Scientists Find the Mind Has Power to Manipulate Matter

A groundbreaking new experiment shows the power of the mind to influence matter.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), founded in 1973 by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, has for decades been at the forefront of scientific research into psychic phenomena and the nature of consciousness. Much of their study has been around psychophysical phenomena or the ways in which our mind or consciousness affects the physical world of matter. In a new experiment, scientists added a novel element from the world of quantum physics which may prove to be quite significant.

Dr. Dean Radin the chief scientist at IONS and the head of the study said, “It has been said that there are strange things associated with quantum mechanics that are very similar to strange things associated with psychic phenomena.”

“The two things in quantum mechanics that are often called ‘weird’ because they’re strange, involve a property called non-locality, which means that objects even though they’re separated in space, are somehow still connected. This is what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and it took roughly 60 years for scientists to figure out ways of telling whether or not things really were connected in a non-local way. So, now we not only know that is a fact but there are technologies being used that use this property of non-locality.”

“So that’s one thing, the second thing in quantum mechanics is the notion that the observer simply by observing a system can change its behavior,” he said.

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“There are some kinds of systems that can be set up, like optical systems, where if you observe where a photon goes in the optical system, then the photon’s behavior will change. And it’s not because you’re interfering with the photon, it has something to do with extracting information out of the optical system,” Radin said.

In this latest experiment, researchers explored this observer effect by setting up an optical system that participants observed for the first time a set of non-local, entangled photons.

“When you look at the history of studies on mind-matter interaction, the mental part is always non-local in the sense that your mind is going to influence something at a distance. But if you look at the kinds of targets that have been studied—and it’s a very wide range, everything from photons and electrons, to water to human behavior, to random events, a huge range—all of those targets are local,” Radin said.

“This new experiment involving entangled photons is, by definition, a non-local matter target. It’s hunks of matter, or energy in this case, with photons that are non-locally connected, we used a device that actually produced about 1,000 entangled photons per second, and so we’re interested in is: does a non-local mind interact with non-local matter.”

In the experiment, participants were instructed to focus their attention on a computer screen, on which were projected entangled photons, which appeared as a line graph. When the line appeared they were told to try to make it go up with their mind, and when it disappeared to withdraw their attention. The degree to which the participants were able to affect the photons, was a measure of the degree to which they were affecting the strength of the photon’s entanglement. The results, while preliminary, were compelling.

“So, entanglement is not an all-or-one phenomenon, there’s a spectrum,” Radin said. “So a very weak entanglement, if you just go below the weakness, it’s classical particles—there are two particles, which are completely separate—the moment they become entangled, they share properties (even though they’re separate). So the degree to which they share those properties, the strength of it, can be modulated. So we wanted to see, could the mind modulate non-local entanglements. So to make a very long story short, the answer is yes. What we found was that when people are asked to focus their attention towards the entangled photons, we found the entanglement strength increased.”

What are the implications of this finding?

“This actually has interesting pragmatic consequences, because, in technologies that are using entanglement, the fidelity of the entanglement is very important. It’s difficult to maintain entanglement, it’s kind of a fragile phenomenon.” Radin said. “So, when you’re creating quantum computing or quantum cryptography, or a range of many other types of quantum-based technologies, a lot of effort is used to maintain the quantumness of the connections. Well, if it turns out that simply focusing your mind towards these quantum objects maintains the fidelity, especially entanglement fidelity, that is doing what is necessary in order to make these things work. So you could project then that, if we get really good at this kind of task, then we can make quantum computers work better simply by focusing our mind towards it.”

Beyond these potentially revolutionary applications, there’s an even greater implication of this research.

“When your intention is focused on something, it’s not just in your head, aspects of the world are changing,” Radin said. “So the most interesting thing about this experiment is that the aspect of the world that changed, we think, has to do with entanglement, which you can think of it as a very deep element of the fabric of reality.”

“Current ideas within physics are that our notions of space and time themselves, those things are not fundamentals as we already know from relativity theory, but they actually emerge out of entanglement, so entanglement seems to be a more fundamental way of thinking about the nature of reality and that gives rise to space and time. So, if your mind can influence entanglement, it means that you can warp space and time itself.”

Further investigations are forthcoming and could lead, not only to dramatic technological advancements but to a deeper understanding of the very fabric of reality.