The International Remote Viewing Association is having their 10th anniversary this year and are hosting a conference in Vegas starting today to celebrate. There press release on the event states:

For 20 years, the U.S. government trained soldiers and secret agents in the use of psychic powers to gain an advantage on enemies.
This weekend, the world’s foremost psychic warriors are coming to Las Vegas to share ideas about the techniques they used, including something called remote viewing.
Las Vegan Ret. Col. John Alexander was one of the insiders of the program. “Part of my time on active duty in the intelligence community was looking at psi phenomena. We were interested in what the Soviet Union was doing and in what could be done. One thing I’d argue, scientists argue about the scientific viability of this. The reality is, we had an operational unit that was out doing intelligence operations quite successfully,” he said.
The conference begins Friday at Green Valley Ranch. It includes speakers who were trained by the CIA, DIA, and Army Intelligence to rely in psychic insights to spy on the enemy.
Among the most dramatic successes was the use of remote viewing to discover the existence of an advanced Russian submarine that was previously unknown.
The conference kicks off at noon and is open to the public.

Though extrasensory perception (ESP) has never been proven in any form, the conference will provide a great opportunity to find out more about the U.S. Government’s whacky Cold War remote viewing research. You might not find evidence of the paranormal, but we can guarantee that you will see weird things.

Speaking of Richard Wiseman, we almost forgot to give you the results of the great twitter ESP experiment we posted on a couple of weeks ago. Watch this video that explains it all. Results were negative for proof of ESP.

Read Wiseman’s write up on it here.

Prof. Richard Wiseman

Today marks the beginning of the first ever scientific experiment conducted using Twitter. Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, has organized an remote viewing ESP experiment using the social networking tool.

Richard Wiseman, assisted by fellow researchers, will visit different locations around the UK and ask participants to “tweet” their impressions of the characteristics of the surrounding area. These participants will then be given a series of five photos to choose the correct location from. If anyone gets three hits, the odds of which are 1 in 125, the outcome will be considered statistically significant in proving the existence of ESP.

Wiseman, famous for conducting mass participation studies, has found the perfect online tool for extending his research, making him the first person I know of to use Twitter to do good in this world.

To participate, follow Prof. Wiseman on twitter at:

https://twitter.com/RichardWiseman

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

An important part of the Star Trek mythos is the idea of mind-to-mind contact. Spock uses this to probe other people’s minds and even transplant his entire consciousness. Counselor Troi used it to read the feelings of other species. It’s a wonderful concept that has fascinated people since at least the 1800’s. Unfortunately, we’re no closer to it being real now then we were back then.

We can imagine all sorts of technology assisted ways to make this real, but there’s nothing sexy about your Vulcan girlfriend asking you to step into an fMRI so she can read your voxels (okay, maybe a little sexy). What we need are some organic solutions or explanations for brain to brain transmission that make the concept a little more plausible.

Pheromones
Pheromones are chemical signals that animals use to influence one another and convey certain kinds of information like mating availability and even directions. The amount that humans are controlled by them is up for debate. Yet, we know they’re there and we know they have some effect – especially when it comes to reproduction.

At its simplest, a pheromone is a chemical emitted by one animal that tells another animal’s brain (usually via the nose) some piece of information. While individual pheromone’s may not say a whole lot, they may be more complex than Chinese pictographs and capable of communicating more information than our spoken communication.

If an organism could control what pheromones it gave off (like we do sound in speech) and another organism could discern the details (like we do with hearing), a whole new level of non-verbal communication is made possible. This is even more practical than mind viruses (see below) and something you can readily experiment with. We’d love to hear from someone who has built a Wi-Fi system based on scent.

Mind viruses
Information is transmitted from mind to mind all the time without overt forms of communication. Animals that inherit their instincts get their instructions from coding in their DNA. Viruses can jump bits of DNA from one organism to another. Our own DNA is filled with examples of this. Some speculate that up to 50% of the DNA in us was left there by viruses.

If we can all agree that animals (including us) can inherit information (patterns in the brain) that predispose us a certain way and we can agree that viruses can alter our DNA, it’s at least possible for an organism to use DNA as a way to shuttle information back and forth between different brains. So when Spock puts his hands on your face in that Vulcan mind meld of his, he’s really just passing on some mind infection to you.

Who knows how effective of a mode of transmitting information this would be. It might be worse than a fax machine from 1960. Or how well it would work between two different people, let alone two different species from different planets. At least it’s a mechanism that may already be in place to some degree.

Magnetoception
When most skeptics approach the idea of telepathy, stock answer number one is how complex the brain is how all our brains are laid out differently. Forgetting for the moment that recent research has shown that we can pinpoint thoughts and decisions much more precisely than we thought; it doesn’t matter how different our brains are. We have parts of our brain dedicated to sorting that out and communicating with the rest of the world. All you need to do is send a request for information to that spot to get your response. Think of a spy on sodium thiopental. This truth serum works (kinda, sort of) because it affects a part of the brain that’s semi-conscious and not self censoring.

Now all we need is a nonverbal, non-chemical way tap into that part of the brain. Maybe it’s already there. Bee’s, sharks, birds and now apparently cows can all sense magnetic fields due to the presence of a magnetic organic compound called magnetite (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7213948). In the laboratory we can send signals to the parts of their brains that control their magnetoception and screw up their sense of direction. Studies in humans have been inconclusive yet we apparently have deposits of magnetite in our noses. At some point on our evolutionary path we likely had magnetoception to some degree.

A biologist wanting to give us the ability to read minds needs to first increase our ability to sense magnetic fields (tweaking a gene sequence or two) and then give us a controlled way to transmit. It could be a matter of giving a part of our brain that involves speech control over a muscle or organ (other than our tongue) that can generate really strong EMF waves (stronger than the ones our body already produces). Maybe some eel genes could help. Maybe there’s already coding for that.

The end product is a human that can naturally transmit and receive thoughts through electromagnetic radiation just like a cell phone or a radio – without the need for either.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible