Previous Recipients

2006
AT the time of the award, Ms. Roxburgh was a second year post-graduate student at the University of Northampton. Her project was titled “Science and Séance: The Psychology and Phenomenology of Mediumship.” Based in the University’s Centre for the Study of Anomalous Processes in Psychology, she was interested in: expanding on the psychology and phenomenology of mediumship to include cross-cultural research; distant mental influence and healing research; and the power of belief, and synchronicity. The University of Northampton provided Ms. Roxburgh with funds to complete her first study, the aims of which were both to investigate whether any personality variables are characteristic of mediums, and to determine whether mediumship is associated with positive or negative mental health. She intended to use the Tart Award to cover the travel expenses for herself and for participants in the second study which involved interviews with mediums conducted to map mediums’ own understanding of their experiences, how they began and developed; and the exploration of the process and nature of mediumship, especially to determine what its necessary conditions are perceived to be and on what basis someone is classified as a medium.

2005
The fourth recipient of the Charles T. and Judith A. Tart Student Incentive Award was Louise Farrell. At the time of the award Ms. Farrell was an in-coming post-graduate student and part-time staff member of the Centre for Anomalous Psychological Processes, in the Division of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Northampton in England. She was working under the supervision of Dr. Chris Roe (the 1999 D. Scott Rogo Award Winner for Parapsychological Literature) and Dr. Simon Sherwood (the 2003 Frances P. Bolton Fellow). Ms. Farrell planned to use the Tart Student Incentive Award to fund the second study she planned to conduct as part of her doctoral work, investigating ESP in altered states with a particular focus on lucid dreams. This project sought to compare lucid dreams with normal dreams, an induced state of relaxation, and a state approximating normal waking consciousness with regards to subjective experience and the potential for psi functioning in these conditions. Ms Farrell’s interest in this area came from both a desire to expand upon her M.Sc. thesis in which she had some success with a similar project, and from her general fascination with the less mundane aspects of the human experience.

2004
The third recipient of the Charles T. and Judith A. Tart Student Incentive Award was Itai Ivtzan. At the time of the award Ivtzan was a post-graduate student in the Anomalistics Research Unit of the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths College of the University of London in England. Under the supervision of Professor Christopher French, Ivtzan intended to conduct three experiments: (1) a dice-throwing test in which participants would try to influence dice throws; (2) a Tarot card study in which participants would attempt to distinguish between their own real reading and a control reading; and (3) a group consciousness experiment in which participants would take part in a six-week-long meditation course while trying to influence an RNG machine. Ivtzan would consider various factors with respect to the manner in which they may affect PK processes, including: altered states of cosnciousness (meditation), imagination, belief, and distance from the RNG machine. Ivtzan, in discussing his motivation for conducting this research, noted that substantial empirical evidence has accumulated to suggest a correlation between mental states and the output of an RNG machine (for example, in the work of Dean Radin and Roger Nelson). This technology allows an important line of research to be conducted, that of monitoring environmental backgrounds in specific situations in which human consciousness might be “at work”.

2003
The second recipient of the Charles T. and Judith A. Tart Student Incentive Award was Bryan Williams. At the time of the award, Williams, a Native American, was completing his Bachelor’s degree at the University of New Mexico with a major in psychology and a minor in physics. Williams’s main interests lay in the emerging paradigm of environmental psychophysiology, which examines how physical energies within the environment — both natural and artificial — might come to interact with and affect brain functioning so as to produce perceptual, cognitive, and emotional alterations in conscious experience. Prior to applying for the Tart Award, Williams had been involved in the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) managed by Dr. Roger D. Nelson of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. Active in the GCP since 2001, Williams carried out supplemental 15-minute block analyses of the RNG network data in relation to several major world events, including the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the U. S.-British war in Iraq, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. He planned to use the Tart Award to extend the current field RNG research on group consciousness by conducting two experiments focusing on group religious ceremonial events. The first experiment was intended to explore group consciousness effects during a sacred Native American kachina dance held annually at Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, which has several spiritual and meditative aspects to it that might be conducive to a group “consciousness field.” The second experiment was designed to be a first-step in exploring a possible PK component in distant mental healing through field RNG measurements of group consciousness effects during distant intercessory prayer circle sessions. The results of both experiments, Williams believed, could have useful implications for both the spiritual and distant healing paradigms.

2002
The first recipient of the Charles T. and Judith A. Tart Student Incentive Award for Parapsychological Resarch was Devin Terhune. At the time of the award, Terhune was an undergraduate student majoring in psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Terhune had attended the 2001 Summer Study Program at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, and in 2002, was also the recipient of the Robert H. Ashby Award given by the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research for an essay he wrote on mediumship. He intended to use his Tart Award money to help support two investigations, one of a recurrent apparition and the other of an ostensibly precognitive crisis apparition. The purpose of this research would be to apply the well-supported naturalistic explanatory models to the cases — namely temporal lobe lability/dysfunction and the impact of geomagnetic fields — and if these failed to account fully for the reported phenomena, then to investigate the applicability of psi-based models.