Implicit psi in a stimulus detection task
Jacob Jolij, Dick J. Bierman
Over the past years, it has become increasingly apparent that perception is not a passive process: how stimuli appear is not just a function of stimulus properties, but also of the memory, and expectancies of the observer. In an experiment testing the effects of stimulus randomization on these expectancy processes, we have reported an anomalous effect of apparent precognition. Here we show that there may be another anomalous effect in play in stimulus detection tasks, namely psychokinesis. In a simple stimulus detection experiment, we used quantum-random versus pseudo-random generated stimulus sequences. If pseudo-generated sequences contain implicit structure, we would expect better performance for these sequences. Contrary to this prediction, we found participants performed better and faster in the quantum-random generated sequences. We explain this result in terms of the observation theory-framework, which postulates that psi-effects are closely related to the radical subjective solution of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Our results can be explained by assuming a combination of PK and precognitive priming effects for quantum-random generated sequences. We describe a replication experiment to formally test this hypothesis.
•Jun 20, 2017•1 citation