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Category: Project

Description: With this pre-registered confirmatory study, we aim at demonstrating that five selected participants for their experience in mental control and strong motivation for this line of research, will try to increase the number of photons detected by a photomultiplier (PMT) located approximately 7300 km far from their location using their mental intention. At a predefined time, all of them will focus mentally on the PMT for five minutes by using personalized strategies. These group of participants will contribute to ten experimental sessions carried out in different days. Ten control sessions without mental interaction recorded on the same days of the experimental ones, will be compared with the experimental sessions. A typical session will consist of: 80 minute for the cooling of the PMT + 40 m pre MI + 5 m of group MI + 55 m post-MI [experimental session] + 40 m + 60 m [control session]. To avoid any experimenter effect, the control and experimental periods will be randomized with the experimenter acting on the PMT blind about the period of the MI. Participants will agreed with the co-author John Kruth(JK) of the Rhine Research Center Bioenergy Lab, the day and the time to start and end each session. In the agreed day, JK, will activate the PMT and the participants will start their 5 minutes mental interaction after 120 or 220 minutes in randomized way from the start of the recording time. All MI periods will be carried out in the participants’ home. All participants will be connected each other by using ooVoo™ video chat. Before the beginning of the session all participants will see some images of the Rhine Research Center, the Bioenergy Lab and of the PMT to have a representation of the site and the apparatus to influence. Even if free to adopt every strategies, the general instructions to influence the PMT will be that of getting mentally within it trying to emit light feeling completely at ease, protected from external disturbances. Confirmatory hypotheses: The number of photons detected by the PMT in the 30 minutes after the MI will outperform those detected in the 30 minutes before the MI. These differences will hold subtracting the number of photons in the corresponding 60 minutes of the control sessions. Exploratory hypotheses: check if the above differences hold for shorter periods: 5,10,15,20,25 minutes and longer periods:35,40,45,50,55,60 minutes. The comparison between the means of the photons x sec detected in the pre and post MI experimental periods and these differences with respect to the control periods will be done with a paired estimation of the means and the standardized effect size d by using the 95% confidence intervals obtained by a bootstrap procedure with 5000 samples and the calculation of the BayesFactorH1/H0, using the ttestBF from the package BayesFactor and fixing the prior effect size rscale parameter to 0.3. Furthermore the BayesFactor will be repeated varying the rscale parameter from .01 to 0.5 to check the robusteness of the effect. A BF above 3 will be considered as acceptable evidence.