Herb Mertz (Interview Archive)
Herb: That's a question I find genuinely compelling, because the circumstances vary quite a bit. In some cases a person starts something and only afterward does another person try to influence it, so you end up with a whole range of setups. This process has been carried out remotely, across the Internet and from a distance, as well as in the same room. On the feedback side, researchers have also run versions that are time shifted, where the participant hasn't even gone out and done their part yet. So this isn't a spatial effect or a local one. It's something of a different order. I think that's why what you see tends to register with you: you recognize most of what you look at, and what you see carries meaning for you. There's your relationship to the event, your mental connection to it, the process you're involved in, rather than some purely physical mechanism.
Eric: How do the mental states of the subject affect how they perform?
Herb: One of the more surprising findings is that when people really bear down, concentrate hard, and strain to produce an effect, they get nothing. In fact that approach tends to backfire. That matches what came out of the PEAR lab, and I'd back it up myself. So I'd say that turning attention toward inner mental states is probably the next direction, rather than only studying brain states and looking at the brain from the outside in, which is more or less how we approach it now. We hook people up to fMRI, magnetic imaging equipment, EEG. On paper there's no reason a brain should be able to influence those devices, since current thinking treats the brain as just material and doesn't grant the mind any capacity beyond neurons firing. Yet there does appear to be some sort of feedback loop between brain and mind, and that loop has another side to it, the side I've been describing in terms of meaning. The meaning structures involved seem to matter.
Eric: Last question. Have you noticed any exceptional individuals who stand out from the general population?
Herb: It's a little funny to recall, but when the PEAR lab got started, Princeton University worried that the work would feed people's fantasies about having psychic gifts or special powers, whether real or imagined. So that was the official posture. Anecdotally, though, there's no doubt that some people do better than others, whether through training or just the way they're wired psychologically. After a while you can use that capacity almost by rote, the way you'd work a muscle. People with certain meaning structures seem to be connected at that level, producing different kinds of effects on the environment around them as they go about their lives.