At an online conference on the Theories of Psi in March of 2022, I first met professor Russell Gruber.
As we were chit chatting, I learned that he had done a great deal of research into psychic ability over the years, but that he hadn’t published it and barely anyone knew about it. Writing about psi research is what I do, so after a few discussions we agreed that I would write an article about his 18 years of psi research conducted at the University of Eastern Illinois.
You can find the article here: https://paranormaldailynews.com/skeptics-psychic-psi-missing/1394/
The Mirror Worlds research is so named because the experiments uncover a strong correlation between what people believe, how they act, and their performance on psychic tasks. On a graph, you can see quite plainly that there are people who exceed chance results at a psychic task, but also that there are people who exceed chance results by being unsuccessful at the same task. If you look at this on a bar graph, these two results mirror each other in opposite directions.
The research is valuable to parapsychology because it strongly validates some properties of psychic ability known to other researchers, but not as fully explored.
Superpsi or telepathy?
Telepathy, for example, has been theorized to be either clairvoyance or precognition. This is the origin problem of not knowing where psi information comes from because our consciousness is a kind of black box in that it’s impossible to objectively observe what’s happening. Psychic ability is not a physical process, so there is nothing to measure or watch as it happens. What that means is that we’re not sure what’s actually happening with telepathy and mediumship. How are people getting the information? We don’t know. It could be coming from where people think it’s coming from, but it could also be some combination of clairvoyance and precognition.
(I’ve never been a fan of the SuperPsi or precognition hypothesis. While technically feasible, it doesn’t match up well with human experience. Superpsi and precognition seem to be “taking the long way” to getting the answer.)
In one of the Mirror Worlds studies, Gruber had the senders intentionally deceive the receiver by telepathically sending the wrong answer. If the superpsi or precognition hypothesis were true, then this should not affect the choice of the receiver, as the senders would be bypassed in favor of the receiver getting the answer directly through clairvoyance or precognition.
But that’s not what happened. The receiver consistently got the wrong answers that the senders were sending and not the correct answer. This strongly supports the hypothesis that telepathy is what was actually happening in the experiments and not clairvoyance or precognition.
People Are Psychic, But in Different Ways
Gruber’s research made heavy use of the mirror worlds effect, which validated a known testing condition also known as the Differential Effect, that was almost unknown in the field. If you gather enough information about the personalities and beliefs of participants, you can often find that the data divides according to various criteria, the strongest of which is the belief or lack of belief in, psychic ability. That division is a very strong indicator that you’re not getting chance results.
The idea that test results can be affected by belief suggests something important: It leads to a more fluid idea of objective reality. We are all somewhat blinded by our beliefs , as this research shows, and at some deeper level of our subconscious we know the outcome of various paths we’re about to take. Our beliefs will cause us to choose the outcome that matches those beliefs most closely, whether it is what we consciously want to achieve or not. This can be somewhat difficult to wrap your head around, but everyday examples abound, particularly in romance where the effects of deeply held beliefs are particularly obvious.
For example, there are always those men and women who find themselves in toxic relationships over and over again, even if they aren’t particularly toxic themselves. A subconscious belief about their own self worth is causing them to not only ignore warning signs, but also to actively, psychically choose to bond with people who are toxic. Meanwhile, other people seem to be able to consistently avoid that type of person.
The Mirror World studies expose one of the mechanisms responsible for consistently making choices which are not in line with what a person might consciously want.
What this means for Psi Research: Our Subconscious Is In Control
How we perform at psychic tasks is an indication of what is coming from our subconscious and it is very important to be aware of this because it has a huge effect on what we experience. Psychic ability is also intuition. It’s our ability to make the right decisions with limited information. What we subconsciously believe affects our ability to make those decisions.
This can either be an accumulation of small decisions or a few larger ones. This can lead to very negative or positive outcomes generally, as we might miss clues that something is wrong and end up in a bad situation or instinctively recognize a hidden opportunity and become quite successful. What this research is showing us is that those outcomes don’t come from nowhere. Our subconscious is constantly nudging us based on our deepest beliefs.
Some people are lucky in love, or lucky in financial stability, or lucky in staying healthy. They may not be lucky in any of them or only lucky in one or two of them. This luck appears to be the result of subconscious beliefs driving us in certain directions.
To sum it up, I think that we all need to be aware that our largely ignored subconscious is playing a much larger role in our lives than we imagine. What we consciously desire can be sabotaged by our subconscious, beyond our conscious ability to access it.
It’s a much bigger deal than we give it credit for.