At this time, we can refer to one such entrepreneurial provider that is well launched on just such a course.  Psyleron, Inc., based in Princeton, New Jersey, offers a hierarchical menu of REG products.  These range from inexpensive pocket-size entertainment or personal assessment devices, to sophisticated research-grade equipment, all supported by appropriate operational and interpretive software, with access to centralized collaborative experiments, discussion groups, and individualized consultations, as detailed on their own website.

In addition to extending the PEAR research agenda to many more participants and topics, and providing broader and more effective educational outreach to its own and related communities, ICRL also aspires to stimulate commercial development of an array of derived consumer products that convincingly display their capacity for scientific and personal applications.  More effectively than archives of research data or philosophical argumentation, these pragmatic demonstrations can verify the validity of anomalous phenomena at the same time that they enhance human quality of life.  It is the emphasis on this third goal that distinguishes the ICRL organization from its peers.

The typical route for new technologies to spawn useful products normally begins with years of institutional basic research that generates sufficient fundamental knowledge for promising applications to be identified. This phase then evolves into more focused applied research to delimit, qualify, refine, and optimize the potential product lines in the context of their appropriate markets. Then follows development of viable production facilities and manufacturing methods, along with establishment of effective marketing, distribution, advertising, assessment, and quality control strategies.  Eventually, if this gauntlet has been run astutely, and if the public interests and needs are propitious, a beneficial and profitable array of products may emerge and be utilized.

While this may be an adequate roadmap for the evolution of new vehicles, energy sources, or microelectronic entertainment facilities, the genesis of pragmatic technologies based on consciousness-correlated physical phenomena is inescapably more complex, for several reasons.  First, the basic research phase in this case has returned a pattern of fundamental understanding that conflicts with established deterministic science.  Second, the underlying phenomena are known to be fostered by uncertainty, complexity, and subjectivity, all of which can compromise the precision and reliability usually required of publicly deployed products.  Finally, and possibly most importantly, the entrenched ideological resistance to the entire conceptual basis, primarily rooted in the “exact” science communities, requires that a corresponding public reticence be overcome  (see the essay “Change the Rules!”.)  Nonetheless, for those inquiring minds open to new findings and radical concepts the potential benefits of successful introduction of such a product line could be immense.

Here the motivation for development of practical products plays a somewhat different role.  Historically, an enduring body of basic research, well-reported and well-debated, has largely failed to enlist the interest of the scientific establishment despite a widespread, if somewhat restrained, public interest in these phenomena.  The availability of an effective and attractive line of products and their utilization would inevitably erode this credibility firewall and force more circumspect attention from a broader research community.  At the same time, they would provide useful tools to encourage self-exploration, which in turn could lead to a deeper subjective understanding of the nature of consciousness.  In other words, in this case successful applications may drive the knowledge base, rather than the other way around, with profound practical, cultural, and spiritual implications for both the public and private sectors of our society.

The ICRL attention to such applications thus has two symbiotic purposes:  empirical validation of the conceptual premises, and empirical enrichment of human experience.  To advance on these goals requires two crucial resources: a reliable base of fundamental understanding, and a community of visionary, astute, and resourceful entrepreneurs.  We believe that three decades of PEAR experimental and theoretical effort have provided much of the former platform.  Our attention has now turned to the stimulation and intellectual support of the latter.  From the perspective of our basic research experience, it is not difficult to foresee beneficial applications of the derived technologies across many public and personal venues: individual and collective exploration of consciousness-related phenomena; development of more effective intuitive decision making in business and education venues; advances in medical diagnoses and health care; expansion of robotics technologies, to name but a few.  Most of these will require well-trained users who understand the subtleties and limitations of their particular equipment, protocols, and interpretations.  The responsibility for this user-friendly indoctrination must largely fall to the product providers, so that  the concept of a full-service supplier must be expanded to encompass not only the equipment per se, but also its subjectively sensitive deployment, analysis, and interpretation.

ICRL applications initiatives have extended beyond the world of practical innovations into cultural venues as well.  One of these was a collaborative effort between scientists and artists to produce an aesthetically appealing art installation that was also a rigorous scientific study, known as “The Trapholt Experiment.”  This was a museum exhibit based on PEAR’s “ArtREG” project that was presented for a year at the Trapholt Museum in Kolding, Denmark, where it attracted much popular attention from visitors and the news media that led to its subsequent installation at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm.  It has now been updated and installed at the Esbjerg Museaum of Art in Jutland, Denmark, in collaboration with scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Another ICRL collaboration, having potentially important practical applications in the fields of medicine and psychology, entailed an investigation of the acoustical properties of ancient ceremonial sites.  A subsequent laboratory study, published in the journal Time and Mind, explored the effects of the specific resonant frequencies observed at these sites on regional brain activity and revealed an unanticipated shift in prefrontal involvement that may be related to emotional processing of information.

 
All of ICRL’s  activities are financed by philanthropic contributions from visionary individuals and organizations.  We would welcome your tax-deductible donation in support of our overall educational objective, or of any of the specific enterprises described above.  If you would like to contribute, please visit our contributions page.