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Friday, August 24, 2007
Reading List: Entangled Minds
- Radin, Dean. Entangled Minds. New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006. ISBN 1-4165-1677-8.
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If you're looking to read just one book about parapsychology,
written from the standpoint of a researcher who judges
the accumulated evidence from laboratory investigations
overwhelmingly persuasive, this is your book. (The
closest runner-up, in my estimation, is the same author's
The Conscious Universe
from 1997.) The evidence for a broad variety of paranormal
(or psi) phenomena is presented, much of it from
laboratory studies from the 1990s and the present
decade, including functional MRI imaging of the brain
during psi experiments and the presentiment experiments
of Radin and Dick Bierman. The history of parapsychology
research is sketched in chapter 4, but the bulk of the text
is devoted to recent, well-controlled laboratory work. Anecdotal
psi phenomena are mentioned only in passing, and
other paranormal mainstays such as UFOs, poltergeists,
Bigfoot, and the like are not discussed at all.
For each topic, the author presents a meta-analysis of unimpeached published experimental results, controlling for quality of experimental design and estimating the maximum impact of the “file drawer effect”, calculating how many unpublished experiments with chance results would have to exist to reduce the probability of the reported results to the chance expectation. All of the effects reported are very small, but a meta-meta analysis across all the 1019 experiments studied yields odds against the results being due to chance of 1.3×10104 to 1.
Radin draws attention to the similarities between psi phenomena, where events separated in space and time appear to have a connection which can't be explained by known means of communication, and the entanglement of particles resulting in correlations measured at spacelike separated intervals in quantum mechanics, and speculates that there may be a kind of macroscopic form of entanglement in which the mind is able to perceive information in a shared consciousness field (for lack of a better term) as well as through the senses. The evidence for such a field from the Global Consciousness Project (to which I have contributed software and host two nodes) is presented in chapter 11. Forty pages of endnotes provide extensive source citations and technical details. On several occasions I thought the author was heading in the direction of the suggestion I make in my Notes toward a General Theory of Paranormal Phenomena, but he always veered away from it. Perhaps the full implications of the multiverse are weirder than those of psi! There are a few goofs. On p. 215, a quote from Richard Feynman is dated from 1990, while Feynman died in 1988. Actually, the quote is from Feynman's 1985 book QED, which was reprinted in 1990. The discussion of the Quantum Zeno Effect on p. 259 states that “the act of rapidly observing a quantum system forces that system to remain in its wavelike, indeterminate state, rather than to collapse into a particular, determined state.” This is precisely backwards—rapidly repeated observations cause the system's state to repeatedly collapse, preventing its evolution. Consequently, this effect is also called the “quantum watched pot” effect, after the aphorism “a watched pot never boils”. On the other side of the balance, the discussion of Bell's theorem on pp. 227–231 is one of the clearest expositions for layman I have ever read. I try to avoid the “Washington read”: picking up a book and immediately checking if my name appears in the index, but in the interest of candour since I am commending this book to your attention, I should note that it does here—I am mentioned on p. 195. If you'd like to experiment with this spooky stuff yourself, try Fourmilab's online RetroPsychoKinesis experiments, which celebrated their tenth anniversary on the Web in January of 2007 and to date have recorded 256,584 experiments performed by 24,862 volunteer subjects.
Posted at
22:46
