In Supernormal, Radin reviewed the classical yoga literature alongside modern parapsychological databases, arguing that phenomena described as siddhis, including clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, correspond structurally to laboratory-tested psi phenomena.⁶ The proposed mechanism, that deep meditative absorption reduces the cognitive noise that ordinarily masks psi signals, remains the researcher’s preferred interpretive framework; alternative interpretations include demand characteristics in practitioner populations, selection bias toward high-belief participants, and regression to the mean in small samples. No consensus interpretation has emerged.

The experiment enrolled eight experienced meditators and eight matched controls (N=16 total; small convenience sample, selection criteria based on self-reported meditation experience). Thirty-two channels of EEG were recorded before, during, and after exposure to unpredictable light and sound stimuli selected by a truly random process. The primary hypothesis was that prestimulus electrocortical signals would differ depending on the upcoming stimulus type, and that this difference would be more pronounced in meditators.¹ The study was exploratory in design; the small N severely limits statistical power and generalizability. The specific artifact of optional stopping was partially addressed by the fixed-N design, but multiple-comparisons risk across 32 EEG channels was not fully resolved. The researcher’s preferred interpretation is that meditative training enhances sensitivity to future-oriented neural signals; alternative non-psi interpretations include differential baseline arousal between meditators and controls, and group differences in habituation to repeated stimuli.

The study by Alibalaei, Radin, Ilavarasu, and Nagendra comprised four preregistered components conducted online during the COVID-19 lockdowns: three forced-choice precognition experiments and one questionnaire study.² Experiment 1 used a pre/post design around a short-term yoga course (N = 104); Experiment 2 a pre/post design with meditation as the intervention (N = 103); Experiment 3 a one-time comparison of participants with low versus high yoga experience (N = 164); and a fourth questionnaire study (N = 245) examined correlations between precognition performance and gender, age, education, and reports of unusual childhood experiences, using the Gunas Scale, the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale, and a Mysticism Scale. The hypotheses were preregistered with the Open Science Framework, and none of the experimental precognition outcomes reached statistical significance — a preregistered null result. Because the primary hypotheses were registered in advance and not supported, this study is a useful counterweight to expectancy-bias concerns: a believing practitioner population did not produce inflated hit rates, consistent with the absence of a genuine precognition effect under these conditions.

Shiah and Radin conducted a randomized, double-blind trial in which participants consumed oolong tea intentionally treated by three Buddhist monks or untreated tea from the same source over three days, recording mood via the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire.³ Stratified random sampling was used for group assignment. The study addressed the artifact of demand characteristics by blinding participants to treatment condition; it also assessed belief about treatment type as a moderating variable, finding that belief interacted with actual treatment condition. The specific artifact of experimenter cueing was mitigated by the double-blind protocol. However, the study was exploratory and the sample size was not reported in the available extract, limiting power assessment. The researcher’s preferred interpretation is that monk intention transferred a detectable influence to the tea; alternative non-psi interpretations include subtle physical differences between treated and untreated batches not fully controlled by the blinding procedure.

Shiah, Hsieh, Chen, and Radin tested whether Arabidopsis thaliana seeds hydrated with water intentionally treated by three Buddhist monks showed differences in hypocotyl length, anthocyanin, and chlorophyll compared to seeds hydrated with untreated water from the same source.⁸ The double-blind design addressed the artifact of experimenter expectancy in plant measurement. Seeds with cryptochrome mutations were included to probe possible light-pathway mechanisms. A competing non-psi explanation is that minor physical differences in water handling between treated and untreated batches, temperature, agitation, container differences, could produce differential plant growth without any intention effect; the study’s blinding procedure partially mitigated but did not fully eliminate this possibility. A follow-up study replicated the basic design with mesenchymal stem cells.⁹

The study collected 94 hours and 33,927 trials of truly random bit data during Transcendental Meditation group sessions (average 261 female, 398 male participants per session) using a true RNG located in a large meditation hall.⁴ The study was exploratory. The primary artifact risk in RNG-group studies is environmental confounding: large groups in a building may produce temperature, vibration, or electromagnetic fluctuations that affect hardware RNG output through physical rather than psi mechanisms. The study did not report specific environmental monitoring controls for these physical confounders. The researcher’s preferred interpretation is that collective coherent attention produces anomalous structure in random physical systems; alternative interpretations include unmonitored environmental artifacts and multiple-comparisons inflation across analysis variants.

In a guest editorial, Radin argued that the rapid mainstreaming of meditation research, evidenced by successive Time magazine cover stories from 1975 to 2014, created an opportunity to incorporate psi-related hypotheses into contemplative science without the stigma that attaches to parapsychology as a standalone discipline.¹² The proposed mechanism, that meditation cultivates a “nonlocal mind” capable of information access beyond ordinary sensory constraints, is the researcher’s preferred interpretive framework and remains contested. A multi-author paper in PLOS ONE, co-authored by Radin alongside researchers from mainstream contemplative science institutions, formally recommended that future meditation research expand to include psi-related phenomena as legitimate scientific targets.⁵ The paper also engaged with the relationship between parapsychology and transpersonal psychology as adjacent disciplines that have historically developed in parallel without sufficient dialogue.¹³