"Science and the taboo of psi" with Dean Radin

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Google Tech Talks
January, 16 2008

ABSTRACT

Do telepathy, clairvoyance and other "psi" abilities exist? The majority of the general population believes that they do, and yet fewer than one percent of mainstream academic institutions have any faculty known for their interest in these frequently reported experiences. Why is a topic of enduring and widespread interest met with such resounding silence in academia? The answer is not due to a lack of scientific evidence, or even to a lack of scientific interest, but rather involves a taboo. I will discuss the nature of this taboo, some of the empirical evidence and critical responses, and speculate on the implications.

Speaker: Dean Radin
Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and four-time former President of the Parapsychological Association. He holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs and GTE Labs, mainly on human factors of advanced telecommunications products and services, and held appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and Boundary Institute. At these facilities he was engaged in basic research on exceptional human capacities, principally psi phenomena.

Channel: People & Blogs
Uploaded: January 18, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Author: googletechtalks

Length: 01:34:57
Rating: 4.43
Views: 27368

Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education

Video Comments:
BeingSomeoneHuman (October 7, 2008 at 7:31 am)
What is the controversy on pounds per square inch?
rabarbersnopp (September 22, 2008 at 6:19 am)
I don't have an explanation for psi but I have to say it's incredibly arrogant to simply dismiss it just because you can't explain it. Do we really know everything about how the world works today?

If a 15th century physicist came up with an experiment to show effects of electricity his colleagues would probably laugh at him. Perhaps they didn't know everything about how our world works?
MetaphysicsAddict (September 22, 2008 at 10:13 am)
Yes indeed! we don't know how gravity works, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss the evidence for gravity!
alanstarkie2001 (October 4, 2008 at 12:30 am)
I thought we did know how gravity works, mass & distortion of space-time etc as demonstrated by gravitational lensing.
slyburner (October 4, 2008 at 1:28 am)
We have a very vague picture of how it works, not much of an idea of what it is. Look up 'quantum gravity', it's under very poor theoretical control in physics.
slyburner (September 22, 2008 at 5:37 pm)
Well said. The point is that for controversial subjects, as soon as we get an explanation, things get accepted but in the meantime, the evidence gets discarded. Funny old world, isn't it?
MetaphysicsAddict (September 21, 2008 at 7:33 am)
PS. I asked you, "Which non-ganzfeld studies have you extensively examined for yourself?" - to which you replied with: "You seem to place credibility with sheldrake"

Wait, what? While I do indeed find Sheldrake's work ot be *generally* solid, he is just one author out of many doing non-ganzfeld research. Others include (but are definitely not limited to) Liebert and Radin himself. Seriously, did you not watch this whole video? In this very video Radin mentions many non-ganzfeld researchers.
slyburner (September 21, 2008 at 6:29 pm)
Not to mention Bierman and Hameroff working on retro-PK which could account for a vast amount of these phenomena. To top it all, presentiment was also discovered in the original data of the gambling studies by Antonio Damasio, the results of which also demonstrate intuitive intelligence. There is much more research going on here but Ganzfeld has the best results.
MetaphysicsAddict (September 23, 2008 at 8:20 am)
true!
MetaphysicsAddict (September 21, 2008 at 7:28 am)
That's false. Actually, Jaytee did *not* go to the window every 5 minutes, but instead went to there much more frequently when the onwer was coming home than when she was not. Further, Wiseman reproduced the very same finding and his data are similar to Sheldrake's when put on a graph, which he recently admitted. I'm sending you a link via PM.Also see "Commentary on a paper by Wiseman, Smith and Milton on the 'psychic pet' phenomenon", in Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 63, 306-311