Discovery Lab Answers

Mario P. Varvoglis, PhD

Mario P. Varvoglis, PhD is an experimental psychologist and parapsychology researcher who has served as President of the Institut Métapsychique International (IMI) in Paris since 1998. He is a past president of the Parapsychological Association and has been active in the field since the mid-1970s.

Before reading further: the quantitative picture below reflects one study currently in the ESP-Nexus library associated with his work. The library’s share of the published literature on this question has not been measured, so what follows is a summary of what the library holds, not a settled account of the field or his complete research record.

Experiments

Varvoglis’s research spans three main lines: forced-choice precognition, micro-psychokinesis (micro-PK), and ganzfeld studies.

The study currently captured in the ESP-Nexus structured evidence base is a pre-registered forced-choice precognition experiment conducted at IMI with collaborators Peter A. Bancel, Jocelyne Boban, and Anaïs Bensahra. It used a novel collaborative online platform and compared cohorts — including meditators — in a paradigm built around the Selfield, a purpose-designed precognition interface developed at IMI.

An earlier exploratory precognition study (Varvoglis, Bancel, Bailly, Boban, and si Ahmed, 2019) introduced and tested the Selfield protocol itself. That study examined whether psychological and attentional factors — particularly meditation experience — modulated forced-choice precognition performance.

On the micro-PK side, Varvoglis and Bancel (2016) examined the question of whether micro-PK capacity is limited to exceptional individuals or is more broadly distributed across the general population. Their 2015 handbook chapter reviewed the literature on micro-PK optimization factors.

Varvoglis has also addressed the relationship between expanded states of consciousness and psi phenomena in a conference presentation context.

Methodology

The Selfield is the core methodological contribution of Varvoglis’s recent precognition work. It is a computerized forced-choice precognition interface designed to sustain participant attention and reduce boredom — a specific response to the problem of performance decline in repetitive laboratory psi tasks. In-person laboratory tests showed participant experience with the Selfield to be consistently positive. Each formal session consists of 20 trials in which participants interact with a graphical target container on screen.

The 2025 Bancel et al. study was pre-registered, a significant methodological feature. It used session-level pooling across cohorts and incorporated a session variance test — a measure designed to detect cases where psi might manifest as elevated variance in hit rates across sessions rather than a simple above-chance mean. This test has prior theoretical and empirical precedent (Timm, 1983; Storm & Ertel, 2001), and earlier IMI laboratory studies had found weak evidence for elevated session variance in forced-choice paradigms.

The 2019 Selfield study was explicitly exploratory and examined psychological moderators including mental discipline and meditation experience, and compared feedback versus no-feedback trial conditions.

The micro-PK work situates itself within a debate between “elitist” traditions (using exceptional participants) and “universalist” traditions (testing general populations), and argues for optimization factors — passive-volition sets, goal-oriented visualization, and meditation practice — as ways to enhance performance across unselected participants.

Data

The one study in the ESP-Nexus structured evidence base is Bancel et al. (2025). Across all cohorts pooled (90 sessions, 1,789 trials), the headline result was a hit rate of 0.5059, yielding z = 4.0 and p = .000031 in the positive direction.

The 2019 Selfield exploratory study reported directional results for subgroups (participants with meditation experience, feedback vs. no-feedback conditions), but those figures are not in the structured evidence rows and are not stated here as settled statistics; the retrieved excerpts show partial figures and the study was framed as exploratory throughout.

Because only one study is represented in the structured evidence, no trend over time or cross-study pooling is possible. The chart condition for a publication-year scatterplot is not met — there is only a single result on this metric.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism of Varvoglis’s work by named critics. The 2025 Bancel et al. paper itself notes that the study was designed to address known methodological weaknesses in precognition research — including participant boredom and attention decline — which reflects the authors’ own awareness of standing critiques of the forced-choice paradigm. The exploratory 2019 Selfield study was also explicitly framed as preliminary, with the authors acknowledging its limitations as a foundation for subsequent pre-registered work.

For a fuller picture of Varvoglis’s research, see his profile at Mario P. Varvoglis, PhD.