Mind Mysteries

Obama's Global Consciousness

Greg — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:09:57 +0000

No, the title doesn't refer to Barack Obama's inner thoughts about the rest of the world, it's about the latest data from the Global Consciousness Project (GCP): U.S. election night. We've mentioned the Global Consciousness Project before on TDG, but for those who don't know about it, here's a quick summary from the horse's mouth:

We have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years... Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We can interpret this as evidence for a growing global consciousness.

The GCP summary points out that while there does seem to be an effect, "given the powerful emotions aroused by Barack Obama's success, and the feeling of wonder and joy generated in huge numbers of people around the world, we might expect a correspondingly powerful effect in the GCP data." But instead while the data is positive, "it isn't 'off the charts' and we are tempted to believe it should be". Likely to be an aspect seized on by critics...

Nevertheless, the summary does then go on to discuss some of the other factors involved, such as the signal to noise ratio and also the various ways of analysing the data. Interesting in any case. Thanks Richard.

The Dualism Battleground

Greg — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:58:47 +0000

Last week I reported on how New Scientist had published an article linking proponents of Intelligent Design with theories of Dualism. Video from the conference which inspired the article - the Mind Body Symposium - is now available online at the conference website, along with audio of some of the lectures. Contrary to the "Creationist" scare words of the NS article, those present included some 'near-death experience' researchers, such as Sam Parnia and Bruce Greyson, as well as physicist Henry Stapp and neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.

Beauregard's co-author on the book The Spiritual Brain, Denyse O'Leary, has also published a rejoinder to the New Scientist article on her blog, which she described as a "hit piece". O'Leary points out that contrary to the headline, nobody in the article is a "Creationist" (though some certainly do support the plausability of the Intelligent Design hypothesis). She also gives an example of how people's words (notably, Mario Beauregard's) were selectively edited to make them sound more militant than they really were. And O'Leary questions why the NS article put so much emphasis on the Discovery Institute's interest in Dualism, when many of those involved are not aligned with them (along the way, giving a little insight into the 'politics' behind the scenes):

Conspiracy thinking is a weak substitute for information. Discovery Institute is sympathetic to non-materialist neuroscience** (no surprise there), but it is not in any sense a key player. Non-materialist neuroscience probably owes much more to the Templeton Foundation, about whose science efforts Gefter is quite ambivalent, to say nothing of the Nour Foundation, which co-sponsored the recent symposium. But that would not fit the picture she is trying to paint.

Incidentally, will Templeton sour on non-materialist neuroscience, if Discovery gets more involved? Templeton and Discovery are not on friendly terms. Maybe, but Templeton may refuse to cede a fruitful area to a hated upstart. You don't get to be big that way, and Templeton is big.

It's an indepth piece, which brings into question large parts of the NS article (regardless of your position), so it's worth checking out.

The 'Haunt' Project

Greg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:47:29 +0000

Earlier this week, Wired posted a Halloween story which showed how to "Make the Ultimate Haunted House". Now for me, fake blood and smoke doesn't really qualify for the 'Ultimate' banner. If you want to move beyond the kid's stuff you have to try something a little crazier than that, and perhaps do something like what Professor Chris French and his team at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in the UK did: they built a room and saturated various parts of it with electromagnetic fields and infrasound - which are both suspected by some researchers as being correlated with reports of hauntings and paranormal experiences.

French's study was set up in order to test these suspicions scientifically. The results will soon be published in the journal Cortex, under the title "The 'Haunt' Project: An attempt to build a 'haunted' room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound". From the abstract:

Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with ‘‘haunted’’ locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations include fluctuations in the electromagnetic field (EMF) and the presence of infrasound. A review of such work is presented, followed by the results of the "Haunt" project in which an attempt was made to construct an artificial "haunted" room by systematically varying such environmental factors.

79 volunteer participants were recruited through websites and email lists, and each spent 50 minutes alone in the 'haunted room' wandering around. During this time they were asked to record any unusual sensations, as well as when and where they felt them. Conditions varied on a random basis - some were given nothing at all, some EMF, others infrasound, and the real guinea pigs got both. All participants were informed in advance of the possible EMF and infrasound exposure, and also told (as part of the ethical requirements) that as a result they might experience "mildly unusual sensations" .

Unfortunately, although most participants reported some unusual sensations, there seemed to be no correlation between feelings of being haunted and the presence of EMF/infrasound (or lack of, as the case may be). Despite such a kick-ass experimental setup, it would seem the unusual sensations were probably just a result of suggestion, with participants expecting to feel something after being told pre-experiment. The only significant predictor of unusual experiences in 'the haunt' was the temporal lobe lability of the participant. French and his team see this as simply being most likely due to the the psychological profile of these people (increased suggestibility, belief in paranormal events, seeing stimuli in noise). What would be nice to see considered is whether the causation runs the other way (yes, I am a trouble-maker)...

Overall, despite the results, Chris French and his team feel the experiment was worthwhile. Given that most participants did report unusual sensations they felt that "we can indeed claim some success in building a haunted room." Just the haunting didn't come from EMF or infrasound, but instead from suggestion and a quiet, round, dimly lit and featureless white room which "may have constituted a form of mild perceptual deprivation"). On the basis of their study (and of previous ones by others),they concluded that "the case for infrasound inducing haunt-type experiences now appears to be extremely weak".

However, the paper does finish by saying that, despite the findings, the possibility of EMF-related effects is still worthy of further investigations. It is pointed out that previous work - most notably by Michael Persinger - has had positive results, and that the 'Haunt' project's experimental setup may have not been suitable to replicating Persinger's effect.

Previously on TDG:

(For those wishing to check out the entire paper, here's the citation: French CC, et al., The "Haunt" project: An attempt to build a "haunted" room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound, Cortex (2008), doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2007.10.011. My sincere thanks to Professor Chris French for providing me with the full paper before publication.)

Intelligent Design Gets Outside Your Head

Greg — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:21:20 +0000

Last week on Boing Boing Cory Doctorow posted a link to a New Scientist article about how the 'Intelligent Design'-aligned Discovery Institute was starting another battlefront against Darwinian evolution - this time employing Cartesian Dualism as their weapon.

I think Cory's introduction to that story, where he describes Cartesian Dualism as "the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard", as a rather knee-jerk and simplistic reaction to a complex and fascinating topic. To be fair, his wording is a little obscure and he might have been describing Dualism as Intelligent Design proponents might define it. But the more concerning aspect for me is how the topic might be hijacked, and therefore further marginalised. From the NS article:

[T]he movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of 'The Spiritual Brain', put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

I've noted before how, before the religious aspect came into it, the idea of 'Intelligent Design' was a scientific and much debated topic. Materialist and co-discoverer of DNA Frances Crick even wrote a book on the topic. So I'm wary that developments in understanding consciousness - at least those which suggest some sort of dualist underpinnings - may now be thrown in the wastebasket as "Creationist nonsense".

In any case, the comments thread which follows Cory's posting at Boing Boing makes for good reading - there's some very intelligent commentary (amidst the usual fare, which you'll have to filter out!). Hey, I even got "disemvoweled" for criticising Cory's simplistic opening (which I find rather odd, considering that there was nothing inflammatory or vulgar about it - simply a critique of his statement...so much for teh free speech!).

Would love to go into more detail on this story, but have a busy day ahead - perhaps I'll revisit some of the topics in a future post. Readers interested in really heading down the rabbit hole with dualism and other topics of an immaterial mind, should definitely check out the textbook-like exposition in Irreducible Mind (Amazon US and UK).

Stargate Statistician on Psi

Greg — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:03:06 +0000

Missed this last week: 'psi statistician' Professor Jessica Utts was featured in a short news story last week, in which she commented via email on her investigations into the validity of positive psi experiments, in particular her work assessing the U.S. government's 'Stargate' remote viewing program:

I definitely think there is a place for parapsychology in intelligence gathering, but it’s somewhat limited by two things. First, although remote viewing and similar abilities work well enough that we can reject chance guessing as the explanation, the results are usually not completely correct.

Occasionally, the remote viewer produces a striking match to a target, but there is no way to know when that has happened until we know the target. Even experienced remote viewers don’t know when they have done well and when they haven’t until they see the target.

So I think remote viewing can be useful, but it’s not going to work every time, and it’s not going to give 100 percent accurate results. When all other methods have failed, or in combination with other intelligence, I think it can be useful.

Jessica Utts' conclusion on psi results is often overlooked when the topic is discussed - for instance, in his recent book Physics of the Impossible, Professor Michio Kaku dismisses Stargate by citing the (CSICOP-biased) AIR committee report. He makes no mention at all that Utts - a very well-respected statistician - concluded quite the opposite:

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance...there is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.

Unfortunately, parapsychological research will never get the same standards applied as other areas of science. And so the dance continues...

Dutch Psi

Greg — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:19:09 +0000

The Parapsychology Foundation's international conference in the Dutch city of Utrecht kicks off tomorrow and runs till the weekend, and has a kick-ass line-up of speakers including Dr Ed May (well-known for his remote viewing research), Dr Carlos Alvarado, Nobel Laureate Dr Brian Josephson and Dr Roger Nelson (formerly of PEAR, and discussing the Global Consciousness Project). Topics covered include everything from the academic problems faced by psi researchers, through to techniques for field investigation of poltergeists and hauntings. For full details, follow the link.

Inside the Psilocybin Room

Greg — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:26:04 +0000

TDG reader Michael M. Hughes wrote in to let me know about an article he's just had published:

My article on the Johns Hopkins psilocybin studies went live yesterday: "Sacred Intentions: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies". I got full access to several of the study volunteers and the researchers, and I think it's the best article yet on the studies (yes, I am modest).

Jokes aside, I've got to agree with Michael - it's a wonderful article, not least because he's familiar with the topic and therefore not prone to the usual mistakes/hype that other reporters normally include. But the best part is the personal touch of talking to subjects Sandy Lundahl, John Hayes and Anne Dorsey Emmons, as well as study designer Roland Griffiths and psychedelic therapist Bill Richards:

Richards describes the final, and as far as his work is concerned, most important, stage. "After the archetypal realm comes the mystical state," he says. "There's a dimension of awesomeness, of profound humility, of the self being stripped bare. In the psychology of religion, mystical experience is well-described--unity, transcendence of time and space, noetic knowledge, sacredness, ineffability....It's the sacred dimension of revelation, but it can be what Kierkegaard called `fear and trembling'--incredibly profound and powerful terrain to travel.

"People who have never studied the psychology of religion hear `mystical,' and it sounds like `misty'. . . something vague, not very precise or clear. We know what we're talking about, but the man on the street doesn't. So who would want a mystical experience? I'd rather get drunk!" He laughs.

Richards frowns upon so-called recreational use of psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs: "There are a lot of people who have taken psilocybin who haven't had a mystical experience. Especially college students taking `shrooms' who experience minor perceptual changes and view it as recreational. With the higher doses [like those in the study], when you get to those transcendental experiences...that's not recreational at all. If you want a recreational drug, this is not a good drug for you. You want to be cool with your friends, and all of a sudden you start reliving your mother's death...it spoils the party!"

The article also discusses the use of psilocybin in helping terminally ill patients. Bill Richards again discussed some of his past experiences in the area:

"There are a lot of people with cancer lying in bed, depressed, just lying there, suffering, preoccupied with pain and estranged from their family members. Sort of half alive while they're waiting for the cancer to advance. We found that people who have mystical experiences tend to benefit most dramatically. They resolve conflicts of guilt, grief, estrangement from family members, breaking through the denial and pretense that often accompanies cancer. That's incredibly helpful. They are less anxious, less depressed, closer in their personal relationships, less preoccupied with pain.

"And, perhaps most significantly, those who have mystical experiences claim loss of a fear of death...that they somehow feel part of something eternal. Not necessarily personal immortality--there's a paradox there--it's not denying death, but that somehow in spite of the reality of death, it's a good universe. Life makes sense. And there's every reason to live the rest of this lifetime as fully as possible. It's pretty inspiring."

These substances have been a part of human history from the very beginning. After a brief time of rejecting them completely - and on the flipside, abusing them as playthings - it's so wonderful to see people seriously discussing the use of entheogens as tools for exploring the inner world of the psyche. Thanks Michael, great job!

Remote Viewing the Fossett Crash

Greg — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:58:26 +0000

A while back I linked to a case study on 'remote viewing' (also known as 'traveling clairvoyance' - that is, the supposed ability to see things at a distance, not through the normal sensory modalities) provided by remote viewer Daz Smith. Here's another, more topical one, just released: "Remote Viewing the Steve Fossett Disappearance":

On this blog in September of 2007 we posted a single session and blind analysis from a group of civilian remote viewers, and their attempt at finding out what happened to Steve Fossett.

As with ALL remote viewing - it can only be real Remote Viewing and fully evaluated with feedback, and with the latest discoveries of articles the plane and a crash site a picture is now starting to emerge of what happened that fateful day.

With this in mind the members of The Aurora Group - a civilian remote viewing group working operational and humanitarian projects, have given me permission to post all the blind remote viewing sessions and blind analysis.

The document can be downloaded as a PDF from Daz's blog. It provides a good inside look at the technical side of how RVers do what they do (and how they document their thoughts). For more background on the process, and what all the acronyms and squiggles mean, it's probably worth consulting the original Military CRV Training Manual and also Daz's handy guide (PDF download) to using it.

The case study also shows how difficult it is to analyze this scientifically - there are a number of hits that seem spot on, but then other completely unrelated (and sometimes plain bizarre) misses. Really, to give a solid evaluation you'd need to do some sort of test at the end where 'blind' evaluators pick the best analysis from a random selection.

Having said that, still interesting to note that the overall summary of the RV target was a single middle-aged male, falling from above in a mechanical flying vehicle, into a desert region. Though considering the target was issued a day after Fossett disappeared, a skeptic might have a solid argument in saying at the very least the RVers' subconscious filled in the blanks to the big news of the day.

Unlocking the Inner Savant

Greg — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:23:52 +0000

Prof. Allan Snyder gave a talk this week at the Royal Society in London, about ways of unlocking 'savant skills' which he thinks lie dormant within all of us. Speaking at a discussion meeting on "Talent and Autism", the eccentric (but brilliant) director of the Centre for the Mind (at the University of Sydney), detailed his research into artificially inducing 'savant syndrome' by using magnetic fields:

The savant syndrome is a rare condition in which people with autism or other mental disabilities have extraordinary skills that stand in stark contrast to their overall handicap. Savant skills are typically confined to five areas: art, music, calendar calculating, mathematics and spatial skills and these skills are accompanied by an exceptional ability to recall meaningless detail. In autistic savants these skills appear spontaneously at a young age.

Prof Snyder has been able to artificially induce savant skills in people who do not have autism using the inhibiting influence of low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to turn off that part of the brain which controls all our inbuilt expectations.

"To do this," says Snyder, "we direct magnetic pulses into the brain, to a specific site called the left anterior temporal lobe, which is near to the left ear. This site has been implicated in individuals who suddenly display autistic savant skills after injury or fronto-temporal lobe dementia." The magnetic pulses are applied over the left anterior temporal lobe for 15 minutes using directed, low frequency rTMS."

From what I've read of Snyder's work in the past, his research seems to suggest that by shutting down some of the higher level processing, we can gain access to the 'raw data' without further interpretation. Anybody that's ever tried to draw a person's face will understand this - you have to forget what you think a nose 'looks like', and actually draw it as it is...which is usually just a line here, and a shadow there (the raw data).

At the discussion meeting Snyder spoke about these innate skills, and discussed why it is that savant skills are usually suppressed.

"Normally we are aware of the whole and not the parts that make it up. These attributes of objects are inhibited in normal brains" says Snyder. "Savants have access to the less processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and labels. Autistic savants tend to see a more literal, less filtered view of the world."

You can learn a bit more about Professor Snyder's research and thoughts in this interview (though it's from 2001, so his thinking may have progressed some). You probably don't want to try this at home, because other strange things have been known to occur when you combine magnetic fields and the brain... (h/t BoingBoing.net)

Previously on TDG: Savant Talking.

The Dude's Mind Abides...

Greg — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:47:11 +0000

Are stars sentient? That Solaris-like idea isn't just science fiction speculation - it's one of the topics touched on in an upcoming book edited by David Skrbina, author of Panpsychism in the West (Amazon US and UK). The new book, Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium, will feature...

...15 dedicated chapters written by leading-edge thinkers of mind and consciousness. In each case the writer moves beyond a basic defense of panpsychism, and toward new positive theories as they relate to mind, consciousness, and reality. Writings are targeted at a broad audience, with minimal use of jargon, and yet penetrate deeply into the subject matter. Topics covered include mind-body interaction, the physical basis for consciousness, the ‘combination problem’ (on how lower-order minds can combine or merge into higher-order ones), the psychology and phenomenology of panpsychism, and process philosophy perspectives (as per Whitehead and Russell).

Now, I know I'm not the brightest light bulb in the house, but I have to argue a little bit about the "minimal use of jargon" - at least, going by Chapter 5 of the book "The Conscious Connection: A Psycho-physical Bridge between Brain and Pan-experiential Quantum Geometry", which is available freely on the web. Written by one of our old buddies, quantum consciousness researcher Stu Hameroff, with Jonathan Powell, the chapter looks at the set of philosophical positions which see consciousness as a "foundational component of reality" (as opposed to the materialist view that consciousness is simply a by-product of the brain).

These positions (e.g. panpsychism, pan-experientialism, idealism) relate consciousness to irreducible (‘funda-mental’) components of reality, something akin to mass, spin or charge. These views take consciousness to be present in low level entities, in which—on some readings—they inherently contain a phenomenal nature or subjective experience (qualia). Consciousness or its ‘proto-conscious’ precursors are thus somehow built into the structure of the universe—a view that we might label pan-protopsychism.

Most of these views are monist in nature, in that they take reality to be, ultimately, a single entity or substance. At issue, then, are two key points: (1) the essential characteristic(s) of this monist substance, and (2) how it gives rise to apparently diverse entities like ‘mind’ and ‘matter.’ If the one reality is essentially mind-like, then we have a form of idealism—which may or may not entail panpsychism. If it is essentially physical or material, physicalism obtains.

Alternatively, the one reality can be seen as something other than mind or matter, in which case we have a form of neutral monism; Spinoza, James, and Russell are typically cited as holding this view. A contemporary form of neutral monism—one defended in this paper—defines the one reality in terms of quantum spacetime geometry, i.e. as a consequence of the fine-grained structure of the universe.

While the jargon is pretty heavy (at least for me), the underlying discussion is fascinating: the chapter goes as far as debating whether a rock could be conscious ("probably not") - but doesn't stop there. They bring up the observations and speculation of one of the greatest living mathematical physicists, Roger Penrose, on whether stars might be in some way sentient:

Penrose observed that interiors of neutron stars may have huge quantum superpositions which would reach OR with very large E, brief t and high intensity. By Orch OR criteria such events would indeed be conscious. But because the conditions are presumably random, such conscious moments would lack cognitive information processing: OR without Orch. Similarly, OR conscious moments without cognition may be occurring in various crystal-like, large scale quantum materials throughout the universe.

Astrophysicist Paola Zizzi has applied Penrose OR to the problem of inflation in the early universe. During the Big Bang, the universe expanded (inflated) rapidly—for about 10-33 seconds. But rapid inflation then stopped abruptly, and expansion has been slow ever since. Zizzi (2002) considered that during inflation the universe was in quantum superposition of multiple possible universes. Using E=h/t and setting E to the mass of the universe, Zizzi calculated that OR threshold would be met, surprisingly, at 10-33 seconds into the Big Bang, and conjectured that the end of inflation coincided with the universe undergoing a cosmic conscious moment (the ‘Big Wow’). She further suggested our individual consciousnesses are literal microcosms related to the initial cosmic conscious moment.

I remember some similar topics being discussed in a video chat between John Horgan and David Chalmers a while back, for those interested in pursuing the nature of consciousness down a very deep (and possibly sentient) rabbit hole.

Previously on TDG: The Quantum Mind of Stuart Hameroff