Abstract

Efforts to establish a correlation between anomalous cognition (AC) performance and geomagnetic fluctuations (GMF) have met with mixed results. This study reexamines the correlation between AC and GMF including Local Sidereal Time (LST, the longitudinal-like astronomical coordinate for that portion of the celestial sphere directly overhead at the time of viewing) as a variable. The Spearman\'s rhocorrelation between the ap geomagnetic index and AC effect size was -0.029 in a large database of 2,879 free-response trials. However, a sharp increase in the magnitude of the correlation was found for trials occurring at approximately 13 hrs LST. This may be connected with an earlier result: the AC-effect size increases by 380% within 1 hr of 13.5 LST. The correlation observed here for trials which occurred between 11.2 hrs and 14.8 hrs LST was -0.192 while the correlation was effectively zero elsewhere. The maximum magnitude correlation of -0.33 was observed at 12.9 +-1 hrs !LST. The negative correlation peak was confirmed in both the ganzfeld and remote viewing protocols and was homogeneously present in those studies with trials in the relevant LST interval. This finding allows an understanding of the varying correlations to GMF found in different studies.