Research Grant Awarded: Bial Foundation

The Bial Foundation, a non-profit institution in Portugal, offers research grants every two years in the areas of psychophysiology and parapsychology with the aim of “encouraging research into healthy human being’s physical and mental processes, namely in fields still largely unexplored but which warrant further scientific analysis.”

Although the Windbridge Institute was awarded five Bial grants for research projects with Windbridge mediums since 2008, this was the first year since the formation of the Windbridge Research Center and moving the mediumship research there in 2017 that these grants were offered.

In November 2018, we were informed that the Board of Directors of the Bial Foundation selected the Windbridge Research Center project “Correlating accurate intuition with learning styles and sensory modality preferences” for funding through the 2018/2019 Bial Foundation Grant Programme.

This funded research project (211/18) will take place from February 2019 through December 2020. The two primary investigators (Co-PIs) on the project are Julie Beischel, PhD, and a researcher/instructor with expertise in complementary and alternative medicine, sociology, statistics, and research methodology.

The project examines the learning styles and sensory modality preferences (LS/SMPs) of Windbridge Certified Research Mediums (WCRMs) and how their LS/SMPs relate to the accuracy of their statements about specific deceased individuals collected under blinded/masked conditions.

Phenomenological research with modern mediums has demonstrated that their experiences are multi-modal and most often include seeing, hearing, and feeling. Learning styles are biologically and developmentally imposed preferences and behaviors that are consistent across time and task. LS/SMPs and how they relate to psi abilities have not been widely examined by psi researchers. The study compares mediums’ LS/SMPs to their accuracy scores when asked specific questions about a deceased person.

This project involves a deep re-analysis of the item scores from more-than-double-blind (previously termed ‘quintuple blind’) proxy-sitter phone readings for individual discarnates by breaking them out by question; previous research grouped item scores for all questions together. This study is relevant and important because it will obtain novel data on the accuracy of types of mediumistic information and may shed light on which LS/SMPs are most conducive to obtaining which types of information. Further, the results will inform future research in this and similar areas including the relationship of LS/SMP to the acquisition of different types of psi information. This may allow researchers to tailor psi tests to the LS/SMP of individuals in order to optimize the capacity to capture laboratory evidence for psi.

One reviewer of our grant application noted, “This is a competent proposal for a project that can produce results that may be generalized beyond the mediumistic focus.”

To learn more about the Bial Foundation, visit https://www.bial.com/en/bial_foundation.11/grants.18/grants_for_scientific_research_.a38.html


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