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And listeners can get an exclusive 20% off Ixcel membership when they sign up today at Ixcellearning.com/audio. Visit Ixcellearning.com/audio to get the most effective learning program out there, at the best price. From the mind of a two-foot tall talking spokespuppet comes this year's biggest challenge. It's time for Bob's dare to compare! The hottest game show on TV that asks, "What happens when you compare Bob's to the competition?" You get style, you get quality, you get beeps and boops and dings and whops, and thousands of dollars in savings! Everyone's winner when you dare to compare with Bob's discount furniture! Shop in store at mybobs.com to play now! Welcome to Other World, I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode comes from a woman named Elizabeth. She emailed in a story about participating in some sort of scientific study that was done on psychic abilities and ESP that took place at Princeton University. She was a student attending Juilliard at the time for acting, and her professor told her and her boyfriend about this study, and that they were looking for volunteers, and that those volunteers would be paid. And they agreed to do it, basically, just because they wanted the money. But when they actually went and participated in the experiment that was conducted at this place, it ended up leaving a very strong impression on Elizabeth. Now, this was, of course, very interesting to me. Psychic studies being conducted at Princeton University, potentially. But as we're emailing back and forth, I actually realized that I recognized Elizabeth's name, and it turns out she's actually quite a well-known actor. And so is the boyfriend from the story that she was dating at the time, which really just adds an interesting spin on this whole thing. Anyway, let's get this episode started. Elizabeth's experience ended up sending me down a bit of a rabbit hole when I set out to discover what exactly this study was, who the group was that conducted it, and what happened to them. This is episode 92, the title is The Receiver, and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At that it's core, the science, you can't argue. He's so unjorried about science, he's up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happened. I'm the chief, yes, I'm going to die of budget. It's wins, we're just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. [Music] My name is Elizabeth Marvel. I am an actress, and I live in Brooklyn, New York with my husband and son. I've lived in New York for a very long time. I came here at 18 to go to Juilliard, and I've lived here ever since. I grew up mainly in Pennsylvania, in a very small town. I was in the woods, in the country, a very teeny, tiny town in the country. And I was always kind of an odd, I was always an odd kid. And I had this thing, I never believed that I was from this planet. So I would take all the flashlights in the house and line them up alongside my body in the yard and lie there and turn them all on and wait for the aliens to come get me. Because I was significantly meant to pick me up, apparently, when I was very small. So yes, I was a funny, funny little kid. My father died when I was 11, which was kind of odd, because my father often said that he never believed he would live a long life. And we always thought that was weird and creepy. But he died at 45, which is kind of young. Oddly, not long before he died, two things happened. The woman that would, our cleaning lady, said that her astrologer told her that my father would die shortly, because this woman was kind of close to our family. And it was apropos, nothing, it was just because my father wasn't like a sick person. He wasn't a heavy drinker, but he didn't have health issues. Also, my father, he was a big deep sea fisherman, and he had been in Bimini, and he had his palm red. And the woman, the palm reader, didn't want to read his palm. He insisted that she do. And she showed him his lifeline, which was short, I guess. And she said, "You'll, it looks like you're going to die soon." And he did, he did die soon. And it was very shocking. We didn't expect it. And it kind of blew up my family. My brothers were away at school. They're much older than I am. And my mother, it was very difficult. So fast forward slightly, and my mother remarried and moved to Sicily. And I went to boarding school in northern Michigan at 13, when I was 13. I went there to this school called Interlochen Arts Academy. And I went there for visual arts, and I ended up doing a play. My freshman year, which was funny, and I knew nothing about theater. But I was playing one of the main parts. And the theater was this theater called the Gruno Theater. And it was like a, I don't know, 200 seat black box theater on the lake. And I went there one night to work on my lines. You know, I'd gone to school all day, and after classes and after dinner, you'd have the evening to kind of work on whatever you want. And if you were an art student, you'd go into the studio, or you'd go practice your violin, or whatever your art was. So I went to the theater to work on my lines, and there was nobody there. And I was on the stage, and the lights were all out in the house. I had a couple of lights on up on the stage, and I was sort of walking around, trying to practice my part and my blocking. And I really didn't know what I was doing. And I sat down on a chair, and I looked out at the house. And I had never experienced anything like this. I was not a person that, you know, had experienced ghosts or anything. And but I saw in the house of the theater, there was sort of a lighter area that seemed to be a different, like a, it was lighter than the darkness. It's hard to explain. So everything was dark, right? It was, there were no lights on. So it wasn't as if a light was being shined on an area. It was, it didn't have that any definition that way. It was, you know what it was like? It was like, you know when you see light under water, and so it doesn't have like edges. It's murky, but you can see it's a lighter patch there. That's what it was like. Because it wasn't a light, it just was lighter than the darkness, and it was an area. And I was staring at it, and then I got hit with this intense feeling in my, I guess, my solar plexus. It's a very overwhelming feeling of extreme sadness. And when it hit me, it wasn't, I could feel it wasn't my feeling, if that makes sense. I don't know if you've ever felt that. But like, it's an outside emotional state sort of hitting you, but you can identify that this is not related to your own emotions, or your own emotional state. It was something from outside of me that hit me. It absolutely terrified me. It really terrified me because it was, it was like something invaded me. Something from outside, it got inside. And it really freaked me out. And so I got up and I jumped off this stage, and I, to leave the theater, you had to run out past the house seats to the door of the theater. And when I ran past, it was like really cold. I remember feeling it was really cold. And then I booked it back to my dorm. And that was a very strange thing that happened. But during that time, when I was like 13, 14, 15, 16, going through puberty, I had this reoccurring problem like with holding glass bowls or serving bowls. If I had to set the table, if I held, it happened a handful of times. If I held serving dishes or serving bowls, they would explode in my hands. Later in life, because now I'm 54, so as a adult, I've heard, I've read things and heard things over time that I guess it's not a wildly uncommon phenomena for pubes and girls. They have like this kind of intense energy that happens to them. I think we tap into something maybe vibrationally or energetically. So that happened when I was a teenager, which was odd and kind of upsetting whenever it would happen. Wait, what do you mean by exploding glass? Like while you're holding it, the glass would explode like what it would be like? Like literally like explode. Like I remember the first time it happened, I was in my mom's house in Sicily and she given me this empty like glass, kind of not heavy, heavy, but kind of heavy, like big empty salad bowl to put on the table outside and I was walking to and it just like shattered in my hands because she had a marble floor and it kind of exploded all over this floor and I remember and it was just crazy because things shouldn't do that. Did you get cut? No, no, no, and I never did when it happened. So it wasn't like I was squeezing it, I would just be carrying the things. So no, nothing would ever go into my hands. It's just like it would shatter. Probably happened like four times in my life, I would guess. And they would just like shatter like if you like if you took a bowl and just dropped it, like what would happen to it, it would just go and kind of break into pieces like that. Once was in California, same thing was always like in relation to my mother. So I don't know if that's a whole other element. But yeah, it was always sort of the same thing of being given a container to carry to during a meal and this would happen. But it was never like amidst an argument or it was just doing a mundane job of setting the table or getting dinner ready. I don't remember like actively doing anything or seeking anything out to deal with it. Just sort of, it didn't go any further than that. Until this time later at Juilliard, when I accidentally kind of reengaged whatever that horusness was, and then I had to learn how to deal with it. Okay, so after high school, I went to the Juilliard school for drama. And my first year, I was 18 when I got to New York and got to Juilliard. And Michael Stuhlberg, who's another actor, was in my class and he was my boyfriend at the time. And we were approached one day. There was a teacher, Dr. Roy Sevech, who was kind of a groovy teacher. He was kind of groovy, kind of cool. Students liked him. And he had been doing some work at Princeton and knew this group of Princeton grad students who were doing this study on the arts and ESP psychic ability. They were doing this study. And it was at this place called the Pear Lab. Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, basically, that used to exist in Princeton. I'm not sure when it closed down, but I know Princeton was trying to close it for a very long time. I don't think they were very happy that it existed, but it did for a long time. And he basically appealed to our desperation for money. He was like, hey, I know these grad students are doing this thing at Princeton and it's kind of cool, but they'll pay you. And it's only for a day. And you just have to take the train to Jersey and they'll pay you. And they'll give you free pizza. So that was really enough. It honestly is what got me there. It wasn't like, ooh, I'll be a part of an ESP experiment. It was like free pizza and money was the big enticement. So we got on a train and we went to Princeton, New Jersey and we went to this facility. It was an odd lab. It was like an odd place that they took us. There was this room, it was sort of wood paneled. I remember it had this hideous orange couch. It was sort of like the basement of the X files. You definitely felt like, oh, this is where all the weird Princeton students end up. It was a little well worn. There were a lot of stuffed animals. I don't know why. There was a lot of activity though. And there were different rooms, a lot of them I didn't go into. This was sort of a big room where this orange couch was where I was kind of just sat waiting while they were setting things up and getting ready to take me into these other areas. I remember there was a fountain that they had these different things that they were doing ongoing experiments on. One was like the flow of this fountain. Another one was this huge wall. It was like a pachinko machine. It would cascade down pieces of metal would roll down in various roots, little canals and pile at the bottom and then it would get whisked away and brought back up to the top and it would all flow back down. And they had some crazy robot things because what they were trying to do is see if human minds could affect machines, which considering we were doing this in the early 90s, I was there and what would it have been like 90, I guess. And there was like lots of stuffed animals and lots of gizmos and lots of geeky people wandering around and all kinds of filing cabinets. And they separated Michael and I pretty quickly. And they sat me at this table and there was like this machine. You know how on those calendars, those electronic calendars, they would like flip the date. The date would flip. It was like something like it was like a machine, but it had numbers. I would have to tell them if I thought the next number would be higher or lower than the number I was being shown. So they had me do that for a while. And then someone came and just had a bunch of playing cards. The person I was with got very excited with my performance on whether the number would be higher or lower. So I guess I got it. A lot of them right. So then someone just grabbed some playing cards and they said, "Can you guess to say out loud what card I'm going to turn over?" So they started doing it and I didn't get many right. And then I started being able to guess a lot of the cards. And then I guessed like I want to say like six in a row and then I stopped and I started guessing them wrong. So then they were like, "Okay, we're going to take you into this other building." It may not have been another building, but I remember I walked down this long concrete hallway. And they took me into this room that had this chair in it that was like, it was like a dentist chair, like a modern dentist chair because it was it would recline really far back the way a dentist chair does. And it had like a headrest and it had armrests on the sides. And they explained that they were going to take these half ping-pong balls and tape them on my eyes. And then they were going to shine this red light on my eyes. And they were going to put these headphones on me that was going to play white noise. And then what they wanted me to do is if anything came to my mind, if I saw anything in my mind's eye, if I had any visions, if I, if anything happened, that I was just supposed to say it out loud and they would be recording it, but I wouldn't be able to edit myself because I had these headphones playing white noise, so I couldn't really hear what I was saying. So just any images you have that come to your mind, just say them. So it started and the white noise played and I felt like the all of these images exploded in my brain, like super vividly. And it was like one thing, but none of them were connected. They were like so crazy. And there was like this giant golden apple and this African-American woman blue singer singing and dancing across this golden bridge that was the Brooklyn bridge. And she had red shoes on. And there was a man who was wearing metal. And yeah, so there were all of these things. And then there was like a man playing golf, then a man playing tennis and a woman playing tennis. And then there was this cartoon of this cat. Is this something that would normally happen to you? Like when you close your eyes, do you normally see things? No, I mean, look, I have a hyper imagination. I have a very active, very vivid imagination. But no, this was a very, I mean, that's why I'm telling you about these things, because I understand like, I understand what is my imagination. This was different. This was different. This was something else. And it seemed to go on forever. And then it stopped. And they, all four of the grad students came running in. They took all this stuff off me. And they were so excited. And they said, okay, now we're going to read back what you said. And we want to hear any thoughts you have about anything you said. So they read back what I, the manuscript, what I had recited. And it was all describing exactly what I had had had going in my mind. So what happened was one of them, I thought it was Michael, but Michael confirmed with me. No, he had the same thing happen to him. So it wasn't Michael. They had one of the grad students in a room watching a video clip. They had four video clips that they could choose from. They were watching that clip over and over in another room and trying to send it to me. And this student was watching one of them, which was a clip from the movie The Wiz, which I had never seen. And in the movie, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, so we dance across the Brooklyn Bridge, which is also the yellow brick road. And there's a giant golden apple that rises. And I completely received it and described it like verbi, like every step of it, I described it in this transcript that they read back. And so when they showed me the clip, I was like, yes, that's, that is exactly what was in my mind. And then I said, but there were also all of these sports like close-ups of like a man hitting a tennis ball and then a woman running to like get a ball. And then these, this man golfing and, and they, and then I said, and there was like a Felix the cat that I kept seeing like running along a piece of wood and then falling. And so I guess what they were doing is those were the four short videos that they would use for each of their different experiment to send. Those were the four things that they used to send, but they would pick one. So mine was the whiz, but somehow I picked up on all of them, even the ones that weren't being sent to me. But after I did this, they, they, like, right, they were hugging me and like, they were just so excited. They were so excited. They were so nice to me. I felt like I had, you know, cured cancer or something. There was one woman and three guys and they were, you know, a little from central casting. They were all kind of geeky and, you know, they were science people and they talked to, you know, they had a billion questions. They talked to me for a long time about what happened and really nothing happened except when it was happening. I just vividly, it was like a movie projector in my mind. I just saw all of this stuff in sequence as it, as I guess it was being played. And then when it was all over and I answered all their questions and all of it was done, they took us back to the train and Michael and I went back and he, I guess, found out he was being sent the Felix the cat one, but he didn't, he had no response at all. He had no, he didn't see anything, he didn't experience anything. And I remember him being like, that's crazy. That's totally crazy. I did not experience that at all. And then I think, you know, it was just back to Juilliard. But then what happened was I was then in New York City, walking around in New York City. And the first time it happened was I was in line. It was either a Walgreens or a Dwayne Reed up by Lincoln Center. I can't remember. I was standing in line to buy cigarettes because it's back when I used to smoke. And I was standing in a line of like four people. And I got that same feeling that I had had in high school, I got like invaded by an emotion. Like it hit me in the solar plexus. And I became overwhelmingly despondent and like started to cry and just felt like overwhelmed out of nowhere. And when I sort of took a moment, I saw that the cashier was kind of having a breakdown. And I thought, Oh shit, I wonder if this is theirs. Like this isn't mine because I was fine. I was just buying a bag of cigarettes. Like I wasn't having some psychological problem or depressed or anything. I was really okay. So I got out of, I split, I left and I like walked around for a while and the feeling lifted. It didn't stay that long. But I started like this started happening, like not a ton, but it happened a few more times. Like once at school, once in a restaurant that I would just like feel this emotional thing and not always like the one at school wasn't like sadness. It was kind of this weird like hyped up weird energy, but it just wasn't mine. And I could identify that it wasn't mine. So I started feeling like fuck these guys, these people in Princeton like fucked me up. Like something's going on, something happened because ever since I did that thing, like there's been this problem happening with me. So I called this guy whose name I can't remember, but he was one of the students and who gave me all of their info. And I called him and he said, yes, that they had heard of this happening, that it had, it wasn't common, but it had happened. And that what I needed to do was, if this happened again, I needed to just stop and breathe and visualize closing a door, shutting a window, lowering the blinds, closing the curtains. And I needed to do it like in my mind's eye, like repeatedly. And I needed to just keep practicing closing the door and the curtains and the window. All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. Otherworld is sponsored by Rocket Money. I love Rocket Money. I use it myself to keep track of all my bills and accounts. Rocket Money is a feature where if you think you might be paying too much on a certain bill, you can have Rocket Money try to negotiate a lower price for you. I honestly didn't even know that was something you could do in general, but I recently had Rocket Money try it with my cable and internet bill, and it totally worked. They negotiated it down like 30% less than what I paid before. And all I had to do was click a couple buttons. 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So Elizabeth's story really piqued my interest in this lab and the studies that they're conducting. It sounded like she performed extraordinarily well in this specific one. But that was basically the last she ever heard of it. Many years have gone by since then and she told me that she's always wanted to know more about what exactly that was and now I wanted to know more as well. So after our interview, I set out to learn more about Princeton's parallabs. It turns out that unfortunately parallabs closed its doors in 2002, but we decided to try tracking down some of the people who were involved in parallabs or maybe the study. We spent quite a lot of time doing so and talked to a lot of people, but eventually ended up getting in touch with a man named Dr. Roger Nelson, who was the coordinator of research from 1980 to 2002. However, the first thing Roger told us is that Elizabeth was a little mistaken. The study was not actually done at parallabs. It was done by a neighboring research group called PRL labs that pair often collaborated with and even shared space with. Nobody at PRL was able to speak to us, but we're able to talk to Roger Nelson about this study, the history of par and PRL, and how they ended up doing this type of psychic research at Princeton in the first place. Now, I'm, of course, in no way a scientist myself. A lot of this research being done at the time was very complicated, very far out there, and of course, highly debated, but more than anything, I find it really interesting that all of this was being done at and around Princeton for over 20 years. So this is my conversation with Dr. Roger Nelson of parallabs. Joining me now is Roger Nelson. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you, Jack. So the reason I reached out to you in the first place is that I interviewed somebody, an actress named Elizabeth Marvel, who's actually a pretty famous actress, and it turns out that when she was going to school at Juilliard a long time ago, she volunteered for some kind of test at parallabs that was being conducted at parallabs, and had a really, really interesting experience that has stuck with her for a very long time, even though it was just something that she did for easy money when it was presented, which kind of led me down the rabbit hole into researching parallabs, and that eventually led to you. You were the coordinator of research at parallabs. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. It may be not correct, however, that is her name Elizabeth? Yes. I think it's quite possible that she was actually volunteering for tests at what was called psychophysical research labs, and that abbreviation they use most of the time was PRL or sometimes PIRL, but in anything that was Chuck Honnerton's lab where he was doing gun spell experiments, did she say anything about leaning back in a chair with ping pong balls over her eye? Yes, that's exactly what she did. She remembers, and it's not surprising, pair is ultimately much more famous because it stayed in action and continued the research until 2007, I think, and then the research was continued by other entities in Princeton, but PRL didn't last that long. Chuck Honnerton, who was running the place, went off to Edinburgh to get a PhD and unfortunately died a few years later. He was a great researcher in that protocol, the gun spell protocol, which Elizabeth was talking about, is still, was then really very good one because it did two things. One was to do really competent science, completely unimpeachable science. That was partly insured because Chuck and the people at PRL were happy to work with skeptics to do a perfect experiment, if the skeptics would accept. And then the other thing was that they were really understanding that there is a kind of conducive quality and maybe certain features or factors that worked toward getting good results or getting some kind of results at all in these rather difficult and delicate experiments. So Juilliard was the source of the strongest database within the large number of different kinds of things that PRL Lab did. And we all think that's because part of what is necessary for people to do well in an experiment, trying to figure out what somebody else is looking at, who's in a different room that's soundproof and all of that, that requires a kind of creative quality in your thinking and your attitude toward life. And of course, Juilliard being a school of music. Yeah, there's people who have that creative streak. Do you recall what exactly that test was? I mean, you referenced the ping pong balls, which is exactly what she was referring to, but do you know what they were exactly testing and what and what the results were? They were testing what some people think of as clairvoyance or telepathy or remote viewing, there are any number of names for it. Basically, there are two people that are involved with some experimenters around the periphery. One is a, what we in the per lab called the agent. And that person would be looking at a picture or maybe looking at a little video clip, whatever it was, it was randomly selected from a large number of possible targets. And the person who was called the receiver or viewer or recipient, that person would be sitting in a very comfortable chair, a kind of lounger and leaning back practically in a position to go to sleep. And he or she would have ping pong ball halves over their eyes. And there was a red light in the ceiling that was providing a kind of continuous and undifferentiated light pattern for the people. And then also they would be wearing earphones and listening to white noise. So both of those things were designed to make the person to put the person into what we think of as an altered state of consciousness, where because the brain is now kind of shutting down in terms of perceiving stuff, if theory goes, the brain becomes more receptive to stimulation from some other source. In this case, the potential information presented into the, I'll call it, air, the atmosphere in the experiment by the sender. The results are analyzed in, by most of the time, by giving the recipient four pictures to look at. One is the real one. And then there are three decoys. And the person has to decide which one is the target my sender was looking at. And that's a 25% likelihood, okay, one and four chance of getting right. And the average over a long time and lots of different kinds of viewers is something like 35% instead of 25%. And from the Juilliard students, I don't remember the exact number, but it was well into the 40% range. They were just really much better at it than most people. Elizabeth told me in her memory, at least, that they were shown video clips. And what she was shown specifically is a clip of the movie, The Wiz. She didn't know that at the time, but it was apparently a clip of the movie, The Wiz. Her group was theater majors from Juilliard. So it was just interesting that being actors could somehow make them better at this, right? Would I assume would just be like being more invested in the material or creative? Did she tell you whether she hit it directly? Did she have the number one? Oh, yeah. She said, no, yeah, she did really good. Like, apparently, the researchers were very, very interested in her. Right. And like, high-fiving. The person who kind of like started that. And I think she may have been the one first attracted people from Juilliard was Marilyn Schlitz. And she was a very psychandusive experimenter. What that means is that she was able to put people in a frame of mind or relaxed, accepting state, whatever, better than most people who were doing experiments. As I said, the results for that subgroup were incredibly strong, not quite 50%, but was up in the 40% range. It's really, really interesting. Also, anecdotally, I mean, just hearing her talk about it, she describes like instantly being able to see these things as soon as the ping pong balls. I mean, people as experienced differ, but a lot of the successful viewers would basically get out of the way. And that was aided by this, the continuous red field of vision and the white noise. Their brains, they just emptied out, and they became a receptacle, a kind of receiving opening for whatever information was being put out by the person looking at the video clips. Yeah, that makes sense. What did the red lights do in that experiment? We're describing it. Yeah, the German psychologists, I think it might have been vent, started thinking about the kind of what they called the Gonsfeld, in which became the name of this experiment. It was a continuous field, an undifferentiated field, and they thought, the German psychologist, that would be, that would induce a special state of receptiveness. And so the PRL people just took that kind of literally and made a situation which had continuous sound and continuous light. And the red, I don't know whether that was something they tested, they tried yellow and green and red and whatnot, or if they just decided red would be cool. That's interesting. Do you think, was that their most noteworthy experiment that they did at PRL, or are there any that come to mind that are more impressive to you? They had a wide range of experiments. They were a kind of exploratory resource unit in a way somewhat similar to Pear in Princeton. And so they did random number generator experiments, some of the earliest ones, which means that they ask people to try to change a random sequence of numbers that were being generated by a high quality random number source to try to change that. So it actually had some structure of some correlation and so forth. And they explored some things that I thought were very interesting along the lines of finding out whether if there was a hidden random number generator like in the room or in an x-room that the subject in the experiment didn't know about, whether that would be affected anyway while they were trying to do something to the one that they knew about. And that turned out to be surprisingly at least the guy most responsible for that. Lots of the people are dead or gone very far away. And they did creative kinds of things, like there was experiments that a guy named Mario Varvoglas created used a little golden picture of Buddha that could be made to come closer to you or to recede further into the distance. And they, again, using random number generators, the person tried to get it to come closer, also tried to make it go further away. But I love that experiment because it was giving feedback that was indirect. It's so impressive to me that PRL and you guys over at Paralabs were doing this in and around Princeton. It's just amazing. How did all of this get started? Like how did Paralabs get started specifically? In 1979, one of a student in the engineering school came to the dean and said, "When you gave a speech welcoming us, you said, 'If we do good work as students and if we do our, you know, really bang up job, then we will be able to select what we want to study for our independent work.' And she said, 'I'm trying to get a faculty sponsor and nobody will take up my project.' Her project was to test the notion that a human consciousness could intervene with a random number generator. And so he said, 'Okay, I promised and set up a kind of, you know, a project with her.' He said, 'You need to read a lot of stuff and go to a couple of conferences, learn all you can about this, then go ahead and build your experiment and run it. We'll see what happens. What happened was that she got powerful, divergent results in the sense that the random number generators did not stay random. They became structured or they became nagging-tropic. And it was impressive to him. He knew that she had done a good job. And so a friend of his, from college days, was James Mcdonald. And if you're familiar with aircraft industry, there's a Mcdonald Douglas. That's the Mcdonald. He was, so they were friends and Mcdonald had a foundation, which they agreed would support or, you know, financially support a laboratory, dedicated to looking into questions like, does human consciousness intervene with physical instruments, sensitive things, especially stuff that kind of like on the edge random generators. Mcdonald was interested partly because they did fire aircrafts among other things. And they know that that's a stressful position to be in as a pilot. You've got a whole cockpit full of really highly refined, sensitive instruments. And so Mcdonald was saying, 'But what if this guy that's a pilot in this plane just got a note from his wife saying she wants to divorce, she wants to go out and some other guy, you might be inclined to feel emotions.' Anyway, that led to designing a laboratory which, and creating a space in the basement of the engineering school, just taking some storerooms and turning them into a comfortable place to do experiments on unusual topics, though they were often running. He went to conferences a couple of times and he met Brenda Dunn. She became the right brain where he was the left brain, if you will. They were a very good team and the governing bodies of the university who look at research required that they get somebody else, a third person, to help make sure that everything was on the open up. And I became that person. I answered an ad in a Chronicle of Higher Education that was adjacent to an ad. One of my friends said, 'Maybe you'd be interested in this job.' I wasn't interested in that job, but I was very much interested in the one that said, 'We're looking for a cognitive scientist interested in the lesser known aspects of perception.' And it was from the engineering school of Princeton University. I thought, 'Wow, what are they going to talk about?' Maybe the sense of smell or touch, something like that. But they were interested in something much more stimulating, namely, how does consciousness interact with the world? What was your background before joining Paralabs? What was your... Did you join as a student or were you post-run? I was a PhD psychologist teaching in a small college in Vermont. My background was physics first and then psychology with a whole lot of sculptures stuck in the middle. Basically, I escaped the conditioning that most scientists get in the course of their education to become convinced that science is really just a long list of things that we know. It's not. Science is a set of tools for finding out what we don't know. It's a wonderful set of tools which a lot of people abuse or ignore as tools. They live in a dogmatic world. I've never had much trouble escaping that dogmatic world and looking at things that you might say curious about. That is really interesting. You were interested in this stuff before and it sounds like Paralabs was a perfect unexpected home for you. That's correct. It looks like coincidence, but when you get a sequence, one after another lead to the next step in an interesting path. I guess it's time to consider that there's more to it than just apps, absolutely random coincidence. I was interested in consciousness and things like meditation and yoga and all of those kinds of things from early on. My path has been intriguing and unusual or surprising sometimes, but it all fits together. What were the major studies being done at Paralabs? I mean, I have a specific one in mind that I've seen that involves a very large machine with thousands of balls. You mean Murphy. Is that the name? Sure, but the reason is this random mechanical cascade, which was huge. It was 10 feet tall and about six feet wide and the balls are 3/4 inch diameter polystyrene and there are 9,000 of them. You're right. A lot of them. Oh my gosh. The pins that they bounce around in are also 3/4 inch diameter and arranged in a particular mathematically interesting array. That was one of my favorite experiments just because I like Murphy. It's called Murphy because Murphy's law. If anything can go wrong, it will. This had a conveyor belt and had counters and had all kinds of motors and sensors. Quite frequently, there would be something that went wrong. I think something like 1,100 full complete experimental sets where people are sitting on a couch about 8 feet away would be looking at Murphy. The balls would be all dropped down to a bottom bin and then gradually brought up to the top by a conveyor belt, which would dump them in a sort of slope trough with a hole right in the center where the balls would drop through and bounce left and right and left and right through the matrix of pins until they got to the bottom where they would be funneled into counters where they would drop through a diode pair and break the light beam and thus be counted. It took us a long time to be able to make all this mechanically work and even then we would have a Murphy event once more. Anyway, the idea was that people would try to get the balls to bounce more to the right, more to the left, or let it be. The runs were always done at the same time in close sequence and it would take around 12 minutes for each run so it would take about an hour for somebody to sit through this noisy clatter and some people didn't like that but I always loved it. By the way, for those listening at home, they obviously can't see this but it's like Murphy is essentially like a like a pachinko machine is what I would describe it like if those like a giant and pachinkos like yeah yeah like a giant pachinko machine with all these balls dropping down hitting pins and then landing in these different pockets at the bottom and yeah the way I understand it in layman's terms is like somebody would sit in front of a couch or sit on a couch in front of the machine, stare at it and try to like do whatever they took in their mind to just like imagine the balls going differently and then of course you would run the machine on its own with nobody sitting there and then compare the results to that of a person sitting and trying to influence it. The really important comparison had to be between adjacent runs because the pins were made of nylon which is hydrophilic and when the humidity is high they would become softer and so the bounces would be different so we couldn't compare one for today against one yesterday really a whole lot of extra you know like uncertainty or noise in the system. So we compared runs that were very close to each other in time because the humidity changes very slowly so we would expect that it would not change in a substantial way over the course of an hour. I bet it was loud. It looks loud. It was quite loud. It was quite loud. One of our guys York Dobbins who was our astrophysicist and sort of a computer maven he hated it so he would always throw the door in another room. How significant were the results like how much of an effect were humans and the presence of like the human mind able to affect Murphy? Well the composite database this is across years with a lot of different people doing one set of runs or maybe two or maybe a dozen and it's that database that we use for making a judgment and I think the difference between the high I mean the right and left going runs is has a significance on the order of one part in a thousand roughly so that's highly significant. Looking at an individual set the signal to noise ratio in the experiments of this nature is really really small so you have to be patient if you're going to do this kind of work. You won't get an answer that's reliable unless you do repetitions of the basic experiment. That's even more obvious in the random number generator experiments which by the way you ask which was what experiments were most important. I would say the random number generator experiments those are more obviously at some kind of quantum level completely vulnerable to something like thoughts. Yeah I think it's really interesting from what I've seen of the research that was done at PRL in PRL is that the results were small but not insignificant and I think a lot of people when they think about testing what most consider to be paranormal they imagine a psychic trying to move a pen on a desk and trying to lift something with their head they expect something big to happen. This stuff could be real and we could just be very very bad at it. We could have the abilities but not be very good. Not be able to do much with it. It doesn't mean that it's not real. It still could be having an effect if it is just small. The kind of big effects that people like to imagine happen once in a while and they're not repeatable it's not something you can study scientifically. So we take our you know tiny little effects and just repeat the experiment a lot and ultimately we can learn a great deal about what the conditions are that are conducive to these kind of small signal-to-noise effects. How hard do we have to work and the fact that you can do a controlled experiment that is scientifically sound experiment is extremely important. People don't who are interested in big effects but the way I usually express this is that I don't think we're likely to produce a garage door opener that we can think. I want the garage door to open unless we're really patient. If you want to wait for two or three hours maybe you can get the garage door open. We're not going to be switching TV channels but instead what we're going to do with this kind of small signal-to-noise effect is something like learn about consciousness and the way I like to think of it is that we have demonstrated with great clarity even though tiny effects the consciousness is not stuck inside here it's not in your head it's out in the world. Your consciousness lives in a very broad universe and we don't know much about that at this point but the evidence from the experiments of the pair lab and PRL and quite a few other places is really quite strong and should inspire people to want to understand a bit more about what do you mean you know my consciousness is not confined to my head what am I supposed to think and my conclusion mainly because of the field REG experiments which look at group consciousness and then the global consciousness project the data from those experiments say we are connected to each other and the evidence is strong and clear that it can be interpreted in different ways but I think the composite of all the experiments that we have done in different kinds of analysis that we do of this kind of data really show clearly that there is something about human consciousness that reaches out mixes together in groups to be when we're coherent as groups the group becomes the kind of entity of its own right that's not something you can think about much while you're in the midst of such a coherent group because if you do then you're not in the group anymore but in retrospect you can say oh my god that was amazing you know this kind of ritual behavior or the concert that's just got it blows everybody away in exactly the same way those kinds of things are real and they mean something like we are we're really touching each other and the rest of the world with our consciousness that is amazing I love that answer another question I had is what was it like doing this work at Princeton like how did your colleagues and the students treat you all knowing you were doing this work that I think most people do not associate with you know mainstream academia and science Bob John who was a wonderful character in so many ways probably most regretted that he didn't have much time to actually be in the lab he was a hands-on guy he would like to design the next machine or the experiment whatever and he was a he had to defend the lab against attacks a lot of them from inside the university from people who refused actually to even visit the lab and certainly not to read the reports you know not to learn anything about the experiments they knew that it was impossible these results have to be a mistake or some kind of fraud or whatever so there has been a good amount of criticism of pair labs and the research in the past as one would expect I wanted to ask what do you think of that criticism and what are the difficulties of doing this kind of strange research there's two kinds of criticism or skepticism one kind is it educated and reasonable and actually well done we love that because it if they think of something that we should be doing or not doing that we hadn't thought of isn't that an advantage for us absolutely it is so the other kind of criticism is is the sort that comes from people who just don't know actually anything about the research quite frequently they don't when they're pressed on it and you say so have you read this paper and the answer will be well no but I know it's impossible and people who know it's impossible are not useful skeptics or critics they're just wasting everybody's time all right dr nelson thank you so much for speaking to me about all this and giving me this info on PRL and pair labs I am very eager to report back to Elizabeth I think she's gonna be very happy to hear that I found some information about this is there anything that you would like to share with the audience before we go my English language book is called connected and has a subtitle the emergence of global consciousness and there are two books in German one is called developed geist a little bit like a German version of what we've been talking about and then the second one is a kind of self-help book called developed craft in deer if people want to and speak German I want to get a you know a lot of little recipes for doing things that are good for you that books excellent for that thank you to Roger Nelson for speaking to us about pair labs and PRL I actually ended up speaking to him for quite a long time afterwards after pair labs he went on to start something called the global consciousness project where he built and placed machines all over the world in order to analyze data during global events where everyone might be focused on the same exact thing it's a really interesting project if you want to hear more about that I'll post it on the patreon but anyway after talking to Dr. Nelson I decided I should go check back in with Elizabeth Marvel and give her an update about what I learned all right Elizabeth how are you how are you doing I'm good hey I'm good I'm well first of all have you learned anything new have there been any new memories no not really no um I'm a working mom so things just sort of go in the filing cabinet no way I have a graduating senior in my home so it's been a very busy busy time of life right now um so no I didn't dig into it I'm not one of those internet people like I'm not on social media I don't look at anything online so I didn't sort of dig into anything so I'm I'm super curious to actually find out what you have learned okay so the biggest thing is that I believe this did not take place at pair labs unless the person we're talking to is mistaken he thinks this was done by a place called PRL the psychophysical research lab which is also in Princeton the area of Princeton they work together a lot but it was technically a different group okay does that sound familiar at all do you remember do you remember seeing the wall of well the machine on the wall do you I what I mainly remember like viscerally is the is an orange couch and lots of like stuffed animals and I remember having to sit on and I remember there being like a strange thing on the wall but I also remember like cement block hallways like feeling like we were downstairs of a building and having to go down a long hallway after I left Michael to like a little room that had I want to say almost like in a doctor's like I had to lay back in a chair when they put the things on my eyes and the you know and they went into a separate room and that was a very small room so and it was a long time ago here's the other thing Elizabeth you could have been doing remote viewing of all of this you could have now that we know that you have these powers you could have been just seeing the pair labs remotely well all of it is entirely possible because I'm not too I'm not too freaky or you know but I do believe that we use such a small amount of our brain's potential and I also have had the experience of seeing things and experiencing things so that that have not happened in my physical day-to-day reality so I think I think that's possible I think there's a world in which that's possible yes so I did send you the study that I think you were a part of it would yeah yeah there was and I'm so frustrated because my mom had this article and it was from a some sort of psychiatric journal and it was not that article it was a different article and and they I think I was called they gave me some name they said you know to protect the privacy of the individuals involved we are changing the names blah blah blah and it was like Alicia or Allison or something I was named in the article as the test subject and it was very specific about and and unfortunately like her shit is such a mess in her house that I I couldn't I mean her house is not a mess God forbid she hear that and her house is lovely but her papers and stuff are all I couldn't find it when I was there and I can't tell you what the the periodical was or what the article was from but it was not the same one that you sent it was something else oh my god I think I actually might have found it right now oh really well we're talking on the CIA site I don't they all of the stuff all these articles are on the CIA site on the CIA site you know what I'll put this in the description of the episode and I'll send it to you this is a oh this is a Freedom of Information Act document okay I'll send this to you I'll send this to you as part of Project Stargate this okay great this is very spooky this is spooky um well apparently you did really good um it was fascinating talking to uh I talked to Dr. Roger Nelson from Parallabs great and it and it is it functioning or is it no longer it is no longer operating um that's such a shame considering all of this sort of neural you know bridging they're making between machines and minds now yes that I would think it would have been such a growing enterprise I think people are certainly studying it just perhaps not that specific. Sure organization. Sure okay now how do you look back on this like what do you I was just fitting your life like now in the present tense. I mean it's interesting because as an actor too like I what I do is create alternate reality right so it's all interesting because as an actor you can go into very slippery emotional stuff and you need to understand that it's just pretend and that it's a very clear you know line and that it's a job so I think my awareness of that has always been very definite we're just also connected and and I also do think I do think there's a truth in the idea of when people are in difficult times or vulnerable states they can become more porous and more available to energy all kinds of energy now whatever the source of that is I don't know like I said there there are times now like when people die that I definitely feel it you know or things that premonitions I get things I know are going to happen or so I do feel an availability in myself but I think that's true probably of everyone it's just a matter of whether you pay attention to it or not. Do you ever think about the labs and themselves and like what they're studying things like that? Well I think it's fascinating now that we are basically becoming integrated with machines and eventually maybe fully integrated with machines I think they were way ahead of their time and you know I think it's a shame that they shut them down because what they were trying to do was to see if we could affect machines with our minds. I think it was a moment when there was still the question of could the mind control the machine and now we've lived past that moment of the machine controlling the mind. [Music] All right thank you so much to Elizabeth Marvel and Dr. Roger Nelson for taking part in this episode. By the way I had a very difficult time trying to find that specific paper Elizabeth mentioned. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it seemed like it was genuinely erased from the internet. I saw references to it all over the place but I could not find the actual study. Interestingly enough lots of the references I saw to this study were in CIA declassified documents. That's not where I was looking but strangely enough when I was searching for this document a lot of times it would lead me to the CIA website which was just very interesting. However I did not give up and we did eventually find that original study actually a friend of the show Rosie who you have heard in the Goop Demon episode found it for me. She's actually a librarian at UCLA and she's been very helpful to me in the past. She is a relentless researcher. She ended up having to go find an original print copy of it in a book and scan it for me. I'm not sure why it was so hard to find but I finally did find it and I'll attach a link to it in the description of this episode. If you want to hear the rest of my chat with Dr. Roger Nelson you can hear that on Patreon. Thank you once again to Elizabeth Marvel for sharing this story. This has been episode 92. The title is The Receiver and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans. This episode was edited and engineered by Theo Shafer. Our artwork is by Cold Sex Studios. Nikki Kate Delgado is our associate producer production help by Haley Pearson. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review and telling your friends about Otherworld. If you want to hear bonus episodes you can become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Jenna Weiss-Burman, Leah Reese Dennis, Rob Miranda, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Moore Curran, Josephina Francis and Hillary Shuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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