Previous Projects

Previous Projects

The majority of my research projects are about decision making, intuition, and paranormal phenomena. Many of these are student projects.

2008

  • Intuition and meditation. Together with two master students we explored the influence of a 10-day meditation retreat on interoception (sensitivity to your own bodily changes) and intuition. Contrary to our expectations, we found that the retreat did not affect interoception as measured by a heart beat detection task, nor the performance on two intuition tasks. General mood did improve after the retreat as compared to a control group. There was some indication that long time meditators performed significantly worse on one of the intuition (implicit learning) tasks.

  • Heartrate and Intuition. Intuition as measured by a Gestalt Completion task showed that heartrate decreased when people looked at meaningful as compared to meaningless pictures. This effect was absent if people had to judge the meaningfulness of a picture, or choose which one of two pictures was meaningful.


leeuw2 small.jpg
leeuw small.jpg

Which of the above two pictures is meaningful?
These types of pictures were used in the Gestalt intuition task.

2007

  • Heartrate, interoception and analytical intuition. Exploring the relationship between heartrate changes and intuitive decision making in an implicit learning task. While we found that heartrate slowed down significantly while seeing the correct stimulus, but we found no relationship with hits or misses. We also found that people who were more sensitive to their own heart rate were generally more 'rational' as measured by an intuition questionnaire. We suspect that this rationality may indicate a tendency to suppress fear, while the fear may either enhance heartbeats and thus increase the likelyhood of those being perceived, or on the other hand, being more fearful makes one more likely to be sensitive to all kinds of subtle bodily changes, such as heartrate.

  • Heartrate, intuition and holistich intuition. In this study we compared heartrate differences for meaningful and meaningless Gestalts (see illustration above) and found some indication that people who can detect their own heartbeat, show a marginallyincreased heartrate when seeing meaningful Gestalts as compared to meaningless pictures, where they had to choose the one (out of two) that was meaningful.

  • Correlational study aimed at finding psychological characteristics that are related to implicit learning, and comparing two types of implicit learning tasks.These data are still being analysed, but surprisingly, there was a small but significant negative correlation between the twoimplicit learning tasks.

fruit machine.jpg

2006

The Gambling Brain. In this precognition study we explored whether EEG shows a different response to future outcomes on a fruitmachine type stimulus. The participant is passive, but will have an investment because three identical pictures will give a monetary reward. We compared precognitive EEG with EEG in an implicit learning condition in which visible but inconspicuous cues indicated a positive future outcome. Although we did not find any differences in EEG between positive and negative future outcomes in either precognitive or implicit learning condition, the few participants who felt like they could influence the outcome with their thoughts (although not possible in any known way), did show a significant difference in their EEG between positive and negative future outcomes.

dean suit.jpg

2005

  • Meditation and presentiment. Long time meditators and controls were invited twice to the laboratory, once for a session in a meditative, relaxed state, and once for a session in a 'normal' state. During both sessions their skinconductance was being measured. At unpredictable moments, they would hear either a neutral or a very unpleasant loud alarm. We expected that skin conductance response would shownot only a more pronounced response after the loud alarm, but also preceding it (presentiment effect), and expected this would not happen for the neutral sound. Contrary to ourexpectations, the response prior to the neutral sounds instead of to the loud alarm was more pronounced in the non-meditativestate, and significant only for long time meditators.

  • Presentiment in the Brain. (At Dean Radin's lab at the Institute of Noetic Sciences). We registered EEG of participants directly prior to a flash or prior to no flash. Flashes were random and fundamentably unpredictable for both participant or experimenter. We found a significant EEG presentiment effect for women only, and a non-significant trend in the opposite direction for men.(Photograph of Dean Radin on the left).