b. 1952 · A portrait
Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, he has spent four decades running lab experiments on telepathy and mind-matter effects, arguing small statistical deviations support them. Mainstream psychology calls the evidence weak.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
In the 1980s he began running controlled experiments testing whether focused intention could shift the output of random-number generators, part of a research line that traces back to J. B. Rhine's 1930s parapsychology lab.
In this book he pooled decades of ganzfeld telepathy studies and other psi experiments, arguing the combined statistical deviation from chance was too consistent to be dismissed as chance.
Psychologists Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin that failed to replicate the ganzfeld effect Radin and others cited, reporting an effect close to zero across thirty studies — a result parapsychologists disputed in turn.
Radin continues running lab studies at IONS and citing pooled meta-analyses as evidence. Mainstream psychology still finds the ganzfeld and RNG literatures inconsistent, prone to small-study effects, and unreplicated at any reliable size.