Attention narrowing and settling so completely on one thing that the usual background hum of thought quiets down. A spectrum rather than a switch.
Worth separating two uses. In contemplative practice it describes attention settling during a sitting. In psychology, absorption is also a measured personality trait associated with hypnotic suggestibility and fantasy proneness. Related, but not the same claim.
See also Altered state of consciousness, Body awareness.
Reference: Tellegen and Atkinson 1974, the absorption scale; APA Dictionary of Psychology
Response data: the viewer's own reaction to the site rather than a property of the site itself. Awe, unease, tightness, the sense that somewhere is grand or grim or busy.
Recorded separately from the sensory description because it is a different kind of evidence, and because a strong reaction is a common trigger for AOL.
See also Analytic overlay, Stage 3, Sensory channels.
Combining several independent sessions or analyses into one prediction, usually by majority or by averaging confidence, to damp individual noise.
It can manufacture false confidence. If the inputs share a common bias rather than making independent errors, averaging them produces a confident wrong answer.
See also Redundancy.
An umbrella term for any mode of awareness noticeably different from ordinary alert waking consciousness, covering daydreaming, deep relaxation, meditation, hypnosis and sleep stages.
A standard term with a real literature behind it. What is genuinely debated is where the category's boundaries sit, not whether the term is legitimate.
See also Absorption, Hypnagogia.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
Working out which of the candidate targets a reading points at. Done blind, the analyst sees the locked transcript alongside the real target and its decoys, without being told which is which, and puts the candidates in order.
The work is finding correspondences and weighing them, not passing a verdict on each element in turn. A reading is a mixture: some of it lands, some of it misses, and some of it is simply wrong. That is the normal shape of the material, not a sign the session failed. The question an analyst is answering is whether the reading, taken together, leans towards one image in the set more than the others, and how far.
The older word for this is judging, and the person doing it was the judge. rv.studio says analysis and analyst instead, because the job is understanding what a viewer is telling you rather than passing sentence on it. The old word still finds this entry.
Analyzing your own reading is where honest practice usually goes wrong, and not through dishonesty. Once you know which target was real, correspondences appear in your own words that you never consciously looked for, and the hit rate rises on its own. rv.studio displays self-judged work and never scores it.
See also Rankings, Analyst, Commentary, Decoys and the panel, Self-analyzed, Subjective validation, Hindsight bias.
The role, human or AI, that analyzes a locked transcript against the target and its decoys without knowing the real question, its outcome, or which image stands for which outcome in an ARV trial. Rankings lock before any outcome is revealed.
What an analyst produces is the rankings. Anything they might otherwise want to say to the viewer about the reading is commentary, which rv.studio neither asks for nor delivers, at any point.
See also Analysis, Rankings, Commentary, Coordinator, Double blind and triple blind.
The mind's attempt to NAME what it is picking up, layered on top of the raw perception. "Tall, narrow, metal, repeating lattice" is data. "It's the Eiffel Tower" is an AOL: a conclusion your analytic mind reached and handed you as though it were another impression.
AOL is not a mistake and not a failure of discipline. It is what minds do with incomplete information, and it turns up in almost every session. The problem is that it is sticky. Once named, the guess starts shaping everything that follows, and the rest of the session quietly becomes a description of the guess.
The usual handling is to declare it and set it aside rather than suppress it: write it down, label it, carry on describing. On rv.studio an impression tagged as AOL is quarantined, kept in the transcript and never counted as part of what an analyst weighs.
See also AOL drive, Deduction, Named break types, Quarantined.
The term adopted during the later SAIC phase of the US government funded research programme, under Edwin May, for apparent acquisition of information about a place, object or event screened from the senses by distance, shielding or time. In practice it is the formal term closest to what practitioners call remote viewing.
It describes only the observation, an information gain that should not have been possible, and stays silent on mechanism. Read it as "we measured something we cannot account for", not as a claim that a faculty was identified.
Beware the abbreviation. In this literature AC is anomalous cognition and AP is anomalous perturbation, the active side. Everywhere else AC means alternating current. Spell it out.
See also Psi, Clairvoyance.
Reference: Utts 1995, assessment prepared for the government evaluation
What happens when an AOL stops being a passing guess and takes the wheel. The viewer keeps returning to the same conclusion, and each new impression arrives pre-shaped to fit it, so the session produces a detailed, confident account of something that was never the target.
From the inside it is recognisable mostly by its momentum: the material keeps confirming itself and stops surprising you. The usual remedy is to declare it, break, and re-approach from a different angle rather than trying to argue yourself out of it mid-flow.
Sometimes written "AOL-Drive", and often said aloud as "analytic overdrive", which describes the experience well even though AOL drive is the form used in the training literature.
See also Analytic overlay, Named break types.
An analytic overlay that turns out to sit close to the real target, so the viewer works THROUGH it rather than discarding it. Sometimes called AOL matching.
This is the notation most worth knowing when you are analyzing a reading. A plain AOL was declared and set aside; an AOL/S was declared and KEPT. Read the two the same way and you will either throw out good material or count material the viewer had already rejected.
See also Analytic overlay, AOL drive, Analysis.
A model, not an observationA construct describing an internal process nobody can observe from outside.
A model describing how much information the viewer can access at a given point: narrow and sharp early on, widening in later stages to let slower and more detailed material through. Described with a radar metaphor.
See also Signal line, Controlled remote viewing.
Having little or no voluntary visual mental imagery, so picturing a face or a scene produces nothing visual, or nearly nothing. A normal variation in how minds work, not a disorder. Described as far back as 1880 but only named in 2015.
It matters here because someone who assumes everyone sees pictures may conclude they are bad at this, when they are simply working in a different channel: words, sound, or a felt sense.
See also Imagery vividness, Sensory channels.
Reference: Galton 1880, the first description; Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala 2015, the naming paper
Perceiving meaningful connections in data that is actually random or unrelated. Coined in 1958, originally to describe a feature of early psychosis, and since broadened into ordinary cognitive vocabulary.
Any practice that involves interpreting vague impressions is fertile ground for it, which is worth naming rather than assuming it applies only to other people.
See also Pareidolia, Pattern recognition.
Reference: Mishara 2010, on Klaus Conrad and the 1958 coinage
A protocol for questions about future outcomes. Each possible outcome is bound in advance to a distinct target image, and the viewer describes the image they will later be shown, not the event. The description is matched to an image, and the image maps back to an outcome.
The binding has to be sealed before the session and kept from everyone involved, or the association leaks and the result means nothing.
Note that ARV also stands for after repair value in property investing and antiretroviral in medicine. Neither is related, but both dominate search results.
See also The association step, Sealed mapping, Binding leak.
A beta feature: binaural audio tuned against a live EEG headband, intended to help you settle. Framed as approximate personal feedback and nothing more. It is not a medical device, makes no health claim, and does not claim to improve accuracy.
See also Binaural beats and isochronic tones, Brain Map.
People rate vague, generic statements that could apply to almost anyone as strikingly accurate about themselves specifically. Bertram Forer demonstrated it in 1948 by handing a class of 39 students the same personality sketch, which most rated as accurate about them personally. The paper followed in 1949.
Also called the Forer effect after that experiment. A direct warning against descriptions loose enough to fit any outcome, then counted as a match.
See also Subjective validation, Cold reading.
Reference: Forer 1949, the original paper; APA Dictionary of Psychology
How often an outcome happens across a relevant set of comparable past cases, before you take any specifics of this case into account. The starting point any honest estimate is adjusted away from.
Ignoring it in favour of a vivid, specific story is one of the most-studied forecasting errors, first demonstrated by Kahneman and Tversky in 1973. How often people really neglect base rates is itself debated.
See also Chance rate, Calibration.
Reference: Kahneman and Tversky 1973; Koehler 1996, the base rate fallacy reconsidered
In the earliest protocols someone was physically sent to stand at the target while the viewer worked elsewhere. That person was the outbounder, and their presence at the site was described as a beacon the viewer could lock onto.
The finding that mattered was that the outbounder did not appear to need to send anything deliberately. Being there was enough, which is part of why later protocols could drop the person entirely and use a bare reference instead.
Historical. You will meet these words in older material, not in current practice.
See also Coordinate, Operational remote viewing, Telepathy.
Reference: Puthoff, an account of the SRI programme
The divided-attention state practitioners describe during a working session: partly present in the room, partly engaged with the target.
Used descriptively, for a subjective state people report and can learn to recognize. It is not a claim that anything leaves the body.
See also Named break types, Altered state of consciousness.
Sources disagreeThe subjective-effect claim and the brainwave-synchronisation claim have very different evidence behind them and are frequently conflated.
Constructed sound intended to shift mental state. Binaural beats play a slightly different tone in each ear so the listener perceives a third, beating tone. Isochronic tones pulse a single tone on and off at a steady rate.
The evidence splits into two very different claims. That listening changes subjective outcomes such as mood, attention or anxiety has moderate support from meta-analysis. That the beats literally synchronise brainwaves, which is what the word entrainment implies, has weak and inconsistent support: one 2023 systematic review found most of the studies it examined did not support it.
Plenty of people find it a useful way to settle. Treat any strong claim about a specific track with scepticism, and note that nothing here claims it improves accuracy.
See also Entrainment, Attune.
Reference: Garcia-Argibay et al. 2019, meta-analysis of subjective effects; Ingendoh et al. 2023, systematic review of the entrainment claim
Any route by which the viewer or the matcher learns something about the binding outside the sanctioned channel: image reuse, careless handling of the pool, an interviewer's tone, or a matcher who set the trial up themselves.
Once it has happened, results can look strong purely from inference, and it is very hard to detect afterwards from the transcript alone.
See also Sealed mapping, Frontloading.
The standard test for a run of yes-or-no trials where the chance of success on each is fixed and known in advance. For a four-candidate panel at a one in four baseline it is exactly the right tool.
Its four conditions each map onto a way an experiment breaks. Two outcomes only: a partial-credit or ranked scoring scheme breaks it. A fixed number of trials, decided in advance: a stopping rule breaks it. Independent trials: a shared target list breaks it. The same probability every time: a reused or unbalanced pool breaks it.
See also Chance rate, Independence of trials, Optional stopping.
The viewer has no information about the target when they work it. Not "tried not to think about it": genuinely had no access.
Blindness is a property of the procedure, not of anyone's good intentions, which is why it has to be enforced by something other than a promise.
See also Double blind and triple blind, Frontloading, Blind ledger, Commentary.
An append-only record of who saw what, when, and in what role. It stores no secret content, only proof of what each party could see, and a session's blinding tier is derived from it rather than self-declared.
See also Blinding tier, Compliance certificate.
How sealed a session actually was, on four rungs: solo, monitored, double blind, triple blind. The tier is computed from a record of who saw what, never chosen in a setting.
Only double- and triple-blind sessions count toward verified accuracy. Work described as "certified" on rv.studio means it reached one of those tiers and has the record to show it.
This is rv.studio's own machinery. The wider community uses double and triple blind to describe roles rather than as a formal tier attached to every session.
See also Double blind and triple blind, Blind ledger, Verified accuracy, Compliance certificate.
Noticing physical sensation, tension, breath and posture without trying to change any of it, usually to settle before turning attention inward.
A body still carrying the day's tension is a noisy instrument, which is why many practitioners spend a minute here first.
See also Breathwork, Grounding.
The simplest fix for running many tests: divide the threshold by the number of tests. Ten tests at an overall one in twenty standard means each must beat one in two hundred.
Deliberately crude and deliberately conservative, and it works whether or not the tests are related. The cost is real: being that strict misses real effects.
The name misleads. Carlo Emilio Bonferroni supplied the inequality it rests on, but the correction as everyone uses it was set out by Olive Jean Dunn in 1961.
See also Holm-Bonferroni correction, Multiple comparisons.
Reference: Dunn 1961, the actual method
A beta feature that stores EEG captured during a session and surfaces patterns pooled across your own sessions. Owner-only physiology data: never joined to a target, never part of a reveal, never shared to a Space.
See also Attune.
A formal pause the viewer calls to reset when something is interfering with clean data collection: an intrusive thought, a physical distraction, or simply needing a breather. The viewer then resumes from where they left off.
See also Named break types, Declaring a break, Analytic overlay.
Breaks are written in the margin as they are called, usually abbreviated. The ones you will meet: AOL Break, with the overlay itself written underneath. Conf Bk for a confusion break, meaning the lines just above it are tangled and should not be read as clean. TM Break for too much, meaning the data was arriving faster than it could be written, which is housekeeping rather than a quality problem. AI Break for a strong aesthetic or emotional reaction, where what follows is KEPT as response data. Bilo Bk for a bilocation break. AOL-D Bk, also written AOL/D, for a suspected run of drive.
The punctuation is not standardised. AOL-D Bk and AOL/D Break are the same call, and neither spelling is more correct than the other.
See also Break, Named break types, Analytic overlay, Aesthetic impact and emotional impact.
Any deliberate breathing pattern, slow counted breaths, longer exhales, a few full breaths, used to move from a tense state toward a calmer one. Usually the simplest lever available, and it needs no equipment.
See also Body awareness, Grounding.
A way of scoring probability estimates, introduced by Glenn Brier in 1950 for weather forecasting, where lower is better. It rewards confidence that matches reality and penalises both overconfidence and excessive hedging: over the long run the only way to keep it low is to say what you actually believe.
Two conventions circulate and they differ by a factor of two. rv.studio uses the modern binary form running 0 to 1, in which always saying 50 percent scores 0.25.
See also Calibration, Calibration record.
Reference: Brier 1950
Matching your stated confidence to your actual track record, so that the things you call "pretty sure" come off about as often as that implies, and so does "just guessing".
It is a separate skill from being right. Someone can be poorly calibrated and still accurate, or well calibrated and mostly wrong, and only a record kept over time can tell you which.
See also Brier score, Base rate, Calibration record.
The per-tier comparison of your stated confidence against your actual accuracy over time, with a Brier score, hit rate over base rate, and a calibration slope. Kept separately for each blinding tier so looser work can never blend into the trusted number.
See also Calibration, Brier score, Blinding tier.
Stitching a few sparse, ambiguous impressions into a neat and satisfying story. The analytic mind builds something elaborate on a thin foundation, and it feels like a good session precisely because it hangs together.
Worth knowing when analyzing: real signal tends to arrive fragmentary and awkward. A transcript that reads like a finished narrative is more often this than a strong hit.
See also Analytic overlay, AOL drive, Deduction, Analysis.
How often guessing alone produces a match. With a panel of four, chance is one in four.
It is the baseline every result has to be read against, and it is why "I got three out of four" means very little on its own: at a one in four baseline, pure guessing produces three or more hits in four attempts about 5 percent of the time. In any twenty guessers, expect one to post that result.
Results are scored against the chance rate of the panel actually used, never pooled across different panel sizes.
See also Decoys and the panel, Base rate, Margin, Luck odds.
Claimed acquisition of information about an object, place or event directly, with no other person acting as a source. The defining test is structural rather than experiential: if nobody anywhere knows the target at the time, a hit cannot be explained as one mind reading another.
Worth knowing that many researchers hold clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition cannot be cleanly separated by experiment, since a viewer could in principle draw on the later feedback rather than the present target.
See also Telepathy, Precognition.
The observation that words tend to arrive in short bursts of several related items at a time rather than one at a time in a steady stream, as though several facets of the site surface together.
See also Stage 2, Stage 4.
A set of conversational and observational techniques, vague statements, reading reactions, adjusting on the fly, that can make someone appear to know specific things about a stranger.
Included as background vocabulary, not an accusation. Understanding the mechanics is self-defence: a description that lands can feel like accurate perception even when it was built entirely from technique.
See also Barnum effect, Subjective validation.
A record written when a session resolves, showing which controls were actually met, a separate analyst, a blind monitor, a sealed pairing, and which tier was earned. The receipt that a session ran at the tier it claims.
See also Blinding tier, Blind ledger.
One lineage's termPart of one training tradition. Outside it, viewers work the opening differently or not at all.
The two parts following the Stage 1 mark. Component A is a word or two for the felt quality or motion of the mark, hard, soft, flowing. Component B is the first spontaneous guess at what it might mean, written down and then set aside rather than pursued.
See also Stage 1, Ideogram, Analytic overlay.
A range produced by a procedure with a long-run guarantee: repeat the whole study many times, build an interval each time the same way, and about 95 percent of those intervals would contain the true value. The guarantee attaches to the METHOD across hypothetical repeats, not to the single interval in front of you.
So it is not correct to say there is a 95 percent probability the true value lies in this particular interval. It also does not mean 95 percent of observations fall inside it.
The abbreviation is genuinely ambiguous. CI is also the credible interval, the Bayesian quantity, which does support the probability reading this one does not, though only relative to the prior it started from. Conflating them is the commonest source of the error above.
An interval that includes the chance baseline says the result did not establish an effect. How WIDE it is says the rest: a wide one means the study settled nothing, while a narrow one bracketing the baseline is itself a real finding, namely that any effect is at most tiny.
See also P-value, Statistical power.
Reference: Neyman 1937, the original construction; Greenland et al. 2016, on standard misinterpretations
The tendency to seek out, notice and remember what fits what you already believe or hope, while giving less weight to what does not. It runs automatically, regardless of how careful or honest you intend to be.
It is why a practitioner reviewing their own results is the least reliable judge of them, and therefore why blind analysis exists.
See also Analysis, Self-analyzed, Subjective validation.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
The structured, staged method developed at SRI around the late 1970s and early 1980s, principally by Ingo Swann with Hal Puthoff, and later used in the US Army programme. It breaks a session into six numbered stages moving from a first involuntary reaction, through sensory words and sketches, toward a three dimensional model.
The acronym is expanded two ways and both are correct. Coordinate remote viewing is the original, from the geographic coordinates used as cues in the earliest work. Controlled remote viewing is the form that became standard around the programme's declassification in the mid 1990s, describing the staged method as a whole. They refer to the same thing.
See also Coordinate, Stage 1, Structure, Extended remote viewing, Technical remote viewing, Scientific remote viewing.
Reference: Federation of American Scientists, STAR GATE; CIA reading room, Coordinate Remote Viewing Stages I-VI (1985)
The short wind-down after a session, closing notes, a stretch, a break, before moving on. Skipping it and jumping straight into a demanding task is a common reason people report feeling foggy afterwards.
See also Grounding, Detox.
The content-free label standing in for a sealed target, which the viewer works against instead of a description. Early work used real geographic coordinates, sealed away from the viewer, and arbitrary reference numbers took over as the thing actually handed over. Declassified session records show both in use, so it was a gradual shift rather than a clean switch.
Both acronym expansions are attested. The move from "coordinate" to "controlled" is usually dated to the mid 1990s declassification rather than to this change in cueing.
See also Tasking, cue, tasker, Controlled remote viewing.
Reference: CIA reading room, STARGATE collection
The role that sets up and runs a session and, at the top tier, must not be able to cue it. The server draws targets and seals any image-to-outcome pairing so the coordinator is blind as far as possible, including to which written question is live.
See also Monitor, Analyst, Blinding tier.
A forgotten memory resurfacing and being taken for an original thought. You genuinely encountered it before, with no conscious memory of the source, so it feels new.
An impression that must have come from somewhere else might be a memory whose source tag was lost, which is worth holding as a live possibility before reaching for a larger explanation.
See also False memory.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
The convention of saying the break type out loud and writing its label on the page rather than pausing silently, so the transcript preserves when the flow was interrupted and why.
See also Break, Named break types, Objectification.
Sources disagreeFirst described by J. B. Rhine from card-guessing work at Duke University in the 1930s. Everyone agrees scores decline. Why is completely unresolved.
The observation that scoring tends to fall off with continued testing, reported within a single run, across sessions, and across whole research programmes over decades.
A decline across a programme has an entirely ordinary explanation available, that improving controls removed an artefact, so the pattern cuts against the psi reading at least as easily as for it. Regression to the mean, publication bias and optional stopping all produce it with no phenomenon required.
See also Optional stopping, Publication bias, Statistical power.
The other candidate targets shown to a blind analyst alongside the real one. The panel is the full set, real target included.
Panel size sets the chance rate, so it has to be recorded with the result: a match against three decoys is a different achievement from a match against one.
See also Chance rate, Analysis, Target pool.
A conclusion reached by reasoning from what you have already written, rather than an impression received. "There is water and a hull, so this is probably a harbour" is a deduction.
Distinguished from AOL mainly by how it arrives: deduction is deliberate and traceable, AOL simply appears. Both are marked and kept out of the scored description, for the same reason. They are the viewer's thinking, not the viewer's perception.
See also Analytic overlay, Impression.
Sources disagreeA live methodological dispute in expertise research, not settled science. The variance figures come from one 2014 meta-analysis rather than several converging ones.
Structured practice with a specific focus, real feedback, and a deliberate stretch past current comfort, as opposed to passive repetition. The idea comes from expertise research published in 1993.
The popular version, that enough hours of it produce expertise, has not held up well. A later meta-analysis found deliberate practice explained around 12 percent of performance variation overall, ranging from roughly a quarter in games down to almost nothing in some professions, and the original authors dispute how that analysis defined the term.
Useful as a way to structure practice. Not a validated method for this domain, and no evidence shows any amount of practice improves remote viewing accuracy.
See also Practice cadence, Calibration.
Reference: Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer 1993, the original; Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald 2014, the meta-analysis
Informal termLocal custom rather than established technique. Useful if it helps you; nothing rests on it.
A short step at the end of a session where the viewer deliberately disengages from the target, intended to stop the sense of still being partly with the site from lingering.
See also Grounding, Cool-down.
Words for spatial qualities of the site rather than sensory ones. Simple adjectives such as tall or wide appear late in Stage 2; by Stage 3 they are formalised into a fixed set of categories covering things like mass, space, volume and the site's vertical and horizontal character.
See also Stage 2, Stage 3.
A specific experimental design rather than a general claim: one person tries, during randomised intervals, to affect another who is isolated from them and physiologically monitored. The distant-healing and staring-detection studies sit under this heading.
The evidence rests on statistical movement in the monitored person's readings, which is a completely different structure from analyzing a description against a target.
See also Remote influencing, Psychokinesis and telekinesis, Experimenter effect.
Describing a target other than the assigned one, most often another in the same pool, or the one worked immediately before or after.
A recognized effect in the literature and an awkward one to score, because a description can be detailed, accurate, and about the wrong thing.
See also Target pool, Analysis.
Informal termTraining-room slang. Expect blank looks if you use it outside that circle.
Getting stuck on a minor and often irrelevant detail of the target instead of moving through the session normally.
Double blind: neither the viewer nor whoever is with them during the session knows the target, so nothing can be cued by a glance, a pause or a follow-up question.
Triple blind: the analyst does not know it either, and works from the transcript against the target and its decoys without being told which is which.
rv.studio derives a session's tier from a record of who saw what, rather than from a setting anyone selects.
See also Blind, Blinding tier, Analysis, Decoys and the panel.
Locating something using a handheld device: a pendulum, a pair of L-shaped rods, a forked stick. Map dowsing applies the same idea over a map instead of the ground.
The usual explanation for the movement is the ideomotor effect, small unconscious muscle movements rather than conscious control, which is the same mechanism offered for Ouija boards.
Related to remote viewing mainly by the company it keeps. Dowsing works through a device and usually yields yes-or-no or directional answers; viewing is instrument-free and aims at open description.
See also Intuition, Pattern recognition.
The gap between your own probability estimate and the one implied by a market's price. A description of a discrepancy, not evidence that acting on it would pay.
An apparent edge usually means the estimate is wrong rather than the market is.
See also Base rate, Calibration.
Sources disagreeThe concept is not in dispute; comparisons across fields are, because two different quantities travel under this one name.
A number saying how BIG an effect is, on a scale that does not depend on how many observations were collected. Significance asks whether something is there; effect size asks how much.
Because it is independent of sample size, a very large study can produce an unmistakably significant result for an effect far too small to matter. Psi effect sizes sit consistently in that small range: one much-cited ganzfeld meta-analysis reports about 0.14, and that meta-analysis is itself contested.
A trap when comparing across fields: this field commonly computes effect size as a z-score divided by the square root of the number of trials, which is a legitimate per-trial measure but is not the same quantity as the standardised difference used elsewhere in psychology.
See also Z-score, Statistical versus practical significance, Sample size.
Informal termField folklore. You will meet it in write-ups, never in a protocol.
A session so unexpectedly accurate that it rattles everyone who sees the feedback. The joke, from the intelligence side of the field, is that you would need eight martinis afterwards to steady yourself.
Folklore rather than a technical term, but widely enough known that a long-running community magazine took its name from it.
See also Feedback, Analysis.
The general tendency of a rhythmic system to fall into step with an external rhythm. A real, measurable phenomenon in physics and physiology, borrowed loosely into practice vocabulary for attention settling into a steady pattern of breath or sound.
Keep this separate from claims made for specific audio products, which are a different and much weaker case.
See also Binaural beats and isochronic tones, Breathwork.
The family of ways that what someone expects can shape what they perceive, report or unconsciously do, with no dishonesty involved. The precise term with the research history behind it is the experimenter expectancy effect, which Robert Rosenthal demonstrated in 1963: handlers told their lab rats were bred bright or dull got results matching what they had been told, from randomly assigned animals.
This is the whole reason blind structures exist. Knowing the target, or knowing which result would be exciting, is enough to bend perception and reporting on its own.
See also Blind, Double blind and triple blind, Monitor.
Reference: Rosenthal and Fode 1963; APA Dictionary of Psychology
Sources disagreeRichard Wiseman (sceptic) and Marilyn Schlitz (proponent) ran the same staring-detection protocol side by side in 1997 and got different results; a later joint study in 2006 did not reproduce that pattern. Treat carefully: this is the term most often used to explain away non-replication, which makes it unfalsifiable if it predicts both success and failure.
That who runs a study can predict its outcome even with the written protocol held constant. In mainstream psychology this is ordinary and well documented, produced by unintended cueing, differences in rapport, and differences in how flexibly data get handled.
It means the protocol document is not the whole experiment, so a positive result from one laboratory is weak until someone with different expectations runs the same thing.
See also Expectancy effects, Replication.
Reference: Wiseman and Schlitz 1997; Schlitz, Wiseman, Watt and Radin 2006
An earlier, unstructured approach where the viewer reclines and lets their mind drift toward the edge of sleep, aiming to catch impressions surfacing from that drowsy state. It predates the staged protocol and has no stage structure.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Hypnagogia.
A recollection of something that did not happen, or did not happen that way, produced by memory's ordinary reconstructive process rather than any intent to deceive. Details are easily added, merged or reshaped, especially after the fact.
A strong argument for trusting contemporaneous notes over later recollection.
See also Cryptomnesia, Hindsight bias, Transcript.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
Showing the viewer the target after they have committed. Valuable for learning and dangerous for measurement: once you have seen it you cannot un-see it, and anything recorded afterwards is no longer blind work.
The ordering matters more than almost anything else in a session, which is why the transcript is sealed first.
The word carries two senses and only one of them is meant here. In remote viewing, feedback is the reveal and nothing else. It does not mean anyone telling the viewer how the reading went, which is commentary, and which has its own entry precisely because the two get confused.
See also Target feedback, Commentary, Transcript, The feedback problem in ARV, Hindsight bias.
Studies that found nothing were never written up and sit unpublished, so the visible literature is a biased sample of the work actually done. Robert Rosenthal named the problem in 1979.
In a field where a null result is unpublishable and a positive one is newsworthy, the published record can show a solid effect even when the total body of work shows nothing.
See also Publication bias, Meta-analysis.
Reference: Rosenthal 1979
One lineage's termOne practitioner's approach, described mainly by its creator.
Daz Smith's personal way of working CRV: the same staged material held more loosely, taught out of long operational practice rather than as a competing protocol.
See also Controlled remote viewing.
A design where the participant picks from a fixed, known set on every trial. The classic version used the five Zener card symbols, designed by Karl Zener for J. B. Rhine's work at Duke University in the 1930s, so chance was one in five. Scoring is unambiguous and needs no analyst.
Effect sizes reported in forced-choice work are much smaller than in free-response work. Some read that as evidence free-response suits the effect better; others read it as evidence that looser scoring inflates results.
See also Free-response design, Binomial test.
A design where the participant is given no menu and simply describes, draws or narrates whatever comes. Remote viewing and ganzfeld are both free-response.
Richer than the alternative, but it pushes the entire scoring burden onto the matching step, so credibility rests on how the candidates were chosen and how blind the matcher was.
See also Forced-choice design, Analysis, Decoys and the panel.
Working without a formal stage structure: sit with the cue and record what arrives, in whatever order it arrives. The usual label for deliberately unstructured practice.
Some practitioners call this "cowboy" viewing. That nickname circulates but is thinly documented, so freestyle is the safer word if you want to be understood.
See also Generic remote viewing, Extended remote viewing, Structure.
Informal termAn rv.studio term, not a field one. Named here so it is at least findable.
A session mode in rv.studio: looser and faster than the staged approach, where you tune to the target and let impressions surface without working a stage ladder.
This name is ours. "FRV" is not established vocabulary in the wider field, and outside rv.studio "frequency" in remote viewing talk usually refers to brainwave preparation rather than to a way of working a target. If you use it elsewhere, expect to explain it.
See also Solo, monitored, hosted, Generic remote viewing, Freestyle remote viewing, Controlled remote viewing.
Any information about the target given to the viewer before or during the session, from a full briefing down to a single word. Sometimes deliberate in operational work, where the goal is an answer rather than a clean measurement.
It is not cheating, but it changes what a result can mean, because it gives the mind something to build on that did not come from the target. Frontloaded work is not blind and should not be reported as though it were.
See also Blind, Tasking, cue, tasker, Operational remote viewing.
Sources disagreeThe most argued-over body of evidence in the field. Meta-analyses since the 1980s reach opposite conclusions, and the disagreement is about which studies belong in the pool and what meta-analysis can establish, not about the arithmetic. Any claim that the ganzfeld proves or refutes psi is describing one particular analysis and should name it.
A mild sensory homogenisation procedure used as an ESP protocol. The receiver reclines with halved translucent spheres over the eyes under even red light and unstructured noise in the headphones, so both senses get a uniform patternless field for around half an hour, while a sender elsewhere views a randomly chosen target. Afterwards the receiver ranks four candidates, so chance is 25 percent.
German, roughly "whole field". The procedure described here is Charles Honorton's, later automated as the autoganzfeld; it is specific enough that it is often misattributed to the remote viewing work at SRI, which was a different laboratory running a different method.
See also Free-response design, Meta-analysis, Telepathy.
Reference: Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio 2010 meta-analysis; Hyman 2010, the opposing comment
An umbrella used when a result cannot be pinned to telepathy or clairvoyance specifically, because the design does not separate them. Most designs do not, which is why the term exists.
See also Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Psi.
A retrospective label, coined by Paul H. Smith, for unstructured work-it-out-yourself practice, the way viewers worked before any formal staged method existed. Not a taught protocol.
See also Controlled remote viewing.
The broad character of a place before any of its details: whether it is land or water, natural or built, open or enclosed. One long-standing teacher describes it as a target's "water-iness" or "manmade-iness".
In the staged methods the first stage is where this arrives, though the stage is properly called Stage 1 rather than "the gestalt stage".
rv.studio also shows an average gestalt score. That numeric use is ours, not the field's: elsewhere gestalt is a description, never a number.
See also Stage 1, Ideogram, Sensory channels.
Deliberately reconnecting with ordinary present-moment awareness at the end of a period of inward focus: feet on the floor, the room around you, a few slow breaths.
See also Cool-down, Detox, Body awareness.
Private or unlisted rosters people join by invite code, with roles inside the group that carry no platform-wide permissions. A group is a roster, not a vault: it holds no target identity by itself.
See also Spaces, Target event.
The embodied cousin of intuition: a sense of rightness, discomfort or pull that shows up in the body rather than as a thought.
There is a named theory for this, the somatic marker hypothesis, proposing that bodily signals from past experience feed into decisions before conscious reasoning arrives.
See also Intuition.
Reference: Damasio 1996, the somatic marker hypothesis
One lineage's termLyn Buchanan's terminology. The distinction is widely felt; this particular pair of words for it is not.
A working distinction between targets that can eventually be checked against real feedback, a place, an object, a documented event, and targets that can never be checked because no independent confirmation exists. Practitioners using this distinction generally avoid the latter for training, because there is no way to tell whether a hit was real.
See also Feedback, Target pool.
One lineage's termOne school's protocol, not a field-wide method.
A named school with its own two-stage protocol, reported as combining a military intelligence reporting format with techniques borrowed from neuro-linguistic programming, and moving the viewer from alert attention through progressively quieter states. Credited to Glenn Wheaton with Richard Ireland, and still actively taught.
Worth knowing because of the acronym. There is no separate "HRV" in remote viewing: written that way it is nearly always this guild with the G dropped, or else literally heart rate variability, which is what HRV means almost everywhere else.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Extended remote viewing.
Reference: Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild
Once you know how something turned out, it feels like you knew all along, and your memory of how uncertain you were quietly shifts toward the answer. First demonstrated in 1975.
Researchers separate three parts: memory of your own earlier view distorts, the outcome starts to feel inevitable, and it starts to feel like it was foreseeable.
Without a written record made before feedback, this will reliably make your memory of an impression more accurate than the impression actually was.
See also Feedback, Transcript, False memory.
Reference: Fischhoff 1975, the original; Roese and Vohs 2012, the three components
A refinement that gives up less sensitivity. Sort the p-values smallest to largest and work down with a threshold that relaxes at each step. As soon as one fails, it and everything below it stands.
Devised by Sture Holm in 1979. It controls the same error rate as the plain correction while rejecting at least as many hypotheses, and strictly more except in trivial cases, so for deciding which results count there is no reason to prefer the plain version. The one thing plain Bonferroni still does better is hand you simultaneous confidence intervals directly.
See also Bonferroni correction, Multiple comparisons.
Reference: Holm 1979
A family of techniques by which a reading can seem accurate with no unusual information involved. Cold reading works from nothing but the person in front of you. Hot reading uses information obtained in advance and presented as though it were not. Warm reading leans on statements broad enough that almost anyone accepts them.
Two named moves worth recognising: shotgunning, firing many vague guesses and following whichever lands, and the rainbow ruse, a statement that asserts a trait and its opposite at once so it cannot be wrong.
These are the vocabulary of the ordinary explanation. Knowing them is how you tell a specific hit from one that was built to be unfalsifiable.
See also Cold reading, Barnum effect, Subjective validation.
The drowsy in-between zone while falling asleep, when ordinary thinking loosens and brief images, sounds or sensations can appear seemingly from nowhere. A normal, well documented part of sleep onset, named in 1848.
Some practitioners work deliberately near this threshold because it loosens ordinary waking thought without any technique being required.
See also Hypnopompia, Extended remote viewing, Altered state of consciousness.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
The mirror image of hypnagogia: the transitional stretch coming out of sleep, when dreamlike imagery can persist before full alertness returns. Frequently associated with sleep paralysis.
See also Hypnagogia.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
One lineage's termCentral to CRV and the methods descended from it. Plenty of viewers never draw one.
A quick reflexive mark made on paper immediately after the cue arrives, before conscious interpretation has time to start. The mark is then probed for the motion, texture and form it seems to carry.
A technique from the structured training lineages rather than a universal feature of remote viewing. Plenty of practitioners never use one.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Stage 1, Component A and Component B.
How clear and sensory a person's inner imagery feels. A stable individual trait rather than a skill everyone starts equal on, measured by self report, most commonly the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ).
Knowing it is a trait helps a practitioner stop measuring their raw imagery style against someone else's.
See also Aphantasia, Visualising versus perceiving.
Reference: Marks 1973, the VVIQ
Picking up a pattern through exposure without being able to state the rule you learned, the way a native speaker knows a sentence is wrong without knowing why. Formalised in 1967 through experiments with artificial grammars.
It offers an ordinary, non-mysterious vocabulary for why a hunch can feel confident without the person being able to explain it.
See also Intuition, Pattern recognition.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
A single recorded unit of what you perceived, in any sensory channel: a texture, a sound, a temperature, a plain knowing. The raw material of a session.
Kept distinct throughout from AOL and deduction, which are things the mind adds on top of an impression rather than impressions themselves.
See also Sensory channels, Analytic overlay, Deduction, Transcript.
The assumption, built into nearly every standard test, that each trial's outcome tells you nothing about any other's. It is broken more often than people realise.
Feedback between trials breaks it, because the viewer learns. Drawing from a list without replacement breaks it, because ruling one out changes the odds on the rest. Several viewers working one target sequence breaks it. Many trials from the same person are not independent the way trials from different people are.
When independence fails the test does not fail gracefully. Usually it reports far more significance than the data support, because correlated trials carry less information than their count suggests. Drawing without replacement is the exception: it pushes the other way and makes the test too cautious. Either way the stated error rate is not the real one.
See also Stacking effect, Sample size, Binomial test.
Silent verbal thought, the internal narrating or commenting voice, as opposed to thinking in images or in a felt sense with no words attached. How much of it a person has varies enormously between individuals.
Also called self-talk or private speech. Noticing it helps separate words commenting on an experience from the experience itself.
See also Mind chatter, The analytical mind.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology, inner language
One lineage's termOne teacher's school. Described in depth only in its own materials.
A method taught by Wayne Carr that frames viewing inside a broader theory of consciousness and personal development, rather than as a stage-by-stage procedure.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Generic remote viewing.
A judgment that arrives without traceable step-by-step reasoning. It simply feels right or wrong. Generally understood as the output of fast, largely unconscious processing, often built on experience the person cannot consciously recall.
The practical skill is working with it while staying honest that confidence and accuracy are different things.
See also Gut feeling, Implicit learning, Calibration.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
Real-world events with resolvable outcomes that an ARV session can be tasked against instead of a written question. The server picks, the outcome resolves on its own, and calibration is scored against the market's own odds.
See also Associative remote viewing, Resolution criteria, Paper money.
The companion to Margin: how often chance alone would match your result, written as odds. "1 in 5" means a guesser does this well one run in five. "1 in 200" is a different conversation.
This is a p-value, written as odds because decimals invite the wrong reading. Below twelve scored viewings no verdict is shown at all, only how many more are needed.
See also Margin, Chance rate.
One of the two numbers on a scored row: how far above chance a result sits. Zero is level with guessing, +1 is a good stretch, +2 starts to look like something, +3 and up is hard to put down to luck.
Statisticians call this a z-score. rv.studio uses the plainer word because a number people misread is worse than no number, and it gets quoted.
See also Luck odds, Chance rate.
Two things share the name. On paper, the ruled and labelled column layout used from Stage 4 onward, filled in with single words sorted by category. In the model, a postulated store of information the viewer is said to be drawing from.
The page layout is a documented working convention. The information store is a theoretical construct, and the two are worth keeping apart.
See also Stage 4, Signal line, Tangibles and intangibles.
Informal term
Background clutter that mixes in with whatever is being perceived: stray thoughts, fidgeting, emotional residue. Treated as an ordinary part of the process rather than a failure.
Practice vocabulary rather than a technical term, though the underlying idea, internal variability that can be mistaken for a real signal, is well established science under other names.
See also Mind chatter, Impression.
Sources disagreeIntensely contested in this field. The substantive arguments are about which studies belong in the pool and whether pooling can substitute for independent replication at all, not about the arithmetic.
Combining the numerical results of many separate studies into one estimate, so small studies that individually prove nothing can be assessed together.
It cannot repair the studies it pools. If they share a flaw, the pooled result inherits it with false precision, which is why the inclusion criteria are the first thing to read, not the last.
Distinguish from a systematic review, which is the search and selection process. The meta-analysis is the statistical pooling that may follow.
See also Ganzfeld, Replication, Publication bias.
Informal term
The mind's default running commentary, the stream of unbidden thoughts and replayed conversations that continues regardless of intent. Most people notice it more, not less, the first few times they sit quietly.
The research term for this is mind-wandering. "Mind chatter" is practitioner shorthand, not the field's own word.
See also Inner speech, Mental noise.
Someone present during the session to keep structure, prompt and record, so the viewer can stay with the material instead of managing the process.
A monitor who knows the target can cue the viewer without either of them intending it, which is the exact failure double blind exists to remove. On rv.studio a monitor never sees the target.
See also Double blind and triple blind, Movement exercise, Coordinator.
One lineage's termTaught in Lyn Buchanan's intermediate curriculum rather than in CRV training generally.
A mid-session technique where the monitor cues the viewer to shift attention to a different part of the same target, or a related sub-site, rather than starting a fresh session. The viewer signals readiness and the monitor gives a new, deliberately neutral prompt.
See also Monitor, Controlled remote viewing.
Running many tests makes an impressive-looking result nearly inevitable even when nothing is happening. At a one in twenty threshold, twenty unrelated tests turn up at least one significant hit by luck alone about 64 percent of the time. The odds pass even at fourteen tests.
It also happens invisibly, when one question is analyzed several ways and only the flattering version is reported.
Two different targets get confused here: family-wise error rate is the chance of even one false alarm across the whole set, false discovery rate is the expected proportion of your declared findings that are false. Different procedures control different ones.
See also Bonferroni correction, Holm-Bonferroni correction, Optional stopping.
Sources disagreeSources agree on six names and differ on a seventh: some list a separate break for illness or physical discomfort where others have only a generic catch-all.
A small set of named break categories the viewer calls out and notes on the page. Widely agreed ones: an AOL break to clear an intrusive analytic thought, an AI break to let a strong emotional reaction pass, an AOL-drive break for a run of unnoticed drift, a bilocation break for feeling either too far into the site or too stuck in the room, a confusion break for tangled impressions, and a too-much break to slow an overwhelming rush of data.
See also Break, Declaring a break.
The rule that every perception is spoken aloud and written down as it arrives, rather than held in the viewer's head.
It creates the written record, which is the checkable part. Practitioners also describe it as helping to move an impression out of the way so the next one can arrive, though that second function is a claim about the process rather than an observed effect.
See also Transcript, Structure.
In the government programme, the units that put viewers against live intelligence questions, run separately from the research effort that developed and tested the methodology.
A word about programme structure, not a claim about reliability. Operational work used what the research side had produced; it did not exist to test it further.
See also Frontloading, Beacon and outbounder.
Reference: Federation of American Scientists, STAR GATE; American Institutes for Research evaluation, 1995
Watching results arrive and stopping as soon as they look good. It inflates false positives dramatically, because you have given yourself many chances to cross the line and kept only the moment you did.
Simulated in 2011 by Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn: starting at 10 observations per condition, testing after every new one and stopping at 50, produces a false positive 22 percent of the time against the 5 percent advertised. And 22 percent is only because the simulation stopped at 50; peek indefinitely and it climbs towards certainty.
Separately, they combined four everyday flexibilities: two outcome measures, one extra look at the data, an optional covariate, and dropping one of three conditions. Together those produce a false positive 60.7 percent of the time, so a researcher using all four is more likely than not to find something that is not there.
Planned sequential analysis with adjusted thresholds is perfectly valid. The problem is unplanned, uncorrected, undisclosed peeking.
See also Preregistration, Multiple comparisons, Decline effect.
Reference: Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn 2011
The subjective sense of your point of view sitting outside your body, often reported as looking back at yourself. Named in the 1940s as a neutral alternative to more loaded terms.
A different thing from remote viewing: an experience of displaced embodiment rather than a task with a target and an analyst. Some traditions describe it as a route into a working state, which is not the same as it being the method.
Written both OBE and OOBE. Note that OBE means the Order of the British Empire almost everywhere else.
See also Bilocation, Altered state of consciousness.
Assume nothing unusual is happening and every assumption of the model is correct. The p-value is the probability that, under that assumption, you would see a result at least as extreme as the one you got. A small p-value says the data sit awkwardly with that whole package. It does not say which part is at fault.
What it is NOT, and these are the standard errors: it is not the probability the hypothesis is false, not the probability the result came from chance, not the probability the finding will replicate, and it says nothing about how big the effect is.
Its authority extends only as far as the model assumed. If randomisation, independence or blinding failed, the p-value is measuring that failure rather than the phenomenon.
The p is for probability. Not percentage, not proof.
See also Statistical significance, Luck odds, Confidence interval.
Reference: Wasserstein and Lazar 2016, the ASA statement; Greenland et al. 2016, twenty-five misinterpretations
One lineage's termA convention of the staged methods, not of remote viewing generally.
In the structured methods, position on the page carries meaning. The cue sits left, the ideogram and its immediate response in the middle, and breaks are written out towards the right edge.
Worth knowing before reading a scanned transcript, because something in the right margin is usually a break rather than target data.
See also Break shorthand on the page, Ideogram, Transcript.
An optional play-money bankroll that places a simulated wager when you rank a live-market prediction, sized by your own rules and confidence, settling at the real odds when the event resolves.
It never affects blindness: the stake is sized before the pairing is revealed. No real money is involved anywhere.
See also Live market, Associative remote viewing, Calibration.
A familiar flavour of apophenia: seeing a recognisable form, classically a face, in something random or ambiguous. Clouds, static, wood grain. Not a disorder.
A useful sanity check that a vague shape resolving into something recognisable does not by itself make the recognition meaningful.
See also Apophenia.
The mind's constant, mostly automatic habit of matching new input against things it has seen before.
Essential and useful, and it runs whether or not a real pattern is there, which is where several of the biases below come from.
See also Apophenia, Pareidolia.
Reference: APA Dictionary of Psychology
A note flagging something about the viewer's own condition that might color the session: illness, pain, stress, tiredness. Written so that whoever reads the transcript later knows an oddity might trace to the viewer rather than the target.
Beware the abbreviation. PI means many other things elsewhere; inside a transcript it is this.
See also Break shorthand on the page, Transcript.
Sources disagreeSources agree on maximising distinctness and differ on emotional tone: some want images emotionally neutral, others want them matched in emotional weight rather than flattened.
Building an image pool so no single image is simply easier to match than the others: as different from each other as possible in shape, color, texture and subject, while roughly matched in overall richness.
An unbalanced pool hands the matcher a shortcut. A match can look convincing purely because one image was more distinctive, independent of what the transcript says.
See also Target pool, Two outcomes or many.
The rhythm and frequency of practice, and how it is structured over time. One of the few things entirely within a practitioner's control.
Nothing here claims a particular cadence changes results.
See also Deliberate practice.
Sources disagreeThe most cited modern experiments, published by Daryl Bem in 2011, reported significant results in eight of nine studies. Independent preregistered replication attempts found nothing.
Claimed acquisition of information about an event that has not happened yet and cannot be inferred from what is already known.
Everything rests on ordering. The response must be recorded and locked before the target is selected, and the target selected by something that could not have been influenced by the response. If the target already exists when the response is made, it is not a precognition trial.
See also Presentiment, Associative remote viewing, Replication.
Reference: Bem 2011; Ritchie, Wiseman and French 2012, failed replication
Working a target that has not been chosen yet, rather than one that exists and is merely hidden. The viewer describes what they will later be shown, and the target is selected afterwards by a process nothing in the session could have influenced.
Distinct from ARV, which reaches a future outcome indirectly by binding it to an image chosen in advance. PRV goes at the undetermined target directly.
See also Associative remote viewing, Precognition, Feedback.
Writing down the hypothesis, method, sample size and exact analysis plan in a public, timestamped record before collecting any data.
It preserves a distinction that is invisible afterwards: analyses planned in advance, which genuinely test a prediction, versus analyses suggested by the data, which generate ideas but cannot test them. Both are valuable; only the first carries the error rate the statistics claim.
It does not make a study good and does not prevent deviation. It makes flexibility visible rather than impossible.
See also Optional stopping, Replication, Psi-missing.
Sources disagreeA 2012 meta-analysis reported a small effect; a 2014 critique argued it would vanish under proper control of expectation, and the authors replied in 2015. Still open.
A narrower claim than precognition: that measurable bodily responses such as skin conductance or pupil dilation shift in the seconds before a randomly chosen stimulus appears, and shift differently depending on whether what is coming is arousing or neutral.
Not a claim about conscious foreknowledge. The participant reports nothing; the instruments do. That removes analyst bias and introduces a different failure mode, since ordinary expectation and carry-over from the previous trial can imitate the effect.
See also Precognition, Expectancy effects.
Reference: Mossbridge, Tressoldi and Utts 2012 meta-analysis; Schwarzkopf 2014, the critique
Sources disagreeDisputed at the level of whether the category picks out anything real. It is defined by exclusion, which critics argue makes it a label for residual error.
An umbrella label for the class of claimed effects where someone appears to gain information, or exert influence, with no recognized physical or sensory pathway.
It was adopted deliberately as a placeholder. It names the anomaly under study without asserting a cause, a force, or a sixth sense. When a study reports finding psi it has found a statistical departure from what its design predicted, which is a far narrower claim than it sounds.
The Greek letter, not an acronym. Do not expand it.
See also Anomalous cognition, Psi-missing.
Sources disagreeIf results in both directions count as support, nothing can count against the claim. Only a direction predicted in advance carries weight.
Scoring significantly BELOW chance, consistently enough to be unlikely as a fluke. The argument is that reliably avoiding the target still requires knowing where it is, so a strong miss is as informative as a strong hit.
The obvious objection is the important one: if both above-chance and below-chance results count as evidence for the hypothesis, no result can count against it. Any use of psi-missing that was not predicted in advance is an observation, not a confirmation.
See also Psi, Preregistration.
Claimed influence on a physical system by mental effort alone. Telekinesis is the older word; psychokinesis is the one the research literature settled on, with telekinesis generally treated as the same idea or a subset of it.
Influence, not perception, so it is a different claim from remote viewing entirely.
Both abbreviations are heavily overloaded. PK usually means pharmacokinetics in anything medical, and TK is an airline code and a publishing placeholder meaning "to come".
See also Remote influencing, Direct mental interaction with living systems, Psi.
The broader phenomenon the file drawer belongs to: whether a study is published, and how prominently, depends on what it found rather than how well it was done. In medical research, where it has been measured best, positive results have roughly 2.8 times the ODDS of publication that comparable null ones do, though estimates range from about 1 to 5 depending where in the pipeline you look. Nobody has measured it in this field.
Detection methods exist, mostly variations on checking whether small imprecise studies scatter symmetrically around the large precise ones. All are indirect, all can be misled by genuine differences between small and large studies, and none of them proves bias present or absent.
See also File drawer problem, Meta-analysis, Statistical power.
Reference: Song et al. 2010, dissemination bias review; Sterne et al. 2011, on reading funnel plots
How rv.studio handles a declared AOL: it stays visible in your transcript and is excluded from what an analyst weighs. Kept, not deleted, because it is part of the record of what happened.
See also Analytic overlay, Analysis.
Choosing the target by a process nobody involved could predict or influence, giving every candidate its proper chance. The stated chance rate is a claim about how the target was selected, so this is the foundation the whole calculation stands on.
Two distinct failures are common: a source that is not genuinely unpredictable, such as a badly seeded generator or a person picking "at random"; and selection that is unpredictable but not uniform, so some targets come up more often.
If randomisation failed, no p-value computed from the result means what it says. This is the failure mode that needs neither fraud nor psi to produce a striking outcome.
See also Target pool bias, P-value, Independence of trials.
What an analyst submits: the candidates placed in order, from the one the reading points at most strongly down to the one it points at least. On a panel of four that is four positions filled, not one pick and three images discarded.
That ordering is what the analysis produces. There is no score against individual impressions, no mark out of ten, and no verdict on how the viewer did. Everything a result is built from comes from where the real target landed in the order.
Ranking rather than picking is what keeps a near miss visible. A reading that puts the real target second out of four has done something a bare hit-or-miss count throws away.
See also Analysis, Analyst, Commentary, Target feedback, Feedback, Blind, Decoys and the panel.
Two named shapes that analytic overlay takes when it has taken over. Ratcheting is the same overlay returning again and again in a loop. Peacocking is a rapid cascade of different confident-sounding guesses, each built on the last.
Useful when analyzing: both mean a run of lines should be read as one contaminated episode rather than as several separate impressions.
See also AOL drive, Analytic overlay, Analysis.
Running the same question through more than one viewer, independently and blind to each other, so that pooling damps the noise in any single session.
Worth knowing that this does not generalise: at least one analysis reports a benefit from pooling viewers while finding that pooling several analysts did not reliably beat a single one.
See also Aggregation.
Informal termCirculates widely but has no crisp technical definition the way the research paradigms below it do. Treat it as a loose label.
A claimed ability to CHANGE something at a distance by mental effort: another person's state, a process, an outcome. The opposite direction of travel from remote viewing, which is about receiving information rather than acting on anything.
Worth flagging for anyone analyzing a reading: RI in a transcript or a note is not a remote viewing method and should not be read as one. The abbreviation is also badly overloaded outside this field, so spell it out.
See also Psi, Direct mental interaction with living systems, Psychokinesis and telekinesis.
Sources disagreeProponents have argued conceptually related successes across labs constitute replication; critics hold that only independent direct replication counts and that it has not been achieved. That disagreement is where much of the argument actually lives.
Running a study again to see whether the result holds. A direct replication follows the original procedure as closely as possible. A conceptual replication tests the same idea by a different route, which is useful for generality but cannot confirm the original, because any failure can be blamed on the change.
Independence matters as much as repetition. A replication by the same team in the same lab answers a weaker question than one run by people who expected it to fail.
See also Preregistration, Meta-analysis, Experimenter effect.
The rule and reference source stated in advance that decide which outcome a question resolves to.
Criteria that look clear in the abstract routinely fail to anticipate postponements, disputed counts and ambiguous wording, which is exactly when arguments start.
See also Settlement, Void.
A model, not an observationA legitimate topic in physics and philosophy. Borrowing the vocabulary does not supply a mechanism for anything in this field.
The idea that a later event could influence an earlier one, so cause runs backwards. A live topic in physics and philosophy on its own terms, independent of this field.
Sometimes invoked as a framework for precognition results, but invoking it explains nothing by itself. A paper that reports a result and then mentions retrocausality has offered an interpretation, not a mechanism.
See also Precognition.
How many independent observations a result rests on. It has to be settled before collection, because deciding when to stop after looking at results breaks the statistics.
In this field the unit is genuinely ambiguous. Is n the number of trials, sessions, or viewers? Those give very different numbers from the same experiment and are not interchangeable, because many trials from one person are not independent the way trials from different people are.
When someone quotes an impressive trial count, the question is how many independent units it actually represents.
See also Independence of trials, Statistical power.
One lineage's termA commercial lineage with concepts of its own. Its subspace idea appears only in that school's own materials.
A further offshoot of TRV from Courtney Brown's Farsight Institute in the late 1990s, taught in graded forms. It reorders and renames some stage content and adds concepts of its own, including a hypothesised non-physical information layer its materials call subspace.
That subspace concept is internal to one school's own materials and has no independent support, which is worth separating from the mechanical description of the method.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Technical remote viewing.
Withholding the outcome-to-image assignment from anyone who could leak it into the transcript or the matching. An audit control rather than a cognitive one.
A mapping that is nominally sealed but actually recoverable, through a predictable randomiser, a shared file, or one person who built both the pool and the trade, is the most common place an ARV write-up turns out to have had an unblinded step.
See also Binding leak, Blind ledger.
Work where the viewer analyzed their own reading instead of handing it to a separate blind analyst. The status label on those rows reads Self-analyzed; older material may call the same thing self-judged.
rv.studio shows a hit rate for self-analyzed rows and never scores them: no Margin, no Luck odds, no leaderboard. Counting them would lift almost everyone's numbers, which is exactly why they are not counted.
See also Analysis, Verified accuracy, Subjective validation.
A model, not an observationA claim about how the process is supposed to behave. Nobody has measured it, so treat it as a teaching idea rather than a reason to expect a second chance.
The idea that if a viewer misreads their own early impression, the same underlying material will resurface later in the session in another form, giving them a second chance at it.
The categories an impression can be recorded under besides sight: sound, smell, taste, texture, temperature, motion, spatial sense, and emotional or aesthetic response.
The reason for separating them is that viewers differ in which channel is strongest, and forcing everything into a visual frame suppresses whichever one a given person actually works in.
See also Impression, Aphantasia, Aesthetic impact and emotional impact.
Any route by which the answer reaches the participant or the analyst through ordinary senses, defeating the point of the test.
It is usually mundane rather than dramatic: an experimenter who knows the target shifting posture at the right moment, an envelope opened and resealed, creases or smudges or warmth on the real target that the decoys lack, a transcript carrying a date that tells an analyst which order the trials ran in.
Historically the most consequential methodological failure in this research, which is why the first question about any session is who knew the target and what they touched.
See also Blind, Double blind and triple blind, Randomisation.
Reference: Targ and Puthoff 1974, Nature; Marks and Kammann 1978, the critique; Puthoff and Targ 1981, the rebuttal
A session is one working period against one target. A reading is what it produces.
rv.studio says "reading" rather than "read" for the noun. A small thing, but it matters when the same word is doing two jobs.
See also Transcript, Solo, monitored, hosted.
Government-era sessions came with an administrative sheet in front of the working transcript: viewer, interviewer, observers, date, start and end time, site number, the acquisition method used, and, filled in afterwards, the highest stage reached and the actual site.
The method checkbox is where you will meet the acronyms in the wild: CRV, ERV, ARV and PRV all appear there. Note the sheet mixes pre-session and post-session fields, so the actual site was written in at feedback, not while viewing.
See also Target reference number, Controlled remote viewing, Extended remote viewing, Associative remote viewing, Precognitive remote viewing.
Reference: CIA reading room, Remote Viewing Session Data forms
One lineage's termStandard in the structured methods. Somebody working without stages may never write one.
A short written narrative composed at the end of a session, pulling together the impressions the viewer considers strongest and most coherent, so a reader is not left to parse the raw transcript.
See also Transcript, Stage 6.
The step after resolution, where the decided outcome is turned into payouts. Resolution determines the answer; settlement acts on it.
See also Resolution criteria.
Sources disagreeMeta-analyses report the difference but with very small effect sizes, and do not settle whether believers score high, disbelievers score low, or both. An ordinary explanation, that belief tracks motivation and task compliance, is not excluded.
The reported tendency for people who believe the task is possible to score above chance and those who reject it to score at or below it. Groups are assigned from a belief questionnaire filled in beforehand, not from past performance. The labels are Gertrude Schmeidler's, from work in the 1940s.
Note the effect is defined as a DIFFERENCE between groups, so a study can report one without either group performing remarkably.
See also Experimenter effect.
A model, not an observationA construct inside the CRV model, not an observed phenomenon.
In the structured training models, the postulated stream of information the viewer is sampling, spoken about as something that can be acquired, lost and reacquired during a session.
Worth being precise about what this is: a model term, useful for talking about the experience and for teaching, not a demonstrated physical mechanism. Nothing on rv.studio depends on it being literally true.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Aperture, Matrix.
Informal termTeaching vocabulary rather than a measured phenomenon.
A stretch of noticeably worse sessions, sometimes bad enough that a viewer cannot face picking up the pen. Instructors generally treat it as a normal phase of learning rather than a skill that has gone.
See also Practice cadence, Decline effect.
The three ways a session can run. Solo is the whole draw, work, lock, reveal and score loop alone. Monitored adds a live monitor who stays blind to the target. Hosted is a group event, including in-person paper sessions uploaded afterwards.
See also Monitor, Target event, Blinding tier.
Shared community areas, as distinct from private messages or a private session. Chat inside a Space is readable server side by design, which is what makes moderation and other server-side features possible there.
See also Groups, Target event.
One lineage's termOne tradition's vocabulary for techniques many viewers use without naming them.
Three drawing techniques. A spontaneous sketch is fast and loose, valued for keeping contact with the impression rather than for looking accurate. An analytic sketch is slower and more deliberate, used when the fast method stalls. A tracker is a dotted or dashed line the hand lays down almost automatically, letting small involuntary movements mark out a shape.
See also Ideogram, Stage 3.
A distortion appearing when several participants respond to the SAME sequence of targets. People share guessing habits, so if those habits happen to line up with the target order, everyone's score moves together.
The scores are then not independent, and standard tests, which assume they are, report far more significance than the data support. It can push results spuriously high or low.
This is the concrete reason a group session working one target list cannot be analyzed as though it were many separate experiments.
See also Independence of trials, Target pool bias.
The opening stage. Given only a cue, the viewer produces an immediate involuntary mark and a word or two of reaction. The aim is the first, least processed contact, before conscious thought can shape it.
See also Ideogram, Component A and Component B, Controlled remote viewing.
Short sensory words, as if physically at the site: textures, temperatures, sounds, basic qualities. Produced in bursts, without yet trying to interpret what they mean.
See also Sensory channels, Clusters, Dimensionals.
Rough sketches begin, along with the dimensional qualities of the site as a whole rather than isolated words, and a first emotional or aesthetic reaction which is acknowledged and let go before continuing.
See also Spontaneous sketch, analytic sketch, tracker, Dimensionals, Aesthetic impact and emotional impact.
The viewer works from a page ruled into labelled columns and fills it with single words sorted by category, moving broadly from concrete columns toward more abstract ones, building the picture piece by piece.
See also Matrix, Tangibles and intangibles, Clusters.
Sources disagreeSources agree where it sits and disagree on what it does. Treat any single confident definition of S5 with suspicion, including this one.
The stage after the matrix and before final modelling. Beyond that placement, accounts genuinely differ: one describes continuing to draw on site information without depending on a fresh hit of raw signal, another describes it mainly as a toolkit for working through blockages and stuck analytic intrusions.
See also Stage 4, Stage 6.
The closing stage. The viewer may build a small three dimensional model of part of the target from a soft modelling material, working by feel rather than for visual accuracy. The physical act of shaping is treated as useful in itself, separate from what it produces.
See also Session summary, Stage 5.
The chance a study detects an effect of a given size, assuming it is really there. A study with 80 percent power misses a real effect one time in five. That 80 percent target is Jacob Cohen's convention, and like the one in twenty significance threshold it is a convention rather than a fact about the world.
Small effects need large studies, so a small study reporting nothing has established almost nothing, and a small study reporting a positive result deserves more suspicion, not less.
The winner's curse follows from this: when underpowered studies are run repeatedly and only significant ones get published, the surviving estimates are systematically too large, because only the luckiest samples cleared the bar.
See also Sample size, Decline effect, Publication bias.
Reference: Cohen 1988, Statistical Power Analysis; Button et al. 2013, Power failure
Sources disagreeTwo philosophies circulate under one word: one treats the p-value as a continuous measure of discomfort with no cutoff, the other treats the threshold as a fixed error rate for a decision. Modern practice mixes them, which is where arguments about 0.049 versus 0.051 come from.
A verdict, not a measurement. A result is called significant when its p-value falls below a threshold picked beforehand, conventionally one in twenty. That threshold is a convention with no special standing in nature.
Significant never means important, large, replicated or true.
See also P-value, Statistical versus practical significance.
Reference: Fisher 1926, where the one in twenty comes from; Lehmann 1993, on the two philosophies
Two different questions the word significant blurs. Statistical significance asks only whether a result is bigger than the noise. Practical significance asks whether it is big enough to matter.
They come apart in both directions. With enough data a correlation of 0.01 becomes statistically significant while remaining useless, and a large, genuinely important effect can miss significance in a study too small to detect it.
This is the crux for evaluating any psi claim, because the strongest results in the literature are simultaneously significant across large pooled datasets and very small per session. Both facts are true at once and a reader needs both.
See also Effect size, Statistical significance, Chance rate.
Working through the stages in order, in the prescribed way, at every point in a session. Practitioners in the structured lineages treat this as the core skill, distinct from any individual stage.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Objectification.
Informal termWidely used by researchers who study why people believe odd things, though you will not find it in a general psychology dictionary the way you will the biases around it.
Taking a vague statement to be personally accurate because you actively work to make it fit, supplying your own detail and quietly discounting what does not match. It applies just as much to your own impressions as to anything handed to you.
It is exactly how a loosely worded impression can feel like a precise hit afterwards.
Note this is well used in the psychology of paranormal belief but is not an APA Dictionary headword, so a reader checking there will not find it.
See also Barnum effect, Analysis, Cold reading.
Sources disagreeSources agree on what the two categories mean and disagree on which stage they belong to, because they were relocated in a later manual revision.
Two of the matrix's word categories. Tangibles are concrete physical qualities such as materials and textures. Intangibles are abstract ones such as purpose, mood or function, which do not map onto a physical characteristic.
See also Matrix, Stage 4, Stage 5.
One lineage's termAll the work is from one group, Edwin May and James Spottiswoode, and nobody else has reproduced it. The term circulates, so it is worth knowing, but do not build on it.
A proposed property of the target itself that predicts how well it gets described. The underlying quantity measures how much variety an image contains. The specific claim is that scoring tracks how sharply that variety changes across the image rather than the amount of it.
See also Target pool bias, Target pool.
A hosted group session: one sealed target, shared or one each, with a single analysis method locked for everyone so results stay comparable. Can run online or in a room on paper, including for guests with no account.
See also Solo, monitored, hosted, Spaces.
The reveal: showing the viewer the target once their reading is locked. This is what feedback means as a technical term in remote viewing, and on rv.studio the target itself is what a viewer gets back at the reveal.
The longer name is worth the extra word. Outside this field, feedback means somebody telling you how you did, and that is a different thing with a different effect. Target feedback hands the viewer the answer and stops there: no assessment, no encouragement, no correction. Anything of that second kind is commentary.
What the reveal does to a session, and why the transcript is sealed before it, is under Feedback.
See also Feedback, Commentary, Rankings, Analysis, Blind, The feedback problem in ARV.
The set of targets a session can draw from.
Pools matter more than people expect. Reusing a small pool means the trials stop being independent, because you start to recognize the material, and the arithmetic that turns hits into a result assumes independence.
See also Decoys and the panel, Pool balance, Displacement.
Any property of the candidate set that lets an analyst or viewer beat chance without any anomalous information. If one target in four is vivid and the rest are bland, a generic vivid description matches it too often. If targets are reused, someone who has seen the pool has ordinary information about what is likely.
The chance rate quoted for a design is only correct if every candidate was equally likely and equally matchable.
See also Target pool, Pool balance, Randomisation.
The meaningless identifier that stands in for the target on the page, so a session can be filed and found again without anything about the target leaking. Government-era forms labelled the field "Site #"; civilian practice often uses a date-based code.
By design it tells you nothing. If a reference number appears to describe the target, something has gone wrong with the blinding.
See also Coordinate, Tasking, cue, tasker, Blind.
The tasking is the assignment of a target to a viewer. The cue is the reference the viewer works against, which identifies the target to the system while describing nothing about it, often just a number or an identifier. The tasker is whoever sets it.
A cue that leaks any description of the target is frontloading, however small.
See also Coordinate, Frontloading, Blind.
A simplified variant of CRV developed by Ed Dames, intended to be easier to teach commercially. He founded the company that sold it in 1989, while still serving, and refined and trademarked the method after retiring from the Army in 1992. It thins out the early stages and adds standardised end-stage tools for reassembling scattered data.
Whether the simplification helps or hurts is an open question the sources do not settle.
See also Controlled remote viewing, Scientific remote viewing.
Claimed transfer of information from one person to another with no sensory channel. Experimentally it needs a sender: one person views the target while another, isolated from them, reports impressions.
If a protocol has no sender it is not testing telepathy, so a write-up claiming a telepathic result from a sender-free design has misdescribed itself.
See also Clairvoyance, Ganzfeld.
Informal term
The everyday sense-making part of cognition: the part that names things, compares them to what it already knows, and reaches for explanations.
Community shorthand rather than a technical term. The nearest formal idea is the fast intuitive versus slow deliberate distinction from dual-process theory.
See also Analytic overlay, Deduction, Intuition.
Someone other than the viewer assigns each possible outcome to one distinct image from a pool of otherwise unrelated pictures. The images have no natural connection to the event. This indirection is what turns ordinary remote viewing into ARV.
See also Associative remote viewing, Sealed mapping, Pool balance.
Sources disagreeSources differ. Some describe feedback given regardless of whether the viewer matched the right image; at least one describes revealing it only when the prediction was right, though that may be conflating a public reveal with feedback to the viewer.
Because the viewer describes an image standing for an outcome that has not happened yet, a trial only closes when the correct image is shown afterwards.
rv.studio's position is that this feedback should be unconditional. Under time or performance pressure it tends to become asymmetric, given promptly on hits and skipped or rushed on misses, which quietly breaks the calibration loop the whole method depends on.
See also Feedback, Target feedback, Calibration.
After the session ends and the transcript is locked, a separate analyst compares it against the pool images and picks whichever it resembles most. That pick becomes the prediction. The real outcome and its bound image are revealed only afterwards.
If the person matching already knows which image is bound to which outcome, matching collapses into their own view of the likely outcome rather than an independent read of the transcript.
See also Analysis, Sealed mapping.
One lineage's termOne lineage, largely inactive now. Listed because the acronym still appears in older profiles and forum history.
A 1990s offshoot of the structured protocols, developed by Prudence Calabrese through an organisation called Transdimensional Systems, itself descended from the Farsight lineage.
See also Scientific remote viewing, Controlled remote viewing.
The complete record of a session: sketches, words, sensory impressions, declared AOL, timings, and anything else produced while working.
It is what an analyst later compares against the target and its decoys. On rv.studio it is sealed when you lock the reading, so what gets analyzed is what existed before you saw the target.
See also Analysis, Target feedback, Feedback, Session summary.
Most ARV trials use two outcomes, but the mechanism extends to any fixed number, each needing its own distinct image. More outcomes means a lower chance rate, and also a harder design problem, because every image has to stay clearly distinct from every other.
See also Pool balance, Chance rate.
The headline accuracy figure, restricted by design to double- and triple-blind sessions. Solo and self-scored work is tracked in a separate bucket that can never feed into it.
See also Blinding tier, Self-analyzed, Double blind and triple blind.
The difference between deliberately picturing something and noticing something that seems to arrive on its own. Both happen in the same mental space and can feel similar from the inside, which is why beginners struggle to tell them apart.
Not merely a teaching distinction: experiments going back to 1910 show imagined and perceived material can genuinely be confused for one another.
See also Imagery vividness, Impression.
Reference: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Perky experiment
When a question cannot be resolved cleanly against its stated criteria, because the event was cancelled or became unverifiable, and is cancelled rather than settled either way.
What triggers a void rather than a forced resolution is house rules, not a universal standard.
See also Resolution criteria, Settlement.
Informal termLargely archival. You may meet it in older material; almost nobody teaches it now.
An early variant described as closer to automatic writing than to a staged protocol: the viewer writes continuously and treats what emerges as the data.
See also Generic remote viewing, Extended remote viewing.
A written question drawn at random instead of an image target. The set of questions is called the envelope: you may have written every question in your own envelope, but you never know which one you have drawn.
Written taskings have no decoys and no chance baseline, so they are never scored, whatever the blinding tier.
See also Tasking, cue, tasker, Chance rate, Decoys and the panel.
How many standard deviations a result sits from what was expected. Across 100 trials at a one in four baseline you expect 25 hits with an ordinary spread of about 4, so 37 hits sits three standard deviations above expectation: a z of 3.
A large z does NOT mean a large effect. Z grows in proportion to the square root of the number of trials, so a tiny per-trial advantage produces a huge z once there are enough of them: double the trials and the same per-trial edge buys about 40 percent more z. This is why z and effect size have to be read together.
See also Effect size, P-value, Margin.