Experimental Investigation of Precognition in Yoga Practitioners
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can yoga sharpen your psychic abilities? A team including parapsychology heavyweight Dean Radin tested this with 273 yoga students in India across four pre-registered experiments. They tried a 40-day yoga course, cyclic meditation, and comparing experienced practitioners to beginners. Result: nothing. All effect sizes were tiny (below 0.08). But here's the twist — participants consistently scored below chance, a pattern called 'psi-missing,' where people seem to psychically dodge the right answer. In Study 1, there were 14 missers for every 3 hitters (p<0.001). A null result with a strange wrinkle.
Research Notes
Pre-registered null result with intriguing psi-missing pattern across all three experimental conditions. Published in JSPR Vol. 89(1), pp. 1–23. Extends the Roney-Dougal meditation-precognition program with a larger Indian sample. Dean Radin is co-author, linking this to the broader IONS precognition research tradition.
Four pre-registered online forced-choice precognition experiments investigated whether yoga and meditation practice enhances precognitive ability among Indian yoga university students (total N=273). Study 1 (N=104) tested a 40-day yoga course, Study 2 (N=103) tested cyclic meditation, Study 3 (N=164) compared experienced vs. beginner practitioners, and Study 4 (N=245) examined demographic and personality correlates. None of the pre-registered hypotheses reached statistical significance (all d < 0.08), but post hoc analyses revealed consistent psi-missing across all three experimental studies (e.g., Study 1 post-intervention: 14 missers vs. 3 hitters, p<0.001).
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📋 Cite this paper
Alibalaei, Hassan, Radin, Dean, Ilavarasu, Judu, Nagendra, H. R (2025). Experimental Investigation of Precognition in Yoga Practitioners. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.
@article{alibalaei_2025_experimental,
title = {Experimental Investigation of Precognition in Yoga Practitioners},
author = {Alibalaei, Hassan and Radin, Dean and Ilavarasu, Judu and Nagendra, H. R},
year = {2025},
journal = {Journal of the Society for Psychical Research},
}