Techno-Dowsing: developing a physiological response system to improve psi training

Title Techno-Dowsing
Experimenter Paul Stevens (with invaluable assistance from Jannine Rebman)
Context Feasibility study
Period DATA COLLECTION: June - September '95. Analyses ongoing (see description)
Psi phenomenon Subconscious Precognition
Dependent Vars Electrodermal and electroencephalographic activity, and peripheral blood flow
Number of Ss 20
Description Physiological responses from 20 unselected volunteer participants were recorded. An artificial neural network (ANN) was first trained to recognise a variety of recognition responses, then used to predict a precognitive psi target based on participants' physiological responses to concepts related to the target. The ANN trained on all participants' data successfully reduced the possible target pool from 8 to 2 in 8 out of 20 cases. For individually trained networks, this increased to 11 out of 20 cases. Although non-significant, ANN prediction was more successful for those participants exhibiting psychological androgyny (t = 1.194, df = 17, p = 0.125 1-tailed, ns) and field independence (t = -1.320, df =18, p = 0.102 1-tailed, ns).
Hypotheses
  • There will be a specific physiological response for concepts relating to a precognitive target image.
  • Success will be related to perceptual style, as categorised by the constructs of field independence and psychological androgyny.