This presentation describes a long-term research project to personally “access the exceptional and experience the extraordinary” using a random event generator (REG). The REG outputs a stream of random one and zero bits, and the goal is to use the mind to produce a skewed distribution of bits coming out of the device (e.g. more ones than zeros). The project was a single study design with me as both subject and experimenter. The objectives were 1) to succeed in affecting the output of the device using PK to a highly significant level, and in the process 2) begin to understand how the effect might work.
While engaged in the REG process, which took over 10 years, I logged on the order of 10,000 hours of “training time” and I wrote over 2200 pages of notes cataloging experiences and mental states. The project focused on states of mind that were correlated with moments of greater REG output success, as well as those correlated with greater negative results. The data set included the four formal studies which taken together included over 5.5 million trials. The final Z-score of the combined studies was 4.86, or odds of 1.7 million to one of being chance. As in previous REG studies, however, this significance was achieved with many trials giving a small absolute percentage deviation from the chance expectation of 50%.
The presentation will explain some of the experiences that involve very clear and distinct states of mind in relation to REG output. It puts forward a general model of consciousness, which accounts for “beginners luck” and the decline effect, as well as a theory-based analysis of why the process seems be easy at certain times and hard at others. An argument is put forward that in the future anomalies research should be focused on how the structure of the mind seeks to minimize direct outside influence rather than accentuate it. The mind creates a barrier or membrane of “meaning” to keep itself from diffusion into a collective space. The model proposed is nominally called the “associative web model of mind” and has elements of both Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory and Wheeler’s concept of meaning in the quantum measurement process.
Herb Mertz
Psyleron, Inc.,
Princeton, NJ, USA
Recorded at the Society for Scientific Exploration Conference in Boulder, Colorado 2016.
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Published on November 22, 2018
