Recommend:

1. Use primarily female test subjects.  Almost all women I know well have reported some kind of psychic experience.  Different brain wiring, genetic factors or cultural conditioning may play a part.  Possible target groups:
   1. Moms with children that are young, age 5-10.  This group should have the strongest bonds as the kids are big enough to get into serious trouble, but not yet in puberty.  Any psi abilities would be strongly selected for in this group from an evolutionary perspective.
   2. Post-menopausal women
   3. Aspie women.  Harder to find but may be a savant skill.
   4. Female twins or close siblings, not otherwise pair bonded.
   5. If you did use breeding age women, then may have to structure the test around pair bonding.  Hard to find those with true pair bonds.
   6. Could use people and their pets but working with animals gets a lot more complicated.
   7. Could use young children as they are more instinctive and less hampered by cultural limits.  Hide the treat and have them find it????
2. Control variables to measure for significance
   1. Control for belief in psy abilities among subjects.  Those who do not believe may be invested in a negative result.
   2. Control for physical health.  I don’t have any personal experiences on this, but I would suspect this is a factor as well given that pain or health problems will distract or imbalance the system.
   3. Control for mental health.  Major emotional turmoil is going to overwhelm any signals.
   4. Control for medications, prefer none although note my own experience with antianxiety meds above says they may help.
   5. Control for abuse as a child either in family or community.  Highly developed survival skills may create a more receptive mind.  On the other hand, hyper-focus on survival may block calm self awareness for receiving signals.
3. Avoid use of subjects between puberty and age 25.
   1. Seems like breeding age tends to create too much mental and emotional background noise.  Some post-menopausal women have reported that their metaphysical awareness increased once they were no longer fertile.  Hormone levels may play a direct role.
   2. My own experience in a pair bond actually confirmed my abilities.  However, other than echos related to the other half of the pair, I did not get much info.  I suspect that much of my awareness during that life stage was hyper-concentrated on breeding opportunities.
4. Experimental setting
   1. Could try an sensory deprivation tank or other warm, wet, soothing setting.  This seems like it would be good for receiving messages.
   2. Create a guided visualization exercise recording that teaches the basics of focus and reception.  Have subjects listen to this a number of times prior to the first true test event.
   3. Use a few fake tests first and tell all subjects that they were getting right answers.  This could help them relax and take the performance pressure off, as well as increase confidence.
   4. Could create a team structure then send the teams through some kind of emotionally challenging adventure.  Since experiencing a crisis together can cause people to bond quickly this may create other test options.
5. Test Events
   1. Could use a maze where one of the team members is blind folded and the other is outside of the maze nearby.  The one outside can see the maze and partner from the top and must send messages on how to navigate out of the maze mentally.  Need to intensify it somehow so that participants care about the outcome, such as obstacles where participants gets wet or bucket of ping pong balls dumps on them.
   2. Playing cards for money.  This is a calm, focused setting that is non-threatening where abilities could be in use.  This could be predicting others actions or playing based on which cards they others have.  Need them to take notes as they play.  Use double or triple decks to avoid card counting.  Could use roulette but I think you will get stronger results with people to people connections. Similar approach would be a rigged slot machine.
   3. Having doors and putting people behind them, such as with the Mom and child pairs.  Can the Mom pick the correct door where her child is?  Simulates finding a lost child.
   4. Arrivals.  Have one of the pairs be in one location and the other is waiting for the arrival.  Do they sense when the person is about to show.  Have them identify yes no and intensity on a scale.
   5. Remote activities of one of the pair.  One in a number of possible nearby locations is performing an assigned sequence of tasks, using assigned objects.  Can the other correctly identify what, when, and where?
   6. Use the false limb illusion to create a situation where subjects would anticipate an ‘injury’ to the false limb.  This allows the use of a perceived hazard to elicit a strong motivation for self preservation.
6. Develop talent
   1. Use a series of elimination tests to find those with the strongest talents.
   2. Then do in depth epidemiological analysis of the strongest ones to see if there are any commonalities in their backgrounds.  I would even take it down to the genetic level if possible.
   3. Then take the backgrounds that seem to be strongest for talent and create a whole new test group based on those criteria, rather than the self reported abilities.
   4. Then create control groups with wash outs and another with the self reporting talent set.  See how their performance compares after the same number of tests.
   5. I suspect that using this as a continuing cycle of refinement could help pin down any ways to identify those with abilities that may still be latent.  I believe a regimen of preparation and training given to those who are likely talents could over time produce strong repeatable abilities that could then be assessed in detail.
7. Measuring magnitude and weighting factors.
   1. Once you can isolate the target population, types of preparation and testing that give you the strongest result, then need to regress various factors that either enhance or inhibit abilities to see which are truly having a meaningful impact.
   2. Switch out emotionally connected pairs of testers with others who are not emotionally connected.  Try to pin down if connectedness has significant degrees.
      1. Never met strangers
      2. Just introduced
      3. Oriented group, with assigned pairs (could even fake that one has confirmed psy ability)
      4. Pairs where one is allowed to chose the other (enables attraction factors)
   3. Would having multiple people send the message or make the choice help or hurt the result?  Since we are social creatures, do our combined awareness facilitate each other?  Or do our group interactions create background noise that disrupts the extra senses?
   4. Test range in distance and time
   5. Test development of abilities longitudinally over study
   6. Dream notes