Remote perception (sometimes called remote viewing) is the acquisition of information about a distant location, event, or person, through means other than those of the known physical senses.
The goal of this unit is to provide an overview of the Remote Perception experiments as conducted by the PEAR lab.
Remote Perception Protocol
PEAR's remote perception experiments typically involved two people, an agent and percipient, who were attempting to share information about a given location without using any known means of communication. In these experiments, the agent would go to a predetermined randomized target location, and would try to mentally share this location - with whatever method seemed appropriate to them - with the percipient at a distant location.
The percipient, who was anywhere from a couple of miles to global distances away from the agent, was given no information about the target location, but did know who the agent was and at what time they were going to visit the target site. The percipient would try to view, imagine, or visualize where the agent was located and record their impressions to later be compared with the impressions, photographs, and descriptions of the agent at the site.
PEAR's remote perception experiments were based on earlier work done by Russel(cache)Targ(cache) and Hal Puthoff(cache) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), but with additional analytical overlays, different percipient-experimenter interactions, and the notable difference that in PEAR experiments, the site visits by the agent and the perceptions by the percipient were not necessarily synchronized in time. Many of the perceptions were recorded prior to the site visits by the agent, or even prior to the random selection of the target location. For this reason, the PEAR experiments are more precisely termed "Precognitive" Remote Perception (PRP).
The Agent Experience (video)
Elissa Hoeger of the PEAR lab explains the agent's role at the Graduate College of Princeton University.
Quantification of Perceptions
One of the PEAR lab's major contributions in this area of research was the development of methods for quantifying the amount of information that was being transferred so that it could be statistically analyzed. Over twenty-five years of experimentation, the PEAR lab explored and tested many ranking, quantifying, and statistical processing procedures.
These processes are necessary because no percipient description is photographically accurate. Some aspects of a perception could be correct, some parts not, and other parts ambiguous. Relying on subjective judgments of the overall accuracy of an entire perception doesn't give experimenters very much information to analyze, and is not very useful for statistical processing since it reduces the range of information contained in a perception to a single data point. Importantly, prior ranking techniques were also vulnerable to subjective inputs of the ranking judge. Parsing the perceptions into specific informational units allowed for more precise information extraction, more robust statistical analysis, and the development of statistical controls.
Elissa Hoeger introduced some of the descriptor questions the PEAR lab used in the video above. The protocol used involved a set of quantifiable yes/no descriptor questions that were answered by both the agent at the site and the percipient after the perception attempt. By comparing the description and perception responses, PEAR experimenters could then numerically measure the similarity of the perception to the agent's described scene, and thus determine just how much information was being anomalously acquired.
PRP Experimental Results
PRP Results lecture (video)
Robert Jahn speaks on the results found in the Precognitive Remote Perception experiments.
As can be heard in the transcripts read above by Dr. Jahn, some of the perceptions contained extremely accurate descriptions of the scenes visited by the agents. Of course, many of the perceptions were not at all accurate, but overall, the descriptions by the percipients and agents had more in common than they should have by chance. Information was apparently being shared through an unknown communication channel.
The statistical measures that the PEAR lab developed allow us to see just how much information was getting through. The graph below shows both the mismatched scores - the central Gaussian curve (in red), which is what one would expect by chance guessing - and the scores achieved by the matched agent-percipient experimental trials (green).
Positive Information Shift
The difference between the two is graphed in blue, and we can see that - across the board - there is a shift toward more information. Not only are there more perceptions that have more correct information than they should by chance, but we also see that there are fewer wrong perceptions than there should be by chance. That is, the excess of information does not appear to occur in just a few outlying perceptions, but spread throughout all the PRP attempts.
The statistical significance of this deviation from chance guessing could also be calculated. The PRP experiments, with far fewer data points, exceeded the statistical significance of the REG experiments, with a probability of less than a one in ten billion (p=10^-10), as shown below.
Cumulative Deviation
So how does this long-distance, non-synchronized information sharing in PRP experiments fit in with the data from the human-machine experiments? The lack of dependence on distance and time are common features, but the difference in units makes quantifying the comparison less rigorous. By some criteria, the PRP experiments have apparently higher information yields. This may be due to the nature of the task, or it could be that the co-operation of agent and percipient is similar to the enhanced effect size found in the Co-operative REG experiments.
Lessons about Quantification
As the experimentation with PRP proceeded, the PEAR lab continued to refine their statistical methods for evaluating the data that the percipients and agents were producing.
One of the common complaints by the volunteers was that they felt constrained by the questionnaire. As part of their experimentation with evaluative procedures, the lab then tried different methods of quantification that offered more choice, moving from a yes-no, to a yes-no-maybe, to a four point scale, and then to a ten point scale.
As time went on, even though the percipients were still writing some aspects of their perceptions free-hand, they became more and more accustomed to the questionnaire, and the written descriptions became shorter and shorter. Simultaneous with this, the PEAR lab found that the results of the experiments were getting worse and worse.
The graph below shows the chronological sequence of the different quantifying protocols, the first experimental protocol (labeled Ex Post, for 'ex post facto', indicating trials encoded after the experiments were conducted), through the last protocol (labeled Distrib. for distributive coding on a 0-9 scale). Each of these successive quantifying protocols increased in both complexity, and its supposed ability to parse finer and finer detail from the perceptions. Unfortunately, by the time the last protocol was implemented, it appeared that there was no longer any anomalous information flowing that could be measured.
Sequential Effect Sizes
The reduced results in later-stage PRP protocols, and the final null result from the distributive ten-point scale protocol, is an instructive result. PEAR's interpretation of this decline is that as their volunteers put more attention on the analytical component of the judging protocol, and less on the receptive portion of the PRP experience, the shift in mental state somehow decreased the ability of the partners to share the target information. PEAR recommends that future experimenters pay close attention to priming of analytical thinking in experimentation with consciousness-related anomalies, since analytical overlays themselves may eclipse the expression of anomalous effects.
Unit Conclusion
PEAR's Precognitive Remote Perception protocols bring into focus the difficulty that objective empirical science has with identifying, capturing, and quantifying not only anomalous experiences, but the many forms of subjective experience. If you've ever played the game telephone(cache), you can probably think of some of the difficulties with this evaluation process.
Consider for a moment the PRP quantifying protocol and how it correlates with the conscious experience of any given environment. Will an experience of a scene actually be much like the quantifying descriptor list? If I am visiting a golf course, is my experience limited to a colored, outdoor, non-confined, man-made area, with grass, trees, and golf balls? Or does the sand bunker remind me of the beach, and volleyball? If I see a dog, do I then think to myself about that precise dog? Perhaps about my own dog, or pet? Or even ponder dog spelled backwards?
If the vagaries of the agent's consciousness are what are being shared with the percipient, it's quite a hodge-podge. If the percipient receives anything at all, it may be more like a dairy page of non-sequitors than even a blurry photograph. Many percipients describe the experience as similar to recalling dream imagery. Even if the percipient manages to avoid excessive re-interpretation and transcribe this stream accurately, how well might it score on a list of descriptors?
The scope of detail that's capable of being captured in any list of descriptors is very limited. One descriptor asks if any animals are significant in the scene. If a breed of dog is correctly identified, the improbability of that is not captured in the scoring process. In fact, it is weighted the same as the vague response "yes, there's an animal," which could be anything from a whale to a mosquito.
This reduction may seem absurd, but it does accomplish the goal of creating a quantifiable analysis. And even with this extreme reduction the results of the PRP experiments are striking.
As students of consciousness, the PRP experiments give us important pointers as to the proper role of our analytical thought processes in the study of these phenomena. Additionally, the experimental demonstration of this type of anomalous information sharing also lends credence to the numerous anecdotal reports of precisely this sort of information sharing (such as reports of identical twins knowing when the other has been in a car wreck, or a child speaking aloud what his mother has just been thinking).
Our consciousness, then, can not only influence random physical systems, but at times, it can somehow acquire information, or share information, with other consciousnesses, both through distance and through time. Analytical thought process may inhibit this process, but closer relationships and highly emotional content may increase this occurrence.
Suggested Activity
It is not difficult to conduct your own replication of the PEAR lab protocols for the Remote Perception experiment. To gain a more complete understanding of the experience and the experimental process, we suggest trying it with a friend or fellow student.
Download the forced choice questionnaire and print two copies, one given to the agent, and one to the percipient. Pick a convenient time to do the experiment, and decide who is going to be the agent, and who will be the percipient.
Without consulting the percipient, the agent (or a third person, if available) should decide on a target location that is preferably unfamiliar to the percipient. At the designated time, the agent should travel to the target location, and follow the instructions as given by Elissa Hoeger, above - attempt to take in the scene and share its character and details with the percipient, perhaps visualizing the percipient at the site, or in a conversation about the scene.
Only after the agent has spent fifteen to twenty minutes attempting to share the scene with the percipient should they begin documenting the scene with photographs, descriptions, and the downloaded check-sheet.
Meanwhile (or at a different time within a day or so of the designated time), the percipient should record their perceptions by voice recorder or on paper, while attempting to visit the site mentally with the agent. The percipient should try to immerse herself in the scene, and record all free-response impressions, no matter how vague, or seemingly irrelevant. Only after attempting to perceive the scene for twenty minutes should the percipient look at the check sheet and fill out the questionnaire.
Comparing the data is best done by entering it into this provided spreadsheet (an excel file) which provides a calculation for weighting the responses (using PEAR's target descriptor frequency), and calculates a score for the experimental trial.
Once you've done this, and received a score, compare that score to your personal sense of whether the trial was a hit or a miss. Did you get a result with a striking correspondence? Or something that looked a lot more like chance? Did the score seem to correspond with your subjective evaluation of the content? Let us know how you did!
Additional Study Materials
"Firedocs" has a list(cache) of a number of practical insights one experimenter learned after much practice with Remote Perception (CRV, in her terminology)
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PEAR Webcourse
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Remote Perception
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