so this is about a project that we call mind to mind and essentially it's a way of studying this notion of the illusion of Separation one way to get into this topic is by asking well what is reality reality is what I perceive isn't it well no so here's one example so this looks like uh three perfectly lovely ladies but let's turn this picture upside down and something looks wrong well what looks wrong is that their eyes and mouths are upside down and so when we go back to the original picture like this we can't
see that it's upside down because our brains are so used to looking at faces that it it hides that from us so again I'll turn it again and there you go so this is just one of thousands of illusions that show that our perceptions of real are not always what it actually is here's another example choose one of these playing cards anyone doesn't matter now focus on that card that you chose and I've just taken it away so how could I do that because there's lots of people on the call and maybe you all chose
different cards but I took them away well how did I do that well here's the answer so on the top is the original six cards and on the bottom was the one where I supposedly took your card away well they're all different than the ones on the top so yet another illusion that's one that's used by magicians where if you're focusing on a card one of the six on the top you're not paying attention to the other ones and that's why the trick works so all of this means that subjective and objective realities aren't the
same thing and what we see is what we expect to see and what we see is a very thin slice of reality so so then what is real reality well we have a clue from physics on the right side there is the classical world and the left side is the Quantum world and so in the classical world or everyday world we have terms like locality causality fixed reality and SpaceTime these are are what a philosopher would call naive reality it's what we think we're seeing we go deeper into the world of quantum mechanics we find
that this notion of separation that we feel actually there is no separation so instead of locality we have non-locality and we have a causality we have a participatory reality and it's beyond SpaceTime so there are other hints about what real reality is and so here I'm plotting uh the impact of an experience and the frequency of that experience so down here we have things that range from the mundane to the profound and from the common into the rare so common mundane things people get gut feelings about events and then there's the feeling of being stared
at in telephone telepathy distant knowing distant healing premonitions creative Insight religious epiphanies mystical Union so who has these things well down in the bottom left everyone reports these kinds of experiences uh people who are a little bit higher up on this scale we might call healers or in Geniuses prodigies Saints and yogis so we can think of this as a spectrum the extended capacities of the Mind well there's something peculiar about this thing because these phenomena only seem strange for one reason they suggest that the Mind transcends time and space every day time and space
the other thing that's strange is up in the upper right here these are very rare there aren't very many Geniuses and Saints out there it's beyond the reach of science but it's well accepted that such people exist whereas down here where lots and lots of people report these experiences they're very common they're easy to study but they're considered highly controversal so now we must leave our senses now we're actually leaving the ordinary senses so the kinds of of uh experiences then that we can study and do study at ions can be cast into these terms
there's terms like telepathy and psychokinesis and Clairvoyance and precognition all of these are commonly reported these are the kinds of things that we can study in the lab so today we're only going to look at telepathy so in the most popular conscious form of telepathy experiment that has been done for the last 50 years or so it's called the goneld method and it's a German word that means whole field and so you have a a person put into this gelt state we'll call them the receiver and so you have a a red light shine on
them then you take a pingpong ball cut in half and you put one half over each eye so all they can see with their eyes open is pink and then you put headphones on them that are playing white noise so they can't see anything they can't hear anything but they're not sleeping either they're still awake and now have a person playing the role of a sender a telepathic sender who looks at a randomly selected Target and is going to try to inject the perception of that Target into the thoughts of the other person so rather
than sending something what appears to be happening more in these experiments is the correlation that is what is arising in the sender's mind seems to arise in the receiver's mind and that that is better than a transmission model because we don't see signals here we see correlations so in another experiment the sender might see an elephant and the receiver in the goneld state is asked to speak aloud anything that comes to mind and so maybe they say something about an animal maybe something about it's gray so then we take the person out of the goneld
state uh there were four Images one of which was sent by the sender and we play back anything that the receiver said so they can be reminded of of their Impressions so you can see at a glance here that the chance of this of the receiver being correct is one and four so here we have Gail who's our guest today uh being set up for the geld experiment and these are the pingpong balls over her eyes and this is where the experiment was done she is Gils inside our 2,000 lb electromagnetically shielded chamber which had
when when we had the earthrise campus in in Northern California and these were the four targets that were randomly selected one of which was going to be sent by another person elsewhere in the building and so this is what Gail said something has a rough texture tall looking up high like in an art gallery or in a museum a aedy kind of image of a tall Rock monolithic images of Mount Rushmore and Half Dome like a big Stone and since gay is on the call today you can ask her later what it actually felt like
in from the inside to get those Impressions because she had no idea what the image was that was being sent but if you're now the judge in this experiment and you know that one of those four pictures was the actual Target which one would you select well it turns out that this was the target this is what was being sent which matches the best among all of of the other four pictures and in fact that's the one that Gail selected so now skeptic dog says yeah but are these telepathy experiments independently repeatable which is what's
necessary in science to gain confidence that it's a real thing so when you look at the experimental investigations of telepathy using this kind of method and and and precursor methods too from about the 1920s until today lots of places these happen to be ones at universities but also they've been done at private institutes around the world if you look at the 122 experiments that have been published in 20 different Labs there's 4,674 sessions like the one that I demonstrated from what Gail did so there's over 4,000 sessions like that and when you look at each
of the 122 experiments and you look at the hit rate well line in Middle is Chance the dashed line but these dots are the actual hit rates and the error bars are the one standard error bars so we can take the same data since all of the experiments were based on the same idea and just make a cumulative graph as though it's just one huge long experiment involving all 4,000 accessions and that's what you get this is a cumulative hit rate over 4,600 sessions this has been reported repeatedly in the academic psychology literature and one
of the main uh Publications in Psychology starting in 1994 I think the last was in 2018 and so there's there's the overall result so the overall result as as you can see is uh about 30 31% and the odds against chance of being there rather than chance is 300 trillion quadrillion to one or 10 the minus 30th so with odds of of overall results of 300 trillion quadrillion to one you can say this if telepathy doesn't exist we would need to run this experiment 300 trillion quadrillion times to get a result as good as or
better than what we've obser we've observed in these studies and that would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to get these results by chance so it's pretty likely that what we're seeing in these studies are not chance it is something very close to the kinds of telepathic experiences that people report uh and one thing I didn't go through here is alternative explanations well they could take the case of Gail maybe Gail got some kind of sensory leakage about the target even though she couldn't have because she was inside the the shielded room when
the experiment was taking place or maybe there were mistakes in recording or randomization and so on all of these kinds of things have been suggested over the years the one that was difficult to answer until recently was skeptical replication the Skeptics doing the same study get the same result well it turns out that they do so here's two professors of psychology who did the same experiment and they reported after eight studies we had overall statistically significant hit rate of 32% where you'd expect 25% which they then said is precariously close to demonstrating humans do have
psychic powers and they said that because they said in the article they didn't believe in any kind of ESP at all including telepathy so they were to that credit they reported the results that they got but then they said I don't know maybe it doesn't really exist after all uh prominent Skeptics of of uh psychic effects also now admit based on these metaanalyses that something interesting is going on and so Richard wisman said I think that these studies do meet the usual standards for a normal claim but telepathy is not a normal claim it it
is it's challenging to the U scientific worldview so he wasn't quite sure he was willing to say that telepathy exists but something interesting is happening that's pretty big for a skeptic just to admit even looking at Major scientific U journals like nature considered one of the top five or so journals in in the world uh articles you find like this this is all way back in 2005 that the only reality is minds and mind and observations physicist shy from the truth because the truth is so alien to Everyday physics the universe is entirely mental and
here in Scientific American from 2018 uh coming to grips with the implications of quantum mechanics and you look at the the article and the the main conclusion is a primary role for mind in nature so these experim are are doing what Alice is is doing here and pulling back the curtain and we're Beginning to Look At The Matrix the informational nature of of reality and perhaps learning something new about it
