Herb Mertz on Mind, Intention, and the Data from Princeton
The same principle can stretch beyond one person in a quiet room. Picture a large crowd assembling with a shared purpose, maybe meditating together to bring down the local crime rate, or running some kind of group intention experiment. The thinking goes that all those minds, pulled into one direction at the same time, add up to something. The meditation itself may stand in for the relationship we kept seeing in the lab work. People fall into step with one another through a shared, coherent state, and from that alignment their collective intention reaches out and nudges the world in some measurable way.
What we do in the laboratory is put a few of these old ideas to the test. They've floated around for a long time, and most people simply assume they're true, either because the notion feels reasonable on its face or because the stories people tell seem to point that way. What we've actually demonstrated is that the effect turns up more often than chance would allow.
Eric asked how the work landed at Princeton, one of the leading universities anywhere, and how people there took it. John got the whole thing going. He was Dean of the Engineering School and had always been curious about it. Once the results came back positive, his line was simple: you can't argue with the data. Don ran the lab. He'd trained as a developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago. Over roughly eight years the two of them put out more than sixty papers on this material, covering mind over matter, remote viewing, and a handful of other threads.
On the numbers, Eric wanted a sense of how significant the findings were. The odds of these results showing up by accident ran to something like one in a hundred thousand, or one in a million. You'd expect that to settle the question, that people would accept there's real information in play and push for broader study. It doesn't work that way.
When I founded Psyleron, the thing I kept running into is that nobody truly accepts this data until they've felt it for themselves. My guess is that many people watching who already believe anomalies like these are real got there through a personal experience, some moment that told them the world isn't quite what we were handed. Things happen under the surface that sit outside ordinary physical science. So a group of us got together and decided to build the instruments ourselves: random event generators that anyone could run. You buy one, load the software, sit down, and find out firsthand whether you can move the result.