 And I'm here and she's in France in Paris. So at least I can show her that I thought of her I Have to bring a few gifts back to to make to prove it So hey that being said back to consciousness so we've been hearing a lot about in terms of This question that Rajiv posed early on is leadership about clout about the span of Your power your influence and of course I think we've been hearing quite a bit about the fact that it's not quite that We're not talking about that. We're talking about something that comes from within and I'm going into that direction myself but in the domain that is also my domain of research which is psi research and We heard about psychokinesis versus Healing as you you created a contrast between them the truth of the matter is even psychokinesis is not Mind over matter. It's not will over this harsh world It's not imposing your will. There's something very different going on So we call it the influence of the mind on objects But all we can say right now is that there seems to be a correlation between something that's going on inside me which I may call intent Intention and something happening outside whether that outside is a living system or it's a Biological system and we can't quite say that I'm doing it to it even in the case of random number generators in other words, I think that this word of power or Even energy might misdirect a little bit the what's going on in terms of Psychokinesis let alone the subject. I'm going to be talking about which is a bit different so it's not quite the struggle the the kind of Very male young Vision, it's me my mind Getting to overcome the elements that that nature out there and I think that in this whole concept of leadership that we're talking about these two days which includes this question of values and Purpose and energy we need to add a fourth element which is connectedness This is not happening It's not just my will that's coming out and kind of Pulling myself and the world in a certain direction. It's more that I'm connecting to something deep It's there's a receptive aspect to it not just the projective aspect and that connection is maybe Enabling myself to orient things in a certain direction So this is going to be a little bit of theme that I'll be coming back to that He even hidden behind this concept of energy which sounds Kind of like from me to it or from me to my future There's another concept which is much more in much more receptive And that what all we can say about it is that represents something like connectedness So influence through connectedness now. I'm not going to talk about this either now you met some of you may have read a couple of weeks back that Say yeah, finally, we have made the breakthrough telepathy from They had the nerve to say the first successful telepathy experiment across 4,000 miles and in fact, of course, this was not what we call telepathy at best. I'll call it techno telepathy techno telepathy is when you hook up two brains and you use all kinds of paraphernalia like EEG's and Transcranial stimulation so forth and you've managed to read out something from one brain Translated through wires and signals and send it across the internet to another brain that manages to decode What that first brain was thinking so this was a breakthrough? It's a big technological breakthrough, but of course, it's not the word telepathy is a bit let's say a marketing ploy Because when we talk about telepathy generally and for the last hundred and fifty years We're talking about something called mental telepathy like no wires And this is the the domain that interests me Not because the other isn't interesting, but it just so happens. This is what I'm interested in so what is telepathy? Basically, it's this idea that one person at a certain distance Experiences something usually it's something traumatic something powerful something intense and somehow some other person at a distance without any other sensory information is somehow experiencing partially that first person's What they saw what they felt what they heard what they tasted It doesn't work like a camera, but we have enough Information to know that something went on and sometimes it's pretty precise so this is telepathy and this is one thing I'll be talking about and the There are quite a few things that can be said about it But before getting to that just to introduce the the general concept There's one more which is precognition which I'd like to talk about and that is that something happens Monday that I have a vision of something let's say a Volcano that's going to explode with great precision and some time later Maybe two days later or three days later it happens with the exact same detail and it's not just a difference It's not because I've been studying Volcanic explosions in Southeast Asia or whatever. It's because I wake up out of a nightmare with this persistent image and dream that there's going to be an explosion in this very place There's no data leading me to that. It's a total surprise So when these kinds of experiences happen, we talk about precognition something that we could not infer logically So these are the two phenomena that I'd like to focus on and mostly from a research perspective from an experimental Perspective to suggest say how in the world can we address these? Kinds of phenomena within a laboratory context So the first way that these were being addressed was just by collecting cases lots and lots and lots and lots thousands and thousands of cases have been collected in England initially In the United States in France in Germany in most of Europe actually and there probably are case collections Also in this part of the world, which I'm not aware of That's one approach and that's kind of interesting Out of thousands and thousands I can pick a few of course this one happened to be With a sinking of the Titanic which some of you must know about at least because given the film that came out on this it Happened in April 1912 and there are dozens of Cases that we reported That somebody said to somebody else. I have a very bad feeling this ship is going to sink And they said it of course before the ship ship sank and they said it to somebody So there's an independent witness or they wrote or something happened So we know it wasn't they're not making it up after the fact So there were many many cases like this here I'm just giving one because it so happened that in this case The person wasn't expecting anything this this person. It's a woman in New York Who woke up her husband in the middle of the night saying something terrible has happened my mother? I saw her on a lifeboat I don't know why but she was on a lifeboat something that happened and and her husband said you had a dream go back to sleep and Then you know two days passed and of course everybody started hearing about the Titanic and there were lists coming out as to the survivors and She looked in the list of survivors and found her mother on the list in one of the lifeboats, of course But the interesting thing here was that she had no idea her mother was on the Titanic Her mother had decided to do a surprise visit To her daughter On the other side of the Atlantic so this is interesting because there was no expectation nothing Another example mark Twain is a pretty well-known novelist. He's one of them the greatest novelist of the United States Huckleberry Finn and you know you may have heard of him and He had a nightmare. He he had arranged for his brother Henry to have a job a job on a steamboat called the Pennsylvania and So his brother was working on the steamboat, but one night Mark Twain Samuel Clemens woke up with a horrible nightmare. He saw the casket Suspended between two chairs, which is a very weird thing to do with the casket and on it was Henry in you know in it and of so The weirdest thing was that there was like this bouquet of flowers white flowers with a rose on it right in the middle So a week later eight days later the Pennsylvania exploded. There was an accident. His brother was very seriously injured Mark Twain rushed to his death bed and At some point I from what I remember with the story that Mark Twain fell asleep where he went upstairs Well, I Think he died first Then they were going to bury them. There was a series of coffins in the room and for some reason Mark Twain what when he woke up and he came in the room his brother was already in the coffin Suspended on two chairs and he's looking at him and at that moment a nurse a voluntary nurse Volunteer came down the stairs with a bouquet Well, you got it, right? She came down the stairs and she placed it so his dream came true I'm sorry. I don't know why I should there are some Stories that I really shouldn't bring out. I mean he wasn't any he wasn't a relative of mine Mark Twain, okay, let me get to a second approach. The first approach was this approach with Intensive case studies the second approach is to say let's see if we could see it live in front of our eyes rather than just historically Gathering all kinds of cases and there were Many actually not that many but there were some very good Individuals let's say mediums psychics Starting in the 19th century going into the 20th century and still today. Also. There are some who seem to able to reproduce Some impressive phenomena on command So again here This is not my intent to just wow you with big experiences, but just so to give you one or two examples of how this works I Will in a moment I'll give them right afterwards, but essentially the idea is to have people that are really talented in this area and to study repeatedly the same person day in day out and to see How it works? This is the exceptional another approach that I call sometimes the elitist approach We're just going for the exceptional exceptional cases and exceptional individuals But there is another approach which is which was initiated by this man J.B. Rine in the 1930s And his idea was to get out of the whole exceptional sigh Approach and to kind of find a democratic Approach is there a chance that these phenomena occurring at a very low level perhaps, but continuously for anybody Maybe under unusual circumstances, but they're not like Martians that they're the gifted ones And we're the dull ones it that it's happening at some so small scale for all of us And I think this is approach is particularly relevant to these two days here So that's why I'm going to insist on this approach rather than the elitist approach because it has something to say about what we can discover about ourselves so Rine's approach was basically to take deck of cards especially made cards called Xenia cards and to There though you see there are five different signs there And you have them five times each that means 25 cards and basically you shuffle the cards In one way or another and you pull one after the other and the other person there has to guess Which card you're pulling and then you accumulate the statistics if you're just doing one Success out of five. That's not very good. That's chance if you're doing better than you're you're above chance and that's what he's testing see if normal people can have above chance scores and and So the way it would work was generally in the very early experiments. This is 1930s So excuse the quality of the film, but basically the per on the one side of a panel there's a Person that's trying to deal the cards into one of those five positions and on the other side There's there's the person who's pointing and saying I want you to put it here I want you to put it here. I want you to put it there and then they just cumulate the number of cards and see how many did they get right? very Basic, I mean very low-tech approach But it had to start somewhere. So this is where it started and there were many different variations on this initially like I said with these kinds of simple setups that basically anybody can do and Then they got progressively they started to get electromechanical with electronic shuffle electrical mechanical shuffling systems and then they got to be electronic and progressively removed to random number generators all the way up to the random number generators that are now that you can plug in with a USB card to your computer and you can program games This is one of the things that I had done is that I created a CD-ROM with games for testing ESP not not With cards, but different kinds of approaches Okay, so this was the original Let's democratize Psy the American dream. It's everybody can do it right this kind of thing So I'm not going to stick with this too long It's just to say that how do you deal with data because the data that came through here These are as Dean said this morning quite small effects. They're real, but they're small If you get fifty one percent if it let's say it's a coin flip and you get fifty one percent over a hundred trials Ah, if you get fifty five percent, but if you get fifty one percent over ten thousand trials, that's very significant, right? You see that it's a whole different thing if you get one percent over ten thousand trials So meta-analysis is just a way of saying if we put together Hundreds of studies that have been done and there have been literally hundreds of these studies Can we say that there is a difference between what you expect by chance and what was actually obtained? that's basically what meta-analysis is and I'm not going to stick with this too much, but you've seen lots of zeros and ones, but basically Just so you know when you have point zero one That's what we call statistically significant when you have point zero zero the six sigma what we call Then you call the news conference and you Announce big news and that's what we call hard sciences kind of you know That's when you start celebrating and when you have That many sigmas then we're just going to industrialize we're going to the laboratory and we start having control processes and Then you just quit your job and go do something else because there's nothing more to discover go somewhere else now It's just going to processes and industrialization so this is the general kind of rule of thumb and there there's something we call effect sizes from an Effect size is saying if you have for example One percent better than chance That's good. It's statistically significant. It could be very significant, but it isn't meaningful. Can you use it and So effect sizes measure what you can use whether it's a realistic Let's say pragmatic result as opposed to just being statistically impressive Is this under is this? Opaque, I know it's boring, but is it opaque? Okay, I'll we'll see now so Aspirin just to give you an example Aspirin was studied and There was a very they were saying how does aspirin affect heart disease This is really normal. No healing pharmaceutical industry classic. How much does it affect? Does it help heart disease? So they did a very long-term study with physicians They were 22,000 people who participated in the study and lo and behold in 1988. They discontinued the study It was discontinued it actually they stopped it Why because they thought it was unethical to continue doing this study because the people that didn't receive That got the placebo as opposed to the the the aspirin they were saying it's unfair to them We've been giving them a placebo for all these years and they're losing their you know We should be giving them aspirin's we have enough proof now They had a proof of P equals zero zero zero zero zero zero one So they stopped the study But what was their effect size? It was minuscule Meaning the effect size was there point zero three four That means that at best you'll have I think it was something like less than 1% of those who would have gotten Cardiovascular disease if they didn't take aspirin Are you following this less than 1% will not get heart disease if they take aspirin That's how small that effect was meaning it just gives a tiny tiny advantage to you if you take aspirin Nevertheless, it's considered that aspirin is good for you for heart disease So that's this is just to you understand the difference between effect size and what is statistically significant, so and as far as I'm concerned. That's basically that's better advice than just taking aspirin okay So I'm not going to go through this but it's the main thing here is to say that When we did an analysis of all kinds of studies using You know these cards or random number generators when we say okay The person is just doing this just pointing. Is it this is it left or is it right? Is it the the circle or is it the square or is it the plus when we do these studies and we Cumulate them and we see their success rate. They get a very very small effect 0.01 Which is in the same ballpark as the aspirin study, but it's very significant Meaning normally at that point we should decide this has been demonstrated even if it's not very useful It's scientifically this or demonstrated, but can we use it? That's a different issue okay But then we started to get a little bit more Intelligent about these studies. We said can we learn anything from them and one of the things we did learn From it is that not everybody is born equal There are some people that we're having a bit bigger scores than others and some that were literally missing all the time they kept on Getting the wrong card the wrong coin flip naming it the wrong way and so The the general description is from many many experiments and tests where we give you know psychometric tests we Personality MBTI all these things Myers-Briggs type in some of you may know of it the general Outcome is that people who are Relatively extroverted good social adjustment. That's the real word Who are not particularly neurotic or intro not particularly tense in relationships Do better than those who are on the other side So these are a number of Descriptors these are on these tests where you check and you say I'm like this. I'm like that. I'm like this I'm like that people that tend to be on the left-hand side We're the same people that kept on getting better scores in these quick Tests You see there is a correlation there. Okay Another correlation, which is famously known as the sheep goat effect. I Don't ask me why this is has to do with the Bible. I'm not sure it's interested with you But basically this lady here was a professor at the City University of New York discovered a very interesting effect If you just ask people do you believe that these phenomena are real? Yes, no Do you believe that it's possible to have good scores here and now yourself in this test We're going to do in three minutes. Yes. No, maybe and so forth So she accumulates all these scores and she gets a profile and at the two extremes of the profile of the people who say Absolutely, they're real. I am totally convinced and on the other edge End of the scale you have the people later. Are you kidding me? Do I look like I'm naive or something? Of course they don't exist and of course, I'm not going to get any special scores here So now this is so far just purely psychological people have their opinions and convictions and so forth But what she found that if we call the blues the sheep the ones that say yes it exists and If we call the pinks the goats what she found is that the sheep tended to have positive scores But this is exactly the same objective test You just have somebody turning cards and somebody down there trying to guess what that next card is So the fact that you believe or you don't believe Should be of absolutely no help, right? if This doesn't exist But strangely the sheep the ones that were convinced were getting better scores and What's even worse or more bizarre is that the goats were not a chance They were actually getting scores below chance as if they were How do you get scores below chance? It's almost like you have to know what the target is and then avoid it So this is very interesting because we're going to come back to this whole thing about Belief and the impact of belief on the way that we act and what intuitive decisions we take or don't take So this this was interesting. This did come out of the that era of Working with these kind of mechanistic card turning approaches Another and this last I'll just stop there is the decline effect Scientists sometimes can be pretty thick They discovered that if you keep on you know turning cards and writing down a number on the piece of a paper And you keep doing this for an hour at first people scores are good and progressively get worse and worse now again if These phenomena are real That's Totally understandable. I mean basic psychology You know you get bored after a while you get tired you get tense And it's not a very meaningful thing that you're doing just turning over cards and writing a number on the somebody That's in another room trying to catch that card at first. It's exciting and different and then it drops But what's interesting is that the scores do reveal that so there's something meaningful going on there Okay, so you may recognize later. We were talking about Movies quite a bit this you know where this is from Minority report This was about you know, how do you get these people that are dedicated what we were talking about dedicated people that just do You know become specialized in this you know well this science fiction film is about taking some people and sticking them in kind of a pool and That's all they do in life. We're feeding them intravenously and so forth and we're just they're just dedicated there. This was in the film. It's it's called pre-crime It's a police of police investigators who stop crimes Because they have advanced information about where and when and who is going to commit a crime So they intervene just before the crime is committed and they have authority to jail somebody Because he had the intention to commit the crime and the proof is that pre-crime can prove That it was going to happen So this is science fiction, of course But it can make you think about where this might be going with this issue about recognition Okay, so back to reality Now it's funny that Dean used the same slide. I discovered If we want to boost sigh if we want to go beyond this kind of rather mechanical rather meaningless card guessing task and we want to bring it closer to life and Closer maybe to the themes. We're talking about here. How do we do it? In the field in this field sigh research field there have been basically three strategies One is let's go back to the basics. Let's go back to when we used to have Special subjects people that are born talented, and let's just work with them period forget the rest Let's go for the best a second strategy is To assume that the conscious mind the one that makes decision and choices is mostly our Adversary as far as these phenomena concern the conscious mind is ego the conscious mind blocks out distant information Because most of the time it's not relevant and the conscious minds focused on the here and now So Dean was saying this morning, you know, do we really want these phenomena full blast? Because how are we going to focus on our daily business if they're coming in all the time? So one way of getting around this is saying let's go below the conscious mind and seeing what's happening at maybe at the body level maybe at something that's barely perceptible and So here we use physiological, you know sensors and leads and so forth and We tried to see if somehow the person is reacting to distant information Even though the person has no idea Third strategy Altered states this is a funny word, but it basically means is there some Mind state Physiological but above all mental state in which we're more receptive than our normal state So if for example You're not really interested by what I have to say and you start falling asleep, you know This is called the hypnagogic state. So do you suddenly become more suggestive more? Sensitive to distant information. That's maybe more interesting than what's going on here while you're falling asleep So this is an altered state dreams are an altered state meditation is an altered state deep meditation so this is a third approach and We've tried all three and they are the payoff is obvious The payoff is obvious because the effect sizes we're finding in other words the meaningfulness of the data we're extracting is Clearly over way over this card guessing approach And so I think it's pointing to the way of what it means to be connected and It's doing so in a laboratory context, which is kind of artificial, but still it's pointing to something meaningful. So quickly The go for the best. I'm just going over that quickly This is the special subjects approach You may have heard or may not have heard of a program in the United States that lasted for over 20 years it was funded by the Department of Defense by the Department of Intelligence the CIA it was a psychic spying program and What they did is that they went around this was during the War games with the United with the the Russians with the USSR Basically the Americans were afraid that the Russians were doing this and the Russians were afraid the Americans were doing it So they said why not let's just try some Anything works if anything works that will try psychic spying among other things and they went through this big program Testing with the kinds of showcases I showed you 3000 military out of that they picked six So you could see this is a very elitist approach. They didn't just take it They said these are going to be our psychic spies and they did some training programs and so forth and one of them one of the stars was Joseph McMonigal who's still with us and Ed May Who's a physicist was the director of one of the laboratories? Dedicated to this psychic spying program all of this was classified for 20 years We Researchers that some of us Mike myself. I was working in Princeton I had no idea what was going on and these were people that I knew pretty well These are our colleagues, but they could not say a word about what they were doing So anyway Just to give you some examples Joseph McMonigal You may see that this was this is a laboratory it's pretty important laboratory in the on the West Coast and You see the building on the left upper left there You see the building he draw the road with the trees the road with the trees So this is somebody who is several Dozens or sometimes hundreds of miles from the site. There's one person who goes on site and The other person is back in the lab trying to draw what he thinks The the the physical viewer is seeing He's trying to just kind of get an overview and he gets into the state of let's say it's kind of like Sometimes it's automatic. It's like automatic writing. It's like you're not very conscious here It wasn't you can tell because he used a ruler and everything obviously, but it's kind of quick and Try to let impressions come through. This was an extremely good viewer Joseph McMonigal. He's not run of the mill another example Yeah, so here the target site this one was a hundred miles away from the lab the the sender the outgoing person is on the site and the viewer sketches this and he writes down some words and This is what he sees now all these targets are randomly selected the person who is in the lab has Absolutely no idea Where the outgoing viewer is? it's Any place is defined any place within a 100 mile radius and they just have to give them time to get there and then the session begins This was a missile test. There were several of these trials So he you know captures the missile test and several different Items that are related like glowing materials a missile test and the cloud and the sounds in the environment So there are a lot of a lot of examples of this if you're interested There are plenty of references that I can give to you but just to show you that there are several different labs at different times dedicated to this research and They found of course nice big p-values, but more important Their effect sizes are now approaching. They're bigger than what we call small They're definitely bigger than the minuscule. They're bigger than what's called small effect sizes and they're starting to approach Moderate effect sizes and we don't find moderate effect sizes just anywhere. We find them in some Medical research and we find but it's not that common. It's pretty good effect sizes But again, all this depends on gifted subjects Now let's go to strategy to strategy to is looking below the surface and seeing does the normal guy Have some psi some connectedness. Is there some connectedness manifest in us? Not just because we're psychic. We're just maybe at a constant low level and the the Monsieur here Douglas Dean was He started this really I think he was one of the earliest person to start this He did this in telepathy experiments He would he had a large number of names for example all shuffled together Some of those names were meaningful to the receiver and some of them were not and The receiver was hooked up to a plophismograph you know measuring pressure pressure here and so At a agree time the sender now was in another room would turn one card after the other and When he would fall on a meaningful name even though he didn't know because these were just names that the other guy wrote He just shuffled them. This was a double blind experiment so he wouldn't know he would turn them one after the other and when the name was a meaningful suddenly there was a little In the plophism with something was reacting in the other person. So this was kind of a an Early sign of this an early version of the experiments that got much more sophisticated I'll take a look at this image that's showing here not very happy, right? you see that and Chances are if the screen is a few inches away from your face and You suddenly see is popping up you there might be a little reaction in you At any rate it will certainly be a different reaction from this one, right? This is just normal burr boring and this is pretty aggressive So this is a standard thing that we use in physiological Experiments we just try to compare how people react to different images and we look at different measures like blood skin I mean skin conduct this level or temperature or heartbeat or e.g. And we see what are the curves that correspond to this kind of an image versus this kind of an image so a person is taking this session and They're hooked up to different kinds of Systems it depends on who's done the experiment, but there there are many experiments of this sort now They're more over 40. This is quite recent and they're hooked up to e.g. Kind of things or skin conductance And they're also exposed to different kinds of targets sometimes They're neutral sometimes. They're erotic sometimes. They're aggressive sometimes. It's a sound a burst of sound or silence and We just keep looking at what's happening in their body So first there's a blank screen then there's boom the image comes Then there's a blank screen time for them to recover and all this time We're looking at what's happening in your body and then in the next trial Blank screen boom the image comes and we look at what's happening in your body, okay? And of course all this is random you there's no pattern To this so you can't predict rationally What we find is Interesting once you're exposed to the image of course, it's normal. You'll have a very different reaction I don't have a pointer here's you have a very different reaction if it's a calm image Versus an aggressive image you that's obvious, but what's interesting is that we find even before You see the image There's something happening the two curves are separating If you keep doing trial and trial and trial and trial again You see that people have a tendency to pre react to the aggressive images Even before they've been determined Okay, and this has been done with different measures This for example is with an audio tone like a burst of the strong sound and in the bottom Here you can see that there's a separation that pink curve is dipping Just before you actually hear it so it's a bit It's maybe not very exciting, but it's very exciting from a scientific perspective at any rate This is our Dean because Dean was Largely responsible for relaunching this research on pre sentiment Again the FX sizes are quite respectable point 21. This is not quite usable yet, but It's in the right direction and It's very disturbing because as you can see what would it mean if Things were working this way in other words Before the cause, you know the normally the core want things move in a certain way in time and If you start having reactions before the bell rang and you hear the bell before it rings that would kind of Disturb our normal way of thinking and doing in the world But that's what seems to be coming out Okay Can I have an idea how I'm doing term of time? I just have ten minutes Okay third approach altered states I'm going to skip through some of these well this I could say at least so Just to give you the no, I'll skip it because it's going to take too much time Basically in When I joined this field I discovered this field through the mnemonies dream laboratory This is a laboratory in New York at the mnemonies hospital, which was established by two individuals Montague almond and Stanley Kripner and What they were interested in seeing is whether in dreams were particularly receptive to telepathy because there were loads and loads and loads of Cases spontaneous cases that suggested were especially receptive That's when most of the people who have experiences have them during dreams during the night time How many of you have had an experience a psychic what you would call a premonition or telepathy experience? Can I get a raise of hands? Maybe 10 percent 15 percent How many of those people had them either in a dream state or something like that? Premonition or whatever one two three four five six About half maybe half so this is interesting because one single state seems to be predictive of The fact that you may have a telepathic experience. So these Researchers decided to focus on that and they did a number of sessions. Basically the person would sleep all night the receiver Would be hooked up and whenever We knew that the person was dreaming we'd wake them up And say okay, please tell me your dream. They'll tell you dream and I was doing So say okay, thank you go back to sleep and okay, and then an hour goes by and start dreaming again We can see it from the captors. Okay, please wake up. I know they would wake up and so this goes on all night It's a very pleasant experience to be woken up every time you have a dream And it goes on four or five six times a night in the morning Finally the person can you know struggles in they wake him up for good During the whole time there was a sender in another room who was looking at an image This was a randomly selected image. That's what they were trying to Send to the dreamer in the morning the receiver comes out of their room and They're confronted with Several images in this case it was eight So and say okay now we'll read back all the dreams you have on the basis of what you saw all night long Can you pick one of these images being the one that the person was staring at and? Well given what they saw I was in the class Made up of half a dozen people felt like a school. There was one little girl I was trying to dance with me. Well dig up School of dance seemed to be the like most likely candidate so they circle it and then Once that's done. It's finished the person calls in the sender who must reveal now for the first time What the real target was and so now we know if we had a hit or miss? And so we do this many times and we accumulate the statistics and One example was with Malcolm Basant. He this wasn't thousands of trials It was just two series of eight nights in Each of these series had five direct hits out of eight that is very significant That's very improbable that that could have happened by chance So this was a this dream telepathy Approach was a real break with the approach using cards It was the first real study with altered states of consciousness that was getting closer to real life So to speak to real life sigh where we dream seemed to be a major way of Accessing psi abilities. I'll skip this So there were other states that were explored hypnosis was explored This is called sleep onset This is like when you're starting to fall asleep the hypnagogic state that was also explored Relaxation oops, sorry, that's not what I meant relaxation was explored also and Meditation for those who might be curious that's David Lynch up there Meditation was also one of the key Areas explore each of these areas represent several studies that have been done that give positive results Good positive results But I'm going to just this last few minutes. I'd like to focus on this approach which is called the Gunsfeld and This involves putting halved ping-pong balls on your eyes and Headphones with white noise, which is like shh, you know the sound we used to hear between two Radio stations that random noise the ping-pong balls makes everything completely diffuse like you're in a very thick fog So your eyes are open, but you can't see a thing and When you're in this kind of thing for a long time the white noise and the ping-pong balls And we asked you to talk to free associate all along and this lasts like 30 40 minutes After five or ten minutes. You're in an altered state You're you're not in your normal state. You're getting in there like a dream-like state yet. You're not asleep completely so there have been many studies done with this dozens of studies and So here's the sender. This is Charles Anderson my mentor In the one room in the soundproof sound isolated room and the receiver in another room in the Gunsfeld the receivers thinking out loud and Then in the end the receiver has to pick out which of the four targets was sent by the Sender, okay, which were randomly selected by computer. Okay, so Well, I have a few examples But basically it's to give you the quality the quality of these sessions is sometimes very Very impressive and the people that participate are not psychics These are people that are just curious. We had in when I was at Princeton. We had 260 subjects run through I don't think there was one psychic in there one official psychic But at any rate they were all just curious people So you could see that the quality sometimes and the differences between the kinds of thing they said here, this is Dali's Christ crucified and you know, they He's naming Jesus and he's talking about spirit guides and a woman that's looking up and dark and death and This is a picture in front of the French Bobo center with a flamethrower and the person who was here was the Dean of psychology at at Yale University Irv child and These are partial transcripts in his full transcript. He mentioned the word flames something like 30 times He just was obsessed with flames in that session Here this person was constantly obsessed with Birds and very specific birds very pointed big feathers named the eagle again, there is no Absolute no indication of what the nature of these targets would be there's no now you don't the receiver has no idea this is from a film called the Titans or something and as you could say they're waterfall and cities monuments or water gushing dread Temples falling Soldiers running it's again. This is a documentary on a bridge that actually collapsed in the 50s the United States and Again, it gives you the idea of you could almost say the person is describing the target from memory as opposed to describing a target that's not within their visual field or their past experience so okay Drop that I Mentioned three strategies. This was three approaches for enhancing Connectedness and it's true that it's in an artificial laboratory situation, which is the laboratory, but that means it's so much more Likely that in real life, which is not artificial and which there are strong emotions and there are real experiences It's much more likely that these kinds of things are just under our radar and The question is then are there ways to enhance These phenomena for our own use I'll skip all this. These are five great heroes of the last century. Oh, no, this was a mistake. That's not him That's not him. That's him. Henry Berkson he just looks alike but Any resemblance is accidental But these are great great great men philosophers and scientists who anticipated this idea that maybe our mind is Not entirely personal. It's not doesn't belong a hundred percent to us part of our mind Maybe stretches out like roots meeting or islands meeting under the water and maybe under exceptional circumstances something comes through and Something not just from distance, but something also from our own future because presumably we're also connected to our own Life path our own life trace and maybe sometimes we remember the past But sometimes we remember the future and we have premonitions so I guess the take-home here if there is one there are three key factors that that Synthesize what we have found in research One is a concept is which is openness to experience tightness being kind of host not hostile but being kind of pushing out the world means we're in isolated in our shells and I think objectively these people just won't have Experiences and that's okay because their life is structured around it but if you want to have this Larger intuition this larger contact with the world that's around and I think leadership is also about connectedness It's also about picking up subtle cues in the word world and knowing where the world is going Well in that case openness flexibility and creativity Empathy all these are factors that seem to enhance this connectedness and This can be seen on an experimental level with distant Events and objects the second factor is This whole idea of accessing a deeper self Whatever the practice is whatever the approach noise reduction meditation Mental disciplines of martial arts that are really oriented towards the inner self all these and Again, this is upheld by research Help us access either distant information information from other people or perhaps even information from our own future this seems to be Pretty the data is definitely going in that direction the third Is Right Total belief so when I say total belief that's exaggerated even I don't believe it totally but and it's again this whole thing is how you balance healthy skepticism versus just blocking things out and Everybody that's involved in this field is a skeptic But we're skeptics that listen and look at the data and we ask real questions to the world We ask questions. Does it work this way? Let's do an experiment to see so the sheep goat effect Something we call in creativity at least I brought this in from more from the creativity field the angels advocate as opposed to the devil's advocate These are attitudes that open us towards Possibilities and I think that it's healthy to be devil's advocate sometimes and it's healthy to be angels advocate as well That's it folks. Thank you