I heard my teacher (taoist, bagua, Chen tai-chi teacher) has a practice where one person decides what attack he is going to do and another tries to predict the attack. I have never seen him do it or another. This level of practice is introduced by him after years of chi-kung practice and other practices designed to get sensitivity to others energy field.

My teacher is also a healer and has had enlightened experiences. He and his senior students do have an ability to read a person for medical reasons. One of his senior students was able to detect a q-link energy device I was wearing, it was quite strange. My teacher was also able to detect a vice I had (kind of embarassing and shocking).

Couldn’t find the link, but I did see an episode of “Mind, Body & Kick Ass Moves” in which an Aikido like martial arts would test a persons ability to predict an attack before and after meditating under a small waterfall. This is called Misogi. “The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba regularly used this form of meditation to complement his training and search for perfection.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogi.

I am a skeptical believer.
I contacted Randis lawyer before, Randi is a scam. The cost of meeting his standards of experimentation exceeds his prize.

Re: Precognition. This would suggest to me that timespace is not linear but heliptical (a spiral)., Then one could catch a glimpse of the future as it is ‘looped’ in front of them. A set time limit (5 secs) demonstrates the ‘length’ of the loops. You with me?
If the Emotional response shows a ‘10’ & non emotional a ‘0’ then the precognitive response would be about a 1 or 2 on the graph I saw, then it spikes
Ptchang!
CG

Another way of illustrating the [blind spots] is by revealing an asymmetry in how psi experiments are reported in newspapers. In January 2008, newspapers around the world hailed the first conclusive test for telepathy conducted by two Harvard University researchers. According to the Boston Globe: “Brain scan tests fail to support validity of ESP. Research on parapsychology is largely taboo in academia, but two Harvard scientists recently set out to settle, once and for all, the age-old question: Is extrasensory perception, or ESP, real? Their sophisticated experiment answers: No, at least, not as far as they can tell using high-tech brain scanners to detect neural evidence of it.”

Finally. Once and for all. A sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging brainscanner was used (technically, an fMRI), for the first time, to answer this age-old question. The high-tech “no” answer seems conclusive unless you read the actual article, which reported that one of 16 tests conducted showed a stupendously significant outcome exactly in alignment with what was predicted if psi were real. But the authors then took pains to explain why that result was probably an artifact, and so the newspapers didn’t mention that one intriguing outcome. (It also makes one question why they employed an experimental design which allowed positive results to be explained away so easily.)

But the study was conducted at Harvard, for goodness sake, so surely that’s the last word on ESP. After all, for the first time ever Harvard scientists used one of those expensive and mysterious fMRI brainscanners to peer deep inside the brain, and they didn’t see any psi in there. End of story, no?

Well, no. Was this really the first psi study conducted using an fMRI? No, it wasn’t even the second such study. Or the third. Or fourth. Or fifth. It was the sixth. And all of the earlier experiments, all conducted since 2000, showed significant evidence for psi effects. Somehow the newspapers overlooked this, despite the fact that most of those studies are freely available in an instant via PubMed.gov, the National Institutes of Health massive online bibliography of scientific articles related to health and healing…

You seems to misunderstand both Occam’s Razor and the 200 ms delay in perception. Occam’s Razor states that you shouldn’t add more than you need to an explanation. In this case, the simplest thing is not the psychic explanation but the physical, since 99.9% of humans agree that they never had a psychic experience, but also agree that matter exists in one way or another.

99.9% of humans agree that they never had a psychic experience? Surveys say otherwise. IIRC, this point was specifically mentioned in the Dean Radin video. Anyway, this issue will not be settled by having everyone vote for their favorite explanation.

What then is simpler : an explanation based on facts about the human nervous system that we understand or something more added to the nervous system that we never otherwise had a glimpse of (psychic phenomenon)? I think the former is way simpler.

There is no single set of facts that “we” understand. The last point at which any one human could reasonably claim to be at the leading edge of scientific knowledge in all fields, was decades if not centuries ago.

Nowadays, people specialize, and being clever is no substitute for domain knowledge and experience.

You think there are simpler explanations for the test results mentioned above. Most of the people who designed and conducted these tests, and who interpreted the results disagree with you. They are all specialists. While you are not compelled to agree with their conclusions, you haven’t provided any compelling alternative here.

If you think otherwise you are mistaking the level of abstraction : something can be complex in detail but simple in action, and something simple in detail but complex in action., etc. You also have to take care not to mistaken complex for complicated : psychic powers seem simple but they are in fact complicated, by the virtue of them using unknown principles which we cannot make fit with what we know and understand of the human nervous system without postulating various intermediate abstract mechanisms.

Now you are attributing undue specificity to the general guideline expressed as Occam’s Razor, and advancing your personal notions of simplicity and complexity as something more than they are.

Then you go on and misinterpret the 200 ms gap as somehow proving things go on unbeknown to us before we act… of course there are! How can we in a pseudo 3 dimensions without making any effort consciously? 200 ms gap (the vision center of the brain is in the BACK. It goes through a lot to go there, and then some more, and then to the cerebral cortex (our consciousness) which is at the FRONT!!! It goes round-trip the head). Also, how can we MAKE a decision, without any act of the brain? The gap IS the decision. The fact that you make the decision unconsciously is not something paranormal : every acquired reflex is unconscious in that way. When you slip on an ice patch and regain you footing instantly, it was the 200 ms gap at play.

All the 200 ms gap can help prove is that we are determined and that there is really no absolute free will as religion understands it. Our conscious is only a small part of the brain, it can’t control be aware of everything and it also can’t control anything directly!!! (for example, all movement starts from the motor cortex, balance and eye movement are kept by the cerebellum on input from the internal ears and the parietal lobe, etc.)

You’ve lost the track here. The last slide above shows that people can react predictably to future events. The Fight Science video shows Bren Foster acting in response to an event that occurred roughly 200ms in the past.

Are both these results using the same underlying mechanism(s)? I don’t know, hence my earlier statement that none of this proves that history’s greatest martial artists bested their opponents with the help of psychic power.

The difference between brain and mind, and the existence of free will are rich and fascinating topics.