Reality and the Extended Mind

Reality and the Extended Mind

2011, Psychology  -   184 Comments
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Ratings: 7.35/10 from 152 users.

Reality and the Extended MindFrom the author: The inspiration came from many years of personal research into a range of scientific fields including consciousness and psi research, psychology, biology, cosmology, quantum physics and philosophy of mind.

This documentary focuses on experiments exploring what is known by researchers as psi phenomena. These are anomalous extended properties of consciousness that have been measured under experimental conditions by highly qualified scientists.

Their existence signal far-reaching implications to our understanding of both consciousness and reality itself.

The Reality and the Extended Mind documentary is loosely based on a highly researched and in-depth book by the same title.

Directed by: Adrian Nelson

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Mark Riva
Mark Riva
1 year ago

The Reality and the Extended Mind documentary is loosely based on The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paulhttps://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy-ebook/dp/B07FKB3V5S

john
john
6 years ago

Completely unconvincing. Well done.

john
john
6 years ago

I have psi powers that would be hard to imagine by you mere mortals. So I won't go into it so as not to upset you. Just trust me on this, I'm better than you by a long shot. Have a nice day.

Russ Tul
Russ Tul
7 years ago

Great documentary. Thanks for uploading. But the background music is a bit too loud and intrusive.

DustUp
DustUp
8 years ago

By the way the Admiral Byrd ESP experiment was conducted EVERY night at the same time. So they had a number of journal entries to compare.

DustUp
DustUp
8 years ago

Back in the day there was a thing called ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). An ESP researcher pre arranged with Admiral Byrd, who was going on an expedition to Antarctica, to set aside 10 minutes (I think that was the amount) at a particular time to think about something and try to project those thoughts to the research who would try to receive them. They would both write down in a journal the thoughts. When Admiral Byrd returned the compared journals and supposedly they corresponded quite well. This was written in a book by the ESP researcher. I read about it some 30 years ago in his book which I cannot recall the name of. As someone said above. Just because you don't want to believe such things because the evidence, the journals are not in front of you, doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means that for an intelligent person it may be filed in the "unknown" file, waiting for more evidence. I certainly don't need to see more studies, nor this documentary to know first hand that ESP is real, having experienced it enough times myself. Along a street I've walked for years, the same street lights turning off most every time I walk by. I assume that these lamps have weak controller connections or something since I've read about individuals that shut down a whole row along a street. Maybe that whole row is on the same weak connector. If I actually TRY to make them go off, it doesn't work. So it isn't a frontal lobe phenomenon as the docu mentioned. I've experienced a few other types of ESP. Again, not something willed, just observed.

I would imagine that most women would laugh at any man, like some of those above, who flat out deny PSI or ESP. What is intuition? What is the phenomenon between identical twins? Buckle your seat belt ladies but just because you were correct once with your intuition doesn't mean you are every time ...or any other time. Too many gals are creating hell on earth for their guy or family because they assume their intuition is correct when it was just projections of negative thoughts. ALWAYS be neutral about your thoughts and intuitions until you can confirm. Unless of course it is life threatening and you feel very strongly that your intuition is telling you to not take some mode of transport. (Or walk in front of a gun ;)

To all the nay sayers and haters, who think they are superior because they don't believe in nonsensical things... you are the nonsensical thing. You have a self fulfilling prophesy or method of mental clamp down which prohibits experiencing many things. If I live in a windowless house and never go outside I can say there is no sun, etc. Whoever designed our minds did so to prevent the unenlightened (most all of us including myself) from having mental powers that we should not until ready. Somewhat similar as being of a certain age before allowed to get a driver's license. Would it be wise to hand out Gatling guns to 3 year olds? Or too much info about individuals to the govt and their helpers; like Gaggle me with a backhoe dude.

Ron Stephen
Ron Stephen
9 years ago

PeSO821 - And exactly what do you attribute that placebo effect to if not to psi?

Sandra
Sandra
9 years ago

This makes complete sense, sometimes when you randomly think of someone you haven't spoken to in a long time, then later come to find out they send you a random message or call you unexpected ( and this is someone you rarely even talk to ). So I do believe we can sense and send signals to each other, perhaps even in dreams we can reach out to to others but this has to be a high energy and without pausing or interacting with other energy's. The pathway has to be clear and not filled with other energies or thoughts to reach that one hit wonder and to be able to sense it. Like he said he used individuals who meditated and were brought to a state that was clear to catch the other persons signals. With enough practice, I believe we as humans will evolve even more by this very practice! very exciting. Maybe one day we will not even need phones anymore to communicate, maybe we will reach the level we always wanted to. LOL

DIMOJABE
DIMOJABE
9 years ago

I want to know more about the Global Consciousness Projects observation of a spike BEFORE the 911 event. Whaddup?!

Jeremy Lake
Jeremy Lake
9 years ago

I just spent a good deal of time reaching these incredible studies, and unfortunately its all nonsense.

The good news is we don't have to worry about someone inevitably building a global mind control machine.

Christina Marechal
Christina Marechal
10 years ago

Brain waves are measured by their electrical impulses, the same as the heart. So it is possible that telepathy is just a transference of energy from one receiver to another, (one person to another). Furthermore, we are all made of the same biological components, and in that sense connected from a single source. Perhaps this genetic/biological link allows us to effect each other through Consciousness, much like in the quantum entanglement theory, where each particle is effected by the other regardless of locality.

Roamingredant .
Roamingredant .
10 years ago

I was hoping for something about human relationships and interaction. But when they talk about predicting what a computer might do, it just turns into a load of rubbish. The methods they use to measure or details of the way they interpret data / results is not explained and therefore not valid. They say people know when they are being stared at about 50% of the time!!!!!! Not the same as guessing a flipped coin? I wish it were true, but the program demonstrates bad science / evidence only.

monstercolorfun co
monstercolorfun co
10 years ago

its unscientific b cos its religious superstition, but hey who cares its funny! autonomic haha weird word. automatic autonomous!!!

davidlfos
davidlfos
10 years ago

This is a potentially rich discussion, so why is the sound accompaniment so profoundly irritating and distracting? why do so many aspiring documentary film-makers feel it is necessary to impose musical blandness, in conjunction with irrelevant stock imagery? Is it because the actual narrative is so inadequate it needs to be bulked out & "sweetened" with schmaltzy banality?

A sensible production rule-of-thumb might be to generate content first in radio format (much cheaper and invariably more informative,) and then see if additional images & sound accompaniment augment or detract, so that such elaborate film components are sufficiently well justified in terms of cognitive & qualitative content.

Jo McKay
Jo McKay
10 years ago

statistically significant...good luck with additional research

Corinne McConnell
Corinne McConnell
11 years ago

Reminds me of a Darren Brown experiment where he simulates how religious experiences can be evoked under the right conditions. Interesting how convinced people are that the Mind/Soul is separate from the Brain. Can our individual, unique souls (thoughts, emotions, attitudes, memories, beliefs) be explained by physical brain structures? Am I who I am because my amygdala happened to store a certain memory or a certain interaction? There's sort of a sense of spirituality in networks of neurons and how beautifully intricate our minds are, so for me, the brain and the soul could be one and the same. But i guess religious belief in the idea that human beings possess a transcendent "soul" which can be reunited with its divine Creator would encourage a separation of the two (i.e. if my brain is merely an animate object that will someday die, then it can't be my soul, because my soul has an afterlife). So I can understand a specific rift between neuroscience and religion, but not the same conflict between science and spirituality in a wider sense. Humanity seems just as connected and sacred and meaningful when seen as a planet of incredibly complex organisms- organisms which don't necessarily transcend their material existence.

whoa, this post just became an existential rant…my bad

Sigmund_Bernays
Sigmund_Bernays
11 years ago

The 1st experiment they discuss seems to be flawed. Sit someone down and show them a series of pics, some calm, some emotional. After a while, the person would start to get a feel for the experiment: how long each pic is shown, the nature of the pics, the spectrum of emotion that is portrayed in the pics. It would then be completely natural for the person to begin to anticipate the kind of pic that would be coming next and when it would come, no "psi" required. I definitely believe that there's much more to our minds and reality than what we can perceive, but this is more to do with trickery than actually probing the depths of our mind's capabilities.

Stuart law
Stuart law
11 years ago

Comfortably, the article is in reality the greatest on this noteworthy topic.

Tom Rother
Tom Rother
11 years ago

I want to know more about these random number generators they speak of. The explanation was so vague. I want to believe them, but it all ends up smelling a little fishy when they fail to explain the basic design of their experiments.

sonofsarai
sonofsarai
11 years ago

I wish this narrator guy would speak up

Whitney Swope
Whitney Swope
11 years ago

There are an infinite number of things that humans will never understand, about the nature of the universe and of time. Like how an fish will never understand how a computer works.

Erik Ljungberg
Erik Ljungberg
11 years ago

Sadly new ideas tend to be dismissed on the grounds that they are too vague, too lofty, too mystical. This is a natural reaction to anomalies in our worldview. The interesting thing is that usually when several anomalies show up in your theory it shows there's something missing. There are patterns in the data not predicted by your theory and this means your theory needs to change. The scientific theory of matter was pretty airtight around the days of Newton but now there are small leaks here and there where the theory fails to predict the data. Most likely the theory of matter is wrong. Most likely any theory we have at this point will undergo fundamental change in the coming centuries. It is unlikely that we could successfully predict all the factors in a complex system such as the universe at such an early stage of our scientific development. The problem is that the only alternative to scientific materialism is the cheesy new-age take on spirituality. It will probably take a lot more anomalies in the years to come before we can glimpse the contour of the emerging new paradigm.

flyinghaboob
flyinghaboob
11 years ago

Okay, this was a somewhat interesting little amateur documentary, and I've been wading through a sea of comments by people debating what the researchers in the film are proposing. There seem to be two camps on the matter:

1. Those who are standing behind lofty ideas such as "global consciousness" and some kind of mind/universe relationship, and ideas bordering on new-age spiritualism.

2. Rational thinkers who are criticizing this kind of irrational thought, saying that the whole documentary is utter nonsense, the product of wishful thinking and well... new-age spiritualism.

But I haven't seen any discussion on the actual data. Yes, the "researchers" in the film are making huge leaps of conclusion in the same breath as they say very disciplined statements as "incomplete scientific model." And I generally get the feeling that these people have no real scientific background and are simply speculating on an effect they are observing.

But what is that effect? Can these so-called experiments be verified reliably? Critics have called the results of these statistical experiments flawed by selective reporting, but I would like to hear both sides of that argument as well, and I would like to know how this data was gathered, and if there were in fact negative tests that were discarded in favor of the tests that supported results. Forgetting for a moment what the proponents and critics are saying about each other, would it be possible to see some real science involving the data itself? Because if some kind of test like the ones described here were to really produce some kind of result under sharp and critical scrutiny, no matter how small that result may be, if it were verifiable and repeatable then it would indeed have absolutely amazing implications for our understanding of the universe.

d sadler
d sadler
11 years ago

This documentary is a good example of how we humans are less inclined towards cautious rational thinking than we're inclined to rationalize our thinking.
Cognitive bias...
Cognitive dissonance...
Conflation of cause and effect and rediness to assign specific agency without the evidence to necessarily indicate such...
Modelling way out on the mytical fringe... in the realm of wishful thinking.
Go where the evidence leads. Use immagination as a vital tool, but not as a guide.

Isabelle
Isabelle
11 years ago

The problem is in finding the words and concepts to explain these phenomena. Obviously, there is energy and frequencies that become harmonized when a large group of people feel the same way. Another obvious one is that people haven't have a clue of their intentions. This is a problem because there only think of the obvious and hardly understand it. Intention is the original frequency sent into the world/cosmos and will react with similar vibrations because they will find each other, being on the same plane.... Lots to learn here, most of all get rid of simplistic views such as these. The staring experiment is a joke btw.

abhishek sharma
abhishek sharma
11 years ago

True science needs solid results and the ownership of what is being hypothesized, if "Psi Researcher" claims of some deeper process then I want them to come forward and explain it, true science is not made up of murky ideas & maybes, true science stands on the ground of logical explanation which can then be adapted or experienced in reality . This is the only reaon why higgs boson & quantum mechanics is not completely finished, they never claimed that negative energy particle is found, but what i know that they are still working on it. I feel many different things, and I see dreams which are beyond real world around me but one thing I know that just by doing Psi i can not make other people to provide me money for food & survival, only way I know is to do something real & not influence brains or minds of my managers :D

Kay Gibbs
Kay Gibbs
11 years ago

There are lots of books on the subject I found helpful, Radin's Entangled Minds was one.

Kay Gibbs
Kay Gibbs
11 years ago

I don't think there are such things as anomalies of consciousness. We are so unaware of ourselves sometimes that we think they are anomalies.

TheQuackingDuck
TheQuackingDuck
11 years ago

I'd just like to throw out a critic towards the experiment about the psychic 'sending' of the image and the 32% (instead of the anticipated 25%) hit ratio.

Certain Images are subconsciously simply more appealing than others, for example, in the case of the pictures shown on the documentary I recall one being of a very colorful blue hue, the one with the jellyfish. Blue is by far the most popular colour and the favorite colour of 40% of people. Many people will hence be allured to that picture.

So really, the contents of a picture involve subconscious factors that will cause certain images to have a higher probability to get chosen, thereby skewing the results.

Guest
Guest
11 years ago

Frustrating living in a world where I've been taking the subject matter of this program for granted since I was fairly young. No surprises in it for me & have experienced very many similar, plus identical events to those portrayed. Upon crossing a busy city street maybe 30 yrs ago & while concentrating on moving traffic, I unconsciously turned in a reflex type action to look upwards & behind... only to look directly into the eyes of someone staring at me. I then arrived safely other side of road & knew what happened wasn't some random coincidence. I later tried staring at people from a window when standing at one window among hundreds, 'willing' that individual to sense my presence... didn't always work but, sometimes the subject's head would turn just as my own did & our eyes would meet. There's no random scanning of windows until finally spot someone... head turns on 'auto' in one swift move until eye contact. So yes, our minds/consciousness work on levels/ways not generally accepted.

Nice to hear the subject being discussed in rational open way...

Sarah de Bree
Sarah de Bree
11 years ago

I'm watching this video for more then 5 minutes and I have still no idea where this is going. bit vague if u ask me.

thomasweissenfluh
thomasweissenfluh
11 years ago

good video

Johnny Szilagyi
Johnny Szilagyi
12 years ago

of course a conscious observer affects the outcome.. without a conscious observer, there would be no outcome to affect!

hooyo
hooyo
12 years ago

Supernatural, means rule + long live (not to die), therefore the nature of the human is every one of us to have these two thing, for example, when Satan and Adem with his wife hawa, met in the heaven (the paradise), Satan was older than Adem and Hawa, he told them that " if they eat the Satan's tree (zarkum) they will have the power to rule the others and the long live not dying for ever, while ALLAH ( the God, the Supernatural) forbidden eating that bad tree.

the exact features to realize the existence of Allah's Supernaturality is; Allah created the whole with in six days plus one day holiday, THE GOD created the nature, environment, mountains, heavens, earth, sun, stars, rocks, the rain, the wind - Allah commands all of the nature. can we say, the nature is commanded by the people or something we can see - NO

ALLAH created all of the Living things and Allah controls the death and live, Allah controls the CERTAINTY

let me hear and see your feedback

zzbbe
zzbbe
12 years ago

The music is annoying interference and I don't believe a word of it.

MKeynes
MKeynes
12 years ago

When science ceases to look for explanations for those things we currently do not understand we give in to our need for certaintly that is the false preserve of religion

PeSO821
PeSO821
12 years ago

People believe in "psi" or "soul" or things like that long before science, since dawn of human kind actually. It is the way our brain works. We naturally believe in supernatural
on other hand - SCIENCE IS CONTRA INTUITIVE, we don't actually believe universe can really be strange wave functions in Nth dimension. Not even the brightest minds can actually imagine anything on quantum scale, they just know how to do mathematical equations - but have no clue how things really look like.
And this documentary is taking advantage of those two facts. Human knowledge has gone so far nobody really understands it anymore, and we naturally want to believe.
So all you need is a bit of ARROGANCE - scientists have no clue - but I know! and brain believes in supernatural again, and we all feel happy again.
This documentary is nothing but another RELIGION, that takes advantage of the fact scientists do not have all the answers.

Jared Boyes
Jared Boyes
12 years ago

Science has completely explained how the brain works? Are you from the future? There is still alot about the brain that we do not know. There is probably more speculation as to how and why the brain works than there are proven facts.

WTC7
WTC7
12 years ago

I find the documentary interesting, just as I do any discussion that deals with the subject of the mind and our understanding/perception of our surroundings. The question of what is reality has always been very fascinating to me.

First of all, I have come to the conclusion that any phenomenon that stems from our mind, or is related to it, should be deemed normal because these phenomena are the products of human brain. And the workings of our brains have been explained by the science.

Since we are explained that electric impulses is what drives our brains and our consciousness (also our ability to understand the intricacies of quantum mechanics), there should be no reason why we would call certain phenomena our brains exhibit paranormal. In that line, the telekinesis or other unusual traits should be deemed quite normal.

"Paranormal phenomena" is a misnomer as paranormal is understood as "outside the range of normal experience or scientific explanation". However, since our science has explained to us the workings of the brain, these phenomena are not outside the range of normal experience or scientific explanation and, therefore, are not paranormal.

John Marus
John Marus
12 years ago

i'd rather be considered an atheist than one who believes in fairy tales like crist or the one god. do as the film suggests, seek a greater consciousness -- but I would seek this through leaders like Eckhart Tolle and the like. Believing in nonsense is just that, ie, JC; so sorry i can't respect the religious freaks, but i can, in my world, allow for those who don't agree with my beliefs -- unlike the xtians who would just kill the non-believers.

Anyway, this doc isn't worth watching {because it isn't very good} other than the part noting that "if you can tell if someone else is watching you" that's is evidence that we all share an energy with each other & everything, which is god IMHO

Paul Rohe
Paul Rohe
12 years ago

@Core Luminous...."reality exists a priory.." !!!

Haha...You are assuming that "reality" exists in an objective manner, out there, on its own without any input from an observer, oh my, you have shot yourself, philosophically speaking, in the foot, that idea was abandoned many years ago by most serious physicists, pholosophers & so forth, its refutation has been done so many times that I rarely see this idea any more. Looks like it`s still alive n well ... BOO! ... Now that`s what ya call riefication...lmao.

KuShCanVas
KuShCanVas
12 years ago

Just once id like to read a simple review of the video to see if i want to watch it or not. How bout everyone stop arguing about the always lingering religion topic and give people some info on the video at hand!

Core Luminous
Core Luminous
12 years ago

'NEW' Paradigm? I think not. Reality exists a priori. We can only describe reality (which is ever constant) or our illusions, delusions and presumptions, all of which vary. Life is intelligence. Intelligent behaviour is all that which nurtures life. That which is non-nurturant cannot be sustained indefinitely.

MKeynes
MKeynes
12 years ago

This is a great video. Just because it challenges mainstream ideas and science does not make it wrong. What happened to the flat earth theory. We need to move on and accept we don't understand everything. And what has it to do with religion anyway?

Adrian Nelson MetaRising
Adrian Nelson MetaRising
12 years ago

Thank you for the feedback and compliments. I made this film.

I don't expect to convince anyone to alter their perspective on consciousness in 35 minutes. However, meta-analyses of every experiment presented here are associated with odds against chance between a thousand and several million to one.

Its not a documentary about the existence of god, its a brief investigation about how modern empirical scientific research conducted by highly qualified scientists alludes to the necessity for a different model of consciousness. The hypothesis that consciousness may be derived by the physiology from a more fundamental order of reality is not a theological question.

There is no evidence that the researchers interviewed are driven by religious motives. Indeed, knowing them personally I know that not to be the case.
If you are interested in furthering your understanding of this subject there are a few great books out there.

Unfortunately this is an area of research that is often misrepresented. However if you want a good scientific account of the emerging new paradigm in consciousness erupting from quantum physics, cosmology, philosophy of mind, biology and psi research, my book gives a much more in-depth analysis.

PeSO821
PeSO821
12 years ago

@ John Jacquard
You are kind of killing conversation with your monologue.
10 posts in a row - there should be a limit against that.

John Jacquard
John Jacquard
12 years ago

atheism is a cop out and refusal to look at valid data from the last hundred years in every area and disciple. this statement is not a belief that I have it is the relationship between the atheist and his environment. we don't get to choose accept or deny the truth about reality it is what it is and we can only learn that and live appropriately. we have a habit of holding onto a belief and identifying with it so much that we don't update it with new information because we are afraid somewhere along the line we'll lose our self. do children lose themselves in this process or do they advance as they learn. so how about taking responsibility for knowing the truth, after all the difference between 2 worldviews can affect every aspect of who you are and what you do with your life.Imagine if your "sim" said screw this i'm nothing but pixels on a screen so i'm not going to take blurry sh*ts clean the house or paly that acoustic guitar anymore.

John Jacquard
John Jacquard
12 years ago

look at the way quantum mechanics work (programming) and we have mechanistic bodies to detec the envirnment (character) and we have the universe(game environment) is there any reason to think we are not living in a "game" so to speak and consciousness is the controller that theory can fit with the unexpalined and psi everything really, but can materialism account for such things?what about big bang they say the universe expanded(into what)came from nothing the universe and laws of physics created itself now imagine programming such a simulation with algorithms to create itself (game designers do this save time graphics nodes etc.)

Henry Czuprinski
Henry Czuprinski
12 years ago

A beautifully done film.
Covers the same territory & similar studies that many docs here deal with..... I begin to wonder why bother repeating what's been presented so many times... by varied filmmakers ?
I've had a fair amount of training in meditation & psychic techniques over the years so lab tests mean little to me .... though I often learn something from these things
Another film dealing with paradigm changes in science shared this observation by Schopenhauer

"Every truth passes through 3 stages before it is recognised."
1 It is ridiculed
2 It is opposed
3 It is finally regarded as self evident

argument -debate is futile, IMO... one either resonates with this based on their personal experience, or they reject it as fantasy-speculation-a hoax

KsDevil
KsDevil
12 years ago

It is not uncommon for a single species with the same genetic make-up growing a brain that is statistically similar to others of that same species. Common thought. It is lso statistically possible that random number generators using the same methodology will become harmonic to each other and giving the human the desire to find meaning in patterns.
But more importantly, this documentry was a bunch of people making specualtive assessments of their own research.
Gain of salt, my friend...grain of salt.