water waves okay so this is peculiar because. it in fact this is the way that you demonstrate that light and elementary particles have characteristics both of waves and particles it look like particles they show up on the screen as.

individual dots but the pattern of dots looks like it was a wave and so there’s my puzzle number one this is why when we talk about something like a photon it. sounds like a single particle but that’s only it’s like half of the side of a coin it has two sides to the coin the other side is yeah but it also behaves.

like a wave so the second mystery here is that if you have a system set up so that you could tell when you shoot a single photon a single packet of energy which. sounds like a particle you send it through our toward to the two slits and you can measure which slit that it goes through and they’re weighed many made in.

different ways of measuring which of the two slits it goes through if you do that then the pattern that shows up on the screen is suggest that what went through. the two slits is a particle looks like B B’s again as soon as you turn off your math your method of measuring which of the two slits that it went through then.

it starts acting like waves again so the observer effect is what you can know about which of the two slits that the photon goes through and that mystery which is still not. resolved very well that mystery opens the door just the crack into physics for some element like mind or consciousness because mind and consciousness are all about gaining information and gaining.

information is what seems to make photons act like particles or waves there’s an element of the quantum measurement problem that once some kind of physical system such as the double. slit devices observed by the measurement apparatus the physical system and the measurement apparatus are no longer independent and they become entangled is that does that I’m on the right track.

here yes that’s correct if this wasn’t strange enough about where the measurement ends and where the quantum becomes a more classical understanding of what’s going on what is. the von Neumann chain well john von neumann was not one of the founders of quantum mechanics came along maybe fifteen or twenty years later but he was. a mathematician who put the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics on a firm foundation his book on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics is basically the Bible of.

quantum mechanics so von Oy Minh was wondering like many people have about this observer effect and also trying to wonder well when does the wave-like nature of quantum mechanics turn into. the classical object like world that we live in where does that happen and so he came up with the idea that if you imagine that your eye is looking some.

aspect of your awareness is based on what you see then that’s not good enough to describe what measurement means because you can think of what your eye. sees as a purely mechanical process the the photon hits your eye and that stimulates nerves and that goes into your brain and your brain has certain patterns all of this is a completely.

physical process and so that’s not going to collapse another physical system because it’s the same stuff from a quantum mechanical perspective your eye and your brain are just other quantum. systems the nothing there to change the quantum nature so he came up with this idea that what’s going on with measurement is what he called a psychophysical process. meaning it is a mind matter interaction and the only part that he could think of that would be very different than purely physical system would be consciousness.

itself which he presumed was non-physical or at least not physical in a way we usually think of physics he gave the notion that there’s something peculiar about consciousness. that allows consciousness to interact with matter and cause it to behave in different ways and so that’s one of a number of interpretations of what the observer effect is about so his proposal.

is not something to be dismissed lightly and more importantly it’s a testable idea a recent article and New Scientist mentioned that an article was written recently by a well-known physicist who? suggested that maybe consciousness really does have something to do with the way that quantum mechanics works and you see this about every twenty years a mainstream prominent physicist will say.

well you know maybe there’s a way of doing an experiment to see what is the role of consciousness in the physical world so this is great because it means. it’s a discussion that can take place in mainstream physics and it’s also a little frustrating because we’ve been doing experiments like this not just mine but within parapsychology these. eight types of experiments have been going on since the 1960s and when you look at the body of that evidence the overall evidence is extremely strong suggesting that there is something about.

consciousness that is interacting with the physical world so the reason why I’ve been using optical systems in a particular double-slit systems is because when you use something macroscopic like a dice or. Die it’s it becomes more difficult to imagine what’s going on also it’s it’s to a physicist it would seem creepy because the object you’re using is too.

big so they got too macroscopic dye which is big so in the 1960s a physicist came up there with the idea of using a random number generator and so his. experiment was explicitly looking at the notion of whether the mind interacts at the quantum level with quantum particles and his experiment suggested that they. did so that gave rise to 40 years of people doing experiments involving random number generators as the target and over all those studies provide evidence that something’s going on so?

what we did is simply take it into another another level by using the optical systems which are now much closer to what most physicists are familiar with even the analysis that? we’re using the measurements everything else is very similar to what you’d find in physics 101 so they make all a very long story short we’ve done these 17. experiments now we do get strong evidence statistically that mind’s directed at double-slit optical systems will cause the interference pattern to change a little bit but statistically.

quite robustly and even more important whenever you do an experiment like this it’s challenging what people expect you you can’t rely on any one laboratory to make a strong case because a person from. the outside will look at it and say well if that effect is true it’s a breakthrough it’s changes our notion of the way that we think reality works so I.

don’t think we’re going to believe you until somebody else comes along completely independently and replicates it so I’m happy to say now that a colleague at the University of South Paulo we sent. him some equipment we sent him a double-slit and a few other items and he constructed his own double slit system from scratch did experiments using advice that we had developed over the.

years and he did a successful pilot study and now a formal replication both of which were quite significant statistically even to the point now that we begun to discuss the possibility of a. technology based on the use of a double slit system that would be essentially a detector of the mind so we’re testing conscious awareness with this double slit test how far away do you think we.

are from seeing this sort of leap in human consciousness how can we detect that measurable change and you know what? are you doing to affect the human factor while this experiment is being conducted well those are two quite different questions so the first question is how? do you know I think if I interpret it correctly how do you know when the paradigm is changing is that a fair restate myths yeah okay so in that case?

there’s two ways of thinking about why paradigms change one is that you can imagine a line going and this is the current paradigm and all of a sudden. there’s a state change and like a step function and now we’re in a different paradigm that’s a sudden change that happens occasionally but pretty rarely what’s more likely is that you imagine.

that we’re sort of bubbling along with a certain paradigm and there’s a huge status quo that wants to maintain that paradigm because a lot of careers have. been made using that paradigm so when anything comes along that seems a little strange there’s a lot of resistance against it because people don’t want their careers to change so there’s. resistance and the resistance but the evidence keeps building and so you can imagine something like a slowly increasing exponential curve then it goes almost straight up at that point it.

becomes like a step function and you get a change very fast but it takes a long time for this exponential build to occur to get up to that point so I. would say now that if you imagine that this we’ve been in a flat paradigm or a uniform paradigm for a long time that we? are definitely going in the direction of a shift and so at this stage where previously you may have taken a half a century or a quarter of a century it’s?

shrinking now so maybe now we’re in a matter of a decade or half a decade before you start to see major changes and and there are a number of reasons. for this one is that even 10 years ago most physicists thought that quantum processes were completely irrelevant in understanding living systems well that’s no longer the case there’s a. whole field now of quantum biology as quantum biology continues to advance soon people are going to find that it’s operating in an important way in neurons and the symptom moment somebody sees.

that there’s quantum effects in neurons it’s not a very large leap to the brain there are already people thinking about quantum mechanics and brain from that point it’s not a big leap to speculate. that some aspects of brain function are not located in space or time because that’s that’s like the key mystery of quantum mechanics it’s not in space time.

out outside of space time some way and that would mean that our brains are mostly localized but some portions of our brains are not in space or time well. cast into other language that sounds almost exactly what we describe as mystical and psychic experience it’s a portion of your brain which is not inside your head it’s outside. somewhere so this this used to be a fantasy I was writing about this maybe 25 years ago projecting that at some point we’re going to get to the stage.

where it could be predicted that things like telepathy and clairvoyance and so on should occur based on what we know about quantum mechanics in the brain so? that’s that’s like one area another area is that there’s a growing trend and most of the hard physical disciplines and in biology you’re suggesting that if we’re trying. to understand the the ultimate basis like the foundation upon which all of science rests twenty years ago most people would have said well it rests on physics it’s matter and energy today you.

get many different kinds of answers and so some of the answers you’re getting now is well there actually is something below matter and energy its information quantum information science is a growing. field now and there are many other areas in mathematics and in computer science looking at the possibility that what’s really at the bottom or at least as far.

as we can see at the moment is something like informational fields well informational fields sounds a lot closer to mental constructs because the mind or consciousness can be thought of as an. information processor essentially the gap between mind and the ultimate physical substance is beginning to close so it becomes more and more plausible that there’s something peculiar about. consciousness and information that might make it more fundamental than space or time you can see from afar that they’re beginning to converge toward what more and more people including well-known.

philosophers are saying that there’s something fundamental about consciousness it’s not just being a production of the brain it’s more fundamental than that well if we continue to go in that. direction as I think we will and at some point the consciousness is fundamental we’ll be accepted at that point suddenly the whole domain that we currently consider to be anomalous including.

everything in parapsychology and mystical experience will suddenly be viewed in a new light and in that light it’s not anomalous at all so if science science and Bo and. religion both have pretty strongly rejected the notion of of ideas like magic and psychic phenomena from a religious perspective it was banned as demonic and it was banned in science. because science focused on the external world and didn’t really have ways of understanding what was going on on the inside so science and religion are two primary holders of our knowledge of.

reality they both rejected the the notion of psychic phenomena magic all of those ideas and as a result it has been extremely slow in a modern sense to. begin to understand these things in a new way fortunately science is not locked into dogma it’s aspirational sense is to be open and exploratory and change as new. data comes along so we now have scientific data that’s basically pushing the paradigm so that eventually it will it will begin to see reality and ourselves in a new way.

you know I want to talk about against fields how does that work when you’re doing an experiment and testing that peeled for telepathy can you describe that for us please. so the Gon’s field is a German word meaning whole field it was developed by a strong psychologists in Germany in the 1930s or so and the idea was that you.

want to create a homogeneous low level stimulation because at the time the alternative is to put somebody into a sensory deprivation chamber like a floatation tank this does very much like. that except that you don’t need to be floating in water and difficulty so instead you sit somebody down in a comfy chair you have them put on headphones. that play white noise so there’s no pattern you have them put on a half of a ping-pong ball over each eye keep their eyes open and then shine a red light in.

their face and so they can’t see anything they can’t hear anything but they’re fully awake because they are getting a stimulation it’s just one that has no pattern to it and after a few. minutes in that state maybe 10 minutes most people because they’re are not allowed to fall asleep you begin to go into a hypnagogic state like a waking.

dream state exactly the kind of state that you want someone to be in in a telepathy experiment where they’re playing the role of the receiver of the telepathic. information because the idea is that you become exquisitely sensitive to any subtle impression that might arise and the impression in this case is your partner who’s the sender somewhere at a. distance who has given a randomly selected picture or sometimes they see a randomly selected video clip and their job is to mentally send that information to the person who’s the receiver in the.

ganzfeld state so the sending period might go on for twenty minutes and then the receivers taken out of the Khans field condition if they said anything allowed didn’t that’s played back to. them because when you’re in the ganzfeld states very dreamy it’s hard to remember what it was like just like it’s hard to remember a dream sometimes and so you.

listened to what you said and now you’re presented with four images one of which was the one that the sender was trying to send to you and then 3 decoys so. since the original target image was randomly selected there’s no way that either the sender or the receiver could have known in advance what the image is going to be so the best that the.

receiver could do in this condition if there’s no telepathy is guess correctly one in four times in other words a 25% rate so this experiment has been done. over 4,000 times and the overall hit rate is approximately 32% well it doesn’t sound like much from 25 percent to 32 percent but that’s seven percent. given the 4,000 sessions that have been conducted means that the odds against chance are beyond the quadrillion to 1000 to 1 it’s a chance effect so this and among other things shows the.

power of Statistics get enough data even if you have a small effect after a while you gain very high confidence that the effect that you’re seeing is real. so in these God’s field experiments you have a relatively small effect but we know with high confidence that telepathy as demonstrated in these experiments occurs and it doesn’t explain what. telepathy is but it says that what people report in the real world as apparent telepathic connections as that.

can also occur in the laboratory under highly controlled conditions is there an experiment that you’ve done that kind of blew your mind in the the largest way? with is there anything that you can recall I did that well they all do that you see because I had a completely traditional scientific training and if the topic of psychic. phenomena ever comes up and standard science it’s completely dismissed as somewhere out in the fringe or the lunatic fringe right and so you learn very quickly you don’t talk about this.

stuff you don’t even know that there’s any literature on it and if you do know something about the literature you dismiss it you don’t even look at it. so that’s what I did up until about the end of graduate school and I eventually started looking into it in more detail and I became impressed pretty quickly. that there was evidence there were proper ways of looking at experiments of this type and I started doing experiments and to my initial surprise I.

was getting interesting results similar to what other people had reported so that that was the first hook for me that you can use proper scientific methods and forget evidence suggesting that? these kinds of effects are real say then as just to give you one example of a translation from an experience that somebody had into an experiment that. gave pretty robust results a friend of mine told me once of an experience he had which I called presenta meant it’s like precognition except that precognition as the word cognition in it.

which means that you are consciously aware of the effect presenta meant is information from the future but it’s a feeling that’s what the sentiment is about soap resentiment means pre feeling? but without cognition but the way you’d measure that is the measure aspects of your body physiologically skin conductance pupil dilation heart rate things like that these are useful. because they show what’s happening below the level of conscious awareness and there’s a lot of data now suggesting that all psychic phenomena bubble up initially from an unconscious state.

so the Astoria was this this friend like to go hunting and he before he would go out on a hunting party with his friends he had two pistols and he was at the. point where he was cleaning as a six-shot revolver pistol and he would always keep five bullets and the cylinders and the hammer over the empty sixth chamber to make sure that in case.

it was jostled it wouldn’t accidentally fire so he took the bullets out he cleaned the whole gun he’s putting the bullets back in he puts in one two three. four and then he’s about to put the fifth bullet in and he gets a bad feeling about the bullet and so he doesn’t put it in and he sets it aside.

but two weeks go by they go out hunting the folks come back to the cabin and they start drinking which you shouldn’t. do if there are firearms around the fight breaks out between two of his friends and one of them picks up his gun points at point-blank in the face of the? other person and is pulling the trigger and in this type of revolver the hammer goes back cylinder revolves and then the hammer hits the next bullet so this is.

happening and of course my friend intervenes he jumps in between the two to try to stop it but it was too late the hammer the trigger been put all the. way back and the hammer is now going click on to the fifth chamber it went because the cylinder turned on to the chamber where he did not put the bullet.

right and he realized at that point if he didn’t take that bullet out he’d be dead so it’s as though that moment of shock had rippled backwards in time to. two weeks before where he’s holding the bullet and he got a really bad feeling about it well he didn’t have any sense of what of why he just felt it was wrong.

somehow so now you’d say okay this is the real-life experience people have these kinds of things happen and any given case you could dismiss it as a. coincidence so we said okay maybe it’s not a coincidence maybe you really do get it a sense of important things in the future so we want to simulate that. in the laboratory well in a laboratory you can’t put people at risk for real but you can simulate it so what we did.

was we had somebody down in front of a computer screen wired them up to look at skin conductance and heart rate and blood pressure and then they would press? a button and five seconds later on the screen they would see either a very calm or a very emotional picture the very emotional picture was like standing in. front of a gun that’s about to shoot you in the head and the very calm picture is a control and the question is if the future somehow rippling backwards to you and.

affecting you at an unconscious level and before a compa you shouldn’t show much of an effect but before a very emotional picture maybe your body begins to react to it so the. experiment is done with 30 to 40 pictures in a row each one separated by maybe 30 seconds so that you’re even calm down if using an emotional picture.

and they’re presented in a random order that nobody knows in advance and you do this for multiple people and then the final analysis is you look at how the. average physiology is before accomplished as compared to before emotional pictures and to make a long story short we did that experiment we got very strong evidence the people were. much more emotional before the emotional target and they were before the calm target so as as often happens I presented this and my colleagues said that’s ridiculous this is way too good.

of an effect we don’t see effects like that in experiments so fortunately a few began to try to replicate the effect and they were able to flash forward 20 years. into the future and there are over 40 replications by labs around the world meta-analysis has summarized all of them and there’s basically no question and from a physiological point of view that.

people do respond or at least you unconsciously respond as reflected in your body to events that are about to unfold that are emotional and you respond differently than if it’s about. to be a , vent hmm that’s an example of of like constant miracles where I simply take experiences that people talk about figure out a way of safely replicating. that in the laboratory and then see whether or not at least in principle if the kinds of experiences that people talk about especially once ever occur a.

lot can we see that in the laboratory where we’re able to rule out coincidence and the answer in most cases is yes you have been listening to the human. experience podcast if you would like to hear the rest of this interview where dr. Raiden gets into meditation why meditation is so important and how it connects us to this sort of ethereal.

layer of connectivity why it increases this connection to the psychic phenomena that we all seem to exhibit and receive then become a member like I’m a member. of the human experience go to the human XP calm slash members you can just click become a member and you will get access to all of our premium content from all. the guests that we have had on and when we started doing the members content area so thank you guys so much for listening you will hear from us next.

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