Two cognitive DMILS studies in Bali

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2004 by Hoyt Edge, Luh Ketut Suryani, Niko Tiliopoulos, Robert Morris

DISCUSSION

1. As in the two previous studies that aimed to explore the cognitive DMILS paradigm (Brady & Morris, 1997; Braud et al., 1995), the overall psi DMILS effect was supported. There was a significant difference in the distraction scores between the Help and the Control conditions.

There was a strong psi effect in this study. This suggests that the cognitive DMILS paradigm is robust enough to be used in cross-cultural settings, and, in fact, it may be a more useful tool in a culture like Bali where meditative prayer is ubiquitous. During prayer, the Balinese sit cross-legged on the ground and focus their attention, at least for short periods, so the experience, even for a non-trained participant, was within the realm of their general experience, even if the specific task of focusing with eyes open on the burning candle was not.

When one compares the effect size of other DMILS studies to this one (Cohen's r = .35), this study fares quite well. The effect size in the Braud et al. (1995) study was .25 (although this result has been challenged by Schmidt, Schneider, Utts, & Wallach, 2004, as being too high), and in the Brady and Morris study it was .27. These effect sizes are about the same as found in the 15 electrodermal studies (.25) reported in Braud and Schlitz (1991). It is worth asking what factors may have contributed to this success, although we acknowledge that the current study's effect size is not significantly greater than the earlier ones. This experiment was planned not only to see if the DMILS paradigm could be successful in a nonindustrial environment, but also to test whether meditation training would increase psi interaction. Since the success might be due to the nonindustrial environment, to the specific meditation training, or to certain factors about the Helpers or Helpees, among other hypotheses, we could eliminate only some possibilities. Specifically, it did not look as if the meditation training had a significant overall positive effect on the outcome.

It is interesting to note that the mean number of distractions in these data is vastly different from the means in the Brady and Morris study (1997), where the mean number of distractions in the Control period was 19.60, and in the Help period it was 18.45. We had worried that training in meditation might produce a ceiling effect because the participants might be too good at focusing their attention due to the training.

However, this does not seem to explain the much lower means because the untrained Helper/Helpee dyad did not differ significantly in their mean number of distractions from trained pairs. We do not know why we found this result, but it may be that there are cultural reasons. Balinese ritual life is rich, and it requires the Balinese to engage in prayer, as mentioned above, which is a kind of focus-training, so one might argue that all of the participants should be considered as trained. Yet, meditation training in the study seems to have affected the outcome in that the most successful pairs were untrained Helpee and trained Helper.