so this is about the quantum observer effect and its implications this picture by the way I made using the AI drawing program called Leonardo AI which is astonishingly good uh it doesn't always give me the image that I wanted but uh actually this one turned out to be pretty nice too so let's assume that's the quantum Observer so what is it the quantum Observer fact refers to the idea that not only the idea but the observation that before you observe a Quant a photon or electron or elementary particle uh but what you're what is there is considered a wave something spread out over space and time but when you observe the particle it localizes in space and time so this suggests that the elementary world that something about the nature of observation or measurement changes its Behavior so one way to think of this is sometimes that a photon is shy it knows it's being looked at and it changes its Behavior as a result so one way to easy way to see this is through a double slit Optical system so if you're not looking at which of two little slits that a photon goes through or an electron what you see at a camera after the the light passes through or electrons or or almost any elementary particle is an alternating band of light and dark this is exactly what you would see if light was behaving like a wave but if you do know which of the two slits that the the the Quant goes through then you see a different pattern usually it's portrayed this way as though you see two bright bands it's not exactly that but it's close enough uh to illustrate that it's quite different than than the pattern that you would see if you did not know which of the two slits it was going through so this is called gaining witch path information if you gain witch path information you So-Cal collapse the quantum wave function and you go away from waves and you go into a particulate Direction so this is where the idea of uh light having a wave and particle it's like a wave and a particle at the same time depending on on what you what information you gain about it so why does this happen well let's turn to Neil degrass Tyson who is a a well-known science spokesperson and I'm going to do this for several other people like Neil uh to First go through what the uh what contemporary physics has to say about why why is there this Quantum observer effect what is it about well so what Neil would say is that the quanta are tiny so to see an electron requires an interaction which would disturb the electron and you can substitute Photon atom all kinds of Elementary particles here to see it requires an interaction and it's happening all the time and it has nothing to do with Consciousness so let's see him talk about this in a clip exactly but particles electrons atoms all of this it happens all the time and this was a very disturbing Discovery in the 1920s we're in the Centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics in the 1920s because you discover this I want to see what you're doing oh my gosh you kn going to let me see what you're doing because the light I shine on you in order to see it is so so it's really uh it's not so much an observer effect it's a measurement effect exactly okay get the human brain out of it's just the device to measure you you you can't know it okay right so so let's get on to so it has nothing to do with Consciousness okay it has nothing to do with Consciousness sorry Neil it's actually much Stranger Than That so there's something called the reninger effect the r reninger negative measurement effect also known as the interaction free effects and there's a picture of macious reninger who proposed this idea in the 1950s to to make it simple I'll just use this illustration so assume that we're going to fire an electron through two slits and then we have some kind of observing screen so we fire the electron it goes through the sit on the right but we had a detector there so we know that it went through through there and the detector goes Bing we know it and as a result the interference pattern goes away right it wouldn't go away the way I just showed it it would go away the moment we set it up this way but basically you end up with a particulate pattern so something about knowing where the photon was going made a difference so so far this is the conventional thing but what if we had this set up so we have the same setup but now we shoot we're shooting one electron at a time it goes to the other slit and there's nothing there to look at it so there's silence but the thing is we know we shot the electron because we see it on the screen we know it didn't hit this detector so we we had we knew we can infer that it went through the other detector the other slit so this is called interaction free we know something because it went through the slit that didn't have a detector and nevertheless even though it goes to this other slit our knowledge of it causes the screen to show a particular pattern so this is why we know that knowledge alone collapses the wave function and actually you'll see a number of I'm not going to show here but you'll you can find out that you ask conventional science spokespeople about why there is an observer effect they almost never talk about this this rener effect is not it's part of the mainstream in physics and we know that is true uh because it's been experimentally tested in a variety of ways but somehow this is sort of waved away as though it's not meaningful well it's extremely meaningful because it means that knowledge alone will collapse the wave function yeah here's a an article from Scientific American that just came out a few days ago about why quantum physics isn't as weird as you think it's weirder so what they point out here is that if you imagine that the physical world at a deep level is like waves pushing through water well then Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is not quite so weird and superpositions and even entanglement are not quite so weird even Quantum tunneling is not that weird but what's very weird is still the quantum measurement problem why because imagine someone speaking to a crowd sound waves spread out across the crowd and everyone hears the speech and the quantum world the Soundwave would spread out but if a single person in the crowd perceives it the entire sound wave would concentrate itself in that person's ear and no one else would hear it so this is where the wave metaphor breaks down really significantly so how else is the Quantum observer effect understood and explained by the status quo so I'm going to use uh this physicist Sabine Hassen Felder uh who as you can see here is doing quite well a million subscribers to her YouTube channel and for this particular uh talk that she gave over an hour long on YouTube uh almost 600,000 views as as of when it first came out in last November so she's a very popular popularizer of physics and she clearly is quite smart and a good educator this is then how this is understood by the status quo so I'll play a little clip here why did some physicists like f noyman and wigner think that Consciousness is necessary to make sense of quantum mechanics and can Consciousness influence the outcome of a Quantum experiment that's what we'll talk about today for noon's argument was that a particle in a superposition can cause superpositions of the things it interacts with this leads to superpositions of the entire measurement apparatus and everything that follows from that say you use the measurement outcome to decide whether to blow up a bomb or not then you get a super position of a bomb that's blown up and one that didn't and that leads to a superposition of a world in which you died and one in which you didn't and a superposition of words in which you go on to win the Nobel Prize and one in which you didn't and so on for noyman said that this chain of events needs to be cut somehow and since everything in physics seemed to keep the superpositions alive he thought the collapse had to be caused by something extra physical or psychophysical it had to be the conscious perception of an observer The Observer either sees a bomb explode or not the wigner and fyman interpretation has problems because all interpretations of quantum mechanics have problems reinterpreting math just pushes problems around like bumps under the carpet in the we of Forman interpretation the problems manifest themselves as conscious observers who have inconsistent knowledge about reality if you take this seriously it would imply that reality itself depends on who's observing what a few months ago David Charmers and Kevin McQueen wrote a paper about this for a paper by two philosophers it isn't bad my major misgiving about their Consciousness induced collapse model is that it's unnecessarily complicated okay so I'll return to to that talk her actual talk is well over an hour so I'm just showing small Clips here so she mentioned this paper and Consciousness and the collapse of the way function by chmer who's a well-known philosopher uh and Kevin McQueen Kelvin McQueen as well and what he actually say what they conclude at the end of that paper is not that Consciousness collapse interpretations are clearly correct but that there was a research program here worth exploring this is new that there's a a significant ific change that has happened in the academic world especially among philosophers but increasingly among neuroscientists and and and physicists as well on whether or not even the dialogue about this question is legitimate well yes it is now a legitimate question and there is a research program here worth exploring so let's return to uh Sabine okay so here we have people thinking that it's somehow the amount of Consciousness in a system that induces collapse which is kind of weird already but there are also people who think that deliberately focused attention actually influences how a system collapses this idea was also brought up by weer though I think it wasn't his intention in 1967 wigner published a very influential essay titled remarks on the Mind Body problem in which he wrote we do not know of any phenomenon in which one subject is influenced by another without exerting an influence thereupon it's not a big step from there to conclude that if conscious knowledge can be influenced by the result of a Quantum experiment then your conscious knowledge can also influence the result of a Quantum experiment now add to this that back then scientists were still experimenting with telepathy some of them were also studying if concentrating on the outcome of a random number generator would change the outcome it was just a small step from there to the idea that if you focus your attention on photons going through a double slit that affects the pattern on the screen I'm not making this up this is literally how those experiments work there have been a few of them since the 1990s the most recent one was published in 2020 the idea is that when a conscious being concentrates on the light passing through a double slit then that has a similar effect as if you had measured which slid the light went through so the interference pattern should change the authors described the experiment as follows it was explained to the participants that they could try to mentally see or image which of the two slits the photons were passing through to become one with the optical system in a contemplative way to mentally block one of the two slits or to mentally bend the laser beam so as to cause it to pass through one slit rather than both they then statistically analyzed the difference in the interference pattern between the cases where the participants were told to concentrate on the double slit and not the authors claimed to see a statistically significant difference their analysis method was later criticized by another group which argued that the method of analysis is unreliable and the results can't be trusted similar criticisms have been raised about earlier experiments how difficult can it be you may ask to figure out whether the pattern of a double slit changed well the issue is that the common illustration with multiple stripes for the unobserved double slit and two thick bands for The observed one is so misleading I can only call it wrong it's because a single slit also makes an interference pattern it just looks slightly different from that of a double slit so if you don't expect your conscious observations to affect really each Photon it can actually be difficult to tell the difference that' be easier examples to look at but maybe they didn't want that in any case the brief summary is that the results of experiments that claim to find an influence of conscious thought on the outcome of quantum experiments have remained highly controversial and have not been reproduced in addition the idea that your conscious attention somehow influences what the wave function collapses into doesn't make sense wickner was right in saying that in physics if one thing can affect another then that influence can go both ways but that doesn't mean that the influence is equally relevant in both directions if it rains you get wet if you swear at the sky in response then the pressure waves coming out of your mouth move some air molecules so they indeed influence the rain but for practical purposes it doesn't make any difference and your brain indeed has a physical influence on its environment that's because thinking generates electric and magnetic fields but they're too weak to collapse the light going through a double slit I believe okay so with with all due respect to Dr U aen Felder and uh also to um to other physicists who would say similar things uh I think there is a bit of a problem here in terms of what is being presented and the reason why I chose Sabine in particular is because almost 600,000 people have seen that and if they don't know that there's actually an alternative uh explanation as to what's going on here there will be influenc to believe that she's probably telling you what's correct uh but it actually isn't so let's look at some reasons why so first of all she said that viger's article was published in ' 67 it really was 61 that just a trivia uh problem but what vigner also said in that article which is quite good you can find it on on the web he said one may well wonder how materialism the doctrine that life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists to which he responded to himself the reason is probably that it is an emotional necessity to extal the problem to which one wants to devote a life lifetime he goes on to say that under the usual conditions of experimental physics or biology the influence of Consciousness is certainly very small we do not need the assumption that there is such an effect but the same may be said of the relation of light to Mechanical objects in other words light pressure experiments that demonstrate the effect of light on the motion of mechanical bodies are difficult but it is unlikely that the effect would have been detected at all had theoretical considerations not suggested its existence and its manifestation in the phenomenon of light pressure so how would you detect a mind matter effect by discovering phenomena in which Consciousness modifies the usual laws of physics so says vignard only very crude observations of this type have been undertaken in the past this would be pre- 1962 and all these anate modern experimental methods so far as it is known all of them have been unsuccessful that's not true as we'll see however he goes on every phenomenon is unexpected and most likely until it has been discovered and some of them remain unreasonable for a long time after they have been discovered so that's part of what vigner says in this very interesting article so then Sabine goes on to say well if you swear at the sky the pressure waves do in do indeed influence the rain but for practical purposes it doesn't make it any difference to which I my response is science seeks knowledge about the natural world it is not about practical applications or practical purposes sometimes it could take very long periods of time decades sometimes centuries for scientific knowledge to become practical so I don't know what she's talking about here one would think that a physicist is not concerned about practical purposes when you're on the Leading Edge of what is known then she says I'm not kidding back then some scientists were still studying telepathy and if concentrating on the outcome of a random number generator would change the outcome so this is using ridicule to dismiss an entire body of data and so uh I'm going to be harsh with her here uh because two can play the ridicule game so I'm going to play this clip what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard at no point in your rambling incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought everyone in this room is now Dumber for having listened to it I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul this clip is uh one of the more famous movie insult to concern of the movie Billy Madison in 1995 so first of all we know that interaction free experiments show that knowledge alone can collapse the way function so it it does raise the question as vigner and many others had said well can one gain knowledge via ESP does Consciousness play a role in the physical world well so you can go look in the mainstream this came out this article was published in 2018 and American psychologist so it was before uh Sabine gave her talk so there's no excuse for not finding it and you look at the experimental evidence for parasal or psychic phenomena ESP you find there's an enormous amount of evidence this this article here was looking at 10 different metaanalyses of different classes of studies that have been done over the past 100 years or so and it's been looked at a huge number of times this is an impact factor made by a company called alt metric which tracks millions of published articles and in the peer-reviewed literature so top 5% of all research outputs 99th per compared to outputs of the same age and 99% High attention score also compared to articles of the same age so people are paying attention to this apparently not Sabine so the the bottom line for this article was the evidence is comparable to that for established phenomena in Psychology and other disciplines we're talking here about psychic phenomena and likewise in 2016 the president of the American statistical Association also said this that the scientific data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if they pertain to something more [Music] mundane you can find even more recent effects the Articles these came out I think this year looking at a what's called an umbrella review looking at many different Meta Meta analyses in this case for anomalous cognition which is the polite academic way of talking about psychic phenomena so they looked at over 80 years of Investigation 11 metaanalyses uh and the evidence clearly shows that anomalous cognition seems possible and that that said in a way uh to make it academically acceptable it's actually not that it seems possible but the effects are actually very very strong because of so much data that's been collected likewise this just came out in the Journal of scientific exploration a review and metaanalysis of remote viewing data and one of the ways that they talk about it there's lots of different statistical methods but they used a basian approach and a basian approach is the the base factor is 530,000 to one means the odds the odds against chance that the effect is in support of the hypothesis of remote viewing is real 530,000 to1 more or less and a base Factor greater than 100 to one is considered decisive evidence so we have here 530,000 rather than 100 so you would think this is Way Beyond decisive evidence that remote viewing is a real thing likewise anomalous perception in a gon failed condition this is primarily looking at telepathy tests and again in this case the base factor is 1,99 which is not quite as good as remote viewing but still if decisive evidence is 100 to one and here we're talking with something 20 times more than that it's pretty good so the overall picture emerging from this particular meta analysis is that there is sufficient evidence to claim that it is possible to observe non-conventional anomalous perception in a gun Feld environment again said in academic terms to make it nice and clean but they're talking about telepathy as far as INF inuencing random number generators the the pair Lab at Princeton University did this for almost 30 years uh there is their random number generator based on a Quantum indeterminant Randomness and what they found was that over many many people and many many trials if you ask them for a random number generator to produce more one bits than zero bits that cumulatively over a long period of time that is what you get and if you ask them to produce more zeros and ones that's what you get if you asked them to not do anything it meanders around a baseline of zero or a chance so when I was at Princeton my colleague Roger Nelson and I did a meta analysis of all of the random generator experiments that were done at the time over 800 were found in literature and we found unequivocal positive results in experimental conditions and chance results and control conditions there have been several other meta analyses done since then and with some controversy of course because of the nature of the of what we're proposing here but nevertheless all of them have found various ways of looking at the data and suggesting that there are positive results somehow uh focusing your attention at what should be a random event is no longer random and then you can look back now at at an interesting historical thing this is 1965 in the journal science which is one of the top two rated science journals in the world this article extrasensory Electro inspographic induction between identical twins so that was published uh supported by the NIH Grant in ' 65 in 74 we have another major article in nature in 76 a major article and proceedings of the itle E which in the engineering world is the top journal and then in 82 yet another uh article in the proceedings of the I e and so this is pretty much among science and nature and proceedings of a e which are the top tier journals you don't generally find these kinds of studies anymore in these journals and you fig well what happened to them well for many years my colleagues and I were wondering well what how come this showed up in science because it actually wasn't such a great experiment as one of the the criticisms at the time by parapsychologists was that if that's study was submitted to a parapsychology journal it would not have been accepted so what was going on so why did it get accepted well we finally discovered why a couple of months ago I get an email from uh somebody in uh in another country saying do you never know what happened to this study you know did they ever do anything any followup uh and because the this person found something called this coin Coincidence of EG Alpha patterns in humans by the same two authors which as far as I know our colleagues never knew anything about this and not only that it was published was a contract by the Office of Naval Research so if you go back and you start looking for this Niah Grant you can't find it which suggests that maybe the ni administered the money but the money was probably coming from somewhere else like the Office of Naval Research this study by the same authors was a followup to the original study and was much more successful than than the original study and it was never published the only way I was able to find this was go to a government website that publishes military reports and I asked them did do you have something of this title by these people and they spent the while and said yeah we have it but no one's ever requested it before so we can scan it for you if you want so it goes through the whole uh Freedom of Information Act and they scan it and a couple months later I get it back and I look at it and sure enough they did do the experiment it did replicate right around the same time that the US government created the Stargate program which was classified so my guess is that there's long been interest in many governments around the world about psychic phenomena especially for the use of it in in intelligence purposes and so bits of money here and there were were given by places like the Office of Naval Research and getting back data from from people which was quite interesting so this ultimately was interesting enough to people in Congress and then was given to different agencies to create the Stargate program which was a a 20-year program using psychic phenomena for Espionage so I think one of the reasons why these mainstream papers began to disappear is because uh somebody was telling the editors or something I really don't know but it kind of suggests that there was a suppression of don't don't it's okay if those crazy parapsychologist talk about this but we shouldn't make this look mainstream because it reduces the value of having a program a black program uh that is actually using this stuff in other words if you have a secret weapon you don't want to let the your adversaries know that you have it so let's make all that psychic stuff go away all right well we turn back to Sabine Sabine mentions one of the articles that that I published this one involved six different experiments uh in which is is true it provides statistical evidence in favor of the Consciousness collapse interpretation uh and then she brought up this response to it and she said well but it's unreliable uh that's my response to to that question because it's much more complicated than that but she basically uses this as a way of dismissing well that this stuff nobody knows if it's real or not and in particular she says the experiments have not been reproduced well that is an important Criterion in science if you cannot reproduce an experiment then the jury is out you don't know whether it's real or not oops that is wrong too as of uh November of 22 when the video came out there have been five Laboratories that reported the same kind of experiment my lab is just one of them in addition earlier this year there was an independent review published that had a positive conclusion after reviewing all of these studies in other words if you look at all of the published studies your conclusion and I didn't I didn't know these authors I didn't even know that they were doing such a review but it got published in a journal and they said yeah and then she she ends this clip with uh thinking generates electromagnetic fields but they're too weak to do anything to which that is my response because if we we go back and look at the origins of quantum mechanics especially Max plank who was the one who came up with the idea of a quanta regarded Consciousness as fundamental he was a philosophical idealist as were almost all of the founders of quantum mechanics some of whom like Jordan actually published articles in parapsychology journals so even contemporary uh physicists agree that uh that there's something interesting going on with Consciousness and I have a long much longer talk about John Wheeler about this and that's also a very interesting study in cognitive dissonance let's say so many people don't know that uh the quantum mechanics began essentially as kind of a mystical uh tradition and so uh this this article in the the European Journal of physics talks about uh a mystical hypothesis one shaping the mind not the brain a role to play at the material Level of reality shaped the way that physicists understood quantum mechanics even at the level of fundamental equations so we're all the way back to the beginning Quantum observer effect we already discussed and you also heard Sabine talk about this idea of how do you break the chain this is where vanon noyman comes in so one way to illustrate this is it uh how do we see a butterfly well a light Photon bounces off a butterfly and this can be described in quantum mechanics either as a wave function or as a matrix of numbers uh what then happens the the photon that bounced off the butterfly goes into a camera goes onto a screen we look at the screen our brain is processing the information and then some something magically happens and we see a butterfly so if we look at this from the point of view of the mathematics uh we have a a photon a description in this case is a matrix and a camera and a display in the eye and the Brain these are all physical things there's no consciousness in there yet when a photon and a camera interact we have a superposition is created in Matrix terms you create a tensor product between the two the two objects and it's simply just another more complicated wave function or Matrix the same with display same with the eye same with the brain all you're doing here is creating more and more complicated physical systems so far none of it can be none of it is seen yet it hasn't existed in the physical world as we as we experience it so this is a sketch drawn by John Bell who of course was the one who came up with an idea a way of testing for entanglement and he he was the one who coined this notion of how do you break the vanoyan chain in other words the quantum world is described in this wavy fashion but we live in kind of a classical world where did this come from so B noyman suggested that that measurement chain ends only when knowledge of the measurement is registered by an extra physical Factor by which he meant consciousness and if you look and in Wikipedia and you ask what are the various interpretations of quantum mechanics there it is consciousness causes collapse and this and it creates a causal role for the Observer this is the only one of these interpretations that creates a causal role even though other ones are not quite sure uh there are two others that have an intrinsic role so it's it's not the case that physics has kind of wrapped this up there's lots of disagreement and and uncertainties about what's going on here but the important point about this is it is testable so here was a a survey sent in 2016 to over a thousand physicists of whom 149 responded and they were asked in your opinion The Observer a bunch of questions 22% said it plays a distinguish physical role that's what van noyman and all of the other physicists said that means that roughly 1if of contemporary physicists think along the lines of Von noyman and this is not crazy this is not a tin foil hat stuff this is actually for people who are specifically concerned with the foundations of quantum mechanics and as I said it's a testable idea so you can take a double sit system very simple it's a laser a neutral density filter to cut down the illumination a double slit and then some sort of a camera or screen that catches the result so the first two experiments looking at this issue we're published in the Journal of scientific exploration 1998 so the first one was Stanley Jeffers at York University and then Mike ibison at Princeton this this is their setup it's it's a classic double slit setup so the first experiment at York University did not show any interesting results so this it would the results would have to go outside of this 95% confidence interval to show cumulative result uh they then gave their to Princeton which improved it somewhat uh and then they did get a significant result to Princeton and then afterwards a secondary analysis of the York University results did show a significantly elevated variance which you would not see in this kind of graph uh and the control run showed chance expected variance and I'm going to return to this idea of variance uh the distinction here is that this is this is called a a mean shift analysis of everything is is always going in the same direction then as you accumulate the result it's going to start drifting away from chance if you have a variance effect you wouldn't see that you could very well see something that's fluctuating up and down from chance but too much and in this case the variance was too much for the York University results so this then we started doing a replication of the same idea the only difference that we did from what you would do in a physics lab is use people to gain knowledge about what's going on in the double slit similar to what Sabine had described it as that's what we were asking people to do so there's the the double slit slide is this piece of metal over here and it's inside this big thing to hold it and then we have a line camera to look at the interference pattern that's what the line camera sees this alternating light and dark bands if you draw that as a graph as illumination graph you can see it has this nice shape that's what the system looked like when it was all sealed up so this is a qu in of aluminum everything's painted flat black the camera is over here the double sits inside there somewhere you can make other double set systems this one is made completely out of commercial stuff the other one we we had fabricated a colleague of ours actually made it uh but this one's made out of Parts you can just buy it's around $10,000 worth of stuff so there again is what the camera sees the illumination level and so if you take a 4A transform of this you end up with uh something with Three Peaks in this case so this first Peak is this very slow moving shape here and we're looking at this in in spectral terms the spectrum is like a slow moving wave second Peak is this these fast moving waves this is the interference pattern and this third Peak is a harmonic of the second Peak so the measurement that we're taking then in this this experiment is to look at how this second Peak Peak changes because if observation is causing this shape to change then that Peak is going to go up or down so we're looking for changes in that Peak so the experimental protocol is very simple compare the interference pattern according to that Peak during mental observation versus no observation observe for around 30 seconds rest for 30 seconds plus a little bit of additional randomly and repeat it this is a differential measure looking for does mental observation affect in interference at all so we did a bunch of pilot tests in three different groups of people all people together non-meditators and meditators the meditators did really really well and and in the same direction each experiment even using different protocols and different groups of people when we ran it as as a control where nobody was trying to mentally do anything you get results according the chance and so all pilot studies together showed with all data as an interesting significant effect most of which is due to the meditators not to the non-meditators and again the controls r at chance we then were were asked by one of our funders to do a formal test 50 plan sessions with 50 people uh to uh to see if we would get reduced interference would the would we see a change in the interference pattern the answer was yes this is a five Sigma result five Sigma within physics is considered uh a discovery of something so we published that in 2012 and then people started saying well maybe the results that you got R do the proximity of the human body and the reason this comes up is because interets are very sensitive to things like temperature changes and in our experiment we had people about 2 meters away roughly six feet away from the interferometer and we figured well maybe the with effort they were leaning towards the interferometer when they were trying to mentally project themselves into it and then leaning away when they were in the control condition and there would be create a very small temp change in temperature but maybe enough to produce this effect so we did an online version of it so here's the inometrics and also 7,000 sessions run by a a robot as a control a Linux system so in the non- observing case they would a person would go to a browser and just see this this blue rectangle and in the observing condition they would get realtime feedback about how much interference there was or what the what the shape of that interference pattern was so the more that it went up it would meant the more that the interference pattern was collapsing so the goal in this was con conate on on the graph which was then linked to what was going on inside the box and make the graph go up and then the not observing case or Linux box would get exactly the same stuff the interfer the uh double slit system of course did not know who was observing the data was just being delivered to something so was either a Linux box or a human and so the measurement in this case was a little bit different uh one of the ways you can measure an interference pattern is by what's called Fring visibility how how visible is that Fringe and it's very simple you look at the maximum and minimum you take this proportion and so you're looking at the difference between these two dots and the prediction would be that the the visibility would shrink when when humans were doing this task so it would go down and so these black dots are when humans were doing the task and the white squares or when the Linux box was doing it highly significant difference between these two conditions and the other thing you could tell by this is we knew where people were from by looking at their IP address so uh we're able to first of all say uh here's chance chance expectation would have been Zero Effect but this is what we actually saw and so it's a small effect but more importantly it was basically the same regardless of where people were so some people were were within a couple of kilometers of our laboratory up to 18,000 kilm away which was from where our laboratory was would have been South Africa and the fact that there was no difference in the effect size tells us that the effect of Consciousness in this case apparently is independent of distance well then somebody said well maybe you're just seeing some sort of statistical effect what if you use single photons in this experiment and so this is a single Photon double slit system uh with this kind of system you shoot a single photon it goes to a double slit which is underneath the Buddha there uh and then you have a photo multiplier tube to see how many photons do you get so you can't get an interference pattern all you get is a number of counts of photons but what you can do is move the slit in front of the uh of the photo multiplier and see whether you're getting an interference pattern uh which I'll talk about more in a minute but so we used the something we call the illuminated Buddha feedback so inside the Buddha there's a LED and the LED would shine brighter if there were more photons that were seen by the photo multiplier the experiment was done in complete darkness so the only way that you could illuminate the Buddha was by being successful in this task and people like this it was very motivating as as an experimental form of feedback so if you move the the slit in front of the photo multiplier in fact you get a nice interference pattern just as as you would if uh if you're were using a camera with lots of photons it would only get see the we only looked at one particular place on this graph which was right there so put the the slit in front of of that portion of the interference pattern and if the interference was happening it would cause a change in the inter in the interference such that the top would go down but the bottom would go up so the task in this case was for people to get more photons to show up right there and they did significantly so this would say that the effect was even occurring at a individual Quantum event which is what we kind of suspected but we needed to run the experiment to find out for sure okay we did and we ended up doing something like 18 experiments using different methods but the fourth independent replication was a physicist who had been at CERN uh who decided that what we were doing was more interesting so he spent a month with us he went back to the laboratory at sou Paulo Brazil created his own setup uh and then reported this is not yet published but reported six exploratory experiments with statistically significant unidirectional differences mean shift differences very similar to what we had been seeing and then the three formal experiments which were not statistically significant until he looked at it to see if there were variance differences so once again we're seeing interesting results and variance the fifth replication I had I did not know these people I still don't know them although I exchanged an email with the first author uh this is a combination of people from University in Serbia and another one in Moscow who did uh another replication same kind of idea 26 people they also were wearing EEG systems and the results said we confirmed that attention affects the electromagnetic wave which is how they were imagining what was going on causing wave function collapse in a double sit Optical system Raiden observed significant changes in the electric field ratio and the concentrate concentration versus relax condition exactly what we observed in our study which was nice so these are all the the published studies that we know of of people that have been replicating these kind of things total of 30 reported experiments of which 14 are significant at 05 level two tail uh the probability of seeing 14 experiments that are significant two-tailed out of 30 is about a Six Sigma result that's very unlikely to occur by chance so it's not a way of doing a formal metaanalysis but a kind of a a an easy way of seeing is this the results that we're seeing chance or not chance so far it looks this is not a chance effect and more importantly it is women replicated now in five different Laboratories actually Four Labs because for York University the way they reported was not significant until you look at the variance in which case everyone that has done this experiment is seeing a significant result so this is the result I mentioned uh in progress in Brain Research which uh reviewed these studies here's the abstract and their conclusion is this these studies suggest that mental activities are capable of influencing physical systems so again this is from university in Ireland I did not know these people beforehand just sort of accidentally found this article uh and they agreed that something interesting is going on now within Paris psychology people have been discussing these kinds of ideas the relationship between quantum physics and parapsychology since the 1950s this was a journal of parisy issue that reported on a conference about this topic and it included Gerald Feinberg who was an Noel laurat a very also very well-known physicist Olivia Costa dorard and many others who are talking about uh the quantum perspective of these kinds of effects and the relationship to parasyn Princeton of course did these experiments as well and I I've already gone through this so I'm going to just jump right through all that what's less well known is that ya how Cooper did his doal dissertation and published a summary of it in in the Journal of scientific exploration in which he talks about what was developing within parapsychology called the observational Theory and he defined it as the act of observation by a motivated Observer of an event with a Quantum mechanically uncertain outcome influences that outcome that's that's the theory these influences would not be constrained by ordinary space or time because of the quantum event and itct a a retr psychokinetic effect the way it would work is you record unobserved random data coming from a random generator you record that now and then tomorrow or sometime in the future you will be asked to mentally influence the pre-recorded bit this is why it's called a retr psychokinetic effect interestingly this came out just a couple days ago about backwards time effects from Department of physics at Cavendish lab University of Cambridge uh we're not proposing a time travel machine but rather a deep dive into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics the simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past but they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday's problems today that is more or less how these experiments worked so if you look at a meta analysis of this the first in 1975 the last known as 1993 overall a five Sigma effect which again in a physics perspective this would be considered a discovery this is a retroactive PK project this was the first paracycle parasal Theory leading to a prediction and a subsequent confirmation of a new effect that was not previously observed or even imagined to exist so today within quantum mechanics we have results like the delayed Choice experiment which again is showing there's some strange temporal effect going on here but these were done well before the delayed choice of effect were was being studied in a parasal context and it works works just as well as it does in the delay Choice experiment so the summary so far is this 90 years of experimental evidence for the reality of Mind matter interaction and a provides growing support for the Consciousness collapse hypothesis and this has even been talked about in nature so in July 2015 uh the author was writing about the mental Universe the only reality is mind and observations but observations are not of things to see the universe as it really is we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things so implications first of all the implication is a Consciousness plays a fundamental role in the physical world that doesn't mean that it's primary over the physical world yet but it plays a role a a direct role in the way that the physical world unfolds maybe it is fundamental we don't know that for sure yet the scientific evidence supporting this idea is continually improving in credibility and impact scientific interest is rapidly expanding there's new academic openness to esoteric and Indigenous beliefs about mind and matter for example the University of South Carolina and exer University in the UK both have created graduate level degree programs in Magic so they I don't not sure whether they use that term they might calling it something like esoteric practices but you can now get a master's degree in what amounts to Magic uh in the in the academic world it's still not acceptable to say that things like magic are real you can talk about what people believed that might be real uh but nevertheless I think that's going to change because as he said the evidence of mind and matter really do interact and are very closely related to these beliefs is beginning to penetrate into the academic world there's still a lot of skepticism about the reality of Consciousness playing a role in physical world and I would say it's primarily due to hubris and to stigma this is why uh when when a mainstream person is talking about this stuff they will wear a tinf foil hat or they'll point to a tin foil hat that's creating stigma but it also is due to a lack of appreciation about the history the sociology and the philosophy of science like if there's anything that we know we know that we don't really know what's going on even in physics at a fundamental level but nevertheless that is for a a science spokesperson who has a big audience to uh to not talk in terms as though they really don't quite understand what's going on that wouldn't go over very well people want to have explanations for things but the reality is we need to be extremely humble about what we think we know because we don't actually know that much yet science is new implication two today's quantum mechanics what we can think of as the Orthodox mathematics quantum mechanics is a linear Theory applied to systems that are in equilibrium the real world is nonlinear and far from equilibrium so quantum mechanics 2.0 will probably be much Stranger Than quantum mechanics 1.0 if we're at 1.0 today the next version of what's going on here when we start using nonlinear quantum mechanics that are far from equilibrium will be much much stranger it may allow for example for entangled information transfer so Quant mechanics 1.0 does not allow for information transfer I think 2.0 there are models out there suggesting that yeah you could do information transfer in which case telepathy immediately will become recognized as a thing that can happen quantum mechanics 2.0 may also reveal new insights about the observer effect and more importantly the import an of the observer effect we're still at the very earliest stages of understanding both mind and matter so any statement offered today about what's impossible or supposedly impossible because of it might violate physical laws is somewhere between certainly wrong and simply a lack of imagination because as I said we're at the earliest stages of understanding what's going on here so where do advances come from they'll come from new ways of observing ing what's going on that means new instrumentation uh new hypotheses which will force new theoretical developments which will in turn predict new ways of observing and the cycle will go around and around so in general what I usually try to remind people is that don't look at my hand don't don't look at quantum mechanics today as a way of saying that we understand everything because we don't instead I'm saying look at where I'm pointing I'm pointing at a trend in physics pH and in other disciplines as well in in neuroscience and in philosophy that are pointing towards some point in the future I think which will converge with what we experience as psychic effects and what is said in the esoteric literature and is understood within spiritual experiences they're on a a collision course when that occurs it's very difficult to say I think we're somewhere between decades maybe centuries away from actually being able to combine all of these different ideas into something where we have really good explanations for it from a scientific perspective we're not there yet that but that's where we're going I think so I asked this AI program to give me a picture of someone walking down a Hall of Mirrors that's what it came up with it's not too bad and so I need to acknowledge here all of the different foundations and individuals and also the donors and members of The Institute where I work uh because that's how this research gets done we don't get government funding we don't get any other funding than foundations and individuals who are interested in this kind of work [Music]