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[Music]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
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