Dean Radin, Garret Yount and Garry Nolan have been working on a research project entitled "Genetics of psychic ability," funded by the Bial Foundation. Details of a poster on the work presented at a Bial symposium in 2018 can be found on page 265 of this file:
https://www.bial.com/media/2885/12-simpo...omcapa.pdf
At that point the work was still in progress, having taken longer than expected (it was initially estimated that it would be completed by April 2018).
Radin gave a brief summary of further progress in his presidential address (at 35 minutes, 25 seconds) at the Parapsychological Association Convention last year, after discussing separate (but obviously potentially relevant) speculation about links between anomalous experience and unusual anatomical features in the brain, which Nolan is also working on:
"The other technology [that] wasn't available was this. So we didn't have a way to do full genome sequencing. But now we do. So funded by the Bial Foundation we started with 3500 candidates, we pulled them down to 27 finalists. These are people who passed multiple hoops to make sure that they were psychic from psychic families and vetted to be actually psychic and then matched against controls that were not psychic and not from psychic families and did not do anything in the psychic tests. We got their DNA, ran their full genomes, compared the psychic cases and the non-psychic controls and we found genetic differences. The bio-informatics person who did this was extremely surprised because we expected that we'd have to do these genome-wide network analyses to look at maybe constellations of hundreds of genes or even more in order to find any difference at all between this contrast - psychic and non-psychic - but we actually found a half a dozen genes that popped out right away and we're not - none of them were found in the control group. So this again suggests that there's either a genetic basis, and especially for the folklore that psychic ability runs in families, we're finding yeah, it looks like that is the case."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc&t=35m25s
https://www.bial.com/media/2885/12-simpo...omcapa.pdf
At that point the work was still in progress, having taken longer than expected (it was initially estimated that it would be completed by April 2018).
Radin gave a brief summary of further progress in his presidential address (at 35 minutes, 25 seconds) at the Parapsychological Association Convention last year, after discussing separate (but obviously potentially relevant) speculation about links between anomalous experience and unusual anatomical features in the brain, which Nolan is also working on:
"The other technology [that] wasn't available was this. So we didn't have a way to do full genome sequencing. But now we do. So funded by the Bial Foundation we started with 3500 candidates, we pulled them down to 27 finalists. These are people who passed multiple hoops to make sure that they were psychic from psychic families and vetted to be actually psychic and then matched against controls that were not psychic and not from psychic families and did not do anything in the psychic tests. We got their DNA, ran their full genomes, compared the psychic cases and the non-psychic controls and we found genetic differences. The bio-informatics person who did this was extremely surprised because we expected that we'd have to do these genome-wide network analyses to look at maybe constellations of hundreds of genes or even more in order to find any difference at all between this contrast - psychic and non-psychic - but we actually found a half a dozen genes that popped out right away and we're not - none of them were found in the control group. So this again suggests that there's either a genetic basis, and especially for the folklore that psychic ability runs in families, we're finding yeah, it looks like that is the case."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc&t=35m25s
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