Psi@Home: A Platform for Collaborative Psi Research

Peter A. Bancel

Institut Métapsychique International

Paris, France

Skepticism towards psi research is reinforced by two persistent obstacles within parapsychology: the difficulty to replicate results and the lack of convincing theoretical models. The issue of replicability clearly has a direct impact on research, and it is arguably the more critical issue: to advance, theory needs experimental input. When psi effects are difficult to produce and replicability is poor, this input can be blocked.

The Psi@Home program seeks to ameliorate the replicability problem by building a new experimental paradigm for parapsychology. In our view, for a psi protocol to be fully successful and counter unreasonable skepticism, it must do more than produce consistent results. Protocols must also be replicable from a practical standpoint. But has parapsychology really produced an adequately practical protocol in this sense? A case in point is the auto-Ganzfeld. A well-powered replication (with effect size ~ 0.1) requires over 500 Ganzfeld sessions, each taking several hours to set up and run. Such an undertaking would need several years to accomplish and require considerable prior experience on the part of the researchers. This sets an overly high bar for outside researchers to enter the field. Thus, practical protocols are required so that scientists both within and outside of parapsychology can undertake reliable experiments without such onerous overhead.

The Psi@Home research program aims to develop a new experimental paradigm, rather than a particular protocol. We seek an approach that can be adapted to the many experimental questions that need to be addressed. The paradigm thus must be flexible enough to allow for a wide range of experiments. Experiments must also be realizable by outside researchers. This means that studies need to be both practical, given typical resources, and also achievable for scientists new to the field. We term this aspect protocol transferability, and it is a crucial element of our program.

The Psi@Home paradigm takes a modular approach, designing protocols that aim to be reliable, flexible, and transferable. To achieve this, we focus on three basic protocol elements and innovate on each: the psi subjects, the psi task, and the experimenter’s role.

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Peter Bancel holds a PhD in experimental physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Following a post-doc at IBM Research, he moved to France to work with the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris and Nantes. His research interests have included quasicrystals, phase transitions in two-dimensional systems and protein crystal growth. Peter began working in psi research shortly after the US terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he joined a small group looking at data from the Global Consciousness Project. He has published work on state-induction approaches to improving psi effect sizes, theoretical assessments of meta-analyses in psi databases and experiments with meditator cohorts on precognition. Peter works at the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris, France.

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Program chaired by Jacob W. Glazier. Download the Abstracts at https://parapsych.org/uploaded_files/pdfs/00/00/00/01/26/2023_pa_abstracts_of_presented_papers.pdf

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Published on January 15, 2025