Need help: introducing the best psi evidence

Recently I was asked a question by a friend becoming interested in a parapsychology, yet not knowing much about it: what is the best evidence of the existence of the psychic phenomena?

So, I thought: are there some lists of research papers, case studies etc. which can proivide a quick start, so a person new to the topic may become aware of the best evidence? As I recall, Dean Radin once made such list. There are probably others.

Can anyone here provide a link to some kind of such list, or some other way to inroduce the best evidence?

Has just found Radin's list again:

https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references

Would be thankful for any other proposals!

[Laird]

Our wiki page may be of use:

https://psiencequest.net/wiki/Introducto...psychology

I would definitely point to the PSI Encyclopedia as well, go through some of the pages on there discussing overall topics.

Some backround on this entire area:

Direct evidence for the existence of the human spirit/soul and an afterlife consists of a large mass of mostly non-experimental empirical evidence accumulated from veridical NDEs, veridical mediumistic communications, verified reincarnation memories of small children, and a number of other areas.

There is also a large mass of indirect evidence accumulated in the fields investigated experimentally by parapsychology.

Concerning parapsychology, parapsychologist Etzel Cardena wrote a very influential (and controversial among closed-minded skeptics) survey article, in American Psychologist a couple of years ago. A summary is at https://fully-human.org/wp-content/uploa...nomena.pdf . Unfortunately the full text of Cardena's article is behind a paywall.

From this summary:

In his paper Cardeña gives a general introduction into psi, which he divides into 2 major areas:

1) extrasensory perception (ESP) - including telepathy (being affected by other people's thoughts), clairvoyance (obtaining information at a distance) which includes remote
viewing, precognition/presentiment (being affected by a future event), and retrocognition (having noninferable knowledge about a past event).
2) psychokinesis (PK) - including putative direct action of mental events (intent) on physical objects.
PK is devided into 2 subgroups: macro-PK (anomalous force) - observable events e.g. table levitation, and micro-PK (anomalous pertubation) - unobservable events e.g influencing a random number generator

The meta-analysis of psi in parapsychology is at the core of Cardeña's paper. In this segment he summarizes about 1700 psi experiments that have been conducted at over 40 universities around the world.

For those readers not familiar with statistics a very short insert: One commonly uses statistics measure used in psychology is the level of statistical significance. In order to interprete these p-values you just have to understand that the smaller the p-value the more significant the result. Often a 5% value (= 0.05) is used as the limit and any values below 0.05 are considered as signifiant. Whenever you see values with a negative exponent e.g. 10⁻³ this is equivalent to a value of 0.001 so the negative exponent basically tells you the amount of zeros in the value. The higher the negative exponent the smaller the value and the higher the significance of the effect.

P values of different psychic phenomena based on Cardeña's meta-analysis:

Anomalous cognition (receiving information / guessing a randomly chosen target)

Telepathy (Storm,2010): 10^-16  (0.0000000000000001)
Precognition (Bem,2015): 10^-10
Psi dreams studies (Storm,2017): 10^-7
Remote Viewing (Milton,1997): 10^-9
Presentiment (Mossbridge,2012): 10^-8
Precognition (Baptista,2015): 10^-25

Anomalous perturbation (sending information / mentally influencing people/objects)

Direct mental interaction in living systems (Schmidt,2015): 10^-3
Remote Healing (Roe,2015): <.05
Influencing dice (Radin,1991): 10^-3
Random Number Generators / Micro-PK (Bösch,2006): <.05
Global Consciousness Project (Nelson,2015): 10^-13

As you can see, all reported forms of psi phenomena are significant to extremely significant based on this statistical analysis but the level of significance varies.
Phenomena related to anomalous cognition are way more significant than those related to anomalous pertubation, in fact significant to an overwhelming extent.

Cardeña summarizes his meta-analysis as follows:

"The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines..."

About the dream telepathy experiment done by Stanley Krippner, Yale's Irvin Child said ->

The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."
 -From this article about Krippner in the SF weekly.


Also, here's an old email I got from Krippner ->

First of all, our original dream telepathy results were repeated several times in our own laboratory. We published both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications. All of these articles are referenced at the end of our book DREAM TELEPATHY (by Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan). A meta-analysis of all the studies produced high significant results and was published in a 1985 article by Irvin Child in The American Psychologist, flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.

Several other researchers attempted to replicate our work. Both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications have been published in the chapter by Roe and Sherwood in ADVANCES IN PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, VOLUME 9 (edited by Krippner and Friedman). A meta-analysis of all these studies produced highly significant results. They were not as strong as the Maimonides data, probably because they used "home dreams" instead of "laboratory dreams," the latter involving psychophysiological recordings. In the lab, participants can be awakened once they have been in REM sleep for a while. For home dreams, participants are usually awakened randomly by telephone, hence many dreams are lost.