This is the first meta-analysis of all studies related to remote-viewing tasks conducted up to December 2022. After applying our inclusion criteria, we selected 36 studies with a total of 40 effect sizes. Both frequentist and Bayesian meta-analyses revealed a strong average effect size of .34; 95% confidence interval: .22 -.45, after the exclusion of outliers, without signs of publication bias and a minimal decline effect. In terms of raw scores, these average results correspond to a difference in hits score of 19.3%; 95% confidence intervals:13.6%–25%, above the expected chance. Among the meta-analyses of moderators, a small nonstatistical difference emerged between the precognitive and clairvoyance tasks, particularly for those with an outbound agent. A comparison among meta-analyses results observed with other experimental protocols testing extrasensory perception showed the clear superiority of remote viewing. After more than 50 years of investigation into extrasensory perception, remote-viewing experimental protocols appear to be the most efficient for both experimental and practical applications.

This commentary considers the fields of extrasensory perception (ESP) research and cognitive neuroscience, discussing points of conflict and domains where they may be complementary. ESP research challenges the assumption in cognitive neuroscience that the mind is the product of known physical processes in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience methods and tools applied to ESP research could benefit and bridge the gap between the two fields. Firstly, concurrently studying subjective experiences and neural activity during ESP tasks would allow us to better characterize subjective states typically associated with ESP. Secondly, similarities between mind-wandering and free-response ESP experimental designs allow us to speculate on the potential implication of the default-mode network during the percipient’s experience. Finally, tools developed in computational neurolinguistics and natural language processing may become valuable to automatize judging procedures in free-response ESP paradigms such as remote viewing. Despite potentially incompatible assumptions about the mind and the brain, ESP research can gain new insights from cognitive neuroscience methods and approaches and can contribute in its own way to the study of human subjective experiences and cognition.

Welcome to this Special Issue-approximately a year in the making-that addresses an intriguing historical controversy known as the Shakespeare Authorship Question.We thank Professor Don Rubin for taking the lead as Guest Editor, a role that involved enticing top authorities in this domain to contribute their latest arguments and ideas, coordinating various administrative tasks, and facilitating the peer review process.The authors represented here are primarily literary scholars who insisted on presenting their material in a way that they deemed the most readable and impactful.Therefore, the Journal allowed the authors' to use their most familiar referencing style versus strictly adopting our standard APA format.We emphasize that their alternative styles have substantially different requirements for citation and references compared to APA, but we consider this lenience as an experiment in bridging two academic cultures with different approaches to writing papers.Note that all the works here were peer-reviewed for accuracy and suitability of the content, as well as copyedited per standard JSE normal procedures with the help of Ramsés D'León.However, finalization of the articles (including the extent to which authors heeded the Managing Editor's suggestions for APA-related edits) was deemed optional, and ultimately the decision of the Guest Editor in consultation

Most authorship disputes are between rival authors, between two or more writers for whom there is conflicting evidence within the works themselves, or conflicting testimony from others about who exactly composed what. The Shakespeare Authorship Question, however, is quite different. It is based on assumptions about the supposed author’s life, on a stunning absence of testimony by people who actually knew him, as well as silence by the author himself. That is, the traditional attribution is based on a lack of direct knowledge. Despite centuries of intense research and investigation, no credible evidence from his actual lifetime has emerged linking Will Shakspere of Stratford to the illustrious dramatic canon of the author who wrote under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. One major aspect of this search has been attempts by scholars to find individuals among Shakspere’s family, friends, and co-workers who spoke of him as a writer. It turns out that no one who lived and worked during the Stratford man’s dates ever did. Nor did he or any member of his family or his descendants ever claim that he was a writer. There is simply no contemporary record of anyone mentioning him in connection with playwriting. Even among the few literary men who were personally acquainted with him – poet and playwright Michael Drayton and historian William Camden to name two -- neither ever mentioned him as a writer in their accounts of prominent men from the county of Warwickshire. Other residents of the Stratford area -- some of whom were quite familiar with the London theatrical scene -- never referred to him at all, much less as a dramatist. This included the theatergoer Edward Pudsey and the poet and playwright Fulke Greville, also Warwickshire residents. Dr. John Hall, who married Shakspere’s daughter Susanna in 1607, practiced medicine in Stratford for 30 years and wrote about his most interesting patients, never mentioned his father-in-law as a writer. This absence of direct knowledge and this absence of living testimony is unique in the history of authorship disputes. This article looks in detail at the silences of those around the Stratford man, people who should have mentioned his writing but didn’t, and ask what part such silence should play in knowledge formation.

The personal attitudes and experiences of the greatest authors are usually reflected in their works, a phenomenon that gives literary biography its rich potential for new revelations and insights. Within this premise, the Shakespearean poems and plays appear to reflect the viewpoint and education of a high-ranking Elizabethan nobleman of vast experience and deep learning. In fact, many aspects of the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, appear to be closely mirrored by the title character of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Both the Earl and the Prince are each on intimate terms with a female monarch; each is involved with the daughter of the Queen’s chief minister; each brings actors to perform at the royal court; and while the author of Hamlet demonstrably referred to classics of the Italian Renaissance-- The Courtier and Cardanus’ Comforte -- Oxford himself sponsored publications of both these works in England. The specific focus of this essay is on aspects of such “special knowledge” within the Shakespearean works, special knowledge that has no specific connection to the life of the man from Stratford but which was deeply imbued in the life of Edward de Vere. Cited here will be details of the author’s connections to France and the French language; to the unique culture and geography of Italy; to the literature and drama of ancient Greece; to legal terminology and intricacies of the law; his proximity to persons and places of state power; to his military expertise; his medical knowledge; his intimacy with the sea and seamanship; to astronomy; to music; horses and horsemanship; heraldry; and to plants gardens and gardening. Such experiences and knowledge was possessed by the Earl of Oxford, and it is contrasted here with the paucity of similar experience and learning in the life of Will Shakspere of Stratford. The evidence clearly suggests that it was Edward de Vere using the pseudonym William Shakespeare rather than Will Shakspere who actually was behind the Bard’s work.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of Shakespeare scholars, including Israel Gollancz (1894), H.R.D. Anders (1904), J. Churton Collins (1904), and Gilbert Murray (1914) wrote convincingly of Shakespeare’s debt to classical Greek drama. However, in the century since, most scholars and editors have repeatedly held that Shakespeare was not familiar with Greek drama. In Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903), Robert Kilburn Root expressed the opinion on Shakespeare’s ‘lesse Greek’ that presaged this enduring dismissal: “It is at any rate certain that he nowhere alludes to any characters or episodes of Greek drama, that they extended no influence whatsoever on his conception of mythology.” (p. 6) This century-long consensus against Attic dramatic influence was reinforced by A.D. Nutall, who wrote, “that Shakespeare was cut off from Greek poetry and drama is probably a bleak truth that we should accept.” (Nutall, 2004, p.210) Scholars have preferred to maintain that Plutarch or Ovid were Shakespeare’s surrogate literary mediators for the playwright’s adaptations from Greek myth and theatre. Other scholars, however, have questioned these assumptions, including Laurie Maguire, who observed that “invoking Shakespeare’s imagined conversations in the Mermaid tavern is not a methodology likely to convince skeptics that Shakespeare knew Greek drama.” (p. 98) This near-universal rejection of Greek drama as Shakespeare sources have profound philological implications. Indeed, this essay argues that the proscription against recognizing the Attic canon as an influence in Shakespeare has been driven by the belief that Will Shakspere of Stratford had, at most, an education that was Latin-based. The examples show that the real author had to have been exposed to both the Greek language and the Greek dramatists. Evidence for alternative candidates, including Edward de Vere, shows that many were schooled in Greek and that some even collected and supported translations of Greek works. It is my contention that Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination was actually fired by the Greeks, and Shakespeare research has clearly suffered from a century of denial.

There is a large amount of evidence in the Parapsychology literature that indicates thatconsciousness is not an emergent property of neuronal interactions and can exist andfunction independently of a brain. Here we examine mathematical methods that canbe used to derive dynamic equations for the mind-matter interactions occurring in thebrain that these observations imply the existence of. We use the moments method toapproximate the effect that consciousness has on stochastic binary decision-makingneural networks , which we model using biologically realistic Wilson-Cowan equations(Deco et al., 2007). We show that small changes in the variance of the randomness (onthe order of 0.1 Hz2) consumed by the neural networks can bias the networks to selectone binary decision value over the other. Using observations about the interconnectednessof relatively isolated groups of neurons, we argue that biases of the size predictedby the approximation would be sufficient to allow a brain-independent consciousnessto exert significant control over the brain. The results that we present here are relevantto any theory positing that rote computations carried out by neurons are not the solecontributor to consciousness.

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