Why we built it
Psiphase started with a question. Lots of practices promise to take you into a deep, calm state and then do something interesting from there. They seem to have something in common. What is it? We read them side by side, measured what we could, and this is what we found.
The short version. Every one of these practices has two steps. Step one: get calm and settled. Step two: do something from that calm place. Every method spends most of its effort on step two, and none of them check whether step one actually happened. Step one is the part you can measure with a phone and a chest strap. So that is the part Psiphase does.
What we looked at
Not other people's summaries. The original material itself, wherever it still exists.
| Practice | What we read or measured |
|---|---|
| The Monroe Institute's Gateway programme | The 1977 workbook. A 1983 US Army report on the method, later released by the CIA. And the recordings themselves: all 65 tracks of the classic course, about 47 hours of audio. We analysed the sound to find out what the recordings actually do, rather than what the box says |
| Remote viewing (CRV) | The US government's own papers from its remote viewing programme, released years later, and the 1985 and 1986 training documents that set out the method step by step |
| CE-5, the "contact" protocol | The published protocol, and the public accounts of people who say they practise this kind of thing |
| Mediumship | A published modern method, read for its structure |
| Lucid dreaming | Sleep laboratory research. This is the one case where scientists have confirmed, from the outside, that a person really was in the state they said they were in |
| Hypnosis and self-hypnosis | The research literature on induction, suggestion and safety |
| Breathing and heart-rate variability | The research on slow breathing and the heart. This turned out to be the best-proven thing in the whole pile |
What fell out: every practice is the same two steps
Strip the vocabulary away and every one of these does the same two things, in the same order.
Step one: get into a settled state. Body relaxed, mind awake, breathing slow, heart steady. Time seems to loosen a little.
Step two: from that state, turn your attention to something you could not normally reach. A far-away place. A hidden picture. Whatever might be out there. Someone who has died. The dream you are inside.
Side by side, the pattern is hard to miss. Gateway gets you there with pulsing tones and a picture you hold in your mind. CE-5 calls it a sincere heart. The mediumship method spells it out: breathe, lift, expand, surrender, shift. Remote viewing just calls it cooling down. Different doors into the same room. Only step two changes from one practice to the next.
The part nobody was measuring
Here is the thing that turned a reading exercise into an app. Step one is the foundation everything else stands on, and in every one of these methods it is:
- Assumed, not checked. Every recording says "now you are in the state". None of them can tell whether you are. They just take your word for it.
- The same for everyone. The recording plays the same sounds for a beginner and for someone who has practised for twenty years. It cannot know if you tensed up, drifted off, or never settled at all.
- Happening in your body, so it can be measured. Slow breathing. A slower heartbeat. A heartbeat that rises and falls in a smooth wave with each breath. A still body. A phone and a chest strap can read all of these.
So the biggest weakness shared by all this material is the same one: it can't see you.
What Psiphase does about it
It measures the part that can be measured, and it adjusts. Your breathing and how still you are, from the phone. Your heartbeat, from a strap if you wear one. From those it works out one number: how settled you are right now, compared with how you were when you started, not compared with anyone else. An Adaptive session waits for you, eases off, says less, or moves on, depending on that number. The recording no longer plays the same thing whatever you do.
Three things we found in the recordings shaped the sessions directly:
- Less talking works better. Across the classic course, the voice drops from about 1,500 words in the first recording to about 150 in the last. The words are training wheels, taken away as you learn. So the voice in Psiphase says less as you settle.
- Coming back matters. Nearly every recording ends with the same careful wake-up. So every Psiphase session brings you back gently at the end, on purpose, and in the self-hypnosis sessions that cannot be switched off.
- The label and the sound do not always match. The deepest recordings hold a very slow pulse for 35 to 40 minutes, and one was sold as one thing while the sound measured as another. Where the name and the measurement disagreed, we trusted the measurement.
What we did not find
We found no proof that step two works. Not for remote viewing, not for contact, not for speaking with the dead. The people who practise these things say they work. Proper studies are thin or missing. Psiphase does not pretend otherwise. Step two is offered as something to experience, labelled as that, and kept well apart from anything measured. If the app ever scores whether a guess was right, it will show you how often pure luck would have got the same result, right next to your score. That is what remote viewing's own testing rules were for: to stop people fooling themselves.
What we did find is that step one is real, you can get better at it, and it is useful on its own. Slow breathing is one of the best-proven ways to lower stress there is. Being able to settle yourself is worth having even if nothing else on the list turns out to be true.
What this makes the app
Not a mind-reading trainer. A way to get yourself calm and settled, see that you have, and stay there, with the older practices offered on top as things to explore from that calm place. The measured part is the core. The explored part is clearly marked as exploring. Keeping those two apart is the whole design. It is what lets the app take ideas you find meaningful seriously without ever telling you something that is not true.
Read next: the science, including the studies that argue against parts of this app, and what you can do with it.