Jane Katra’s research while affiliated with Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research and other places

Since ancient times, spiritual teachers have described paths and practices that a person could follow to achieve health, happiness, and peace of mind. Considerable recent research has indicated that any sort of spiritual practice is likely to improve one's prognosis for recovering from a serious illness. Many of these approaches to spirituality involve learning to quiet the mind rather than adhering to a prescribed religious belief. These meditative paths include the mystic branches of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity; Kabalistic Judaism; Sufism; and many others. What is hinted at in the subtext of these teachings is that as one learns to quiet his or her mind, one is likely to encounter psychic-seeming experiences or perceptions. For example, in The Sutras of Patanjali, the Hindu master tells us that on the way to transcendence we may experience all sorts of amazing visions, such as the ability to see into the distance, or into the future, and to diagnose illnesses and to cure them. However, we are told not to get attached to these psychic abilities--they are mere phenomena standing as stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment. In this article, we describe the laboratory evidence for some of these remarkable phenomena and their implications for science, mental health, and peace of mind.

Remote viewing (RV) is a perceptual ability whereby individuals are able to describe and experience objects, pictures, and locations that are blocked from ordinary perception, either by distance, shielding, or time. RV is usually carried out as a team effort, consisting of a viewer who is attempt- ing to describe a target, and an interviewer who assists the viewer in exacting images and sensations from his of her subconscious process. We report a RV experiment carried out at a conference in Arco, Northern Italy, with a class of 24 participants, many of whom were healers and " energy workers." Based on previous work of the authors, great attention was given to creating a feeling of community and coherence of intention within the group during the three- day class. In the fourth of the five sessions of the class, a formal, RV experi- ment was conducted with class members working in pairs, wherein each per- son served alternately as viewer and interviewer. Viewers were asked to describe a picture of an outdoor scene, encased in an opaque, sealed enve- lope, which they would be shown immediately after the session. The inter- viewer then was directed to take the viewer' s sketches and written impres- sions to the front of the room and rank order the material (from 1 to 4) against the four possible pictures from a preset target package. In this blind-ranking protocol, 6 first-place matches would be expected by chance from the 24 viewers. Instead, 14 first-place matches were achieved. The binomial proba- bility of this outcome is 5 ´ 10- 4, with an effect size Z/(N)1/2= 0.64

This paper describes a precognition experiment in which two re- searchers took the part of viewers, and worked with two judges to design and implement an experiment in associative remote viewing. We used a redun- dant protocol to eliminate some of the problems experienced by many of us who have tried to harness psi for real world applications. We carried out nine weeks of remote viewing trials, in which the viewer was to describe the target that he or she would be shown two days in the future. At each trial the view- ers had their own target pools of two targets about which they knew nothing. A total of 18 viewings were carried out at the rate of one per person per week. Targets were randomly assigned "up" or "down" status by the judges previ- ous to the viewing. If the viewers both accurately described targets of dis- crepant directions, then the trial was considered a pass. Additionally, if a viewer's target description failed to be awarded a rating of 4 or more on a 0-7 point rating scale, his or her call was declared a pass. Of the 12 viewings that were not rated pass by the judges, 11 correctly described the object that the viewer was shown at a later time @ = 0.003). The objects shown to each viewer corresponded to the direction of the one-day change in the price of May Silver futures. Of the nine trials carried out, two were passed for various reasons, and seven were recorded as traded in the market, although no pur- chases were actually made. Six of the seven trade forecasts were correct.

Nutritional practices influence athletic performance and recovery from injury. The athletic trainer is ideally positioned to effect dietary changes with adolescent athletes-a group at high-risk for nutritional imbalances. Research shows that young adults generally do not change dietary practices when given factual nutrition and health information. This article provides a variety of behavior change strategies, based on models derived from health education and health psychology, which are likely to influence dietary choices. Promoting self-efficacy by enhancing perception of choice and control, peer modeling, cooperative support networks, goal-setting techniques, and behavioral self-monitoring may provide the motivational framework necessary to enhance dietary compliance. Dietary behavior change techniques are a valuable part of an athletic trainer's resources.

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