Engineering Anomalies Research

Anomalous consciousness-related phenomena of possible relevance to basic physical science and modern engineering practice are addressed experimentally and theoretically in an effort to identify those devices, systems, and processes most likely to display operator-related anomalies in their performance, and to illuminate the characteristics of such aberrations. Three interrelated sectors of effort are pursued: the design, implementation, operation, and interpretation of experiments in low-level psychokinesis; the development of analytical methodologies for quantitative assessment of precognitive remote perception data: and the development of theoretical models useful for correlation of the experimental data, design of better experiments, and explication of the phenomena on fundamental grounds.

The primary effect observed in the psychokinesis experiments is a marginal but replicable shift of the mean of output count distributions with respect to empirical baselines or theoretical expectations, with no discernible alterations in any higher moments. Over large data bases, these mean shifts can compound with considerable statistical regularity to high levels of significance, depending on the particular operator, the direction of effort, and other prevailing experimental conditions. In many cases, individual operator "signatures" of achievement are found to transfer across various experimental devices, including some driven by deterministic pseudo-random sources.

Quantitative analysis of a large data base of remote perception experiments reveals similar departures from chance expectation of the degree of target information acquired by anomalous means. Digital scoring techniques based on a spectrum of 30 binary descriptors, applied to all targets and perceptions in the experimental pool, consistently indicate acquisition of substantial topical and impressionistic information about remote geographical locations inaccessible by known sensory channels. The degree of such anomalous information acquisition appears independent of the spatial separation of the percipient from the target, up to global distances, and also independent of the temporal separation of the perception effort from the time of target specification by the agent, up to periods of precognition or retrocognition of several days.

In an attempt to illuminate these empirical results, a theoretical model has been proposed that invokes quantum mechanical metaphors to describe the interaction of consciousness with its environment. By representing consciousness by quantum mechanical wave functions and its physical environment by appropriate potential energy profiles, Schrödinger wave mechanics may be used to define eigenfunctions and eigenvalues indicative of psychological and physical experience, both normal and anomalous, in a form applicable to the experimental designs.

The experimental results in hand, along with the generic predictions of the theoretical model, suggest numerous short and longer term practical applications of the phenomena, and raise basic issues about the role of consciousness in the establishment of reality.