Subtle Energies and the Uncharted Realms of Mind
An Esalen Invitational Conference
June 6 - 11, 1999

Precognition, Presentiment & Remote Viewing
Dean Radin

This powerful anecdote provided part of the impetus for Dean's experiments with presentiment -- which he defines as a vague, noncognitive sense that something bad or good will occur. In 1993, he realized that psi studies using physiological measures are often more successful than those based on conscious reports. He reasoned that using those same physiological measures might be a way to study presentiment in the lab. For one double-blind randomized experiment, he uses a skin-conductance measure and a photoplethysmograph for fingertip blood volume (an indicator of autonomic arousal) as subjects are shown a series of randomized pictures on a computer screen. Some of the pictures are neutral and calm, while others are emotionally arousing in a positive or negative direction (erotic or distressing/violent). Each trial lasts sixteen seconds, plus sufficient time to return to the arousal baseline between trials. A recent improvement forces the subject to reach their baseline before the next trial begins, which might be a minute after a charged emotional picture.

His hypothesis was that, if presentiment were real, we would see an anticipatory bump in arousal levels before the presentation of charged pictures and a neutral response before the neutral pictures. Sure enough, this is what he has found, though he has been refining the experiment in various ways and is still running more trials to create robust findings for statistical purposes. Some subjects show virtually no effects, while others show fairly strong effects. In the presentiment-prone subjects (which, incidentally, correlates nicely with self-reports on an intake questionnaire), there is typically an increase in arousal two to three seconds before the presentation of a charged picture.

In the last six months, they have been working on a modification to ensure that calm pictures are reacted to in a calm way and similarly, arousing pictures in an aroused way. This is to ensure that a picture the researcher rates as emotionally charged is actually reacted to as such by the subject and thus whether the epoch preceding its presentation is valid. For the next stage, he would like to ascertain whether subjects react to a probable future event -- what is likely to occur -- or the actual future event. What if, for example, a subject has a high likelihood of seeing an emotionally charged picture in a few seconds but then sees a calm one? At the core level, these experiments probe the nature of time. After all, Dean reminded us, the fundamental equations of physics are time symmetric: perhaps consciousness itself is not bound to the limitations of perceived time.

Russell Targ's group at SRI International was supported by CIA and defense contracts for most of its existence, so a good deal of their research remains classified. However, in recent years, some intriguing research has been declassified. A number of their studies show that it does not appear to be any more difficult to know the hidden future than to know the hidden present. For example, when they did an experiment with six pictures and the subject's task was to guess which picture would be chosen (via a later roll of a die), the results were just as good as when the subject was asked to view a hidden picture in the present. A recent meta-analysis out of Edinburgh examining 44 different experimental series confirmed that the data for real-time psychic functioning has the same effect size as that for precognitive psychic functioning. A second step in exploring this effect involved telling the die-roller, "You need to get a three in order for the lighthouse to be chosen and to confirm the precognitive remote viewing of the subject." This doesn't seem to interfere at all. This protocol does raise the issue of whether there might be psychokinesis effects; however, Russell feels it is unlikely since PK studies with dice produce only about a 1-2% variation from chance. At SRI, they had sixty targets, which means a PK effect would have to control the data to select precisely a single target from sixty, which seems highly improbable if the usual PK effect is only 1-2%. One famous anecdote involved a pool of sixty locations. The subject was an artist and drew a lot of detail on a Chevy dealership, with a star in the window. Russell's co-experimenter challenged him to psychically force the RNG to choose the number for the target the subject described. Sure enough, the RNG chose the correct target.

What it means to Russell is that, in some profound way, we misunderstand the nature of causality. We can know the outcome though the outcome is ostensibly not yet determined. Their most famous experiment involved silver forecasting, funded by an enthusiastic investor who actually invested real cash in the market according to their predictions. Because reading numbers in the present or future has been shown to be exceedingly difficult, they devised a way to predict the relative price of silver by associatively linking objects to different market moves. They called this "associative remote viewing." If the silver market went dramatically up, their expert remote viewing subject would be shown a certain object on a specified day. If it went slightly down, he would be shown another. They had four market possibilities (way up, up, down, way down), each associated with a different object. Experimenters asked him the question, "Describe for me what I'm going to show you next Thursday." They would then rate the description for its similarity to one of the four objects and invest based upon that description. When Thursday arrived, the subject would be shown the object corresponding to the behavior of the silver market. They repeated this procedure nine times during nine weeks and the subject's guesses were correct every single time. The investor made a profit of $120,000. An attempt at replication, however, did not succeed, perhaps because, at the behest of the investor, they attempted to compress the guessing process into fewer days. More recently, Russell replicated with Jane Katra, using a two-day delay, getting 11 of 12 hits.

With remote viewing protocols involving precognition and using very good subjects, they averaged four hits out of six trials. Subjects typically were instructed to envision the scene where an experimenter would be in thirty minutes. However, the location of that experimenter had yet to be determined through a randomized computer choice from amongst a large database of possibilities. These experiments imply that, in some profound way, we misunderstand the nature of causality. George Leonard wondered whether there is a diminishing effect the further in the future the feedback occurs. Russell stated that research has varied from a few seconds to several days and the effect size appears constant; beyond this time frame, the studies simply have not been done, though anecdotally there have been hits many months in advance.

The picture of causality, time, and precognition grew even more bizarre when Russell discussed a study with a protocol that seemed to confound or interrupt future viewing. In this experiment, there were five possible target pictures. The subjects were asked to describe and draw the picture that will be chosen. Russell then took this detailed description and compared it to the database of five pictures chosen for the experiment. Often there was clear evidence of clairvoyance, such as a lighthouse with stripes and a clover-leaf at the top, drawn exactly like the target picture. They then decided to automatically assign the target picture the number one. A RNG then chose a number from one to five. Ironically, though they got four or five stunning descriptions (out of ten trials) of one of the target pictures, all but one turned out to be incorrect guesses. In some strange way, the addition of a seemingly insignificant element in the protocol -- the researcher choosing the depicted target and assigning it the number one -- foiled the precognitive effect. The standard precognition experiment, where the numbers are preassigned before the subject makes her guess, has worked hundreds of times. In this confounded experiment, the psychic subject was often baffled by getting the wrong picture, so sure was she that she had the correct image. Though the work is still very preliminary, it implies that the experimenter and the psychic cannot cause the RNG to generate the desired target picture to fulfill the forecast. Dean Radin concurred that attempts to manipulate remote viewing, to force the RNG into a pregiven state, seem to turn the process off. Right now, this remains a high-quality puzzle.

Roger Nelson pointed out that their preliminary study (with only ten subjects) is really too small to conclude much yet. Russell said they ended it because they were creating a rebellion among their psychics, who were getting exceptionally detailed and specific descriptions and not getting the feedback of seeing it. It was also frustrating for Russell to not be able to give the feedback on some of the more spectacularly accurate ones. It is possible to get psychics to describe all of the targets in the target pool through a displacement process. They can be asked, for example, to describe the most interesting picture of six face-down images. With multiple subjects, researchers might get five or six good descriptions of different images. Something similar seems to be at work here.

Rather than continue the study in its frustrating form, Dean Radin has created a version on his lap-top which involves a computer screen showing two images while headphones play music. Subjects are asked to guess which image will remain after one of them has randomly been removed by the computer. Correct guesses boost the volume on the headphones, while incorrect guesses and time lead the volume level to decay towards silence. There is thus an extra level of reward/engagement for participants to stay focused and guess successfully. Underneath the standard precognitive design, however, is an experiment similar to the RNG-forcing study above. To successfully maintain a high volume, the subject must actually be forcing the RNG to choose certain numbers. It is thus a manipulative precognition study hidden in a standard precognitive design. The results are not yet in.

Dean Radin noted that the first Esalen meetings on this subject were twenty years ago, so he posed the question to Russell, "What is different about remote viewing, what more is known today versus twenty years ago?" First, he replied, we know that feedback is not necessary to do remote viewing. They did experiments with Marilyn and Hella in the Big House where they would describe pictures shown on a slide projector in a sealed-up bedroom that neither they nor the experimenters would ever know what they were. This was triple-blind study: the eventual judge would only get four slides and a description, in a randomized order, and asked to chronicle hits. The researchers and subjects only got back the statistics, which were quite good, 4 out of 6 matched for first place. Another experiment suggested by an Esalen meeting involved six targets, one of which had a 50% probability of being shown (#1-5) versus the other five with only 10% probability each (#6, #7, etc.). Would the presence of a highly-likely target interfere with describing a low-probability target when it was chosen? The answer was negative. Psychically, what you see is what you get and is not affected by what is probable. (Dean Radin, though, did an experiment on his computer with precisely the opposite results, showing that the precognition was heavily biased towards the more probable future rather than the actual). Finally, the silver futures experiment also came out of Esalen meetings. Ed May & Stephan Schwartz first conceived of the associative remote viewing, but Keith Harary & Russell performed the experiment.

Roger Nelson asked Russell what he would most like to know right now. He responded that what wakes him in the morning is the challenge of resolving our misapprehension of causality. What is it about our awareness that allows us to experience things that reside in our future? Dean Radin interjected that to start, we need to adopt four-valued logic and say, "there is neither free will nor not free will." For Wayne Jonas, this is the fundamental question -- the role of our will in reality -- for as he understands them, the great spiritual teachings emphasize our co-creative, responsible role.

Russell finished our discussion with a remote viewing demonstration, a variation on those used hundreds of times over the last decades. The induction and relaxation lasted several minutes. We were then encouraged to visualize the target and make a sketch of any impressions or shapes that came to mind, as well as to write descriptions of how the object might look or feel, associations that arose, even the emotions it elicited: any of its notable qualities. He told us that our subconscious already knew what the object was and the trick was to pry that knowledge out. He then showed the object, mixed with three decoys, and people were asked to rank their choices. The actual object was a Swiss army knife, which only had two direct hits -- a failed trial -- but several people who missed did have descriptive terms that corresponded. In Russell's experience, though, it is better to have an independent judge rank the outcomes since this keeps the analytical task separate from the altered state.

Russell also showed a video of a remote viewing experiment done for the BBC and joked that the best performances always come in front of television cameras, customers, or before review commissions when it absolutely must work. Through heightened arousal, motivation, or serendipity, almost every public display like this has worked. The BBC video involved Hella, one of their best viewers over the years, who incidentally came to work for them as a control subject, assuring them she had no psychic talents.