Members frequently ask, how can they get more involved in IONS research? One way is through a series of online experiments that explore the potential psi abilities of those who participate. By visiting IONS' website, people can quickly learn something about the field of psi research, be updated on recent developments in the field, and participate directly in real psi experiments.

In September 2000, IONS' senior scientist Dean Radin first launched a series of psi experiments accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web. These tests were sponsored by the Boundary Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank interested in the physics of consciousness.

The three tests include a five-choice ESP card-guessing task, an experiment where a participant is asked to identify a hidden location within a four-inch square, and a test in which the participant tries to describe an image he or she will see later. All were designed as precognition tests: The hidden "targets" are randomly generated by the computer after the participant indicates his or her choice. It is conceivable that some of the successful results in these tests could reflect psychokinesis, or mind-over-matter effects, but this is considered unlikely, since computers usually crash if they are externally influenced by anything resembling energy or force (assuming that mind operates by exchanges of energy).

All participants are asked to fill out a questionnaire, and depending on the answers to those questions, one or two additional questionnaires are presented-one on creativity and the other on remote-viewing experiences. Each test gives the user immediate performance feedback, and a daily, as well as longer-term, "Halls of Fame" list of everyone's performance.

Previous online psi experiments, conducted in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Nevada, had together collected about 60,000 trials. Dean Radin's first three tests took into account what was learned in the earlier experiments, and had a more ambitious expectation of attracting perhaps a thousand trials per day, or as many as 400,000 trials over the course of a year.

To everyone's astonishment, at its one-year anniversary these tests attracted more than 32,000 people from 93 countries, who together contributed 4.8 million trials. The tests continued to run without interruption 24 hours per day, every day (and continue to do so), with so far just one exception. After these tests were mentioned on a popular radio show, the web server was shut down for two days because too many people were trying to access the tests at once.

To put this 4.8 million-trial database into perspective, consider that it took the father of parapsychology, J. B. Rhine, and scores of his colleagues worldwide, more than 60 years to collect 3.5 million ESP card test trials. Because of the explosive growth of the Internet and its incredible connectivity, what used to take a lifetime of laborious work in the laboratory can now be accomplished in less than a year. To make this even more astonishing, based on the increasing daily use of these online tests, we can now project that one year from now we will collect an additional seven million trials.

Of course, having lots of trials does not guarantee that interesting results will be found. And laboratory psi tests differ from online experiments in some important ways. Web-based tests lack personal contact with an investigator, and they can provide only very simple tasks that may not match how psi abilities manifest in people's ordinary lives. Furthermore, from the experimenter's perspective, we cannot tell whether a given trial is contributed out of pure curiosity, or is frivolous, or is the result of a serious effort. It is also difficult to know with absolute certainty that any given data point is what it appears to be. While every effort was taken to provide high security for these tests, experience shows that virtually all web sites are vulnerable to hacker attack, so the data and the results can only be considered suggestive and preliminary. Fortunately, methods can be put in place to help ensure the integrity of the data, and out of 32,000 participants, evidence was found that only one person tried to circumvent the system. The huge database provides enormous statistical power that allows us to find very small effects that otherwise may have been overlooked.

The results of the first year of data collection are now being analyzed in detail. Preliminary analyses indicate that one of the questionnaire items strongly predicts performance on all three of the psi tests-the degree to which participants meditate. As predicted by previous laboratory research and millennia of yogic lore, evidence is strong that the more you meditate, the better your actual psychic performance. Building on this, IONS has now launched a new set of online experiments embedded within a meditative game-like setting. Once you have visited the Garden of Dreams (to be available online soon), you are invited to journey into a magnificent space designed to explore your own potential awakening. The game format is an energy-point to research related to consciousness and causality questions central to IONS' research mission.

THE POTENTIALS OF QUANTUM HOLOGRAPHY

uantum nonlocality remains one of the greatest mysteries of contemporary science. New discoveries suggest that quantum emission is sufficiently coherent to obey the laws of holography. In a recent two-day invitational research symposium held on the IONS campus, leaders in the field of quantum holography discussed the background, the implications, and the latest developments in this area.

Holography refers to the indications we have from the structure of nature that every part contains the whole. While gravitation holds the universe together, it is possible that the quantum hologram helps it self-organize.

Recent experimental and theoretical developments in quantum holography suggest new paradigms for the theory of computation, the nature of information, and for human perception and beyond. The new paradigm implies a wholly quantum world where both classical models of physics and computation are rough approximations of physical reality, and where, for example, the recent experimental demonstration of quantum teleportation is a striking affirmation of the holistic nature of physical reality.

In the past two-and-a-half years, research conducted by a team of American and European scientists has begun to take the idea of nonlocality out of the subatomic realm and show that it applies across the whole spectrum, from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Presenters at IONS' symposium included Dr Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and Founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences; Dr Walter M. Schempp, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Siegen, Germany; Dr Ernst Binz, Professor and Chair for Mathematics at the University of Mannheim, Germany; and Dr Peter Marcer of the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group. A day of general presentations was chaired by Duane Elgin, and a day of technical discussions was chaired by physicist Fred Alan Wolf, who helped facilitate a multidisciplinary conversation among members of the physics, mathematics, and information-sciences communities.

Proposing that the universe may be holographic, with each part containing the whole, the discussion focused on how holography is subject to quantum effects, detailing specifics from the area of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The audience took part in a detailed conversation about the mathematical basis of fMRI, and used this to expand the rules by which an event is quantum at the macro level. The participants also speculated on how this relates to the mystery of consciousness and our emerging model of reality, although little agreement was reached. According to Mitchell, the conceptual basis of quantum holography has revolutionary implications. He believes that its existence as part of nature's information structure suggests a "mindful" universe-a radical departure from classical cosmologies that are either mechanistic or creation-oriented. A report on the meeting and an overview of the emerging field is now in preparation by Fred Alan Wolf. Tapes of the meeting are available through IONS' research department by calling 707-779-8266.

Marilyn Schlitz, Director of Research

IONS RESEARCH: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

Challenging our deepest assumptions has been at the heart of the IONS mission from the very start, along with a willingness to test our beliefs empirically, and a respect for diverse cultural and philosophical views. A quality of emergence, an openness to unexpected possibilities, has also characterized the evolution of IONS’ research program.

Edgar Mitchell began the institute with a keen interest in the rigorous investigation of consciousness anomalies. In what ways does our worldview limit our ability to perceive beyond the known senses?

Willis Harman, who served as IONS president over a significant part of its history, believed we are living in the midst of a new Copernican revolution. He was convinced that nothing short of a shift in worldview (the way we see ourselves and our model of reality) could help us to solve many of civilization’s most pressing problems.

Brendan O’Regan, a biochemist by training and a futurist by practice, led IONS’ research program during the 1970s and 1980s. He was passionately committed to identifying ways in which we might begin to understand healing as a system, similar to the endocrine, immune, or nervous systems. O’Regan’s leadership led to the compilation of the largest collection of case reports involving spontaneous remission and extended survival from cancer. He helped introduce the idea of a healing system that involves connections between body and mind.

We are building on all of these directions today as we seek to extend research on the mind-body problem and our understanding of reality into a broad and integral framework of human and social possibilities. We are entering a new phase in our evolution as a research center and as a catalyst for social change. MS

WHERE ARE WE HEADED?

Until recently, research at IONS was conducted primarily on an extramural basis. Small seed grants were provided to aid individuals willing to risk the exploration of questions that did not fit within the conventional scientific paradigm. This has led to many important advances in areas of philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology.

While continuing to support cutting-edge ideas through small contracts, today our mandate involves a shift toward an intramural program of research and inquiry, committed to multidisciplinary or integral empiricism. By building our own laboratory on the new IONS campus, we will develop a basic science program through which we hope to gain new and important insights into the study of consciousness, including the roles of intention, attention, and perception in shaping our world. Our goal is to bring together a critical mass of scientists from many disciplines to help establish an entirely new model of human possibility. Specific projects include a study of distant healing for breast-cancer patients undergoing reconstructive surgery following mastectomies, a study of qi gong practitioners’ ability to heal cancer cells, and a training study to help cultivate distant-healing abilities in volunteers who are not healers.

We are also moving more fully into new collaborative territory. For instance, IONS is forging strategic partnerships with a number of research sites, including a joint research program with the Institute for Health and Healing at California Pacific Medical Center. Under the direction of Marilyn Schlitz and Elisabeth Targ, our allied energies are directed toward developing a clinical and basic-science program on the nature of intention in health and healing, looking specifically at distant healing and subtle fields of healing. A particularly novel approach involves the inclusion of energy healers and intuitives as full participants in the formulation of research questions and design. Our larger goal is to help create new options for a model of health care in the twenty-first century.

We recently welcomed Dean Radin, PhD, as senior Scientist at the IONS Campus. Author of The Conscious Universe, Dr Radin brings with him a reputation as one of the most respected parapsychology authorities in the country. An engaging communicator, he wields immaculate credentials, a robust skepticism, and a painstaking scientific method to put psi phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and mind-over-matter abilities to the hard test of science. His acclaimed book makes a persuasive case for the reality of paranormal phenomena—and places us on the cusp of what may well be the next great consensus about the nature of reality. New online experiments allow people to explore their own latent abilities from their own laptop computers, and to participate in our research program in an entirely new way .

The greatest significance of such explorations, I believe, is their potential for expanding our sense of what is possible in our daily lives, and in the life of our communities. At a time of dizzying global change, what the historian George Santayana wrote many years ago seems more true than ever: "No transformation is either permanent or desirable which does not forward the spontaneous life of the world, advancing those issues toward which it is already inwardly directed." It is through our research on the frontiers of consciousness that we hope to build bridges between inner experience and action in the world.

—Marilyn Schlitz