Blinded By Beliefs
Last year I wrote a post about Science and Spirituality in which I deplored the fact that there was a shortage of people with open minds on both sides of the debate. For some people it might come as a shock to realize that scientists can be as blindly dogmatic as the most fervent religionist, but it's true.I got a chance to see that blindness in action again, documented, in a new book by Dean Radin called "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality". Radin himself is a scientist, with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering (my kinda guy!) and a doctorate in Psychology, both from the University of Illinois. You might say that's an odd combination of degrees, but Radin did his graduate work in cybernetics, which is where the mind and computers come together, so it makes perfect sense. Radin has continued in his scientific research on the mind, with particular interest in "non local behavior" such as telepathy, remote viewing, and other forms of mind - mind and mind - matter interactions, and in this book he pulls together years of valid, peer reviewed research from physics, neuroscience and psychology to summarize what we know and then to discuss the various theories that might explain it.
You might ask why someone who teaches business building success techniques would care about "esp", but everything that I teach about the power of your mind to control your success, to create your reality and to use of the Law of Attraction to get what you want is an aspect of the non-local mind. We know from experience that these success techniques work, now science is figuring out how they do.
It takes Radin over 200 pages just to discuss and summarize the results of the published research, covering many hundreds of studies involving thousands of experiments. Some of those studies showed no effect, and many did. His meta analysis of the data corrected for bias, error and experimenter effects, however, shows a clear non local effect of the mind with the odds against chance of billions to one. As he said, "Something's obviously going on."
Here's where the blindness of beliefs kicks in. Radin quotes scientists who today will still claim that "there's not a single valid study that shows that any kind of esp exists." Why would any scientist be this wrong? Well, Radin quotes one who declared, "If this exists, then everything I know about the world is wrong, and that can't be true!" Gee, that sounds more like a religionist than a scientist, doesn't it?
Radin is very careful to note what the research shows and what it does not show. In general, the esp effects are small, although some people have shown amazing talents. Most wild claims for esp and psychic abilities are still suspect. But something not predicted by conventional science is indeed going on and Radin suspects the answer might lie somewhere in the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the multidimensions of string theory. We will not find out what it is from scientists who refuse to look. Fortunately there are many courageous ones who will continue the studies.
There is more and more interest across scientific disciplines in the study of the mind these days, and that's good. I mentioned that Radin drew from physics, neuroscience and psychology for his book. I just saw an interesting interview in Discover magazine (July 2006) with Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, who's doing pioneering work in string theory. When asked what area of science outside of her own she felt the most important work was being done, she answered, "Neuroscience!" She went on to say that she wished someone would explain to her exactly what consciousness is. So there is hope for progress when very bright people are thinking across disciplines like that.
How can we be so blinded by beliefs? It's all in our mind - our subconscious - which happily filters information to accept what reinforces our beliefs and rejects that which doesn't. Recent research has shown how this happens. A group of test subjects, all strong political partisans, were shown video clips of the leaders of both major political parties during which both speakers clearly contradicted themselves. In their evaluations, the test subjects glossed over the error of their own candidate and strongly criticized the other. Nothing too surprising in that. But the researchers also were looking at the brain activity in the subjects and they noticed that when they were evaluating the speeches, the emotional (subconscious) parts of the brain were primarily involved. The conscious, rational, logical parts of the brain didn’t light up at all! This serves as a caution to us that when we are confronted with new information we need to be very careful that we are being rational when we evaluate it.
You can get Dean Radin's book from The Institute of Noetic Sciences if you're interested in reading more about this.
