August 2, 2001: Studies of the Mind - Marilyn Schlitz

Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, joins Art Bell to discuss psi research, consciousness studies, remote viewing, distant healing, and staring-detection experiments after a first-hour Bigfoot caller. Art opens with a caller named Rob from Michigan who claims to have struck a large, hair-covered creature with his car at high speed on a rural highway. Rob describes the animal as weighing roughly 700 pounds with long brown hair, a flat face, and horse-like teeth, now stored in his underground fallout shelter and possibly still alive. Art advises him to contact a veterinarian and agrees to send a Bigfoot investigator.

Schlitz describes her own remote viewing experiment between Detroit and Rome that produced six direct hits out of ten trials, with odds against chance of four in a million. She details her laboratory studies showing that one person can measurably influence another person's physiology at a distance under double-blind conditions.

The conversation covers groundbreaking clinical studies where distant healing intentions improved health outcomes for AIDS patients regardless of the healer's religious tradition. Schlitz also discusses her staring detection experiments, online psi tests at the IONS website, and the relationship between belief and psychic performance in research settings.