Today I met with my Dr. who’s originally from Russia who relocated to Canada before the terrible war that’s still ongoing occurred. We had the most fascinating hour long conversation about a secret KGB psychological/ESP research program studying such phenomena. The way they spoke about this makes me think they had direct knowledge/experience with these ESP experiments although I didn’t explicitly ask or clarify how they knew so I may be wrong. They mentioned there was physicists in additions to other roles/fields participating in this research program. All that was sparked by me asking if they knew much about morphogenesis in the context of the brain. We talked about many other interesting things and one such thing I’ve been recently looking into is the extended mind thesis. Albeit neither of us explicitly referred to this idea in our conversation by that term.
I looked up the ESP things they were referencing and found these links among various other sources discussing the idea:
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00792R000600350001-3.pdf
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/01/neuroimaging-fails-to-demonstrate-esp-is-real/
- https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/19/archives/emigre-tells-of-research-in-soviet-in-parapsychology-for-military.html
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soviet-era-pseudoscience-lurks-behind-havana-syndrome-worries/
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1960s-kgb-experiments-subjects-brainwashed/
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/cia-document-claims-soviet-union-was-developing-cybernetic-telepathy/
- https://abc7.news/a-declassified-cia-document-described-the-extrasensory-perception-experiments-that-the-soviet-kgb-did.html
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9186895/Declassified-CIA-document-reveals-spies-believed-Russians-perfected-extra-sensory-perception.html
- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nikolai-khokhlov-kgb-paranormal
I have very strong reservations and doubts about ESP but I suspect if there really was something here it wouldn’t be public knowledge anyway. What a niche and interesting rabbit hole this could be. Not quite my style though, I’ll leave this for others to explore