The Most Undeniable Psi Phenomena In 1 Paper Etzel Cardena

TITLE: The Most Undeniable Psi-Phenomena in 1 Paper | Etzel Cardeña CHANNEL: Essentia Foundation DATE: 2026-05-08 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I had two critics whose response was well we are not going to consider the data because this is impossible. We have the same level of significance as in many areas in medicine, biology and even physics that are perfectly acceptable. I sat down with professor of psychology Atsel Cardinia who published a landmark paper in the American psychologist in which he gives an overview of thousands of pai studies. Take for instance the Gunsfeld effect. The claim that people in a calm meditative state score better in predicting randomly selected images. If it were just a matter of randomness of random selection, Yeah. The person should choose correctly 25% of the time. Yeah. One uh one of four. With thousands of participants, people end up on average choosing about 32 33%. It is considerably more than what you would expect by chance.

What could be an explanation? Are they drawing information out of the future or There’s no such thing as time. There’s no such thing as space. Ultimately, a very warm welcome at the Assencia Foundation’s YouTube channel. I’m sitting here in Porto here with Sel Cardia. A very warm welcome. Thank you, Ed. We’re both drinking tea and I really need to, as I said, I’m having a bit of a cold, so I’m having tea with honey. Excuse me for my voice. It is as it is, but I’m didn’t want to sort of skip this talk with you. I’m really happy to meet you here. We met here at a conference on near-death experiences and side research. And for our audience, you are the Thorson Professor um in psychology at Lint University where you lead the center of research on consciousness and anomalous psychology. Yes. And are a worldleading researcher when it comes to hypnosis and altered states of consciousness and particularly known for doing meta analyses on SAI research. for instance, a 2018 review paper in the American psychologist in which you integrated like decades of SI research which which was really insightful for me in this conversation. I’d love to touch upon all of that. Um maybe nice for our audience to unpack your 2018 review paper because it really helped me as a sort of starting point into SAI because um nice if you could explain how many studies you did meta analysis on and broadly on what phenomena. So for instance I think in your own work you make the distinction between ESP extra sensory perception and psychokinesis like the two broad camps of PI and correct me if I’m wrong in your math analysis you took hundreds of studies. Yeah I think thousands. Wow. Yeah. If you could please just unpack sort of that paper and what you what your findings were. Uh and let me first confession of humility. It is not that I did the meta analysis. What I did is that I had um a couple of years before I had co-edited a book that was a comprehensive review of research on par psychology and I had many people do meta analysis of various areas but there was not a paper that gathered them all together. So yours is a meta meta analysis an umbrella meta analysis but I did not do additional statistical analysis. I just gathered them. But what I did is I gathered all of the metaanalysis that I found in my book that was very comprehensive. It had something like two dozen articles including from a from a critic uh and from any other meta analysis I knew. And I said well when looking at them do they support the evidence for what is called ESP or anomalous cognition which means basically you know things that you should not know. Yeah. you are affected by what your friend is doing in Tokyo even though there is no link. Yeah. No telephone link or you have a dream about something that is going to happen tomorrow that you should not know about that is unpredictable that is not trivial and so on. Yeah. So I took all of those and psychokinesis refers to uh being able to affect matter. Now uh again I took more than all the meta analysis I found more than 10 I think there are about 12 or 13 and they were all consistent all consistent across the meta analysis for different types of doing research for different main um experimental methods. All of them were consistent in saying yes there is they all had supportive evidence. And my main point is well if you only had one meta analysis for one kind of studies and all of the others showed no evidence for sigh I think you would be very justified to say perhaps there’s some mistake here in this type of experiments there is some flaw that has not been discovered maybe two out of the 12 but all of the others find no evidence well you should be probably more yeah reticent to believing it but in this case every single one was supportive Now having said that I would say that for ESP or knowledge having some kind of knowledge you find more overall supportive evidence than you have for psychokinesis which is affecting matter. For psychokinesis uh when you are trying to affect something that what’s called macrocsychinesis that you would affect something that you could just observe in your eyes. The problem is that you have a lot of people who have been doing fraudulent work. This is very much the realm of magicians of fraudulent people and you know very rarely there have been a few cases very few cases where people seem to be able to do that without being fraudulent but they happen extremely rarely so you cannot say well I’m going to get money from the BL Foundation to get a bunch of macro psychoinetic masters to come here. No, there’s no evidence for macro psychokinesis from from the laboratory is I would say fairly weak for microcsychokinesis sort of to be able to affect systems at the molecular level where you have a system that is spewing out for instance to say something once and zeros randomly and you try to affect so that once will happen more often than zeros you have an effect very very very tiny effect. How small is the effect on those random random numbers? Well, let’s say if you are going to go from zeros to ones, uh you would end up because you end up doing this uh in a minute, you would end up having many spewings out of random events. So from hundreds of thousands, you end up having maybe 50 5% in and 49.5% in some stories where when you do the statistics, there are two things. first when nobody’s trying to affect the system it ends up being 50% 50%. Or about or you know 50.0000 0 0 0 one you know uh so when nobody’s trying to affect it there’s nothing what somebody’s trying to affect there is an effect but it’s very tiny and I would say it does make sense that it is so small tell me because if it were yes because if it were larger we would live in a very chaotic world just imagine I I joke to the students in my Of course when I said if I could affect matter by my will I would have already killed some people that yes I am not a saint you have your bad days but before that I would have been killed by the first tune whom I failed I would have been killed by that and we do not see that occurring you know people are killing each other but with weapons not throughout the wheel so yeah yeah it’s a critique of course why aren’t these people are all billionaires because you would sort of have precognition on the stock market or in the casino. Um, and we do not see that and therefore many people think it um it is not a real phenomenon. Although I would say with ESP the the odds are better. You have um individuals who who are known as being very good psychics who do consult with magnets with billionaires and so on to help them make decisions. you know this is not something that is widely known but they are paid by these people so that they will see what they do in the decisions. So even if they are not perfect to be able in those cases to be accurate let’s say 30% of the time instead of 25% of the time is very good and and yeah one one of these so indeed those micro effects do fascinate me for instance what’s a study called where you randomly you need you you give people um in an experiment uh the task to mentally try to influence for for inance a random dice yes throwing machine that randomly throws dice. So it will be like 16.7% sixes one because that’s just statistics. And there then is a statistically significant influence people have on throwing these dices? Yes, but very small. How small is that? So for inance if I would throw a thousand thousand times, would I then sort of like probably with a thousand times you would find a statistically significant effect? You would throw a couple times more sixes. Well, I do not know if a couple of times, but with a thousand probably more than that, but it’s it’s we live in a strange universe that the effect is so small. Um, how would you account for that? I mean, people most people will say, okay, you must have made a mistake somewhere if the fact is so small. What could be an alternative interpretation of such a small effect? Has evolution in some way sort of uh optimized for such a small ESP? What are your thoughts here? You know I well first I think evolution is very much misunderstood including in this conference. Uh evolution is not so much something that is optimizing a path so that people get better. No uh evolutionary processes are mostly getting rid of the nonadaptive versions. That’s what it does. What remains is a number of possibilities a number of different options including some of which may be sigh abilities. But you have some people who have greater propensity to have sabilities and other people who do not have that. But it is not as if you’re becoming better and better and better. Uh so that is what is occurring. Why is it so small? I would probably think of two main reasons and there may be more but the ones that occur to me right now. Uh the first one would be going back to Plato, the notion that we are essentially living in a world uh in which our mind is geared towards having a more or less good enough adaptation to the environment. So for that good enough adaptation, you do not need to be a psychic generally or to have psychokinesis or something like that. You need to have a good enough perception to not bump against the walls and not to be run over by a car. Yeah. And that’s where we live most of our lives. Mhm. In addition to that, we have a culture in which let’s say in the Netherlands or in the western where mostly people are saying all of these things are witchcraft or weird and uh we know nothing about there is no education about how to improve them unless you you be you go to a monastery that might specialize on that. You do not have any training on things that happen rarely. Mhm. uh that sort of go against the notion of what is the immediate reality that is given this good enough perceptual world. So I think that’s why we we do not have and and for instance it could sort of um if you would have more u um extra sensory perception it would be detrimental for instance for your survival in certain cases would that in a sense if if information comes through that does not have a direct use for you in survival um that of course would not be would not benefit your survival hence um well no I I I think generally it would I’ll give you an example where it will uh where it would and one where it wouldn’t and let’s first take a historical account uh of a description of Socrates the Greek philosopher okay now it was it wasn’t something that Plato wrote it was later on that historian wrote about Socrates and the notion was that when he when Socrates was a young man was a soldier he goes with his platoon they arrive to a crossroads and then there is a dialogue of whether they should go to the right or to the left. Uh the majority of the platoon, everyone says, “Let’s take the right path. That’s going to be safe.” And then a little boy in Socrates, his what he called his diamond or his spirit from which we got the the word demon, but it wasn’t bad to begin with, tells him, “No, go the other way around.” Uh so he goes to the left and later on he finds that the rest of his companions had been killed on the other road. Now, you know, did somebody observe it? Did did somebody feel on that? No. But we can think perhaps there was a reason why somebody said that. And more uh in more modern times the case has been made that perhaps people who are very lucky is not so much that they are lucky quote unquote is that they have some of that perception that makes them take a choice that is not necessarily the most popular choice. More in touch with what people would commonly describe as intuition for intuition or hunch. And what is intuition or hunch? Yeah. Well, it’s something that you do not consciously know where it comes from. In some cases, it could be just non-concious processes that are not signed. But in other cases, it could be something that you cannot know anything about and you still choose the correct one more than you should. Yeah. I this it fascinates me also in your work. I’ve read where you sort of say that we um we often problematize these altered states of consciousness and we kind of explain them that there is very individual anecdotal and um and and then of course we put uh normal waking consciousness on a pedestal the consciousness we need to be sitting down here doing interviews um and you then in your work turn it a bit around that maybe we should problematize that I’ve read that that sort of could you please explain your your viewpoint here if you do not mind I will just finish with the answer very quickly and then I come back and I repeat your question uh could sigh be detrimental to your health and I’ll give you an example where it h where it can and that is from shamanic literature we know from many descriptions that in some places where there are shamans or traditional healers uh what has been described is that they often are assumed to be good uh to to work for the benefit benefit of the community but that some people are assumed to engage in negative uh detrimental kind of magic and then those people can be killed uh and there are descriptions anthropological descriptions where this has happened. So it could happen. You know, uh the the shamans I have met in my life, particularly one in Mexico, he seemed to be a very wise individual. I think he was widely respected. I do not imagine that he would have a problem. But it could be that someone would get a bad reputation and have a bad Yeah. Now coming back to your other question, you’re asking me that I’m problematizing ordinary consciousness and I am calling for a greater evaluation of other states. Absolutely. What does ordinary consciousness bring to the majority of people the majority of times? Look at the news. You have the a number of great military powers engaging in destruction, the wanton destruction of a number of innocent people, children. You know, one could think how could a civilized world justify killing one child, not hundreds or thousands, one child. Yet it happens. It happens every not I do not know every day, but it happens very often. Uh the people who are doing that are elected by majorities that are thinking in their ordinary state Mhm. on how to vote. In addition to that we have uh epidemics of people who are so afraid of just allowing themselves to feel alone to have the sense of void death but also vastness that they have to be in front of a screen in front of their telephones uh social networks and so on hours each day and no longer live in the world of nature other beings human and nonhuman. That is what a lot of people in their ordinary states are doing having making bad choices uh healthwise and so on. So I I think if you were to take as a conglomerate how well are we doing after all these thousands of years of being a human being I I would advance that not particularly well. Yeah, I would agree with you and um I asked you of course as sort of an ethical moral question and then your answer is of course a bit more that of perhaps an activist for these other states of conscious than a scientist. your work which I find very interesting is because the scientific question then is of course to to define exactly what we mean by that waking form of consciousness that can can be not good for us and what these altered states are and much of your work is also about that right so you sent me a paper that I read where you try to come up with like a taxonomy that we just have to make clear make have our definitions clear could you just just sort of reflect also on your how you critique per psychology side phenomena not having those definitions clear all of the time and how you try to contribute to that. Yes, let me start which will be the easier one with the altered states. I uh one of the things that happened to me as I started working on what is called dissociation and hypnosis is that I started running across concepts such as trans and dissociation and the more I knew about the literature and did work and read and went to conferences the less I understood what people were talking about and it wasn’t so much me I mean partly it was me perhaps but a lot of it was that people were using the term without describing, defining, explaining what they meant. So trans is a typical example of a very problematic one. Uh you might use the term to talk about a person who has experience being possessed by a spirit and is uncontrollable. You can use it by a person who is in a meditative state feeling nothingness. It is used to talk about somebody who is daydreaming. It is it is used to talk about somebody who goes in a killing spring. you and all of those and you’re like what what are you talking about and then sometimes people may say well I’m not talking about trans I’m talking about a translike state which is even worse because then you don’t know what trans is and then you’re saying this is like something I do not know what it is which makes it doy yeah vague uh so in that other paper written with 15 other experts multi-disiplinary experts what we try to come up with is sort of basic simple alterations of consciousness so that we can say yes, this person was having a state of consciousness mostly characterized by feeling outside of his or her body or mostly characterized by seeing imagery that seem to be as real. Yeah. As perceptual imagery or you know and so on and we go with all seven of them. Yeah. And if you do that all of a sudden, I think you you end up giving clarity and you do some things that have not been done. For example, when people use the trigger or the induction to define our term, you assume that there is such a thing as a hypnotic state or as a psychedelic state. And what that ignores is that if you use hypnosis, you can have a number of outcomes. one a particular hypnotic procedure. One might be some people feel that they are in an altered state and you can use physiology and questionnaires and yes they are in a very different state than the ordinary. Majority of people maybe somewhat affected and some people are not affected at all and are bored and think when is this going to end. So what is the hypnotic state and also in hypnosis it depends on what I say how I say it and and also the gradient of it. sort of indeed I think it’s a good question for you. I I’d love to hear your answer. What exactly is the hypnotic state? For instance, I’ve done um via um a voice guided um um um um a download of voiceguided meditation that brought me to the self- hypnosis and I could sense a different state than my normal state, but it was hard for me to say where at what moment I was under hypnosis and I and I could sort of get out of it every moment. So I’m puzzled by that term for instance and the same goes for many of these terms in par psychology um and also where terms are sort of used interchangeably for instance when we talk about clairvoyance precognition or um um telepathy yeah telepathy exactly exactly so but but first of all the the hypnotic stage you just take it as an example on how to define such a term well what I would say is I’m not going to say there is such a thing as a hypnotic state. What I’m going to say is I’m doing this procedure. This procedure which I call hypnosis, just saying that I’m doing hypnosis makes a difference for people in this culture because people in this culture assume, oh, hypnosis, this is weird. I am given the permission to get into my inner experience. Yeah. People in other cultures, I have done forensic work, for example, in Puerto Rico. I was trying to do a hypnotic procedure with a woman who basically when I told her you can just relax as you listen to my voice and she would just open her eyes and feel you know put herself like very tense. Uh and it was a peasant woman who had probably no exposure to the cultural notion of hypnosis other than perhaps thinking this is devilish think. Yeah. This person is trying to do something weird and bad to me. Yeah. So what I would say is rather than saying hypnotic state is I do this procedure that I call hypnosis where I tell the people these things these things and these things and then I measure how giving saying the saying the people these things in a procedure in which they are just sitting down without moving. I find out what happens to their to their consciousness to their state of consciousness and then I what I will find is that there is a variance a gradient with some people being affected and some people not being affected at all. And the other important I think useful way of not thinking about states defined by their trigger is that then you can compare things that are similar. I have a recent paper where I called it um mind inducing hypnosis and it’s sort of a game of words because psychedelic means mind manifesting sorry mind manifesting because psychedelic means mind manifesting and um uh the person who coined the term it wasn’t um was it not the the LSD um no it wasn’t it wasn’t Timothy Liry um well I don’t remember right now but the person who coined it said well mostly what occurs with LSD is that it a enhances what you already have which I don’t think is bad because when you look at actual reports from people who have taken some psychedelics is that you also find quite a bit of gradient with some people having a lot of imagery and nothing else. Some people find finding themselves some imagery and very anxious. Some people having a sense of unity and gratefulness for everything that exists. Yeah. And you get the same kind of reports for people when I use hypnosis. And I just tell them go deeper into hypnosis. Just keep on going deeper and deeper. Nothing more. No psychedelics. And you end up finding the same kind of reports. So they are also manifesting something that is in their minds either through drugs or through a procedure called hypnosis. Yeah. which could also come from meditation or perhaps going out and going to a museum or going into nature or things of that sort. Yeah. So what that does is it dismantles something that you end up having a short terms that say very little to be more specific about what is happening experientially and later on neuronally at the person. Yeah. The difficulty is indeed that we have to rely on phenomenology in studies like these, right? People have to report, have to use words and these questionnaires, have to ask questions and that that can be be fuzzy to know exactly what we I mean because one common characteristic of many of these experiences is that they are ineffable, right? You come out of them and you have no words and then of course you know but I would say we do fairly well just with language. I don’t think phenomenology is that problematic. There are different types of phenomenology because you can also say give a sort of if you will superficial report of what you’re feeling like I could right now say I know that I’m moving my hand but you know I could even try to go deeper and see how I’m feeling with respect to my emotions to the rest of my body. So one can have levels but I think we do quite well otherwise we would not be doing this this interview. We are using language and we are assuming that you know I think I believe I hope that I’m understanding what you’re asking me and I hope I think that you understand what I’m saying and I think we do and and we think that the listeners will also be able to follow what we are saying even though they do not need to have brain imaging they do not need to have quantities or anything like that to follow fairly Well, perfectly no, but there is no perfect event when you use machines or imagery or anything like that. I agree. I agree. And sorry for being somewhat too critic or somewhat critic, but um I’m doing so because many people um feel that they have to in a sense, but that has to do of course with metaphysics that you think we have to be extremely critical here because it cannot be so right. So what are your um and and also you write about that that before you say this cannot be you have to be clear there as well to what sort of mechanisms uh or physics are you referring if you say this is impossible because you point of course to um where physics is right now and that it could be very well be compatible with per psychology. So I’m curious what your thoughts are not on giving me a specific mechanism for um extra sensory perception but just how you think it is could be compatible with physics. Okay, let me start with that. Um, I’m not a physicist. I have read people who are physicists, who are eminent physicists, um, whom I like a lot. Vetrant Espña has a has an excellent book called Physics and Philosophy. Not an easy one, but it ends up being an extremely clear lucid discussion of the interconnection between quantum mechanics and philosophy. And from there you get very easily into you will like this into idealism because he says well there is no such thing as objects in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. There’s no such thing as time. There’s no such thing as space ultimately and I would say I can see why and what side phenomena point out is exactly in the same way that even though it seems that I am at a distance from somebody who whom I love and who is affecting me in some way. Nonetheless I am not. So we are not particles. We are not entangled particles. But it seems that even though in ordinary reality we are separate there is another type of layer level of whatever in which I am being affected and I’m part of a larger system perhaps the whole universe being a system that is one of the interpretations uh of the cosmology uh but at the very least they are compatible with a very different view of materialism because as I would say How can a person be a materialist or a physicalist when the physicists themselves are saying we do not know what that is? Matter, time, space, object, they are not sure of that. And now I would say Tesla sounds very fussy, difficult and yes and physicists themselves not agree as to the final interpretation of what those are. But what that does is opens up the world much more to uncertainty, to process, to matters changing, to not being certain of matters, uh to considering things far more things that you are typically considering. Also, of course, that does not mean that you have to accept everything. No, there are horrible things that one should not endorse or there are dumb things that I don’t think one should believe. And I can tell you the reason why. But as far as experiences, as far as possibilities, one of the most important things perhaps that I would like to to have as a message is that one of the problems we have is our egoentricity. You have some people who do not typically have let’s say altered states, anomalous experiences. They they do not have them. They live much more in equations or in their literature and so on, which is perfectly fine by the way. uh but because they do not have them they assume that anybody who’s talking about that must be in some way deluded or wrong or misinterpreting things. So they live in that world. There are other people who live in the other world where they are having unusual experiences and they assume everybody should have them or everybody must be having them. Yeah. And then then they’re not and they might be jumping to conclusions also as scientists because you want to as a sort of confirmation bias of your own experiences. Absolutely. Yeah. How to navigate that? That’s that’s coming up in many people I speak with in in this field that for instance in psychedelic um research it’s very much a debate. Should psychedelic researchers have had these experiences to just be able to do good science to just know what it is. And you would never say this in other fields in psychology where you would rather say no it’s much better to to stay out to keep your clean neat third person objective perspective as the scientist. It’s interesting right? What are what are your thoughts? I mean I I would say any formula that is a totalitarian formula is probably wrong sort of to say in ad everyone has to or you shouldn’t absolutely or every single time you should be an experiencer or you should never be an experiences. You should always be detached. you should never be detached. uh I would much rather have a person looking at the context a particular context and say given what I know about myself would it make sense for for me to let’s say take psychedelics to understand more given that I have reached an impass maybe for me it would for another person it might not be good a a good result or a good solution and there’s this um so we we’ve been talking about small effect sizes but There are sort certain phenomena where we see sort of pretty big effect sizes. One that fascinates me is the Gunsfeld Yeah. effect. Could you please explain to our audience what it is and what you found in your work sort of the validity of the phenomenon? Yeah. Uh and I would say the the effect size is is not that large but it is well let me tell you to what extent. Uh I will use a typical procedure for me. Let’s explain what Gansfield is. It is a German term that means the whole field and it refers to perceptual field. It was coined by Gestal psychologist in Germany the beginning of um 20th century. And what they do is to put you in a visual field where you do not see any gradients or shapes. You typically just see colors, redness without again any edges. Uh that may also be matched with listening to white or pink noise. That is random frequency noise where you just hear sound that sound a sound that is like waves. Yeah. Where there are no words or or your thoughts going by. So you’re with red light or a screen with only red light. Red light or or white light. It does not matter. The color I don’t think does matter. But so you’re just seeing redness or whiteness. You are just hearing to ah sound which is better than not hearing to anything. Because if you go to a flotation tank, I have done it. What I heard a lot was my heartbeat. So it was not like there is no stimulation. There is a big stimulation. My heartbeat. So instead I was having something that made no sense and I am relaxed and I have heard somebody giving me relaxation induction. So I get into the Gansfeld. I do a procedure for 10 minutes and then I will go back to something we talked about before because I just published two studies on that. One, some people are going to start reporting that they are in an altered state. You give them questionnaires so they feel yes, I felt more inner oriented. I felt less conceptual, less judgmental. I was having more imagery. Yeah. Some people are going to report, well, I saw some red and I was thinking about what I was going to do when this was over and I was thinking about homework and I was thinking about dinner. So, you have those differences. So you you you should not generalize the Gansfeld state. Okay. Let’s say some people in Gansfeld will feel though that they’re in a more expansive view where there are no perceptual information or stimulation that is coming through them. And then what you might do and I’ll give the easier example which is a precognition experiment. Yeah. is let’s say you you tell them what I would like you to do is in your mind to be able to see an image a film clip that is going to be chosen later on. Mhm. Neither you nor I know what film clip it is. You have not seen any of those film clips. There are more than a hundred uh and it could be of anything. Uh so just make the intention of being open to being affected by the film clip that has not been chosen. Yeah. Okay. So you’re asking you’re you’re giving the task of do something impossible in our context randomly chosen later on by random computer from a database of like billions of pictures. Not billions but aund more than a 100. Okay. Yeah. That are very different that the person has not seen. Okay. You could use billions but why you know. Yeah. Um it’s better to use some so that you can say the four images are quite different so that the person says I choose this and there was another image that was very similar you you have a lot of noise. So the person goes speaks for 30 minutes and then you a person shows them a researcher shows them four film clips and then tells them okay from 0 to 19 or let’s say from one to zero which one do you think is the one that the computer is going to just at random and you have done random tests so that you know that the program the computer program chooses randomly so the person says blah blah blah I did this you say okay let’s go through what you said in the session Done. Okay. Which one do you think is the right one? And then the person chooses, well, I think it’s this one, the third one. Yeah. And then at that time the computer at that point the computer chooses selects one of the film clips and then the person sees it. Now if it were just a matter of randomness of random selection, Yeah. the person should choose correctly 25% of the time. Yeah. One one of four. Yeah. Uh what we know is that in hundreds of studies done now with thousands of participants, people end up on average choosing about 32 33%. Which when you do the analysis ends up being you know about 20% um or no out of 25 I’m just using the the percentage 25. Yeah. Sort of 20% more of the 25. But I’d say yeah I I I said big because inside that to me is big. Yeah. It’s quite a big advantage. Yeah. Gas field. If someone comes around the corner say like in 20% of the cases I can can better guess what’s going to happen than you. I’d be astonished. Yeah. So you get people choosing 30 32%. Right now in the conference I just so um and this is established. So so you’ve done meta analysis on these studies. How many guns experiments have been performed worldwide? I I I do not know the number but many hundreds of experiments just in this conference there are two there are two Gansfeld uh studies that I saw I haven’t looked at all of the posters but I saw two both of them significant no actually one was significant one was not significant but it had the same percentage about 30 32%. They vary a lot sort of that some some tests like is there a lot of variation? Not really. Not really. You end up very rarely do you have less than 25%. Most end up being around 32%. What makes it significant or not depends on how many participants you use. But they end up being close if they are well done. 32 33% very consistently you are getting that amount. So what does that allow you to do? Does it allow you to predict exactly what field clip is going to the person select? No, not even close because the person is still selecting wrongly 66% of the time, 67% of the times, but it is considerably more than what you would expect by chance. And and therefore to me stuff like this is an anomaly. I mean it is it seems like an anomaly. Well, what what in anomaly if if from the ordinary state where we think we are disconnected, we are isolated objects. We should not be time is as we experience it. Space is as we experience it. End of story. Yeah. Of course. So that is an anomaly. Of course. Of course. Of course. An anomaly from a viewpoint of like let’s call it sort of naive materialism. What is your best guess? I don’t like the word mechanism in this sense, but what could be an explanation? Are they drawing information out of the future or what’s your your best guess to explain the gunshot? Uh or do you best guess is that when people are in a different state sort of the the rules the the filters that they ordinarily use the canon categories that they typically use such as time and space and self isolated self and so on have been weakened and then you end up having information that typically is always there but you it is being flooded by the perceptual information that we have. So if I were to say sort of it’s not really a theory but the beginning of a theory might start with the notion that I do believe that it is not as if you uh are not psychic or not receiving that type of information and then you suddenly every once in a while you receive it. I think more that all of the time in our non-concious mind we are getting that information plus a lot of other information. So that is weak that is the the weak relative that gets flooded by the rest and only when you are in a more subdued state perhaps you’re in an altered state where those filters get attenuate attenuated then you may be able to be affected. Now bear in mind um that one thing that is for example the terms that we use that are problematic one of them might be the way that people interpret telepathy which they typically say well I’m reading your mind that’s not how it tends to happen because when people for example choose the correct film clip it is not as if they are describing to you exactly what it is. It is much more as if they have been affected by something they heard while they were dreaming and then in the the dream got affected by that which they heard in their sort of non-concious ear. To give you an example in one of our studies we have a person who who chose the correct film clip who’s saying I see boys uh playing on a meadow. There is uh there are bushes and there is a big balloon with eyes, big eyes with big eyes. Uh and what is the film clip? It is a Russian Winnie the Pooh cartoon where they are not boys, but there are two cartoonish boys. It’s it’s a bear and his friend another animal. And Winnie the Pooh ends up going up on a balloon. Mhm. Not a ball, but a balloon. and goes up to a beehive to try to steal honey. And then you see immediately the big eyes of the beast looking at him. So it looks like elements have been part of his stream of consciousness. It they have become part of it not as if uh he perceived what was seen. Which is why I also not do not like perception. It’s low resolution so to speak. It’s noisy. Well, it’s one of the streams of things that are going into your mind. It’s one of the one of the streams in addition to your associations to what in what place you were eating and what you were going to have for dinner. It’s one of those. Yeah. And um a lot of bar psychology seems to be sort of um suffer from your metaphysical um assumptions you already have. So, I’m I’m uh metaphysically an idealist. I believe that everything is consciousness. Not that I know for sure because it’s metaphysics, but I just think it’s the most plausible thing when I’m diving in whether it’s foundations of physics or neuroscience as we just had Kristoff Koga explain sort of like one of the world’s leading neuroscientists also coming to this conclusion. And then to me, this is all very plausible and I just want to stay rational and just not sort of jump to any conclusions. But I’m very much open to all your work. But then of course many people who are regard themselves as materialist only what I can measure quantify and and know from from the physics we know to be possible. They just want to close their eyes to to or at least it seems to then you just don’t believe it and then you end up with a like perhaps psychology suffer from from from your metaphysical viewpoint. But what are your ideas here on how science progresses? Is this what Carl Puper said once that that science progresses one at the time? It wasn’t Carl Popper. No, Poppers of course just of of the how science progresses and how people uh um just psychologically um identify so strongly with a paradigm that they someone else that that it then dies one funeral. Is that the fate of parab psychology or you see that there’s a shift happening of people being really more open-minded? Well, first thing that mean even though we heard about Christoph, he’s by no means the the only or the first very eminent neuroscientist who has championed consciousness. Lord Sherington more than 100 years ago wrote a book saying no I cannot see consciousness in any of my studies of the nervous system. And he was probably the person who knew more about the nervous system than anybody at his time. Sir John Eckles Nobel Prize winner for medicine uh wrote edited books on parsych that included parabsychology chapters. So it is not new. What you are seeing is percentages of people who are for and against. And I think what we have had is at times there have been more people who have power who have been against uh not letting these papers be accepted in journals or saying they’re pseudocience and this is impossible and so on. And then you have perhaps some push from the culture more at large where I think more people are open to it. And then you have shifts between how many there are on which band. But I do not believe for a second that there is going to be all of a sudden the big victory where you have people embracing the notion. Yes, there are side phenomena. Uh yes we are going to forget about physicalism and materialism. I don’t think that that will ever happen because it has never happened in the history. We have had dialectics, oppositions of people probably coming from their own temperament, their own particular blinders where they see some things clearly and not others and the other people see exactly the opposite and how many of those in power you have at a certain time. M having said that I would say about 10 15 years the the outlook did not look very good for for perhaps psychology but I think in the last maybe 10 15 years because of the greater interest in consciousness because of the failure of anybody to say yes I can explain consciousness by just talking about electrochemical changes. Mhm. Perhaps more of the people who are more open to other possibilities are there. Still, I would say probably more journal editors than uh are against than are open, but less percentage wise than there were 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe in 10 years it will be better. But I don’t think for a second that there will be you know one one time where you will say yes we they embrace us we have persuaded them because people are not not going to be persuaded and yes there is sans progresses burial at the time but that person who died left a bunch of students that also heard him or her say this is nonsense and some of them may become convinced because of experiences or something like that but others will remain saying oh this is nonsense. Why are we wasting our time with all of this? And and one way to also look at this is of course to just look at the quality of the skeptics. Um what were sort of like the best sort of critiques you’ve read on par psychology and perhaps even your own paper, your two 2018 paper. I mean just the quality of of the critiques maybe stuff that you thought okay maybe I have to really think on how to respond to that or Yeah. But but I would say the the criticism has actually gone down. There is a very good paper about 20 years ago by a great parabychology researcher who unfortunately died young Chuck Honorton and he was looking at what were the kind of arguments that were giving against parapsychology and a lot of it was some of it was dishonesty. People would describe something that was demonstrably false. So he would write like Hansel he would write say no you describe the the setup of this experiment was wrong here is here is the map of how where it happened. Yeah and they would not correct it. So he said you have dishonest or very lazy kind of criticism where people do not go and look at the experiments themselves and tell you what is wrong with them. Mhm. They are just saying well mention one of the criticisms that I would think would be very lazy. Uh Jim Al says the problem with parapsychology is that these people are just trying to bring back religion. Does he it could be it could be the case. But did he do an a survey or perhaps psychologist to find out whether the majority all of them Yeah. wanted are religious people? No he did not. He just took that out of his pocket. I can tell you from um being around perhaps psychology, there are some who are into spirituality and so on. There are others who are not at all. There are others maybe who are like me who have a very different kind of of spirituality that is not religious at all and that do not do not care about and the file drawer effect the what they call when you just don’t publish when you don’t have results. We only see studies and in your math analyses of of of studies that show results. Yes. And when that has been done there there are statistical ways to try to control for that. And when you have done those analysis you find out that that criticisms becomes untenable because you would need to have hundreds of studies which given the lack of funding the very few paraphscologists in the world makes it even more impossible. Okay that’s a funny one the lack of funding. And to to end our wonderful conversation, Edel, we’ve been talking of course this the science, the statistics. You are a scientist, but you’re also into theater as a director. Mhm. And as an actor, you started out a playright. And I told you about my my fascination for for um a very specific movie that Jim uh Kerry did on Andy Calfman. And I’m a documentary filmmaker. And the documentary, the making of that film was astonishing me to me. Um I think it’s titled Jim and Andy. Um and um Jim Carrey became Andy Calfman and it’s documented as a documentary film and it’s very hard to uh just believe that he’s he he’s acting that I mean during the shooting of that film the director went crazy and couldn’t reach Jim Carrey anymore. Mhm. So we had a sort of even a breakdown that he wanted to stop the production because this is just when they say okay cut he would keep on being Andy Calfman and and sometimes in annoying alter ego and so it was annoying and said and people were like this is crazy and it’s all in this documentary and Jim Carrey reflects on the whole process and he starts the documentary saying that in preparation of this film and it was his dream role because he was a great fan of Annie Calvin. He sat on a beach and he saw dolphins and he had this let’s call it hypnotic moment of what would it be to be Andy and he described just as if Annie entered him for the duration of that film and where even became emotional relatives of Andy Calfman on set related to Jim Carrey as if he was Andy Calfman uh their son. It’s just amazing to watch that film. Yeah. What are your thoughts with your as a scientist and as a theater lover? Let me start as a state of consciousness person. Yeah. First, you do probably every night exactly what you’re saying that Jim Carrey did. Every night when you go to dream, you become somebody else. While you dream, you know, sometimes you are yourself, your hands, but have you not had dreams where you were a different person, a woman, maybe an animal? We all have had those. Yeah. So, we all have those moments where for a certain amount of time we were different. And also by the way incidentally on the transition between being awake and going to sleep. Sometimes I I think of myself and I see myself referring to myself with a different name as if I had different information as if I was living a different life which is really bizarre you know and it is just because we do not think very much about that that we do not realize that that happens to us very frequently. So what I think is that besides time and space being some of the c the content categories through which we uh apprehend the world, a narrative homogeneous self is another one. Somebody who has a name, hands, a history, a particular way of behaving and so on. That way of being is supported and maintained by what you say to yourself, by how you look at the mirror, by how you try to behave in ways that are characteristic. But you could easily change all of those because those are in a sense narrations. Fictions. Fictions. Useful fictions. Yeah. Convenient. Yeah. But that’s what they are. So you could then decide, well, I’m going to become just completely, you know, my my my boy at seven sometimes just becomes somebody else because he’s into cartoons a lot and and for a while he takes it very seriously. He does not need to be a method actor or have read Stanislavsky or anything. He becomes like that very much involved for a while. So that possibility is always in us. I think as an actor what happens and Jim Carrey is by no means the first one is that you may decide oh I want to start behaving and thinking like somebody else and I load my mind. I start thinking in that way and I continue doing it and in some ways that is amazing and in some ways it is very normal because that is what we do every day with who we think we are. But we could be somebody else. Just do few very simple things in addition to uh to dreaming. Give people a mask. Mask so that they cannot be observed or nowadays social network. Allow them not to be identifiable. And then you’ll see people doing things that they say horrible things that they say they would ordinarily not do. Very simple things. So what we are, who we are can very easily change depending on the circumstances. So what an actor does is try to think well what are the circumstances, the characteristics of this person, what would be the best choices that this person would take and you continue doing this. Daniel de Lewis is obviously uh somebody who does that the same. He learns the the craft of the character he’s going to portray and so on. And so he becomes that person in a number of different ways. Probably also as well thinking about histories and thinkings and feelings and way of interacting. So it is a technique then also in a sense. Yeah. But but also something that says something important about who we are. Yeah. We are not this this solid person. We are changing. We’re shifting every day. We go into dreams. We go into hypnogogic hypnopic. We become somebody different. Even without having mystical states, even without going into let’s say murder’s rampage or anything like that uh we become that we just disregard not pay attention to them and in your own life atas how is your work when you have to be critical about all these phenomena. How has it affected your outlook on life? And do you experience more meaning through your work in parap psychology or do you have or have you become perhaps extra skeptical every moment you you you think you have sort of a precognitive precognition or No. Uh no, I will maybe I’ll tell you a couple of things first. Uh I I do not think I am psychic nor would I want to be thinking all of the time or well where are those very solid information that I probably is coming to because I also want to enjoy a conversation uh looking at the flowers as well. I want all of that. Yet, uh if for instance I have a dream in which um I see something that something bad happened to someone close to me, uh I check see is that person all right? Yeah. If I have no reason to suppose that that person should be sick or have died, I check do am I right all of the time? No. But I have been right sometimes that something had happened to a person who had been important in my life and yeah I just thought of one uh and I checked and I thought this is really bizarre. This person is is youngish. Nothing must have happened to this person. I did check and something had happened. M uh so I do not take it as a certainty as if I had a dream it must something terrible has to have happened but I do check it. So it it changes in that way. It also for example in a dream uh if I notice that I am behaving differently than ordinarily I am. If I seem to be very sad or crying and so on, I wake up and when I wake up, I try to think why might I feel this way even though apparently in my ordinary state I do not. There is probably something or there may be something that I am not paying attention to. So I think what it does it is it it opens it and reaches more the possibilities of my life. It does not constrain them. It just makes things even more mysterious, wonderful, uh, extraordinary. Beautiful. Thank you. And I I couldn’t agree more in my in my own life having also absolutely not a precon as they’re called or psychic, but I take these altered states and and the information that comes to me, I take it serious with an open-minded uh, wondrous uh, outlook on life. And I think it gives more meaning. It’s like a web of meaning in which we are related. Yeah. Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. Yeah. People don’t know but speaks quite some Dutch. We had nice Dutch email correspondents. Donel thank you so much for watching this interview with Cardinia. We will put links of work down in the description below and please leave your questions and comments and we will try and integrate that in more videos like these. Thank you so much for watching and thank you Adon. Thank you.