Discovery Lab Answers

Imants Barušs is a psychologist at King’s University College, Western University (Canada), whose research spans the scientific study of consciousness, direct mental influence, and survival-related phenomena. The sources retrieved for this question give a partial picture of his experimental and scholarly work.

Consciousness Studies

Barušs’s early scholarly work included a systematic analysis of how consciousness is defined in the academic literature ^[2]. Working from twenty-nine definitions, he examined the conceptual landscape of consciousness — its phenomenological, behavioral, and volitional dimensions — and noted that many definitions resist easy unification. This was foundational theoretical work rather than experimental psi research, but it establishes the conceptual frame within which his later empirical investigations sit.

Direct Mental Influence on Random Event Generators

The most detailed experimental data in the retrieved sources comes from a two-experiment study conducted with Tayzia Collesso and Maria Forrester ^[1].

Design

Participants were asked to mentally influence the output of a Psyleron FieldREG (random event generator) in a specified direction. Experiment 1 was a baseline condition; Experiment 2 added structured meditation and visualization exercises. The study also collected self-report measures, including a “love subscale” and perceived sense of connection with the device, to explore psychological correlates.

Results

A post-hoc correlation between the change in the love subscale and the difference between high- and low-intention runs was examined but did not reach significance: r(28) = –.19, p = .31 ^[1].

Interpretation and Limitations

The authors note several complicating factors the psi-research literature has long flagged: psi-missing (the possibility that participants unconsciously reverse their intentions), experimenter effects (experimenters may themselves influence REG output), and the fact that directional deviations in FieldREG data have previously been associated with positive emotional states rather than deliberate volition — including a sunset-bracketed deviation Barušs had noted in earlier work (p = .008) ^[1]. The paper is careful to state that anomalous REG effects, even when observed, are not necessarily caused by direct mental intention in the straightforward sense.

For context, the paper cites the PEAR laboratory’s 12-year, 91-operator meta-analysis, which found significant high–low differences in intended direction (z = 3.81) ^[1] — though the retrieved excerpts do not show that figure being claimed as the authors’ own result.

Survival Research and Scholarly Debate

Barušs also participates in formal academic debate on postmortem survival. He was one of five researchers — alongside Stephen Braude, Arnaud Delorme, Dean Radin, and Helané Wahbeh — who published a direct response to a published critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay contest on survival evidence ^[4]. In that commentary, Barušs contributed a specific example drawn from PEAR remote-viewing data, noting that remote viewers were sometimes distracted by objects more interesting than the official target ^[4] — an observation used to address methodological objections about target selection.

He is also acknowledged for providing feedback on Tucker’s response to a reexamination of a children’s past-life case ^[5], and is listed as a judge or counterargument contributor in the Journal of Scientific Exploration’s special section on the BICS contest ^[3].

Collaborative Theoretical Work

The retrieved ESP-Nexus pages note that Barušs has collaborated with Julia Mossbridge on books examining consciousness, psi, and transcendent experience — including Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness — though the retrieved excerpts do not supply full bibliographic details for that volume beyond the title and co-authorship.

Skeptical Critiques

What critics argue. The broader debate in which Barušs’s REG work sits includes the objection — addressed explicitly in ^[4] — that parapsychology results should be dismissed as long as fraud cannot be ruled out. The same critique applies to REG/DMILS studies: without airtight exclusion of motivated experimenter influence or selection bias, positive results in small samples are difficult to interpret. Critics have also pointed to the flexibility of post-hoc analyses in psi research as inflating apparent effect sizes.

What the experimental data show. In the Collesso, Forrester, and Barušs study ^[1], Experiment 1 produced a null result; only Experiment 2, which added an active intervention (meditation and visualization), produced a significant effect. The authors themselves flag experimenter effects, psi-missing, and the ambiguity of FieldREG directionality as open interpretive problems. The post-hoc psychological correlate (love subscale) did not reach significance.

Analysis. The two-experiment design — one null, one significant — means the positive result from Experiment 2 cannot be cleanly separated from the possibility that adding a more engaging protocol increased demand characteristics or experimenter investment. Barušs and co-authors acknowledge these ambiguities in the paper. Independent replication of the meditation/visualization enhancement effect by a separate group has not been reported in the retrieved sources.

For a broader view of Barušs’s research context, the Julia A. Mossbridge, PhD page covers their collaborative work on precognition and consciousness, and the Quantum Mind & Psi page addresses the theoretical frameworks within which REG research is often situated.