When an Eminent Scientist Says Magic Is Real—Pay Attention
Speaking with parapsychologist Dean Radin about physics and magic, psychic spying, dirty laundry of pseudo-skepticism, why magic works, how to strengthen your practice, and evidence for the uncanny
I will share a secret about how this dialogue unfolded.
On the evening of Sunday, September 14, I was reading an advance copy of The Science of Magic by Dean Radin, Ph.D. I emailed him:
Dean, you magnificent bastard, I see what you’re doing here: you’re writing a scientific grimoire. Maybe the first in post-industrial life.
He replied in one minute:
Haha, thanks. Right.
Dean is an intellectual hero to me. I consider him today’s preeminent parapsychologist and the inheritor to J.B. Rhine (1895-1980), the field’s academic founder in the U.S. Dean matches J.B.’s intellect and integrity leavened with personal adventurousness and oddball wit. Arriving at a conference in Allahabad, India, when the topic of religion arose he told the organizer: “I might’ve just doubled India’s Jewish population”—having to then tell his earnest host he was kidding.
Chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Northern California, Dean received academic honors in electrical engineering, physics, and psychology (the subject of his Ph.D.) from schools including University of Massachusetts Amherst and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also a classically trained violinist who played professionally for five years.
Dean has published hundreds of scholarly articles on parapsychology research, encompassing topics including precognition, distance healing, and mind-matter interaction, in scientific and medical journals not infrequently hostile to the endeavor of psi research itself. As a researcher, Dean fulfills comedian Steve Martin’s maxim: “Be so good, they can’t ignore you.”
I spoke with Dean on the eve of publication of his new book, The Science of Magic, a hugely engaging exploration of the overlap between physics and occult magic. (I define magic as causative ritual.) So far as I know, Dean has never before opened up so fully about his own practice of magic, his informed supposition about both continued black-op psi programs and covert funding of pseudo-skeptics, and the uncanny—yet grounded—possibilities intrinsic to twentieth- and twenty-first-century science.
In short: magic is real. Dean explains why.
Before moving on, let me issue a clarifying note about Dean’s work, perhaps all the more necessary in our era when some form of partisanship defines nearly every interaction. The point of Dean’s research is not validating what he or I may wish to be true. It is entering the most fraught—and hence necessary—territory of scientific and philosophical inquiry: Does there exist a bridge between mechanics and cognition? We know that quantum physics, and now an increasing number of quantum technologies, violate conventional rules of one-dimensional, straight-arrow time and classical concepts of local causality. We likewise possess a century of widely vetted, replicated evidence from parapsychology demonstrating that the psyche similarly bends the everyday constraints of space, time, and mass. This would not surprise the founders of quantum mechanics, most of whom were philosophical idealists. Dean endeavors to complete the circle, unifying the two fields—matter and mind—through rigorously designed experiments and replicated evidence.
Those weary of the ponderous tone of scholastic dialogues will, I believe, welcome our bluntness. This interview is slightly edited for order and concision. It remains long. It is worth it.
Mitch: One of the things I love in your new book is how you begin with complexity and work your way to simplicity of application. The last twenty percent or so of the book is delightfully practical, including such things as candle magic, sigils, magical working of knots, working with infused water or other substances. And you even present a quiz elucidating what methods might be best for the reader. I was delighted because I felt as though you made magic accessible for those with harried lives.
Dean: I put it there because the most frequent feedback I got from my book Real Magic was that somebody would finish reading and say: “Okay, magic is real. How do we do it?” I decided, “If that’s what people want, I will put that in there”—by the way, following your excellent lead in your book, Practical Magick.
Mitch: Thank you. I find that especially in today’s world people are staggering under terrible stress and to access the great magicians and alchemists, and even their modern inheritors, such as Aleister Crowley, requires a level of complexity that can prove very difficult.
Dean: Yeah, it’s true. If anything takes more than three minutes of focused attention today, forget it. By the way, as I was just discussing this morning with colleagues, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find participants for experiments. To bring them into the laboratory has always been difficult, unless you happen to be on a college campus and you’re getting them for free. But if you’re not—at IONS we recruit people from the local area—it’s significantly worse now. It’s even difficult now to recruit people to do experiments online. I’m doing an experiment online now that takes just 10 minutes. It is an intentionally short 10 minutes. It requires just a series of 30-second bursts of high attention followed by relaxed periods. Unless I can offer $100 for somebody to spend 10 minutes to do it, it’s just becoming more and more difficult, which reflects what you just said. The level of stress and the inability to focus at this point is just endemic around the world.
Mitch: Speaking of offering people $100, I wanted to ask you something about the [Robert] Bigelow prize that was recently offered for essays on after-death survival. I’m going to give you my point of view and I can afford to be blunt about it. I was appalled by it. Because there’s a crying need in our culture for funding for parapsychology. You’ve said there are about fifty scientists active in the field right now. You and your colleagues around the world compete for grant funding from a single generous Foundation in Portugal [the Bial Foundation]. It’s never been easy raising funds for this sort of research. If you have $1.8 million to spend on essays about extra-physical survival, my God, can’t you just take half that or 20% and spend it on parapsychology research? Most of these essays are never going to get read. They’re mouldering somewhere in a digital archive. It seems to me a terrible waste of resources.
Dean: One thing I’ve learned about people who have a lot of money, first of all, they don’t care what anybody else thinks. They have an idea they want to support, and they can spend millions of dollars the way we might think about spending $100. To us a million dollars is huge, but to them it’s practically trivial. So, yeah, I agree. In the case of the Bigelow money, I worked at the University of Nevada for a couple of years with support from Bigelow and he was very generous toward my program there and I pretty much got to do whatever I wanted. But then he lost interest in lab-based psi studies and decided he was really only interested in evidence for survival. I’m not that interested in survival research because it is unavoidably confounded with psi in the living. I mean that 100% of the evidence for survival comes from the living. We might infer that some of the evidence comes from the dead, but that’s an inference that can always be challenged. So I’m more interested in controlled studies we can do in the lab to better inform us about what psi is, how it works, and what are its limits. There are certainly a lot of very capable researchers at the University of Virginia who are doing field work, case work [into after-death survival]—and that line of research is perfectly legitimate, but it’s just not something I’m interested in. But, nevertheless, that’s what Bigelow is interested in, and it’s his money, so he can do whatever he wants with it. But I think you’re probably right. You could put $2 million towards more investigations that try to piece apart the survival versus psi question. That would be interesting. And I understood that after the essay contest that he was offering grants for survival research. But I have not heard about anybody who ever got those grants, so I don’t know what happened to that effort.
Mitch: In the new book you reference Peter J. Carroll’s magical equations in his Liber Kaos. You note in a clarifying manner that his data is derived from experience. I think this is important to state. However we organize magic, there remains a subjective or personal element.
Dean: I had a two-hour interview with Carroll. That was an interesting discussion because he actually knows way more about physics than I had suspected, and that’s where his equations come from.
Mitch: I have tremendous respect for him for all the obvious reasons and he has a depth of education in physics and calculus that I do not have. Hence, I cannot evaluate his figures. But looking at them as a layman, I kept nursing this internal objection that he’s stating these things with boundless confidence. But as you said, they are derived from experience, which I honor, but I also believe an author should clarify that up front.
Dean: I guess I didn’t think of it in those terms because at least within the soft sciences oftentimes people make up equations to model behavioral effects, and those models are often based on experience.
Mitch: That’s true of the p-value itself. [P-value is a formula used in statistics and meta-analysis to rule out chance results.] Wouldn’t you agree?
Dean: I think most people would agree this is reasonable and at least in that case there’s pretty rigorous mathematics underneath it. It is based on distribution theory and that sort of thing. So the mathematics are correct. I would say that a lot of mathematicians use intuition. And then they go back and justify it. The nice thing about mathematics is you can prove things, whereas in science you can only gain increasing amounts of confidence based on your evidence. But mathematics, like alcohol, has proof. Scientists also often rely first on intuition, and then they go back and try justifying their insight.
Mitch: That is a bridge you trace out in your new book. You’re kind of saying: “Look, we have complex ways of measuring things—but we have hypotheses, we have intuition before we start to try to subject it to measurement. And then we not infrequently justify it after the fact.” You justify it by independent replication, right?
Dean: Yes, because anybody’s intuition could be wrong. You come up with some amazing idea, as theoreticians often do. But it doesn’t go anywhere unless somebody can actually test it—and then other people can test it as well.
Mitch: In this vein, I very much like how you end the book. When reporters or interviewers are fishing for a snappy response as to the most magical phenomena you’ve ever witnessed, you tell them about an exceptionally low p-value [i.e., excluding chance]. I thought that was wonderful because to me, and I think you share this point of view, in parapsychology that’s the empirical equivalent of Moses parting the Red Sea.
Dean: Yeah, I try to point out, making quips about the nerdy aspect of magic, that scientists are somewhat OCD [obsessive-compulsive] by nature. Otherwise, you can’t spend the amount of time and high focus it takes to do this sort of work. And we also get very excited about things that from a non-scientist perspective seem crazy. I’m excited to see a low p-value—because I understand what that means. I understand where it came from. I understand the implications of it. So yeah, that’s what gets me excited. And most of my colleagues, too. Except if you start talking about exceptionally low p-values, then you have another problem because it might be too good. So, there’s some middle range where everyone gets excited and says, “Oh, I hope that replicates.”
Mitch: Not long ago I was telling somebody about that conference that you and I and Whitley Strieber and Jeff Kripal and others attended at Esalen in spring of 2009. Those relationships proved very lasting. He asked me, “What was the most amazing thing that happened there for you?” Instead of saying I saw Bigfoot or something, I find myself telling him how Dean Radin and [parapsychologist] Ed May explained to me exactly the significance of J.B. Rhine’s Zener-card experiments for ESP. Once that happened, I never looked back. And it’s the same point you’re making. Those few deviations from chance, widely replicated and vetted, tell us that the world is ineffable. That the extraphysical is real.
Dean: I don’t remember if I wrote this in the book—because you turn in the manuscript a year in advance so I don’t remember some of the details—but there’s always been this conflation between existence and efficacy—does it exist, and how big or practical is it? In the popular mind, if it’s not a big thing, then “Who cares?” But the real answer is: “Who cares how big it is?”
Mitch: The question is: “Does it exist?”
Dean: Right. I use an example of the electron, The charge on the electron is really, really tiny. But once we learned more about it, we were able to do all sorts of interesting things with it, and we now have this multi-gigawatt technology running the world today. And so today we see tiny little bits of magic, right? In the future, once we learn more about these effects, the whole world will run on magic (but we’ll have different names for it by then).
Mitch: It’s kind of the equivalent of saying, “We have proof that aliens visit Earth—but rarely.” It changes everything.
Dean: Right.
Mitch: I am burning to ask this next question because I am interested in the work of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation. It’s a practice of mine. I care deeply about it partly because of what I was saying about people being so terribly stressed out today. I think the Maharishi’s genius was he met the West where it lives. He said, in effect, “You can do this [TM] at lunch,” which is true. My question is about the more advanced siddhis or yogic-flying program, which you consider a bit in your book Supernormal. I’m agnostic on the yogic-flying siddhi. We have a First Amendment—give it a try. Experiment. Is this a priori disallowable in your mind? Is this something that serious people shouldn’t be involved with?
Dean: I think many more serious people should be involved with it. Because in my book Real Magic I talked about two cases where individuals apparently levitated. St. Joseph is one and [physical medium] Daniel Dunglas Home is another. The scholarly book They Flew by Carlos Eire goes into detail about not only St. Joseph, but a whole bunch of other saints said to have flown. There are bunches of them who have done this with hundreds of witnesses. Now, with witnesses who were reporting things that happened hundreds of years ago, you never know how much of it is embellishment. And you can tell that Eire was really struggling with this. He’s saying no rational modern person could obviously believe that any of that stuff was true. And yet it was subjected to severe “devil’s advocate” inquisitions at the time. And the process of somebody becoming a saint back then put you right on the knife’s edge of being executed—or becoming a saint. In the modern world today, this sort of talk is disallowed. You have the status quo saying that’s just stupid, at least in the academic world.
Mitch: So, is it conceivable—with today’s classically reductive materialism as the worldview?
Dean: It is not inconceivable. But to levitate a person, you could do that if you were able to suspend an asteroid the size of Texas over your head to create mass that would attract you in that direction. So it’s not a practical idea, but in principle you could do that. We can think of highly mechanistic ways of manipulating gravity.
Mitch: Are there other ways?
Dean: I think the answer is yes. And in fact, I’m working on an experiment to explore if our intention can manipulate spacetime itself. We’re talking here about exploring ontology with a capital O and reality with a capital R. If you only work from a materialistic perspective, it wouldn’t seem possible for something as ephemeral as consciousness to manipulate spacetime. That’s why leading skeptics say this stuff is impossible. What they mean is it’s impossible from what we knew about physics in the seventeenth century. But if we go into the twenty-first century, and especially project into where we’re heading in the twenty-second century, our worldview is going to change a lot. It’s already changing a lot. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book—because we’re in the midst of a major paradigm change now. You see it all over the place. The direction of that paradigm change is towards a more comprehensive philosophy of science. And that will become a different philosophy of civilization itself.
And so all you need to do, you don’t need to go down the rabbit hole into full-blown idealism, to imagine how you could manipulate gravity. You just consider something like dual-aspect monism. Or neutral monism. In those metaphysical models, which I think are probably closer to reality with a big R, sure, it should be possible for the mind to manipulate gravity and spacetime. Because they’re interconnected in an intimate way, there is the possibility of modulating foundational concepts in physics.
I haven’t put this experiment together yet, but it’s based on an interferometer with two laser beams. A participant in the study would be asked to make one of those beams shrink. An interferometer is a nice piece of apparatus to use for this sort of thing because you can measure changes in length down to about the size of the diameter of a proton. We’re talking really, really tiny. If it turns out that through intention you could squeeze a light beam as little as the diameter of a proton, then we can detect that. Such an outcome would suggest a couple of things. One is that mind can directly manipulate spacetime. We can create warps in spacetime, and warps in spacetime are very closely associated with gravity, as Einstein showed. If we can do this even to a tiny little smidgen—this is again the existential vs. efficacy issue—the difference between a UFO landing on the White House lawn versus the existence of UFOs in any form—then we would have evidence suggesting that mind is primary over the physical world. Suddenly then the idea of levitation becomes more plausible, whereas before it was literally impossible.
Mitch: And how does the experiment you’re planning relate to the Rhines’ psychokinesis (PK) experiments on dice back in the day? Is it the same theory?
Dean: It could be the same kind of phenomenon. Because in any kind of random system you can say well it’s a manipulation of informational probabilities which may not require doing any sort of violence to our present understanding of spacetime. But we don’t have a good answer to that yet.
Mitch: In the book you write about double-blind, published studies that involve intentionally charging candy or other foods to elevate mood. Why should the magical-candy effect exist?
Dean: The magical candy and the magical tea and the magical water—we’ve gotten very interesting results with all of those targets. In one experiment we did with healing, psychic healing, we saw structural change in the water, but that wouldn’t be enough to produce all of these different kinds of effects that we saw. And maybe we saw the structural change in water because we were using an instrument that was designed to look at structural change. So our expectations were already built into the experiment. In psi research this is called the experimenter psi effect, where we tend to get what we want to see, even under strictly controlled double-blind conditions.
Mitch: Why does any of this happen?
Dean: To begin to answer that would require a theory that would predict that whatever it is that the mind is doing is able to manipulate things into the direction that you want. This is the essence of magic, and it’s also a theory within parapsychology proposed years ago by Rex Stanford, which he dubbed a “psi-mediated instrumental response.” It says that through a combination of ESP and PK we have the capacity to perceive and manipulate our surroundings in a way that makes the world conform to our wishes. Experiments were done to test this idea, and it did gain some support.
Mitch: These different totems that we use, whether it be a knot or candle or for that matter a communion wafer or sigil, are these all, in a certain sense, target systems for intention?
Dean: Oh yeah—I hope to make that clear in my section on how to do these things, that these classical magical practices are, at the early stages, essentially crutches to help you both mentally and physically get into a certain way of thinking. And if it helps in the beginning to make a knot or to write words simply to focus the mind on the task at hand, even for a few minutes, well that’s what you need to do. All of the experienced magicians I’ve spoken to and read about all say the same thing: ultimately you don’t need any of that stuff. You don’t need a wand, you don’t need a crystal, because the method or the object isn’t where the action is.
Mitch: The rejectionist would say, it’s just suggestion. That is, when the rejectionist is not busy saying that suggestion doesn’t exist, but that is another story. In these situations sometimes the empiricism goes very far beyond suggestion, which doesn’t mean that suggestion is not also present. There may be a dozen different things going on. One of my wishes, and I think this appears in your book, is understanding that all these things are steppingstones to realizing the extraphysical dimension of human existence.
Dean: Right, they’re steppingstones. I mean it’s no different than learning how to play tennis. You don’t throw somebody into a competition on your first day.
Mitch: Now, that granted, what do you think about the prospect of certain objects, like a botanical object, having some intrinsic quality? In hoodoo, for example, John the Conqueror root, which is the most venerated botanical object in hoodoo, is said by the practitioner to have something in it. What do you think?
Dean: Right. How did people in the Amazon figure out how to make ayahuasca? It’s made out of plants that by themselves don’t do anything. So, can we talk to the plants? Can we gain information in other ways? Probably, especially if you live amongst them and aren’t distracted by TikTok. The same is true for virtually any other object. Some things will simply resonate with you better than others. Try all of the methods because some you’re going to resonate with, for who knows what reason. It doesn’t matter. And others will resonate less so. I have a wand sitting over there that has a crystal embedded in it, because it looks nice. And that aesthetic sense probably bolsters belief, which is of course one of the key elements.
Mitch: Let’s talk about the pseudo-skeptics. Are they dying out? Can we look forward to a day when we don’t have to spend so much time correcting these guys? Does their criticism even matter?
Dean: Well, in science, it matters a lot. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll get a constructive critic who can only help you in the long run. You may not like the criticism at the time, but it does help a lot. If you get a destructive critic or a denier, they are flies in the ointment. They’re useless because they’re distractors. They’re still important though because some of them have the voice of the media and push an agenda that makes it difficult to raise funding to support this type of research. I’ve spoken to some of these folks in private and they are very different in private than they are in public.
Mitch: Likewise. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?
Dean: Yeah, extraordinary. Which is annoying. In some cases—I can’t prove this, and I think I mentioned this in the book—but I think some of them may have directly or indirectly been paid or supported to promote debunking and disinformation.
Mitch: You don’t mention that in the book, but I have heard you privately say that. What do you think about that? What’s your sense of that nowadays?
Dean: Again, I can’t prove it, but I see signs historically that it is probably true. One of the most glaring examples is from 1985 when the U.S. Army was interested in “be all you can be.” That was their motto. They were doing this big study on enhancing human performance.
Mitch: Yes, I mention this in Occult America.
Dean: They were looking into acupuncture and hypnosis and parapsychology. And they came out with a report in 1985 that was written by the National Research Council, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences. This was a big whoop-de-doo to review these different areas, assess the quality of the evidence, and ask whether the Army should be looking into this or not. So they go through the whole exercise and then they have a big media circus where the authors of the report are present and they announce the results. They say that for parapsychology there is no evidence after 130 years that anything interesting is going on. So that’s what was reported widely, and that’s what people remember. But if you read the actual report, it’s another story altogether. Among other things, it says, well, there are some areas that the Army should probably be looking at. One of which is telepathy and the other is psychokinesis. But that’s not what they said to the media. And then later we find out, because I was president of the Parapsychological Association at the time, that they had hired Robert Rosenthal and Monica J. Harris from Harvard University who were experts in research methodology, to review the parapsychological literature to assess if it was any good. Their report stated that this kind of research is superior as compared to all of the other areas that they looked at. In other words, the parapsychological studies that the committee reviewed were stellar work. So they submitted their expert report but it didn’t show up in the final report. I asked the head of that committee, “What happened to the Rosenthal report?” He said, “We didn’t think it was useful to put in opposing views.” I said, “But isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? You’re supposed to hire people with different expertise so you get a balanced assessment.” Well, it wasn’t so balanced, was it? The irony here, and the reason I think there’s disinformation going on, is because while the Army was giving that media report, at the same time they were funding Star Gate [the psychic-spying program]. It wasn’t called Star Gate then. It had an earlier codename, Grill Flame. But nevertheless, in the midst of making this big public pronouncement, i.e., there’s nothing going on, they were actively funding secret psychic spying. So is that disinformation, intentional disinformation, to deflect public interest and hopefully adversary interest in what is actually going on? I think so.
Mitch: So, in other words, arguably it’s a psi-op to say, “Nothing to see here, folks,” in hopes that our adversaries will say, “Ah, well, they’re not dedicating resources to this. We don’t need to either.”
Dean: Not only adversaries, but even people within our own government. For some projects that are classified as secret, if you have the right clearance, it’s not that difficult to find out about it. Projects that are top secret are more difficult to find out because you must have a need to know. And at higher levels of clearance, like SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] information is really difficult to find out. And if it’s top secret plus, SCI and SAP [Special Access Program], that’s now a so-called black program. It’s almost impossible to find out what’s going on. That’s why they’re called black projects. There is literally a book that you have to read and sign. And if you haven’t been “read on” to the project and signed that book, you do not know that the project even exists. Portions of the Star Gate program were at that level. I remember looking at the book and thinking, “Who are these people?” I recognized one or two names but most of them I had no idea who they were. There may have been 100 or 150 people who knew about this government program. It was kept very, very quiet because it involved active military operations. And whenever you have that kind of thing going on, you are obligated to protect the people and the methods because you’re putting people’s lives at risk. So from that perspective it makes sense to deflect attention, not only from the outside, but even from within.
Mitch: I met and had a chance to speak with [remote viewer] Joe McMoneagle at the Monroe Institute this past July. It was a huge honor. I asked Joe, “Do you think this program is still going on in some way?” And he was adamant, “No, it’s not going on. They don’t have the science.” What do you think?
Dean: I think there probably is something under way. It may not be structured as a black project or any kind of official project, but I think there are consultants that are being paid to do what they can do. I’m almost certain of it. If I knew for sure, of course I couldn’t say, but since I don’t know I’m free to speculate. So my speculation is that a lot of people knew that this worked back in the Star Gate era. The research was slow and plodding and a big part of it was looking at people like Joe and trying to figure why he was so accurate, whereas the average Joe Six-Pack on the street wasn’t.
Mitch: Rejectionists sometimes say, why don’t these remote viewers go to Vegas and win big? To which I counter, how do you know that’s not happening? How do you know that’s not the guy who’s great at blackjack?
Dean: Right. I have met people who do that. That’s how they make their living. And they’re very quiet about it, obviously, otherwise they’d never be allowed into a casino ever again. But they know they can do it and they have the receipts to prove it.
Mitch: So maybe Joe Six-Pack on the street can do this.
Dean: So far it looks like people like Joe McMoneagle are pretty unusual. At least at that exceptional level. We couldn’t figure out exactly what the talent was, but it was certainly there. There are some clues though. One of the major clues is that Joe’s sister was also like him, and these kinds of abilities tend to run in families in the same way that other talents run in families. That suggests a genetic basis. One of our projects has been looking at the genetic basis of psychic ability. We call it the psi-genes project. We did a small-scale study where we found what looks like a genetic difference between psychics and non-psychics. We recently finished another study, which we haven’t published yet, which again suggests that there are some genetic components that look different in people who report lots of psi-type experiences as compared to those who don’t, which again suggests a genetic basis. Some people really don’t like to hear that being psychic might involve genetics. But then I just say, well, we have no problem with people being different in sports talent or musical talent. There’s no denying that people have different skills. And you see this even for something relatively simple like meditation. Some people can start to meditate and in three months be at the level of holy crap, right? Other people, like me, can meditate for fifty years and still not achieve a level of calm that I can reliably get in 20 minutes by taking say, five milligrams of Valium.
Mitch: I’m the same way. I have a question about magic that touches on that. You were referencing the story of doing a sigil. In the book you write about people doing sigils to find a $10 or $20 bill on the ground and it worked and it was very improbable to say the least. One of the problems I have with magic, and you might experience something similar, I don’t know, is that I’m very fixated in my thinking. Maybe it’s OCD. And you point out in the book, I think very rightly, that in order for magic to work, you must have an emotional connection. You must want the thing. Whenever I do a sigil or any other magical operation, I’m always thinking really big because that’s what I want. I don’t really care about the $10 bill and I can’t persuade myself to care about the $10 bill. I might be hauling a really big boulder up the magical hill, so to speak, even though we’re all supposed to be doing this with “effortless effort.” And the thing that I want, that I’m doing the sigil or the operation for, whatever it is, is usually very big and it means a lot to me. The $10 bill, the smaller thing, just doesn’t mean that much to me. So I have trouble with proofs sometimes. I will sometimes get things that are really far out. I had something like that happen this morning. But overall I have trouble with proofs.
How do you approach it when you do sigil work or candle work or whatever it may be? Are you asking for big things? Are you asking for small things? Do you let your emotions lead you?
Dean: I do almost all of my magic as part of my work. I’m an experimentalist. I test various kinds of psychic ability all the time. The magical part comes in through the intuition of what I think will work. But it’s also about getting a feeling for what’s going to work, right? Like Barbara McClintock said about her understanding of genetics in corn. She got a “feel for the organism.” After a while your intuition gets really good. So I get a feeling. If I have a dream about an experiment then I’m sure it’ll work. That’s why I dedicate a lot of time and effort to figuring out how I am going to demonstrate something that I’m interested in. For more mundane things, I’m perfectly happy to find a dollar bill just laying out there on the ground. It’s not so much proof as an inkling or hint in the same way that I could be given a motorcycle and some people will just say, “Okay, go.” Well, if I’m really lucky, I won’t crash in ten seconds. I need training wheels. I need little steps along the way to figure out, “How do I do this without harming myself or somebody else?” Beginning steps make sense in any kind of training. Eventually though I also learned, as I say in my story about spoon bending, that I know that if I get into a crazy kind of obsessional need state then big magic can happen. It’s also kind of scary because in that state it’s like you’re not fully in control. You’re not in an ordinary state of mind at that point. In the case of the spoon bending I felt on the edge of crazy, which is not pleasant. Not so much at that moment, because I was so deeply in it, but immediately afterwards I thought, “Holy smoke what was going on there?” I did something I previously thought was impossible.
Mitch: But you will do magical operations sometimes intentionally with the training wheels on just as a personal experiment perhaps?
Dean: Yeah, oh yeah.
Mitch: You told me a story that appears in The Miracle Club, which is you got really specific about something that you wanted. In this case you needed a grant to hire a very highly trained technician to help you analyze some neurological data. And your assistant, who had been a student of Osho, told you, “You’re thinking about this wrong. You’re thinking you want the grant whereas you don’t really want that. The grant is just a means to the thing you really want, which is this guy.” And then this guy shows up. It’s uncanny.
Dean: What I’m talking about is what I think is a proper way of thinking theoretically about what magic is doing. So, consciousness has two aspects. We can perceive and experience things—but consciousness also has agency. We can decide to do stuff. All of the divination work involves nonlocal perception. Enchantment is about nonlocal action. Both of those are operating all the time, as I mentioned about the theory of “psi-mediated instrumental response.” When I put the ESP and PK both in high gear because I want something, I will be scanning the universe forwards, backwards in time and pushing things around to accomplish what I want. Think of it as a gigantic probabilistic matrix. And the end of that matrix or maze is the thing that I want. I might think, well, the way to get through this route is to turn here or there, and that might work eventually; but it’s way more efficient to take the simplest path. I can consciously figure out that path if it’s extremely complex, but if part of me is looking everywhere all at once—like the movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once—then I can look at the whole maze and say, “Oh, here’s the straight shot through the maze. All I need to do is this.” This, by the way, is why quantum computers are so much more efficient than classical computers. They calculate based on the entire universe of possible solutions, rather than trying to work out each one separately.
Applying this to magic, that means first figuring out exactly what it is that you want. That’s where clarity of intention comes in. It’s not that you’re just grabbing at the end-goal. You’re instead creating worlds that will collide in just the right place at the right time by manipulating tiny little events along the way. I think that’s what’s going on with magic and it’s also what’s going on with every kind of psychic experiment that we do and every spontaneous psychic effect and every synchronicity. We all live in this metaphorical matrix or maze and we want certain things, and so some part of our unconscious is constantly probing and testing possibilities. If you’re probing possible futures, and someone else is probing in the same direction, and it’s something that both of you want, then it’s far more likely to happen.
Mitch: Someone once said to me, “Maybe all this positive thinking stuff is just telepathy.” We’re looking for people to meet us halfway, help us, or what have you.
Dean: I find that a pretty convincing proposition. You could recast this in terms of this maze or matrix idea. It’s the thing that pulls. Well, pulls and pushes at the same time because maybe to achieve the thing that you want, you just need to nudge an event, or thought, or chance outcome, whatever it may be, just a little bit. So rather than an outcome or decision going this way, it goes that way, because then in the future it’ll result in the outcome you want. Of course, it becomes really tricky the moment you start thinking about manipulating other people because that’s black magic, and at that point unless there’s receptivity and you both want the same thing, you’re asking for trouble. I think I mention in the book that if you want to seriously help somebody who’s feeling ill, you should get their permission first before you start healing them from a distance, because otherwise you might be overriding their free will. And that’s black magic.
Mitch: Let me go back for a moment to the pseudo-skeptics or rejectionists. Max Planck wrote in 1949: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” As alluded earlier, are these rejectionists, these pseudo-skeptics dying out? They seem frightened to venture beyond their cultural hub. I find that I am assembling a small but growing list of credentialed rejectionists who will not debate me. Michael Shermer won’t debate me, but Michael has the excuse, “Well, I’m better known than Horowitz. Why should I raise his fortunes?” Okay, fair enough. Steven Pinker at Harvard has criticized me by name but won’t debate a pleb like me. But others have fewer excuses. There is, for example, a University of Kansas anthropology professor who’s obsessively caviling on X—I’ve known him for fifteen years—and he runs away and won’t debate me, even though his employer pushes him as a media skeptic. A pseudo-skeptic who wrote a book recently about Charles Fort calls me out online over an article I am unsure he read—he’s got a podcast and I said, “Invite me on—it’s your microphone and your questions.” And he runs. I’m wondering if these guys are dying out, because they’re running, which may indicate rational self-interest but also low-confidence in their positions.
Dean: They have more to lose than they have to gain. It’s partially because you and me, to some extent, are on the side of the rest of society. The voices that they’re projecting are based on what amounts to a classical physical view of reality. But hardcore materialism is fading away. That means that if you’re on their side and you either know or you suspect that you’re defending a status quo that’s in the process of dissolving, well, why would you want to debate anybody on that?
Mitch: And they’ll lose. They’ll lose face. But we’ve both found that skeptics or professional skeptics are quite different in private, where they are more open.
Dean: Right, because they’ve crafted a life with this other persona. And it’s a good living. They’re doing what they think is right, maybe. So it’s hard to give it up.
Mitch: In the book you describe the episode in which theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler attempted to expel the Parapsychology Association from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Your description of the Wheeler episode is very good. You omit certain embarrassing details about Wheeler and the public apology that he grudgingly had to make to J.B. Rhine for accusing him of cheating. It’s interesting to me that Wheeler and perhaps David Deutsch and others will write things that could come straight out of a Dean Radin book, but as soon as somebody says that they violently deny it and shoot the messenger. Are these guys wearing blinders? Because they agree and then they can’t agree.
Dean: It’s purely sociological. If you want to be considered a serious, sober scientist, you cannot embrace any of the sensitive P-words [psi-words]. You just can’t. Because you’ll instantly lose credibility. Bob Jahn at Princeton [dean of the school of engineering and founder of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research] said they were doing anomalies research and yet everybody knew what they were really doing—but it didn’t make any difference. Bob used to say that they were two buildings away from a very famous physics department with a couple of Nobel laureates, but none of them ever dared to even visit the laboratory. They were very willing to loudly badmouth the whole thing, but not willing to walk 200 yards to personally check out their lab.
Mitch: It’s straight out of Plato.
Dean: Yeah. You can’t embrace the other ideas because it dilutes your value. The other thing though, and I thought this was maybe just Princeton but it seems to be academia in general, is that the silos of knowledge are so deep, even within the same department, that people can hardly even talk with each other. I was in the psychology department at Princeton, and there were people in cognitive psychology and social psychology and perceptual psychology and so on. Sometimes they’d show up for department talks, but if the talk wasn’t specifically within their silo they might fall asleep. I thought, well, maybe they’re just not interested. But then I learned that it wasn’t about feeling sleepy but because the other studies being presented “had no value.” That meant that outside one’s silo, what other people are talking about doesn’t have any value for you because everything that you and your colleagues are doing that’s considered “of value”—meaning the information supports your career or ego—only exists inside your silo. So, literally somebody in a different area of psychology in the same department is engaged in activities that have no value. I was shocked to learn that because my personal value has always been to learn everything from everywhere.
Mitch: It’s a grim facet of human nature. It’s straight out of George Orwell. It’s straight out of Plato. It’s straight out of Gurdjieff, who talks about buffers which block out contradictory impressions. I also recognize the extent to which a good deal of academia runs on fear. It’s like, “Oh my god, if I don’t get tenure, I’ll have to move out of Minneapolis. My kids are going to school. I can’t just pick up and take them to Shreveport, Louisiana.” That’s the fear that these guys live under. I feel for it. I don’t know about your experience, but I have found that when I talk about parapsychology or adjacent topics, I generally get along well with people in finance, in computing, in engineering, in hard sciences, and in medicine. Things more often go to hell with people in the social sciences, humanities, and legacy journalism.
Dean: Yes. By far among academia, the people who are most skeptical about these things are academic psychologists.
Mitch: I recognize that. But why?
Dean: Because a lot of academic psychology reveals how easy it is for us to fool ourselves. Like people who study visual illusions, you immediately can see that we are absolutely convinced that something is the way it is, but it objectively isn’t. So you learn that we are extremely adept at fooling ourselves, and then it becomes easy to dismiss experiences that people commonly report, like psi experiences, as illusions or delusions. What’s missing in that viewpoint is that the whole reason why experimental methods have been devised in psychological testing is to get beyond those illusions and delusions. That’s how the idea of a double-blind experiment came about. They were developed for studying psychic ability to get beyond chance, expectation, delusion, and so on. In fact, many of the rigorous methods that are commonly used in psychology for exploring subjective experiences were developed first for studying parapsychology.
Mitch: Like meta-analysis itself, of course.
Dean: Yeah. Meta-analysis. The use of statistics to evaluate data. This long list of innovations that are now standard. This is why we become obsessively strict in running experiments and try to think of every possible thing that can go wrong, and then you hand it over to your skeptical buddies, the constructive skeptics, who say, “Well, did you think of this and did you think of that?”
I’m in the midst now of doing an analysis using machine learning to analyze precognitive remote-viewing data. Starting in 2000, I wrote an online suite of tests that has collected 300 million trials from 300,000 people so far. We have huge amounts of data from that online test, including the remote-viewing data I just mentioned. I’m analyzing 500,000 remote-viewing trials where people entered words describing a future target. This is a perfect database to use for machine learning because it can perform a semantic comparison between what people wrote about a future target and an AI-generated text description of that future target. I’m doing everything I can possibly think of to make sure that the analysis is correct.
I’ve mentioned this to an online group that I’m on and people immediately come back and say, “Well did you think of this, and did you think of that?” And yeah, I thought of some but not all of those things, so it’s a very good example of constructive criticism. I’m taking advantage of this feedback by saying, “Well actually, I didn’t think of that. I better test that, too.” And so when you eventually write an article, you will be way in advance of the referees, because you’ve already answered their questions before they even thought of them.
Mitch: I think of the sorry state of affairs in which pseudo-skeptics and activists who support pseudo-skeptics have run riot over Wiki. And then the things that you have to deal with on a clinical and professional level. But, in actuality, they have made parapsychologists better. It’s a refining fire. It’s painful, because it’s misleading, but it’s refining. This may seem like flag-waving and I do not intend it that way, but this accounts, in part, for the finer intellects you find in parapsychology than in what remains of the media-skeptic apparatus.
Dean: Yep. It’s not always that comfortable, but yeah, we get much, much better collectively.
Mitch: Two questions regarding AI and parapsychology. First, do you think AI is starting to eclipse Wiki? And second, on both a cultural and also professional level, do you think that AI is going to abet parapsychology and the understanding of its data?
Dean: Well, first of all, a lot of AI has sucked up all of Wikipedia. That’s what it’s trained on. So it is just as bad as Wikipedia. You go to any kind of AI and start asking about what you think of parapsychology, its predictably blah blah blah, pseudoscience.
Mitch: But the ideal is that eventually AI will smarten up isn’t it?
Dean: If you know what questions to ask. And so I do this occasionally: I ask an AI chatbot, “What do you think of parapsychology, like is telepathy real?” I get all this garbage coming back and I’ll say, “Well, what about this paper?” The AI will then say: “Oh,” and it’ll come back with, “Oh, actually, yeah, that’s pretty good . . .” And then I add another one. “What about this paper? What about this meta-analysis?” Within five minutes, you can completely reverse its first answer, but you need to know already how to prompt it to get there. So after one of these sessions where I basically informed it to the point where the AI was able to give a genuinely informed assessment, I asked: “Are you going to remember any of this?” It replied, “no.” “But even if I come back and ask you the same question, you’re not going to remember any of this stuff?” “No—unless you tell me to remember it, and then maybe I will”—but it depends on the particular AI that you’re using.
Some of us are trying to fix this by creating specialized AIs where we suck in all of the literature from parapsychology. So then you could go to those AIs and when you ask questions you’ll get authoritative answers back. Of course, it includes the good skeptical responses too, which a lot of parapsychology is about anyway. Once that data becomes public the other AIs will start to suck that up too and it will become smarter and smarter over time. But we have to do the work to get that information first into the digital form and we’re doing it.
Mitch: Can I visit that AI model or is this just kind of a beta thing at this point?
Dean: We’re in the process of developing it. We’re making one at this point only on telepathy in response to The Telepathy Tapes because we know there’s a lot of people interested in it. To do this we’ve been loading hundreds of articles on telepathy as far back as we can get up to the present time. And then it will be available through a chatbot specialized for telepathy. It will know everything from the literature.
Mitch: I hope that like the Psi Encyclopedia it can get released to the public at some point because it’s so important and I would certainly do everything in my power to attract attention to it. Different question: I was enchanted with the section in the book where you tell the story of naming the various flora that were giving you all these sinus problems and things got better. What’s your understanding of that? What was going on?
Dean: That’s a kind of naming magic. The idea was this: when IONS had our campus up in the hills in the Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, we were surrounded by hundreds of acres of ragweed. I have seasonal allergies so I didn’t like to go on nature walks because I knew I either had to load up on antihistamines beforehand, and even then I knew I was going to suffer one way or the other. So, one day I was socially pressured that you have to go on this walk. I was kind of worried about it because I would be walking among plants that were going to attack me. Fortunately the naturalist leading us said, well, if you know what these plants are, if you know the formal and the popular name, the plant will be your friend. Just like if you’re walking through a dangerous city and you don’t know anybody, it’s threatening; but if you already knew everybody on the block, you’ll feel much more comfortable. It’s a very different kind of feeling when you’re streetwise in that sense.
So, I needed to become streetwise when walking through fields of plants that would normally attack me. On the walk I was told the official Latin name of one kind of weed or another, and then the common name. But I just called a plant a name like Bob. This is not ragweed. This is Bob, your friend Bob. And so I did that for the whole walk and then I returned to my office. I was astonished because I had no allergy symptoms, at all.
This is similar to classical word magic. A word or name provides power over the object associated with the word. In this case it wasn’t so much that I was gaining power over a particular plant, but more that I was making friends with it. I was now in a relationship whereas before I was shielding against it, which takes a lot of energy. But in this case it was just, “Oh, there’s Bob and there’s Jimmy over there and here’s Freda.” It completely changed how I was reacting to walking through things that otherwise I would have had a serious problem with. And I wondered about broadening the application of that method.
Mitch: So, for example, if I have a fixation or some adversity, could I try to name that fixation or name that adversity in some way that puts me on friendly terms with it?
Dean: Yeah. I mean people have said in healing research that if you imagine that your body is attacking you, like an organ or something, and then you kind of reverse that and you say, “Well, I’m going to talk to the individual cells in this case. So here’s Betty and there’s Bobby and Jimmy—what are you guys doing? What’s going on?” It’s a mental shift and in some cases it makes a significant difference in terms of how you’re reacting because now it’s not your body attacking you. It’s that you had a disagreement with Betty and asked, “Well, what’s the deal? What’s going on?”
Mitch: Is it magical?
Dean: Well, I don’t know. It’s probably related to the placebo response, but that’s still somewhat magical. In some respects, you can reconceive anything in the physical world in mental terms. It’s magical in that sense. Your relationship to the rest of the world is already a kind of mental illusion, because psi reminds us that we aren’t as separate or as isolated as we think. It’s really hard for us to imagine this because we’re constantly being reminded by our bodies that we’re only here and now. But that’s not all that’s going on. We’re also connected with everything else. We’re there and then too.
Mitch: I used to argue that AI could not really be conscious because parapsychology has demonstrated, as have other fields like neuroplasticity, that the mind has psychokinetic effects. Maybe we could use different names but there is mind over matter. There is nonlocal intelligence and quite obviously nonlocal conveyance of information between organic beings. I could argue for that point of view but I received a different point of view recently when I was interviewing Dr. Tony Nader, a neuroscientist who’s the successor to the Maharishi. I asked him do you think AI can be conscious and he said absolutely, because his point of view is consciousness is all there is. It’s everywhere and in everything. He has a panpsychist point of view that says, yes it’s conscious; it may not yet be sentient but it will become sentient and it’s already conscious and that should give us some cause for fear because we are a badly behaved species and it could get pissed off. What do you think about all that?
Dean: Today’s AI is almost certainly not conscious. Today’s versions of AI, regardless of whether they can simulate being aware or not, are probably not sentient. They do not have self-awareness. They don’t have any awareness at all, because they are classical machines. Your PC is a classical computing machine. It does what it does and there’s no awareness internally of what’s going on. Someday, when we start having quantum computers, that will be a very different issue and the difference then is that the machine itself will have nonlocal properties. Then we can make a case because of quantum biology—the reason we have psi abilities, including consciousness, psychical, magical, all those abilities, is because of the nonlocal nature of it. More and more evidence is suggesting that aspects of the brain are operating at a quantum scale. That means from a quantum perspective, most of your brain is inside your head, but not all of it. There are parts of it that are scattered everywhere. And so at this point as a metaphor you can say part of us is literally spread out through the entire universe like a wave, and part of us is more localized like a particle in or around you. Most of the time we’re paying attention to the here and now, but under the right circumstances you can pay attention to there and then. That’s where psychical and mystical and magical stuff happens. And so that is a materialistic perspective, but with very different kinds of matter than was imagined in classical physics. The material that we’re talking about now is radically different. As science continues to march on, it’s moving from a billiard-ball universe into probabilistic and informational and nonlocal field-like models. And at that point, traditional notions of idealism, or of panpsychism, will be identical to our understanding of what matter means. So materialism may well transition very nicely into panpsychism and beyond because they will be the same. That’s what I expect will happen. From that perspective then, yes even today’s computers have some sort of sentience, because everything at every scale is already conscious. But whether we can rigorously detect that today’s AIs are conscious is another matter. We still have trouble detecting for sure if another person is conscious.
Mitch: And could a constructive skeptic come to you and say, “Look, Dean, of course there’s quantum effects in the brain. There’s quantum effects in everything. There’s quantum effects in our biological systems, but that doesn’t imply nonlocality.”
Dean: I would say that anytime you have a quantum system, there is nonlocality. If you think of the quantum system in the brain like a physics experiment where the quantum coherence is very fragile and lasts for very short periods of time, that may be true in an optical physics experiment. But it’s not true in an open, dynamic system. In such a system quantum coherence can be continuously recreated. And so a classicist in the quantum sense will say no, quantum coherence is being decohered at femtosecond or faster levels. But there’s also something called recoherence. So, sure, decoherence is happening, but that doesn’t mean the quantumness disappears, because it’s also being dynamically recohered. And so a case can be made that the nonlocal, meaning quantum, part of us is continuously sustained, and I’d even speculate that the degree of nonlocalness may be related to one’s state of consciousness. If you take a psychedelic or dream, the nonlocal part of us spreads out because your brain is not constraining it as much as it does during the ordinary waking state, and “you” become more wavelike. It’s during these altered, non-ordinary states, where people start reporting all of these psychic things. And it’s why a magician will want to go into the state of gnosis, which is exactly the same thing as what a yogi would call samadhi, or I might say is noetic.
Mitch: I was pretty excited by the statement that came out of Google late last year about its quantum-computing prototype Willow solving that 10-septillion-year math problem in under five minutes. I don’t know how much the engineers were engaging in hype or PR, but it seemed exciting to me. I found it thrilling to be frank. What was your response to it?
Dean: Everything on the internet is clickbait. That’s rule number one.
Mitch: So, was it pushed?
Dean: Yes. Marketing got a hold of it.
Mitch: But is it also true?
Dean: If it was a quantum process being used for computing, then yeah, it’s practically quasi-infinitely faster than a classical computer.
Mitch: When I read the Google statement, I thought to myself, okay, you want a flying saucer to land on the White House lawn? Well, it just landed. These guys just provided experimental evidence for the multiverse. Kind of a big deal.
Dean: Well, the multiverse part of it was projection. It’s a speculation. There is actually no direct evidence for a multiverse. It’s a popular theory, but there’s no way yet to clearly test if that idea is true.
Mitch: I guess you could say it provided evidence in favor of interdimensionality. Would that be a fair statement?
Dean: Maybe. I don’t know.
Mitch: When I use these statements like multiverse, I have to remind myself they’re just conceptual. They’re just metaphorical.
Dean: Right, it’s a metaphor. And very much in the same way that in mathematics we can talk about multiple dimensions. In math it’s easy to do that. I mentioned before about doing semantic analyses of remote viewing data using a neural network. Well, semantic analysis involves testing how well one set of words, like what a remote-viewer might say when she imagines a future target image, matches another set, like a judge’s word description of that future target. To do this, you start by importing every word from Wikipedia and other large databases of written text, and then you record for each word how often it shows up in relation to other words. What are the words two words away, three away, and so on? What’s the context in which the word is showing up? You then create a long mathematical vector based on these kinds of questions that provides a very rich description of what that particular word means in lots of different contexts. The vectors I’m using to analyze the words used in the remote-viewing trials were trained on twelve billion words, resulting in each of one million different words being represented on 300 dimensions. So now for each word in a sentence you have a 300-dimensional vector that captures its meaning, and from that abstract mathematical construct you can now create and combine the words into sentences that provide a very effective way to compare one set of descriptions to another set of descriptions.
Mitch: Apropos of that and the Willow statement, granting that everything is clickbait or marketing propaganda that comes out of Google, I still felt very excited by it because the claim, if it’s correct, is suggestive. The solution is, conventionally speaking, impossible. And yet the solution occurs within a very short period. So it must have been somewhere. It must have been plucked from somewhere. It seems very exciting to me.
Dean: The reason a quantum computer is so fast is because with classical computing methods you have to examine each possible answer, which even using parallel computing hardware can take a very long time. With quantum computing, because the “answer” you’re looking for exists as a superposition of all possible states, you can test all of those possible answers at once. So what might otherwise take longer than the lifetime of the known universe to come to a solution, can be done in a snap. That’s why there’s so much effort going into developing quantum computers. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the solution is taken from another dimension or universe, but realistically we don’t really know what a superposition is. It is well-defined mathematically, but in a practical sense we make up terms like multiverse because we don’t know what else to call it.
Mitch: Do you believe that the implication of the many-worlds interpretation points towards the coexistence of infinite dimensions of events?
Dean: It might, except I don’t know how to think about infinity without blowing a few gaskets, right? In mathematics you can specialize in the study of infinities, but what do such ideas even mean in an everyday sense? How do I translate the mathematical sense of infinity into something that makes any sense to me? I don’t know. As a metaphor it’s like the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. But even that metaphor starts to break your brain, because when we watch that movie we’re watching it in one instance. The actual “everything” can’t be visualized. The other thing about the multi-world idea that is difficult to understand is that it proposes that every decision by every particle in the universe spawns off an entirely new universe. So now we have an exploding infinity of infinities. Well, those are nice words, but try to translate that beyond mathematics without getting a brain ache.
Mitch: Speaking of meaning, what do you think is going on in the cognitive retrocausality experiments that Daryl Bem did? What’s at work?
Dean: Retrocausal effects are already demonstrated and known to exist because of the way the equations of quantum mechanics work and because of things like the delayed-choice experiment. We know that the present, at least at the micro scale, is influenced by both the past and the future. And within parapsychology there have been many studies looking at whether you can influence how something evolved from the past to the present. Those studies suggest that you can’t change the past. But you can influence it as it was unfolding in its own time up to the present. And because the present is always moving along, it means you can sort of pull the past towards you.
Mitch: Here’s a question about application. Let’s say you’re taking an exam and you want to do your best on the exam. You read about the Bem experiments and you decide: I’m gonna study. I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna take the exam. Then I’m gonna keep studying—and I’m confident that that’s going to make a positive difference. That’s a reasonable supposition. Wouldn’t you agree?
Dean: Yes. And that was Daryl’s idea and the first ninety experiments with the meta-analysis showed that it was a very viable idea. It was repeatable. Interestingly, after that a couple of large-scale multi-site replications did not work, which is really interesting. Historically within psi research, small-scale experiments work even when rigorously done, whereas large scale, very public experiments usually don’t.
Mitch: Why?
Dean: My guess is that a public large-scale experiment is messy and noisy from an intentional perspective. If we adopt the idea that somehow the mind is wrapped into the way reality works, then when we’re doing a PK-type of experiment in the lab, if lots of people know about the experiment, then it’s like we’re using a dirty test tube. If we’re studying the role of intention on some sort of physical system, it’s not a good idea to have lots of minds—and intentions—in the mix. It adds substantial noise. I think the same thing is happening on these large public experiments.
Mitch: What is something I haven’t asked that we should cover?
Dean: If you haven’t yet read or run across Dan Brown’s latest book, The Secret of Secrets, it’s all about nonlocal consciousness. I talked to Dan about this and he very kindly mentions the Institute of Noetic Sciences many times in the book. The lead character is a noetic scientist. That character repeats a lot of the things that I usually mention in a talk. The book does a credible job. It will introduce the idea of noetic sciences to a lot of people who otherwise may not know anything about it. I would say most of what he says is correct. He’s referring to experiments, mentions Daryl Bem, mentions me, mentions other people. So, strangely, we are now characters in a fictional story. Dan does that intentionally because he adds a lot of real history in these thriller books. It’s a long book, something like 600 pages, but it’s a fast read. If you know the literature you’ll see one or two things that are not quite right, but on the whole it’s pretty accurate.
Mitch: Alan Moore insists that his characters take on real life. So maybe Dean, you emerged from the pages of Dan Brown, and you have a past, present, and future, because it’s all instantaneous.
Dean: Yes. I prepared a talk I’m going to give at Harvard Medical School in October [2025]. Then The Secret of Secrets was published, as I’m reading it I see that the noetic scientist in the novel is giving a talk which is almost identical to what I was planning to say. Almost word for word. It’s kind of freakish to just finish writing a talk and then reading what a fictional character says, and thinking, “Holy crap, I just wrote that.” So, who’s writing who?
Mitch: Or maybe Dan Brown emerged from your psyche. We’re all profoundly convinced that Dan has been writing novels for decades, but maybe that’s just a selection that we’ve all engaged in because he emerged from your psyche.
Dean: Or a corner of the multiverse.
This is so good!
Excellent! Now I know my next must read! Thank you Mitch and Dean 🖤🖤