Arnaud Delorme, Helané Wahbeh, Dean Radin

Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma CA, USA; SCCN, INC, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA; Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA

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Introduction: The first known use of computer networks to conduct psi experiments was in 1972 by Jacques Vallee, an internet pioneer who conducted a remote viewing study using a forerunner of the Internet (the ARPAnet). In 1977, Dean Radin used the PLATO computer-based education network at the University of Illinois to provide public-access precognition tests. Some twenty years later, other public-access web-based psi experiments were reported. Starting in 2000, Radin developed and launched a suite of web-based psi experiments dubbed “GotPsi.” By 2020, over 250 million individual trials were collected from more than 300,000 people around the world, yielding significant results for some of the tests. The GotPsi website and the other online experiments could have potentially been used to identify psi talents. However, they were not designed for that purpose, so contact information was not systematically collected, making it impossible to contact individuals who appeared to be performing well. The current project used modern online testing techniques to identify people with potential psi talent and to evaluate predictor variables associated with such individuals. Methods: The tasks described involve a variety of experimental setups aimed at testing participants’ ability to predict or influence future events through tasks ranging from photo and card guessing to location identification and interacting with a digital environment to influence outcomes. Task 1 and Task 2 explore “remote viewing” abilities, with Task 1 requiring participants to guess which of five images will be shown next and Task 2 involving more complex predictions about unseen images using shapes, descriptors, and keywords. Tasks 3, 4, and 5 are variations of card-guessing, focusing on the ability to predict the appearance of specific cards or images. Tasks 6 through 8 explore different phenomena: Task 6 tests the ability to guess a randomly selected location, Task 7 simulates a lottery to assess prediction accuracy, and Task 8 examines the potential for psychokinetic influence over digital bubble movement. We tested the following predictors of psi performance: gender, meditation status, paranormal belief and experience, personality, and self-transcendence. The study had five specific aims: 1) develop and integrate various psi tasks into a single online platform; 2) develop methods to analyze the data to identify talented individuals among a large sample of volunteers; 3) select 50 of the top-performing individuals; 4) assess if above-chance performance was consistent in test-retest scores of talents; and 5) evaluate potential personality predictors of high performance. Results: In phase 1, we recruited 1014 participants over ten months. We tested again 50 of the best phase-1-participants in phase 2. The performance of two of the 8 tasks (remote viewing and psychokinetic) was above chance expectations in phase 2. However, it fell below the significance threshold after we corrected for the fact that multiple tasks were tested. Considering all the tasks and participants, we observed that personality conscientiousness was negatively correlated with increased performance, and agreeableness positively correlated with higher performance. Discussion: This study marks a significant advancement in parapsychology through its innovative use of an online platform for large-scale participant data collection and a novel method to identify individuals with high initial psi task performance despite a potential methodology limitation of selection bias. The research suggests the need for larger sample sizes for a more comprehensive understanding of psychic phenomena, as the current sample of 1014 may not sufficiently represent the estimated prevalence of psychic talents in the general population, highlighting the importance of study replication with more participants for enhanced statistical power and generalizability.

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Arnaud Delorme is a researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and SCCN at UC San Diego, focusing on consciousness, meditation, and psi phenomena through large-scale online experiments.

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The Parapsychological Association is an international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of psi (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition. The primary objective of the PA is to achieve a scientific understanding of these experiences.

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Published on February 20, 2026