In addition to the question of whether or not psychic functioning is possible, the experiments at SAIC were designed to explore a number of hypotheses. Experiments 1 and 10 were both designed to see if there is a relationship between the "change in visual entropy" in the targets and the remote viewing performance.
Each of the five senses with which we are familiar is a change detector. Our vision is most readily drawn to something that is moving, and in fact if our eyes are kept completely still, we cease to see at all. Similarly, we hear because of moving air, and our attention is drawn to sudden changes in sound levels. Other senses behave similarly. Thus, it is reasonable that if there really is a "psychic sense" then it would follow that same pattern.
Experiments 1 and 10 were designed to test whether or not remote viewing performance would be related to a particular type of change in the target material, namely the "change in visual entropy." A target with a high degree of change would be one in which the colors changed considerably throughout the target. A detailed explanation can be found in the SAIC reports of this experiment, or in the article "Shannon Entropy: A Possible Intrinsic Target Property" by May, Spottiswoode and James, in the Journal of Parapsychology, December 1994. It was indeed found that there was a correlation between the change in entropy in the target and the remote viewing quality. This result was initially shown in Experiment 1 and replicated in Experiment 10. A simulation study matching randomly chosen targets to responses showed that this was unlikely to be an artifact of target complexity or other features.
It is worth speculating on what this might mean for determining how psychic functioning works. Physicists are currently grappling with the concept of time, and cannot rule out precognition as being consistent with current understanding. Perhaps it is the case that we do have a psychic sense, much like our other senses, and that it works by scanning the future for possibilities of major change much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change and our ears are responsive to auditory change. That idea is consistent with anecdotal reports of precognition, which are generally concerned with events involving major life change. Laboratory remote viewing may in part work by someone directing the viewer to focus on a particular point in the future, that in which he or she receives the feedback from the experiment. It may also be the case that this same sense can scan the environment in actual time and detect change as well.
Another hypothesis put forth at SAIC was that laboratory remote viewing experiments are most likely to be successful if the pool of potential targets is neither too narrow nor too wide in terms of the number of possible elements in the target. They called this feature the "target- pool bandwidth" and described it as the number of "differentiable cognitive elements." They reasoned that if the possible target set was too small, the viewer would see the entire set and be unable to distinguish that information from the psychic information. If the set was too broad, the viewer would not have any means for editing an extensive imagination.
Combining these two results would indicate that a good target set would contain targets with high change in visual entropy, but that the set would contain a moderately-sized set of possibilities. The set of 100 National Geographic photographs used in the later days at SRI and at SAIC may have inadvertently displayed just those properties.
Experiment 7, described in Appendix 2, provided results very different from the standard remote viewing work. That experiment was designed to test claims made in the Former Soviet Union and by some researchers in the United States, that individuals could influence the physiology of another individual from a remote location. The study was actually two separate replications of the same experiment, and both replications were successful from a traditional statistical perspective. In other words, it appeared that the physiology of one individual was activated when he or she was being watched by someone in a distant room. If these results are indeed sound, then they may substantiate the folklore indicating that people know when they are being observed from behind.
Experiment 2 was also very different from the standard remote viewing experiments, although it was still designed to test anomalous cognition. Three subjects attempted to use a statistical enhancement technique to increase the ability to guess forced choice targets with two choices. This clever computer experiment showed that for one subject, guessing was indeed enhanced from a raw rate of just above chance (51.6% instead of 50%) to an enhanced rate of 76 percent. The method was extremely inefficient, and it is difficult to imagine practical uses for this ability, if indeed it exists.