Natural Anomalous Cognition Targets: A Fuzzy Set application/Objetivos De Cognicion Natural Anomala: Una Aplicacion De Conjunto Difuso (Fuzzy set)/Cibles Naturelles Pour la Cognition Anomale: Une Application Des Sous-Ensembles flous/Naturliche Zielobjekte Zur Anomalen Kognition: Eine Fuzzy-Mengeanwendung

A traditional set (called a crisp set) is simply a collection of items that share a common property. For example the set of cities that possess 1,000,000 people or more includes New York, New Delhi, London, and Hong Kong. However, a city that has a population of 999,999 (i.e., one person short of a million) is not a member of this set of cities by definition. Zadeh (1965) realized that this kind of reasoning is not the way people actually think about problems. In this example there is no real difference between a city of one million people and one that is one person short of that number. Like crisp sets, fuzzy sets are simply a collection of items that generally share a common property. Using fuzzy sets, it is possible to construct a set of reasonably large cities. Here cities that differ by an insignificant number of people are still member of this set. In other words, fuzzy sets allow the quantification of the ambiguous. This concept has broad appeal outside the application to psi research. Because, for example, experimental psychology and cognitive psychology are concerned with how people think/feel about various concepts, using fuzzy rather than crisp descriptions of the concepts is valuable (Sternberg, 2008). Honorton (1975) may have been one of the first to encode pictorial information in a quantitative way. Honorton used 10 concepts from Van de Castle's dream research (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Van de Castle et al., 1972). Dream concepts included color, mythological characters, food, human artifacts, etc. These were turned into a binary system of characteristics either present or absent from a picture (usually a collage). For example, a colorful collage of superman sliding down a disembodied leg into a pile of bananas would have four of a possible 10 binary bits each with the value of one. For a variety of reasons this clever attempt was shortly abandoned, in part because of the lack of thematic content for any given collage and some of the 1,024 pictures in the set were a bit racy even for 1975 Brooklyn, New York. One of us (May) was present at Maimonides when this target pool was under construction. So much of this is first-hand recall. Then Jahn, Dunne, and Jahn (1980) advanced the free-response judging methodology by using a set of descripters for the target material. Later, however their free-response methodology was critiqued (Hansen, Utts, & Markwick, 1992), whereas the PEAR group offered a rebuttal (Dobyns, Dunne, Jahn, & Nelson, 1992). May et al. (1990) first applied fuzzy sets for the analysis of anomalous cognition (then called remote viewing) data and photographic targets; however their first attempt was cumbersome and the set of elements (USE)--all possible elements that might describe any of the target photographs--contained 130 separate elements, thus making it difficult to encode any given photograph. By universal we mean only within the jargon of fuzzy sets; that is, this universal set of elements is only for the design of the fuzzy sets for the particular sites and responses. It cannot be applied to any other circumstance. So by definition, it is not a generalized concept. For example, a USE for sites in India would not apply to sites in the US, and a USE for sites in California would not work for sites in the Eastern half of the US. Using a different photographic target pool May et al. (2012) reduced the USE down to a more manageable set of 24 elements. Our first attempt to apply this technique to natural sites occurred as part of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research workshop hosted by the School of Management at GITAM University near Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India in 2011. Over the course of an 8 week, 8 hours/day, 6 days/week intensive, we carried out a preliminary search of sites within one half hour drive of the university. As with any new approach there were numerous false starts both with site selection as well as the design of a proper USE. …