From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat May 09 1998 - 04:59:36 MDT
At 07:28 AM 5/8/98 -0700, Hal wrote:
>Are your results consistent with the research you mentioned recently
>which aggregated data from multiple studies?
Not quite - largely (I think) because the conditions are not at all alike.
A truly huge amount of lottery guessing, as I mentioned, is stereotyped and
repetitive (not only selection of birthdays, but blatant patterning such as
filling in vertical, horizontal,or slanted lines of numbers, and crosses).
While there is also a tendency for that kind of routinisation to occur in,
say, ganzfeld or free response psi experiments, those formats are far more
open to novelty. A standardised lotto form provides a ready-made template
for locking in die-stamped responses.
>Presumably they found some
>incidence of successful information transfer.
Indeed. This is all in the literature. Dean Radin's book, despite its
simplifications and a certain broad church inclusiveness that worries me,
offers good, brief outlines of the main findings, with endnotes leading to
the original papers. Of course, even university libraries tend not to hold
the Journal of Parapsychology, Journal of Scientific Exploration, and other
peer-reviewed outlets.
>Was your sample set large
>enough that you can would have seen an effect if that same level of psi
>were present in your lottery participants?
Yes and no. On the one hand, a pool of getting on for a thousand million
guesses looks likely to be contaminated by psi effects, even against the
constraints of patterned biases. On the other hand, these were chunked
into only 20 draws. I'd like to see a couple of year's worth of draws
normalised and compared.
Damien Broderick
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