A lot of research, however, has been done into non-religious spiritual experiences such as Near Death experiences, Out-of-Body experiences, and various kinds of extrasensory perceptions. The problem, as I have mentioned before, is that the inherent plasticity of the subject matter makes observation and repeatability much more awkward and hard to codify than it is when normal physical events and their statistics can be used.

Despite these hurdles, a routinely greater-than-chance set of observations has been the general rule.

There are some really important differences, though. As far as can be seen, electrons don't give a hoot what anyone thinks about them. But people do. If you are studying the modalities of thought transferral over distance in "sensitive " people and do it in a hostile way, the chances of results (I suggest) are going to be diminished by the very framework of the examination.

This is just the tip of an iceberg, of which (for example) the strange impacts of the placebo effect on provien physical conditions is another tip.

A