Discovery Lab Answers

Edwin C. May, PhD is a physicist who directed the U.S. government’s remote viewing research program at SRI International and later at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and who has continued parapsychology research through his own Laboratories for Fundamental Research (LFR). His profile page is at Edwin C. May, PhD.

Experiments

May’s experimental record spans several distinct lines of work:

Remote viewing and anomalous cognition (SRI / SAIC / LFR). May entered parapsychology research at SRI International in the mid-1970s, joining the remote viewing program then led by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. His early collaborative work included studies on remote viewing methodology and EEG correlates of anomalous cognition. By 1985 he had taken over as director of the program, running it through SAIC until 1995 — a 23-year project in total, partly classified and sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency and Joint Services. After SAIC he continued anomalous cognition experiments at LFR in Palo Alto.

Confidence-calling and target-pool methodology. Working with collaborators including L. V. Faith, M. Blackman, and others, May developed an automatic confidence-calling technique for anomalous cognition experiments, tested against a structured target pool and database ^[4]. Three experienced participants contributed trials under this protocol ^[4].

Psychokinesis and volitional control (1976). May participated in early SRI experiments investigating psychokinetic effects, including work involving Ingo Swann, and contributed to studies of volitional control in psychokinetic tasks.

Target entropy and anomalous cognition. May and collaborators investigated whether the Shannon entropy of a target image — its degree of randomness or visual complexity — predicts anomalous cognition performance, finding a positive correlation.

Presentiment / skin conductance. LFR studies examined whether skin conductance responses occur measurably before stimulus presentation, consistent with a precognitive or presentiment mechanism.

Psychophysiological methodology critique. May, Spottiswoode, and Faith (2010) re-examined previously accumulated skin conductance and EEG data to identify a methodological problem in how psychophysiological correlations were being computed in the literature ^[3]. This included a reanalysis of a published “correlated brains” study using Monte Carlo methods.

Global Consciousness Project critique. May and Spottiswoode (2011) published a response to Nelson and Bancel arguing that the Global Consciousness Project’s results are better explained by Decision Augmentation Theory — that psi-mediated experimenter effects enter at the event-selection level — than by the project’s own interpretation ^[2].

Decision Augmentation Theory (DAT). DAT is May’s theoretical framework reinterpreting anomalous cognition and psychokinesis as goal-directed selection processes rather than force-like mental influence. It informed the design and reanalysis of multiple experimental programs.

Book review / historical record. May published a letter to the editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (2016) critiquing Annie Jacobsen’s book Phenomena, correcting the historical record of the SRI remote viewing program — including clarifying that Uri Geller was involved in only a six-week series of experiments out of a 23-year project, and that foundational SRI work was published in Nature ^[1].

Methodology

Remote viewing protocol. The SRI / SAIC program used a structured protocol in which a remote viewer, kept blind to the target, attempted to describe a geographically distant location or object while a monitor recorded responses. Judging was typically by rank-ordering: independent judges compared transcripts against the correct target and a set of decoys.

Fuzzy set analysis. May introduced fuzzy set technology as an analysis tool for remote viewing data, aiming to improve discrimination and quantification of target-related information beyond the traditional rank-order judging approach.

Automatic confidence-calling technique. The method developed with Faith and others relies on an estimate of a null-hypothesis Figure of Merit distribution — derived from the target pool itself — to assign a z-score to each trial without requiring human judges ^[4]. This eliminates pool bias, participant bias, and judging bias from the primary measure. The three Figures of Merit per trial were computed entirely by computer code ^[4]. Targets were drawn from 12 groups of three orthogonal categories each ^[4].

Target pool and entropy measurement. May and collaborators built a structured target database and measured the Shannon entropy (gradient) of each target image as an independent variable to test whether target complexity predicts performance.

Psychophysiological reanalysis methodology. May, Spottiswoode, and Faith (2010) used a Monte Carlo technique — 1,000 passes of randomly selected 10-second intervals, with null distributions constructed from independent data records — to model true chance expectation for skin conductance and EEG correlations ^[3]. They argued that the standard Z or T methods used in prior published work (including the Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al. correlated brains study) inflated significance by failing to account for autocorrelation in physiological time series ^[3].

DAT as a design constraint. Because DAT predicts that psi operates at the selection level rather than by forcing outcomes, May argued that random number generator experiments and Global Consciousness Project event selection are themselves subject to psi influence at the selection stage — a methodological argument with implications for how controls are designed ^[2].

Data

The retrieved sources support the following specific figures. Where the surrounding text is intact and the attribution is unambiguous, figures are reported; where the OCR context is ambiguous, that is noted.

The confidence-calling study produced strong positive results across all four measures ^[4]. The correlated-brains reanalysis produced a non-significant Z = 1.22, directly contradicting the original authors’ claims of significance ^[3].

The retrieved excerpts do not contain specific effect sizes or trial counts from the full SRI / SAIC remote viewing corpus, the target entropy studies, or the presentiment skin conductance program — those figures are in the primary reports, which were not retrieved for this question.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. Nelson and Bancel, responding to May and Spottiswoode’s DAT-based critique of the Global Consciousness Project, argued (as represented in May and Spottiswoode’s published reply) that the project’s event-selection procedure is blind and therefore not susceptible to a DAT-style experimenter effect at the selection stage ^[2].

What the experimental data show. May and Spottiswoode (2011) replied that the claim of selection-level blindness is “simply factually incorrect and flies in the face of most all of the psi literature,” asserting that a psi-mediated experimenter effect can enter at the event-selection level regardless of whether the procedure is nominally blind ^[2]. They argued this renders comparisons of z² against number of eggs moot as a test of the project’s hypothesis ^[2].

Analysis. The exchange between May and Spottiswoode (2011) ^[2] and Nelson and Bancel is a disagreement about whether DAT’s selection-level mechanism is logically compatible with blind event-selection procedures. May and Spottiswoode published their reply; the retrieved sources do not include Nelson and Bancel’s counter-response to that reply, so whether the specific statistical and logical points were subsequently answered in print is not established by the sources retrieved for this question.

On the psychophysiological methodology side, May, Spottiswoode, and Faith (2010) ^[3] argued that the Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al. (1994) correlated-brains result rested on a flawed statistical model.