Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question are from Helmut Schmidt — a physicist known for quantum-process psi experiments — rather than Stefan Schmidt, the German parapsychologist. These are two distinct researchers, and the library passages do not contain Stefan Schmidt’s experimental data directly. What the retrieved pages do contain are several references to Stefan Schmidt’s work in context, which I can draw on, supplemented by what the ESP-Nexus pages surface about him.

Stefan Schmidt — Experimental Work and Data

Stefan Schmidt is a parapsychology researcher whose work has focused primarily on two areas: distant mental interaction with living systems (DMILS) and telephone telepathy replication studies.

DMILS Meta-Analysis

The ESP-Nexus page for Dean I. Radin, PhD notes that Schmidt produced a literature review of DMILS research in which he observed that Radin established the Las Vegas DMILS laboratory after learning the paradigm from William Braud, and that all four laboratories that have conducted DMILS research trace their methodology to the same origin. Schmidt used this fact to address the critique that DMILS results lack independent replication — arguing that the shared methodological lineage constrains how “independent” the replication attempts can be considered.

Distant Intentionality and the Sense of Being Stared At

The Jessica M. Utts page cites a 2004 paper co-authored by Schmidt, Schneider, Utts, and Walach, published in the British Journal of Psychology, which presented two meta-analyses on distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at. The retrieved excerpts do not reproduce the effect sizes or p-values from that paper; for those figures you would need to consult the paper directly.

Telephone Telepathy Replication Studies

The Telepathy page references a study by Schmidt, Erath, Ivanova, and Walach (2009) involving three phone-call replication studies with 21 participants, each identifying the callers of 20 calls. The retrieved excerpt does not carry the full outcome statistics for this study; the page itself carries the quantitative summary and is the right place to read the results in context.

“Aristotle’s Fly” — Meditation and Psi

The Telepathy page also surfaces a 2012 article by Stefan Schmidt titled “Aristotle’s Fly: Remarks on Anomalism and a Research Overview on the Connection Between Meditation and Psi,” published in Zeitschrift für Anomalistik / Journal of Anomalistics, vol. 12. This is a conceptual and review paper rather than a primary experiment, examining the relationship between meditative states and psi performance.

Skeptical Critiques

The DMILS lineage point Schmidt raises is itself double-edged: his own observation that all four DMILS laboratories trace to the same methodological origin is cited in the literature as a reason to be cautious about treating their results as fully independent replications. The Schmidt et al. (2004) stared-at meta-analysis, like most DMILS work, faces the standard methodological critiques applied to that paradigm — blinding adequacy, file-drawer effects, and the degree to which “feeling of being stared at” studies can control for sensory leakage — though the retrieved sources do not reproduce a specific published rebuttal to Schmidt’s work in particular.

Note on Helmut Schmidt vs. Stefan Schmidt

Because the two names overlap, it is worth being explicit: Helmut Schmidt (1928–2011) was a physicist at the Mind Science Foundation who designed quantum random-number generators for psi testing and reported highly significant results in precognition and psychokinesis experiments ^[1][2]. Stefan Schmidt is a separate researcher working several decades later in DMILS and telepathy paradigms. The sources retrieved here are primarily Helmut Schmidt’s papers; Stefan Schmidt’s primary data are not fully reproduced in the retrieved excerpts.

For the full quantitative record on telephone telepathy studies including Schmidt et al. (2009), the Telepathy page is the most directly relevant resource on this site.