Discovery Lab Answers

Dean I. Radin, PhD

Dean I. Radin, PhD is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and an Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, whose research over several decades has tested whether human consciousness can interact with physical systems in ways not explained by conventional physics. He is profiled in depth on ESP-Nexus at Dean I. Radin, PhD.

Coverage: what follows reflects the studies currently in the ESP-Nexus library, not the complete published literature on Radin’s work. The library’s share of that literature has not been measured, so treat this as a summary of what we hold rather than a settled account of his full record. One further caution about the quantitative picture: the studies collected here report different, non-comparable metrics — standardized effect sizes, raw hit rates, z-scores, correlations, and p-values — so there is no single “overall effect size” for his work, and the directions of the reported results disagree (some positive, several null or below-chance). The scatterplot rendered below plots effect size against publication year for the subset of results reported on one comparable metric.

Experiments

The sources retrieved for this question, together with the structured evidence, span several distinct lines of Radin’s work:

• Global Consciousness Project / New Year’s Eve analyses. Radin (2025) examined how Global Consciousness Project random-number-generator data behaved around midnight across multiple New Year’s Eve celebrations, and Radin (2026) issued a corrigendum correcting a principal-component-analysis composite score reported in that paper. This “experimental metaphysics” framing tests whether mass collective attention correlates with deviations in physical randomness.
• Water “excess correlation” replication. Radin (2025) conducted an independent replication of a claimed “excess correlation” effect in pH between physically isolated beakers of water, using a magnetic-field stimulation technique.
• Double-slit and mind–matter interaction work, including the Kauffman and Radin (2023) cumulative analysis of double-slit optical experiments across multiple labs.
• Presentiment / retrocausal analyses, including the multi-language retrospective slope analyses reported across Radin’s 2022–2023 work.
• Consciousness / anomalous-cognition collaborations with Helané Wahbeh and others.

The ESP-Nexus profile also lists deeper-dive spoke pages on the autoganzfeld, presentiment and electrodermal activity, the Global Consciousness Project, and intention-mediated effects.

Methodology

Radin’s recent work relies heavily on secondary analysis of large archival or automated data streams rather than participant-by-participant testing. The New Year’s Eve study drew on GCP network data from 1998 through 2025, aligning random-number-generator output by time zone around the midnight transition and applying smoothing windows and Stouffer-Z aggregation. The 2026 corrigendum is itself a methodological point: it documents a correction to a previously reported PCA composite figure — the kind of self-issued correction that bears directly on how the primary statistics should be read.

The water replication used isolated beakers energized by magnetic “halos,” with a non-stimulated control beaker placed between local and remote beakers, and separation distances varied from roughly 1 meter up to 10 meters. Radin’s own discussion in that paper enumerates numerous uncontrolled factors — field strength, magnetic sequence, water quantity, halo orientation relative to magnetic north, geomagnetic field strength — that could bear on the outcome.

Data

Because the studies report incompatible metrics, the figures below are grouped by study and metric rather than pooled. The reported directions are mixed: several positive results sit alongside null and below-chance (psi-missing) outcomes, and nine result rows in the wider set report a null or negative effect.

The full evidence table below carries the complete set of 81 result rows across 66 studies, along with each row’s own headline finding. Note the negative signs on several z and effect-size figures: some reflect the predicted direction of a difference score, while at least one (Radin 2023, Experiment 1) is flagged as a below-chance psi-missing result. The scatterplot beneath your answer plots effect size against year for the five results reported on a common z-over-√N metric.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published third-party criticism of Radin’s work by a named critic. What the record here does contain is a self-correction: Radin (2026) is a corrigendum in which Radin himself revised a principal-component composite score he had reported in Radin (2025) — an author-acknowledged correction to a primary statistic rather than an external critique. In his water-replication paper, Radin (2025) also records numerous uncontrolled variables that could account for the effect.

For the fuller treatment of critiques and rebuttals across Radin’s individual lines of work — which the site structures separately for each experiment — see the spoke pages linked from Dean I. Radin, PhD.