by events occurring at a distance from the patient and outside his
　　　　  or her awareness."
　　　　  If this is true, it could topple the tallest spire on the cathedral
　　　　  of science--the double-blind experiment. Science works by accounting
　　　　  for--and controlling--every variable and influence that could
　　　　  conceivably affect an experimental outcome. What if there are
　　　　  factors that must be taken into account that have heretofore been
　　　　  ruled out as theoretically impossible? For all we know, Dossey says,
　　　　  outcomes could be influenced "by people outside the experimental
　　　　  arena, like well-wishing friends or praying kinfolk. When we look
　　　　  back on our present era, I think we're going to be astonished how
　　　　  naive we were, that we actually believed we could isolate people in
　　　　  such a way that the influence of consciousness could be annulled."
　　　　  Under his prodding, the NIH's Panel on Mind/Body Interventions has
　　　　  sandwiched into its report a daring call for a Task Force on the
　　　　  Nature of Consciousness, to comprise representatives from every
　　　　  discipline: psychologists, neurophysiologists, artificial
　　　　  intelligence experts, physicists, physicians, and philosophers.
　　　　  Similarly, the professionally variegated Causality Project has
　　　　  already been meeting for three years, aiming for nothing less than a
　　　　  new paradigm of science. Other enclaves--with exotic names like the
　　　　  Bay Area Consciousness Group, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies
　　　　  Research lab (PEAR), and Temple University's Center for Frontier
　　　　  Sciences--are already pins in the sketchy map of a brave new world.
　　　　  A project is even underway to create an internationally affiliated
　　　　  group of first-class "Consciousness Research Laboratories" that
　　　　  would exchange data and provide replication of each other's work.
　　　　  All the baroque-sounding formulations that have sparked centuries of
　　　　  philosophical wrangling--Descartes' "radical dualism," Leibniz's
　　　　  "psychophysical parallelism," Spencer's "mindstuff theory"--may soon
　　　　  move from the Victorian armchair to the cyclotron, the petri dish,
　　　　  the electron-tunneling microscope.
　　　　  But what species of researcher is going to risk grants, tenure, and
　　　　  professional repute by venturing out into the night with a high-tech
　　　　  jelly jar to try to capture a flitting, hypothetical psychic quark?
　　　　  Typical of a new breed of what might be called experiential
　　　　  experimentalists, biophysicist Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., director of
　　　　  Temple University's Center for Frontier Sciences, has logged time on