It was a hand that played the violin.

Dean Radin spent five years as a professional classical violinist, on real stages. That same hand would later draw circuit diagrams, attach electrodes to human skin, and count the output of random number generators. To measure the paranormal.

Here, most people brace themselves. A psychic researcher — the phrase drags in images of darkened rooms, crystal balls, a shady fortune-teller. But trace Radin’s résumé in order, and that picture is betrayed at every turn.

He studied electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts, with honors in physics. A master’s in control systems and cybernetics at the University of Illinois, and then, in 1979, a PhD in psychology. His employer: AT&T Bell Laboratories, the legendary lab that built much of twentieth-century telecommunications. There he designed human interfaces for network operations centers in the United States and Japan. Before personal computers existed, he was building rapid prototype systems for complex human-machine interfaces. An engineer.

Not a mystic. An engineer.

And while designing communication systems at Bell Labs, he had quietly started running other experiments. Experiments in psi. He published papers, presented at the annual meetings of the Parapsychological Association. In time he held appointments at Princeton, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Nevada. He moved through Silicon Valley think tanks. At one of them — SRI International — he served as a scientist on a classified program studying the paranormal for the U.S. government.

The state was funding psychic research. And there, on the ground, stood an engineer out of Bell Labs.

Why would an engineer come to a place like this? Radin’s own answer is almost disappointingly plain. Since childhood he had been gripped by an intuition that “the mind is far more mysterious and powerful than we know,” he writes. He read mythology, Eastern and Western psychology, science fiction. As a teenager he ran his own experiments on hypnosis and psi. That boy simply grew up able to draw a circuit diagram. The motive was a single thread, start to finish.

He has served as president of the Parapsychological Association four times (1988, 1993, 1998, 2005). Today he is senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. This book, Entangled Minds, is the experimental data of more than twenty years, handed to the general reader.

And here is where it truly begins. Radin doesn’t want to say “psychics exist.” His weapon isn’t mysticism. It’s physics. A strange fact of quantum mechanics — one Einstein loathed, and one that was proven anyway. That is where his argument starts to move.

Einstein hated it.

Two particles, once they touch, stay connected no matter how far apart they drift. Disturb one, and the other answers — with no signal passing between them — at the very same instant. Hundreds of kilometers apart, instantly. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and refused to accept it to the end. Such an eerie thing could not possibly be happening at the root of the universe, he insisted.

But it was. Quantum entanglement is now a confirmed physical phenomenon, verified in experiment after experiment. There is no doubting it. Einstein was wrong.

Here most people think: that’s about particles. A strange law of the world smaller than atoms, with no bearing on my life. Let electrons and photons hold hands at a distance — the morning coffee still goes cold.

What Radin slips into is exactly that gap, that “no bearing.”

He asks: if particles do this, what about minds? If two separated particles correlate across distance, would it be so impossible, in principle, for two separated minds to correlate too? You know who’s calling before the phone rings. You feel, for no reason, that something is wrong with a distant relative. Could such “connections between minds” be the human-sized expression of an entanglement the universe held all along?

The book’s original title is Entangled Minds. The title itself declares the leap.

Let me be honest. This leap is also the book’s single most fragile point. Most physicists shake their heads right here (their rebuttal gets a whole chapter — Chapter 9). Between the entanglement of particles and the connection of minds, they say, no bridge has been built.

But Radin doesn’t jump straight to the conclusion. First he stacks up a mountain of experimental data. Before he asks you to believe the flashy claim that “minds are connected,” he lays out the plain numbers, one by one. And the first step is that ordinary moment everyone has lived through at least once.

The phone rings. Before you pick it up, you already know who it is.

Everyone has felt it.

The phone rings, and a face surfaces. You suddenly think of a parent who lives far away, you call — and they had just fallen ill. Someone you’d been thinking about emails you that very day. A premonition. A pang of unease.

We usually file these under one heading: coincidence. You only remember the hits and forget the countless misses. You’re just reading meaning into chance after the fact. — This is a sound way to doubt. And often, it’s exactly right.

Radin doesn’t deny this “coincidence.” He starts from it. What he asks is something else: if it really is mere chance, why do humans across every culture and every era report the very same experience, as if stamped from the same mold?

According to the book, extrasensory experience is not the rare gift of a special few. In surveys, most people say they believe in, or have had, some kind of psychic experience. This is not the delusion of a handful of eccentrics, but a phenomenon spread widely across the human animal.

And precisely because it’s so common, science has refused to touch it, Radin says. It’s vague, hard to reproduce, and study it seriously and your colleagues look at you sideways. So most scientists keep away. Worldwide, only about fifty scientists study psi full-time — so the book records.

Here Radin makes a wager. He drags the “coincidence,” scattered through everyday life, into the laboratory. Turn the vague anecdote into a number you can measure. Count the hits and the misses, strictly. Then see whether a deviation that chance should never produce shows up anyway.

Anecdotes are not evidence. Radin admits this too. So he uses them only as a doorway. The real contest is inside the controlled lab. And what he found there did not file under “coincidence.”

The human body was reacting in advance — to an event that had not yet happened.

This is the heart of the book.

In 1993, Radin thought up an experiment. The setup: sit a subject in front of a monitor, attach electrodes to their fingers. Measure skin conductance — that index used in lie detectors, where a startle or a strain makes the sweat glands respond faintly and the skin’s electrical conductivity shifts. Measure heart rate too.

Then show photos on the monitor, one at a time, chosen at random by a computer. Either a calm picture (a landscape, quiet nature) or an emotionally charged one (violent, or erotic). Which one appears, no one knows until the instant it does. Not the subject. Not the experimenter. Double-blind.

When an emotional photo appears, the body reacts. Skin conductance jumps, the heartbeat stumbles. Obvious. The question is when it reacts.

Common sense says: after the photo appears. You see it, you’re startled, the body responds. The order has to be that way. Cause first, effect after. That’s how time flows.

The data betrayed the order.

Only when an emotional photo was about to appear, the subject’s body began to react several seconds before the image showed up. As if bracing for something unpleasant to come — while still having seen nothing. With calm photos, that anticipatory response did not appear. The body seemed to know what was coming next, before the computer had even chosen it.

Radin named it “presentiment.” In his words, “an intuitive hunch that something not quite right is about to unfold.”

This was no one-off fluke. He ran the experiment again and again. The first used 24 subjects; the odds against chance for the anticipatory response were 500 to 1. The second, 50 subjects, came out in the predicted direction but weaker. The third changed the hardware, software, and pictures, used 47 subjects, produced a strong presentiment effect, with odds of 2,500 to 1. The fourth showed no statistically significant difference.

There’s scatter. Radin doesn’t hide it. But analyze the four experiments together, and the overall odds against chance came to 125,000 to 1 — so the book reports.

And this was not one man’s conviction. The Dutch psychologist Dick Bierman, at the University of Amsterdam, replicated the same experiment and reproduced the effect. Many researchers followed, capturing the same phenomenon not only in skin conductance but in heart rate and pupil dilation, other physiological measures.

Radin’s conclusion is quiet, but heavy. When an average person is about to see an emotional image, that person responds before it appears — under double-blind conditions.

Your body may be touching the future a little before you notice.

Not just the individual body. Radin tried to measure something larger. The world itself.

It’s called the Global Consciousness Project. Begun in 1998 out of Princeton’s lineage of anomalies research, started by a researcher named Roger Nelson. Place random number generators in dozens of locations worldwide — at its peak, 65 to 70 sites around the globe. Each is a kind of electronic die that, left alone, spits out 0s and 1s at random, fifty-fifty. There’s no reason for it to skew. A pure spring of chance — scattered from Alaska to Fiji, across nearly every time zone.

The hypothesis: in the moment when minds around the world converge on a single point — a great event, a disaster, a time when everyone is fixed on the same news — if that “collective attention” influences the physical world even slightly, then a skew might appear in numbers that should be random.

The dice, hearing the world’s mind, stop being chance.

September 11, 2001. According to the book, hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Center, a spike began to appear in the random data, and the deviation persisted for over a week. The death of Princess Diana, the turn of the new year — when the world’s attention gathers at one point, the data moved, he reports.

The book holds that this data shows a deviation almost impossible to attribute to chance. Yet Radin himself never fails to attach the caveat: “this is purely speculative.” He doesn’t insist it’s proof. He only says he saw something strange.

Let me be honest. This chapter is the most fiercely contested ground in the book.

The mind reaches ahead into the future. So — can the mind touch matter?

Psychokinesis. A word stuck with the cheap image of bending spoons. But what Radin brings out is no stage trick. It’s the dull numbers of the laboratory.

The classic version used dice. Ask a subject to “will” a particular face to come up. Roll tens of thousands of times and count whether the willed face appears more often than chance. Dull. No flashy psychic needed here. All you need is a slight deviation and the enormous number of trials to hold it up.

A more refined stage stood at Princeton University. The PEAR laboratory (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research). That such a lab existed inside a university’s engineering school is itself startling. Here a subject faces an electronic random number generator and wills it: “more 1s,” “more 0s.” The measurement is whether the device’s output tips, ever so slightly, toward that intention.

The book records that these mind-matter interaction experiments were stacked up in enormous numbers. The effect of any single run is laughably small. But run it enough times, and that small deviation remains at a size chance can’t erase — that’s how Radin builds his argument.

This far, it’s all a skirmish. Radin’s real weapon isn’t any single flashy experiment. It’s in his method of bundling hundreds of dull experiments into one enormous number.

Radin’s main battlefield is meta-analysis.

The effect of one experiment is small. Too small — on its own it can be waved off as “maybe coincidence.” Skeptics strike there. So Radin flips the approach. One arrow snaps. Then bundle hundreds.

Take the ganzfeld experiment. Gently cut off a subject’s sight and hearing. Halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, pink noise into the ears. With sensory input dialed down, test whether they can receive, by telepathy, the image a “sender” in another room is viewing. Radin calls it “as close to the perfect psi experiment as anyone knows how to conduct.”

The hit rate of any one ganzfeld run only slightly exceeds the chance level of 25%. Dullness itself. But gather dozens, hundreds of ganzfeld experiments run in labs worldwide and combine them — and a deviation hard to explain by chance rises up across the whole. This is meta-analysis. When Radin and colleagues bundled every study from 1974 to 2001, the hit rate across some 2,900 sessions settled at 32%. A mere seven points above 25%. But for that many sessions to drift seven points off is, by chance, astronomically improbable.

And then comes the book’s grand reckoning. Radin bundled every kind of psi experiment — dream telepathy, ganzfeld, the staring effect, distant intention, dice PK, random-generator PK — about a thousand studies, into one enormous meta-analysis.

The result: the odds against the whole being chance came to one in ten to the 104th power.

Write the magnitude again. A 1 followed by 104 zeros. Orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the universe. The probability that all this data is a product of chance is, effectively, zero — so Radin thrusts at us. “There can be little doubt that something interesting is going on.”

One assessment offered of the book says that, facing this number, a person has only three roads left. Either every researcher involved is staggeringly incompetent. Or a worldwide, organized fraud is underway. Or something is really happening. That three-way choice is handed straight to the reader. Which one do you pick?

Here the book turns a strange corner.

What kind of person believes in the paranormal? The popular image is fixed: unscientific, gullible, undereducated — easy to file away. The non-believer, surely, is the smart, level-headed one.

The book’s chapter title flips that head-on. “People who believe are more creative.”

By the data Radin presents, whether you believe in psi is not a matter of intelligence or education. The simple scheme — believers foolish, skeptics smart — doesn’t hold. Rather, the tendency to believe is tied to a certain cognitive style.

The key is a concept called “latent inhibition.” It’s a technical term, so let me put it in everyday words at once. The brain has a mechanism that automatically discards information it has once learned to be irrelevant, keeping it out of awareness. A filter that mutes the noise so you can focus on what matters. That is latent inhibition.

In some people, that filter is looser than usual. Information that would normally be discarded flows up into awareness. It’s the danger of drowning in a flood of information — but at the same time, it’s the power to connect, unexpectedly, the fragments others throw away as unrelated. Highly creative people, artists and inventors, show this looseness of the filter, according to research.

And people inclined to believe in psi show the same tendency, Radin says.

So it goes like this. From the seams of the world, they pick up signals that ordinary people don’t. That same sensitivity makes one person creative and another a person who feels “the premonition.” The believer isn’t failing to see reality. In the book’s phrasing, they may be “seeing farther into the depths of the world than other people do.”

So far I’ve written from Radin’s side. Now it’s time to pour cold water.

The readers who’ve been lifted up by this book should stop, here, especially. Because Radin’s central claim — “quantum entanglement explains the connection between minds” — is one most physicists clearly reject.

No bridge has been built. That is the core of the criticism.

Quantum entanglement is real. But you cannot use entangled particles to send information instantly. That it can’t exceed the speed of light is theoretically guaranteed. Entanglement is “spooky,” but it can’t be used for communication. Meanwhile, the probability that the vast cloud of particles in one brain is meaningfully entangled with the vast cloud in another — to a physicist, near zero. Radin himself admits there are “practical difficulties” in even demonstrating entanglement in living systems. So the book’s banner, “entanglement → entangled minds,” stays not proven physics but a poetic analogy.

The criticism reaches the way the data is gathered, too.

One reviewer warns that when Radin says something “succeeded” or “was replicated in several labs,” the words should be heard at a discount. An example. The staring-effect experiment (the sense of being watched) run in Radin’s own lab. When two researchers, Schlitz and Wiseman, ran the same experiment, nothing came out. Radin’s name is on the published paper. Yet the book, the reviewer says, doesn’t mention this negative result from his own lab.

The PEAR study, where one subject earned most of the score (Chapter 6). The 9/11 GCP data, within chance under independent analysis (Chapter 5). The presentiment “blip,” treated as psi before the plain explanations — memory, unconscious prediction — were ruled out (Chapter 4). The critics’ read is consistent. Every time a statistical anomaly or a blip on a screen appears, Radin “takes it for granted” as evidence of psi. When the real question is the single point of whether that blip has anything to do with psi at all.

One more thing. After this book, Radin’s research pushed further still. In his later work, he ran the most famous experiment in quantum mechanics — the double-slit, where particles behave like particles when observed and like waves when not — together with a subject’s “intention.” When subjects focused their attention on one slit, the interference pattern shifted slightly, he reports. And the effect came out stronger in people with meditation experience. But this lies outside the scope of the book, and replication and scrutiny are still ongoing. I leave it here only as one glimpse of what may lie along the extension of the book’s claim.

The physicist Heinz Pagels once dismissed, in another context, the move of yoking modern physics to mystical thought: a qualified physicist who did it knowingly, he said, would be committing fraud. The same blade is turned on this book. The gesture of setting quantum mechanics beside Eastern mysticism and spirituality and saying “look, they line up” is a rehash of something refuted once already in the 1970s.

Radin barely engages these critics’ assessments in the book. He dismisses criticism as “outdated” and “stubbornly incredulous.” But to the critic, that is only an excuse to dodge the heavy work of answering.

Let me leave it fairly. This is the book’s weakest place.

Reading this far, did you notice something strange?

Radin holds a number that exceeds the count of atoms in the universe — ten to the 104th power to one. Having stacked up that much evidence, he never once writes “psi is proven, believe it.” What he repeats are more modest words. “Entanglement may lead to an understanding of psi.” “This is purely speculative.” “There are practical difficulties.”

He doesn’t assert. That is the book’s strangest power.

Usually, persuasion is thought to mean speaking in absolutes. Radin goes the other way. He admits what he doesn’t know, discloses his own weak points first, leaves room for criticism intact — and quietly holds out only the data. That caution is exactly what pulls him away from the crystal-ball prophet. It makes him look like a scientist standing at a frontier. He wrote it himself: “I am comfortable tolerating the ambiguity of not knowing the ‘right answer,’ which is a constant companion at the frontier.”

But the honesty of not asserting doesn’t set the book down in a safe place. At the very end, instead, the blade turns toward us.

Remember it — that body from Chapter 4, bracing in advance for a photo it hadn’t seen.

That was not the story of a special psychic on a stage. It was the body of an utterly ordinary subject, sitting in a lab chair. A body made the same as yours, as mine. If presentiment is real, it isn’t a gift held by “some chosen one.” It means a function built into the very skin and heart of you, reading this sentence right now.

We think of the mind as something lonely, sealed inside the skull. The world is outside, I am within, and the skin is the boundary line. Knowing the caller before the phone rings is coincidence; feeling a distant person’s crisis is chance; my consciousness is complete inside me alone — on that premise, we stand up the “I.”

What Radin tried to shake with twenty years of numbers was not the existence of psychic powers. It was that premise. The mind may not end at the inner face of the skin. You may not be as cut off from the world as you think.

You began reading this as the tale of some distant lab, some strange experiment.

And your body, right now, is bracing for the next line.