Experimental preparation: ARV and Presentiment

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December greetings to my remarkably generous funders!

I am excited to report that preparation is fully underway for both the market-prediction (using associative remote viewing or ARV) and smartphone-based presentiment experiments. I'll talk about presentiment first, because that's related to the image above.

PRESENTIMENT: The image above shows mean changes in heart activity from my previous smartphone-based presentiment experiment. Note: higher values mean increased inter-peak intervals, and that's the same as a reduced heart rate (I think it's easier to just call it inter-peak intervals). The red line shows the mean inter-peak intervals over time for participants who were told at t=0 seconds that they lost money, while the black line shows the mean inter-peak intervals over time for participants who were told at t=0 seconds that they won money. Note that for women, during the 10 seconds BEFORE the time they are told about winning or losing, it appears that being about to win produced a decrement in inter-peak interval compared to being about to lose (before t=0, the black line is higher than the red line on the left graph); the men show the reverse pattern (on the right, before t=0, the black line is lower than the red line). This effect is statistically significant, and, in terms of arousal, it matches what I've seen in the lab using skin conductance instead of heart activity. In other words, men and women seem to consistently respond to the future event of winning versus losing money in different ways.

The next step is to increase the reward amount to $4 and then to $6, to determine if there is a dose-response curve. That is the step that you all are funding -- thank you very much! I've run 47 pilot participants to make sure there is a strong (arousing) response to winning $4, and indeed there is. So after registering the experiment, I plan to run the remaining participants in January.

ARV MARKET PREDICTION: After delightedly reporting that the funding is coming in for this experiment, I am working on registering the experiment and making sure the requirements for the automatic trading software are clarified. I met with our financial services team member yesterday to go over the software requirements: we are making sure that the viewers and the judges don't know which bet was selected, based on the remote viewing process, until after the bet is complete. That way we won't consciously be biased by any opinion about the potential success of the bet. Of course, given results in precognition and presentiment experiments, it appears that there is unconscious information about future success, and we do not know how to shield participants or judges from that information -- nor do we know if it would reduce our chances of getting good predictions about the market direction. There's a lot to learn, and the first step here is getting fully automated software to make the next year of judging and trading easy as pie!

Have a wonderful end of 2015 and beautiful, safe, and peaceful holidays!

Take care,

Julia