The relationship between local geomagnetic activity, Tibetan Buddhist meditation and psychic awareness: preliminary study
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Roney-Dougal, Serena M., Ryan, Adrian and Luke, David 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2141-2453
(2010)
The relationship between local geomagnetic activity, Tibetan Buddhist meditation and psychic awareness: preliminary study.
In: Abstracts of presented papers, 53rd Parapsychological Association Annual Convention, Enclos Rey, Paris, France, July 22-25 2010.
Parapsychological Association, Columbus, OH, USA, pp. 35-36.
Abstract
The proposal is that the local environment, as well as the person‟s state of consciousness, affects the ability to consciously use psychic awareness.
For the past three decades research in parapsychology has found evidence that psychic awareness may be related to fluctuations in geomagnetic activity (GMA). Most of this research has used global measures of GMA, but recently Ryan found that certain classes of local GMA appeared to enhance receptive psi, whilst other classes had an inhibitory effect. He demonstrated that these patterns accounted well for the previously reported relationships between psi performance, global GMA and local sidereal time. We are running a long-term study with a special population, which will hopefully help to elucidate this effect.
This research also extends previous studies with Yogis and Tibetan Buddhist monks in India, seeing whether the finding, that more years of meditation practice is related to psi-hitting, remains true for Western Tibetan Buddhist meditation practitioners, and further exploring which aspects of meditation are most psi-conducive.
A clairvoyance/precognition free-response design is being used in which the participant, after a 15-minute meditation period, attempts to correctly choose a video clip selected at random by a computer. The computer program (PreCOG) chooses a target set at random from a pool of 25 sets, and a target video clip at random from the 4-clip set. Each participant completes a minimum of eight sessions each year, which enables both a within-subjects and a between-subjects design to assess whether or not local GMA is related to psi awareness. This design has both a randomized double-blind and inbuilt fraud control. Participants are all meditators residing at Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan centre who have practiced meditation for at least 10 years, up to a maximum of 30 participants.
There are three psychological tests being correlated with the psi scores at present: the Meditation Attainment Questionnaire is a measure of the level of meditation attainment achieved by each participant; the Stroop test is a measure of focus of attention; and the Temporal Lobe Questionnaire assesses temporal lobe lability, which may be an indicator of the degree to which the person is affected by GMA. Geomagnetic field measurements sampled each second are being supplied by the British Geological Survey's Eskdalemuir observatory, which is located 2 miles from Samye Ling Tibetan centre. There are three formal hypotheses:
1) Years of meditation practice will be positively associated with performance on the psi task;
2) Psi performance for sessions conducted during “high band” 1 (0.2 – 0.5 Hz) GMA will be greater than psi performance for sessions conducted during “low band” 1 GMA;
3) Psi performance for sessions conducted during “high band” 3 (0.025 – 0.1 Hz) will be less than psi performance conducted during “low band” 3 GMA.
In addition, as this is a preliminary study, a number of exploratory analyses, such as correlations with the psychological tests, are planned in order to enable optimum design for the controlled studies to follow.
| Item Type: | Conference Proceedings |
|---|---|
| Title of Proceedings: | Abstracts of presented papers, 53rd Parapsychological Association Annual Convention, Enclos Rey, Paris, France, July 22-25 2010 |
| Additional Information: | Paper presented at the 53rd Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, held 22-25 July 2010, Enclos Rey, Paris, France. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Tibetan Buddhist meditation, geomagnetic field fluctuation, pineal gland, psi, precognition, clairvoyance |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| Pre-2014 Departments: | School of Health & Social Care School of Health & Social Care > Department of Psychology & Counselling |
| Related URLs: | |
| Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2017 23:48 |
| URI: | http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/3910 |
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