There were 1898 records collected from March 17, 2018, to November 4, 2020. Of those, 1175 were unique pre-event records (1210 minus 35 records from people who completed the pre-survey multiple times). Participant characteristics for the unique individual pre-event dataset are displayed in Table 1.
Participants hailed mostly from the United States (1033, 88%), followed by Canada (48, 4%) and United Kingdom (16, 1.4%), Australia (12; 1.0%), and the remaining countries with less than 1% each: Austria, Brazil, China, Dominican Republic, France Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Mauritius, Mexico, Netherlands, Oman, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, and United Arab Emirates. For all the unique individuals, participants reported attending 2.5 ± 2.8 workshops (N = 1146) within the last year, and in their lifetime, 22.6 ± 27.8 (N = 1144).
Relationship Between Well-being, Interconnectedness, and Extended Perception
The means, standard deviations, and Spearman rank correlations are displayed in Table 2. The False Discovery Rate multiple comparison correction level of significance was p = 0.043. There were 34 significant correlations at this level, 29 of which were significant at the p < 0.00005 level.
The interconnectedness measures were moderately correlated (ρ = 0.35 to 0.43). Intuition (Jar Task) was weakly correlated with the variable “interconnectedness with others.” No other extended perception measure was significantly correlated with any other measures. Interconnectedness measures were significantly and positively correlated with well-being (ρ: 0.27 to 0.33), positive affect (ρ: 0.20 to 0.27), and compassion (ρ: 0.21 to 0.32), and negatively correlated with sleep disturbance (ρ: -0.13 to -0.16) and pain (ρ: -0.11 to -0.16). The well-being measures were all significantly correlated with each other at varying strengths except for compassion with negative affect and sleep disturbance (Table 2).
Did All Workshops Demonstrate Significant Pre-Post Measure Changes?
There were 534 paired pre-post records, with 11 people taking more than one workshop (10 completed two, and one person completed three). Six hundred forty-one people did not have a post-event record for the various reasons mentioned in the methods section and were not included in this dataset. Participant demographics for the paired pre-post dataset are displayed in Table 1. In addition, participants rated their sleep disturbance 4.2 ± 2.5 (n-503) and pain 3.8 ± 2.6 (n-509) over the last month and their lifetime mental health diagnoses. Two hundred forty-one lifetime mental health diagnoses were endorsed in 152 people (they could check all that applied): including mania (n-77), anxiety disorder (n-72), posttraumatic stress disorder (n-50), substance dependence requiring treatment (n-24), bipolar disorder (n-13), and psychosis or schizophrenia (n-1). Seventy-six participants said they were currently being treated for a psychiatric condition with medication, psychotherapy, both, or some other form of treatment. Five-factor personality variables included Extraversion 3.2 ± 1.0 (n-514), Agreeableness 3.6 ± 0.9 (n-514), Conscientiousness 4.1 ± 0.8 (n-514), Neuroticism 2.8 ± 1.0 (n-512), Openness 3.8 ± 0.9 (n-515). Their noetic belief was 78.8 ± 18.7 (n-510), and noetic experience was 55.5 ± 22.5 (n-509).
There were 33 different workshops represented in the dataset. Workshop leaders endorsed the following format types: lecture (n-22), small group (19), pairs (n-12), discussion (n-17), movement (n-10), and outside/in nature (n-9). They also endorsed the following content categories: meditation (n-17), positive psychology (n-17), spirituality (n-13), health and healing (n-12), intention (n-12), intuition (n-11), nature practices (n-10), embodied practices (n-9), art (n-7), death and dying (n-5), sound healing (n-5), parapsychology (n-4), technology tools (n-4), altered states of consciousness (n-1), and dreamwork (n-1). The last two were not included in predictor analysis because only one workshop included that content. The average time between the pre and post-surveys completion was 34.0 ± 45.5 days (range 0.08 to 319.8 days), which reflected the workshops varying lengths from as short as two hours to as long as ten months.
Participants reported previously attending 2.4 ± 2.8 workshops (n-510) in the last year and 22.9 ± 27.7 (n-508) in their lifetime. Participants reported reasons for attending their current workshop, including personal growth (n-519), spiritual (n-350), business (n-248), academic (n-85), and rest and relaxation (n-82). Fifty participants (9.5%) said they began the pre-survey after workshop activities had begun.
The means, standard deviations, and pre-post comparisons combining all the workshops are displayed in Table 3. Overall well-being, positive emotion, and compassion significantly increased, and negative emotion, sleep disturbance, and pain significantly decreased. All three interconnectedness measures significantly improved. Remote viewing had the only significant change in the extended perception tasks, with slightly above chance accuracy in the pre-survey and slightly below chance in the post-survey.
What Workshop and Individual Characteristics Produced Pre-Post Measure Changes?
Workshop format. The workshop formats of lecture, small group, pairs, and discussion predicted changes in the well-being measures (Table 4). For example, a small group workshop format was associated with -5.39 points in the AIOS change score (post-pre) at fixed levels of the other formats (covariates). None of the workshop format or content variables predicted change in the three interconnectedness measures. Only the discussion format predicted the extended perception measure score changes (X2 = 24.54, p = 0.0001; remote viewing change (β-0.10, SE-0.02), intuition change (β-53.69, SE-40.83), time estimation change (β-0.27, SE-0.32), bubble change (β-0.04, SE-0.01)).
Workshop content. Meditation and technology tools workshop content predicted well-being changes (Table 4). For example, meditation workshop content was associated with +3.61 points in the AIOS change score (post-pre) at fixed levels of the other formats (covariates). No other workshop content variables were significant for any other outcomes with multiple comparison corrections. Statistical output for the workshop characteristic models is in the Supplemental Data.
Demographics and mental and physical health. The demographics variables of age, gender, education, relationship, race, and income did not predict any outcome variable. Only one of the mental and physical health variables predicted an outcome: the personality trait of conscientiousness predicted well-being outcomes, although the direction of association varied (Table 4). For example, conscientiousness was associated with decreased overall well-being scores (AIOS) but improved sleep disturbance and pain.