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Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research
by the experimenter (W.G.B.), by the laboratory personnel who suggested
and scheduled potential subjects,
and/or by the
subjects themselves. A
third possible source of sorting involved the experimenter s hemolysis
measurements. By consciously or unconsciously altering the timing of his
actions, he could determine
the
start point of the measured hemolysis
curve, and this in turn could influence the hemolysis rate measure. The
experimenter was aware of this
possibility, and therefore he exercised
great caution in maintaining the consistency and stereotypy of his labora-
tory technique in an attempt to obviate this factor. Only automated proce-
dures could eliminate this factor, and even then, the elimination may or
may not be absolute, depending upon the completeness of the automation.
It is important to note that deliberate timing changes could influence only
the tube number effect in the present experiment, because this was the
only independent variable for which the experimenter was not blind. Be-
cause he was unaware of the blood source or of the scheduling of the
protect versus control periods, any timing changes that could influence
those two effects would necessarily have to be psi-mediated.
It should be
added that subjects may have influenced hemolysis rate indirectly by ex-
erting a true, causal remote action influence upon the experimenter s
timing behavior, so that what appears to be IDS by the experimenter could
in reality be RA by the subject. As the reader will begin to appreciate, a
truly definitive test of the IDS model, or even a definitive identification of
IDS and RA components, is an exceedingly complex and difficult task.
The issue of whether the results of this experiment are described more
closely by an IDS model or by an RA model was not resolved unequivo-
cally by the mathematical analyses carried out at SRI International. Our
own statistical analysis of the tube number factor did not indicate the pres-
ence of the significant difference between the 2-tube and 8-tube conditions
that the IDS model would have predicted. The absence of a performance
difference between the two tube conditions is more consistent with an RA
(psychokinesis) interpretation than
it is with an IDS (informational) inter-
pretation of the obtained results.
In the blood experiments reported here, the hemolysis process occulted
in vitro and was produced by osmotic stress. Caution should be exercised
in the generalization of the results of this study to in vivo hemolysis. In the
body, red blood cell lysis can occur through osmotic stress, but is more
often contributed by other factors (Hillman & Finch, 1974; Ponder, 1971).
The rationale for selecting blood cells was that perhaps material that had
once been part of the body might be more susceptible to distant mental
influence than would be the case for more “alien” biological materials.
At the very least, the use of such “familiar” material would be expected
to increase the participants’
motivational levels and hence increase the
likelihood of positive results. Red blood cells were chosen as “targets”
for these
initial bio-PK investigations because their rate of hemolysis
could be measured by means of the equipment and facilities available to
us. However, this choice was not without its difficulties because the bio-
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Distant Mental Influence of Hemolysis Rate
logical status of red blood cells
is somewhat peculiar. On the one hand,
human mature red blood cells have no nucleus, cannot reproduce, and
have limited lifespans (approximately 120 days). On the other hand,
as
Ponder (1971) notes: “On metabolic grounds, mammalian erythrocytes
are living cells; although in absolute terms the rates of respiration and of
glycolysis are small, from the standpoint of cellular physiology the metab-
olism is far from negligible” (p. 366). Red blood cells certainly qualify as
biological
systems.
In
future
cellular bio-PK
investigations, however,
perhaps the use of white blood cells or of artificially cultured neural cells
may yield more dramatic results than those obtained in the present study.
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