Psi in the Ganzfeld

I don't think there is a thread on Ganzfeld experiments in general. I thought it would be helpful to have one.


The SPR Facebook page had a link to this post about Ganzfeld experiments on Gordon Bonnet's Skeptophilia blog:
http://www.skeptophilia.com/2019/01/cont...zfeld.html

I thought it was reasonably balanced, except that the quotations from Susan Blackmore made my hackles rise. I added a comment pointing out the inaccuracies in her article attacking Daryl Bem.

I notice I was cited in that, although somehow he's under the impression that I'm a psychologist. I've commented to let him know.

On her blog, Caroline Watt posts some more details about the conference, and in particular about the contributions from her own department:
"There will be two papers reporting latest KPU work (precognition research using the ganzfeld method, and studies replicating Walach and von Lucadou’s Correlation Matrix Method)."
https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/2018/...ciousness/

[SNIP]

Going back to the Edinburgh contributions, with the help of the titles in the programme, it was possible to find recent abstracts of related work at the "Edinburgh Research Explorer" portal, as copied below. Sometimes one gets the impression that the message coming from Edinburgh is "it's all very interesting whether there's anything real behind it or not". The message of these two studies seems to be "it looks as though there's something real behind it".

(1) Ganzfeld

Caroline Watt, Emily Dawson, Alisdair Tullo, Abby Pooley, Holly Rice.
Testing Precognition and Altered State of Consciousness With Selected Participants in the Ganzfeld. A Pre-Registered Study.

A paper with the same title was presented by Caroline Watt at the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association in August:
The present study was the first to contribute to a registration-based prospective meta-analysis of ganzfeld ESP studies ...
We sought to maximise the anticipated psi effect size by selecting participants ...
Results. Twenty-two direct hits were obtained out of 60 trials, corresponding to a statistically significant 36.67% hit-rate. Therefore our hypothesis that the randomly selected future target would be identified to a greater than chance degree was supported.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/...66a3).html

Here's a video of the presentation of this work at the Annual SPR Conference 2018:



The presentation was given by Deborah Delanoy, as Caroline Watt was unable to attend. Actually, most of it is a survey of Ganzfeld studies, touching on meta-analyses, selected versus non-selected participants, telepathy versus precognition and the question of whether an altered state of consciousness (ASC) is important.

The study itself found that the hit rate was significantly higher than chance (p=0.03) but failed to find a significant correlation between hit rate and measures of ASC.