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Anomalous cognition is the phrase used to describe human mental activity that affects objects independent of any tangible means. It used to be called psychokinesis. Anomalous cognition is also the phrase used to describe human to human information transfer independent of any tangible means. It used to be called telepathy. Both fall under the umbrella term psi. Anomalous cognition is a serious area of research. The effects have been well demonstrated and the results well documented. The effect sizes tend to be small, but have been replicated across multiple sites, thousands of trials and varying research protocols.
The use of the term ‘psi’ is in the title of a recent (2023) preprint of article in Cortex, Mind-Matter Interactions and the Frontal Lobes of the Brain: A Novel Neurobiological Model of Psi (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830717301453).
Freedman, Binns, Gao et al. at Baycrest, Rotman and Sunnybrook respectively, in Toronto documented psychokinesis in a human to machine protocol. They used a model in which mental effort alone perturbed the output of a random event generator from random to non random patterns.
I have been writing about internal information transfer between conscious and unconscious modes of cognition, but this is on another level altogether. This is external information transfer.
That the study was done at all, then pre printed in Cortex, was my first surprise. The authors are well established and the journal is venerable and respected. In full disclosure, I did a predoctoral internship at Baycrest decades ago and observed first hand the high quality of work in Dr. Freedman’s neurology service then. The authors of the 2023 paper had published two earlier papers on the topic. In the latest paper they more closely investigated activity in a specific brain region thought to influence psi activity.
Dr. Freedman and his colleagues are not the first to publish evidence of psychokinesis. They used methods that were well established. The rationale for the study was rooted in clinical cases they had previously published and in the context of decades of earlier research at other sites. The research protocol was strict, consistent with models used elsewhere to control for factors that might distort the findings. Parts of the methodology are beyond my expertise, but do seem consistent with, for example the groundwork laid at Princeton over decades of research (e.g., Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (http://pearlab.icrl.org/publications.html).
The Freedman et al. and Princeton studies used a model involving random event generators. These are devices that are widely used to produce random strings of binary events such as 1s and 0s in computer code, on and off switches, and the like. Random event generators have a wide range of uses and are established features in situations such as clinical trials and psychological experiments, to assign someone randomly to receive an experimental treatment or the control treatment. REGs are prone to making some random errors too, so there are well established methods of vetting the output of an REG to control for non randomness.
This line of research demonstrates that it is possible to alter the output of an REG by mental effort alone (e.g. http://pearlab.icrl.org/pdfs/2004-sensors-filters-source-reality.pdf) and (https://journals.lub.lu.se/jaex/article/view/23206/20893).
But that is just one example of anomalous cognition, which I had been thinking of as information transfer by intangible means. The research is long and robust enough that the scientific community acknowledges this phenomena exists and can be measured (e.g. https://journals.lub.lu.se/jaex/article/view/23206).
The effect sizes obtained in this line of research are small but replicable. While the PEAR project looked at information transmission by healthy subjects, Dr. Freedman and colleagues had previously assessed psychokinesis in two clinical cases of frontal lobe dysfunction due to different causes. In the 2023 preprint, the frontal lobe region of interest from the previous studies was transiently suppressed by use of the technique of repeated Trans Cranial Magnetic stimulation (rTCM). This is an established technique used, for example, in the clinical treatment of depression.
To demonstrate the neural involvement in psi is quite a conceptual bridge to cross, and there are at least three challenging ideas. There is the concept of information transfer by intangible means. REG devices can be altered by mental effort alone, especially in the context of suppressed frontal lobe activity. The next conceptual bridge is this: Jahn and Dunne at Princeton also had earlier demonstrated that information can be transferred between subjects with a statistically significant degree of accuracy. Finally, the third bridge: the PEAR Project demonstrated accurate and reproducible transfer of information between subjects independent of location (distance apart, at a global level) and independent of time (plus or minus a few days between ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’). Transfer of information from human to machine; from human to human; independent of location and time.
An adequate explanatory model has not yet been found for anomalous cognition. One possibility is to turn to the field of physics, which has been working for decades on a series of similar phenomena that defy standard models of physics. Entanglement, for example, was famously called “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein. It appears to demonstrate information transfer between photons independent of space and time. It appears to defy the principle of locality, which holds that objects only act on each other directly or through intermediaries. No intermediary between human and random event generators can be identified in the work described here. The PEAR studies further demonstrated information transfer between humans, apparently violating the principle of locality, and also independent of space and time. See, for example, George Musser Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, 2023 and Spooky Action at a Distance, 2015 for a more thorough discussion of these topics for the non physicist.
In the Freedman et al. and PEAR studies, an element of human interaction has shown ‘nonlocal’ features, which means in defiance of standard physics models. The mental activity of the human in the experiment is now an independent variable. It challenges the mind. How to understand the human, subjective element affecting an otherwise objective paradigm?
Curiosity, not scoffing, takes us where the fun is: the open territory between event and explanation.