Assessing the Evidence for Mind-Matter Interaction Effects
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Plain English Summary
Can your mind nudge a random number generator (basically a digital coin-flipper)? Critics said the evidence from decades of these experiments was inflated by publication bias -- researchers only publishing exciting results. This rebuttal punches back hard. The authors point out that critics assumed the mind would influence each individual random bit equally, regardless of whether the machine was spitting out ten bits per second or millions. That assumption spans six orders of magnitude and is, they argue, simply unjustified. The suspicious funnel-plot pattern (a graph used to sniff out bias) actually matches what you'd expect from genuinely varied experiments, not hidden negative results. A survey of researchers turned up roughly one unpublished study per person -- far fewer than the thousands needed to sink the findings. Even the critics' own stricter statistical model still yielded an overall z = 4.08 after excluding three outlier studies, and their pre-planned subset was separately significant.
Abstract
Experiments suggesting the existence of mind-matter interaction (MMI) effects on the outputs of random number generators (RNG) have been criticized based on the questionable assumption that MMI effects operate uniformly on each random bit, independent of the number of bits used per sample, the rate at which bits are generated, or the psychological conditions of the task. This ''influence-per-bit'' assumption invariably leads to the conclusion that the significant cumulative results of these experiments, as demonstrated in meta-analyses, are due not to MMI effects but rather to publication biases. We discuss why this assumption is doubtful, and why publication bias and other common criticisms of MMI-RNG studies are implausible.
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Cites
- Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems — Radin, Dean I (1989)
- Engineering Anomalies Research — Jahn, Robert G (1987)
- The Strange Properties of Psychokinesis — Schmidt, H (1987)
- Examining Psychokinesis: The Interaction of Human Intention With Random Number Generators—A Meta-Analysis — Bösch, Holger (2006)
- Effects of Consciousness on the Fall of Dice: A Meta-Analysis — Radin, Dean I (1991)
- Decision Augmentation Theory: Toward a Model of Anomalous Mental Phenomena — May, Edwin C (1995)
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📋 Cite this paper
Radin, Dean, Nelson, Roger, Dobyns, York, Houtkooper, Joop (2006). Assessing the Evidence for Mind-Matter Interaction Effects. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{radin_2006_assessing,
title = {Assessing the Evidence for Mind-Matter Interaction Effects},
author = {Radin, Dean and Nelson, Roger and Dobyns, York and Houtkooper, Joop},
year = {2006},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}