Herb Mertz Interview: Minds, Random Number Generators, and the PEAR Experiments
Eric opened by asking Herb to lay out the basics for anyone who had never come across this line of research. What did the experiments actually involve? What were the materials, and what did the numbers say once everything was tallied up?
Herb explained that the laboratories concentrated on two broad areas. The first was remote viewing, which some people already know about, where one person stays put while another heads out to a target location. The second involved a device producing a stream of ones and zeros, each one genuinely uncertain. Not just hard to predict, but unknowable in advance even in principle, because the output traces back to a quantum process running underneath.
That uncertainty is the whole point. The researchers wanted to know whether a person, by focusing on the flowing stream of ones and zeros, could nudge a pattern into it that would never have appeared otherwise. The plainest version of such a nudge is simple imbalance: tilt the stream so it leans toward ones, or toward zeros, instead of staying even.
A coin toss gives you a useful comparison. Over a long enough run, a fair 50/50 process settles into roughly equal heads and tails, or in this case equal ones and zeros. So if a clear lean shows up, a computer can flag it and say, in effect, this should not have happened by chance.
Herb said the lab ran well over a hundred people through these sessions, with the statistics calculated afterward. The findings came out strong. Depending on which data set you looked at, the odds against chance landed in the one-in-a-million range or beyond, and pooling everything together pushed the significance even higher. Something about a person simply attending to the device's activity was leaving a mark on the output.
Eric picked up on a phrase and asked Herb to describe the scene with hundreds of people in a room. Herb corrected the impression. The hundreds were spread across the whole body of research, not packed into a single space. Still, the question touched on something he found worth describing: PEAR did run trials with more than one person in the same room working on a device at the same time.
Here is where it got interesting to him. When two people of the same sex who were just friends or acquaintances tried to influence one of these random event generators together, they did no better than a single person working alone. Occasionally they did worse.
The pattern changed with couples. When the pair shared a close bond, in the studies this generally meant a man and a woman in an intimate relationship, their combined results came out markedly better than what an individual could manage on their own. To Herb that pointed at the relationship itself doing something. As if the bond sent out a kind of ripple, drawing the random event generator into the orbit of the two people and lending the output a little more coherence, an extra pattern tied to whatever existed between them.