# Experiment Plans ## E1 — Distributed Binding and Aesthetic Resonance **Question:** Do subjective consonance and dissonance correspond to reproducible distributed neural patterns? **Design:** Present visual and auditory stimuli that are matched for luminance, loudness, duration, and approximate complexity but vary in harmonicity, symmetry, temporal regularity, and learned meaning. Participants rate consonance, dissonance, familiarity, pleasantness, and arousal. **Measures:** EEG or MEG; ECG/HRV; respiration; skin conductance; eye movements; reaction time; trial-level ratings. **Predictions:** Ratings should be better predicted by distributed connectivity and phase relationships than by activity in a single sensory region. Neural patterns should distinguish experienced consonance from physical intensity after preregistered covariates are included. **Metaversalist interpretation:** Aesthetic resonance may have a measurable neurodynamic correlate. **Critical controls:** Scrambled versions, intensity-matched stimuli, counterbalanced order, musical training, mood, hearing/vision screening, multiple-comparison correction, held-out participants. --- ## E2 — Resonance-Frequency Perception **Question:** Do frequency-tagged or rhythmic inputs produce stimulus-specific phase-locking that predicts perception? **Design:** Use nonharmonic flicker or amplitude-modulated tones at several tracer frequencies, including a neutral intermediate frequency. Ask participants to classify the stimulus or report which learned category it resembles. **Measures:** Stimulus-frequency EEG/MEG power, interregional phase-locking, evoked-potential morphology, behavioral classification, confidence. **Predictions:** Correctly perceived categories should show more stable distributed temporal patterns than errors. A neutral stimulus should sometimes recruit a learned pattern, but the effect must be separated from response bias and physical frequency distance. **John connection:** This is the closest direct adaptation of the tracer-stimulus and distributed-coherence logic described in John’s paper. **Critical controls:** Randomized trial sequences, equalized stimulus energy, no-feedback blocks, preregistered decoding, source-localization caution, replication with a second modality. --- ## E3 — Observer–Environment Coupling **Question:** Does structured environmental input alter neural and autonomic coherence beyond ordinary sensory intensity and expectation? **Design:** Compare quiet, structured, and deliberately dissonant environments. Vary geometry, rhythm, color, sound, and symbolic content independently where possible. Include passive viewing and active co-creation blocks in which participants modify the environment. **Measures:** EEG/MEG, HRV, respiration, skin conductance, pupil diameter, movement, subjective presence, agency, coherence, and environmental-state logs. **Predictions:** Environmental structure should explain incremental variance in neural and autonomic measures after intensity, novelty, expectation, and participant preference are modeled. Active co-creation may produce a feedback effect: the participant’s output changes the next environmental state, which changes the participant’s response. **Metaversalist interpretation:** The observer–environment relation can be tested without assuming a nonlocal field. **Critical controls:** Blind or masked hypotheses, randomized environments, matched stimulus energy, habituation analysis, no-contact control, preregistered causal model. --- ## E4 — Memory Reinstatement and Endogenous Patterns **Question:** Do learned patterns reappear during ambiguous perception and predict the meaning assigned to a stimulus? **Design:** Train participants on two categories paired with distinct visual or auditory tracer patterns. Introduce neutral or ambiguous stimuli between the trained conditions. Record neural activity before the behavioral response and test whether the participant’s eventual interpretation is predicted by reinstatement of one learned pattern. **Measures:** Time-resolved EEG/MEG decoding, evoked-potential morphology, reaction time, confidence, memory tests, pupil response. **Predictions:** Pre-response neural activity should contain category-specific information before an overt decision. Reinstatement should be distributed and should predict trial-by-trial interpretation better than sensory evidence alone. **John connection:** This operationalizes the paper’s discussion of endogenous activity, memory, neutral stimuli, and behaviorally appropriate patterns. **Critical controls:** Cross-validation, temporal leakage prevention, stimulus-only decoding baseline, response-motor controls, counterbalanced category labels, delayed-response condition. --- ## E5 — Coherence, Choice, and Erasure Cost **Question:** Do retention, revision, and binary choice have measurable physiological signatures that could motivate—not prove—a Landauer analogy? **Design:** Participants make binary choices under three conditions: simple choice, choice followed by forced revision, and choice followed by intentional forgetting or replacement. The task should separate decision difficulty, emotional salience, response conflict, and memory updating. **Measures:** EEG/MEG, ECG/HRV, skin conductance, respiration, pupil diameter, reaction time, subjective effort, and if available, indirect metabolic measures. **Predictions:** Revision and memory replacement may increase measurable autonomic and neural cost relative to simple choice, but the effect must be explained against conflict and workload models before any thermodynamic interpretation is considered. **Metaversalist interpretation:** “Erasure has a cost” becomes a cautious information-processing hypothesis, not evidence that human emotion literally measures Landauer energy. **Critical controls:** Difficulty-matched controls, randomized trial types, workload ratings, calorimetry only with qualified oversight, no claims about fundamental constants from small physiological effects. --- ## E6 — Distributed Group Coherence **Question:** Do groups coordinating around a shared task show more persistent relational patterns than isolated individuals or randomly coupled groups? **Design:** Small groups complete repeated communication and coordination tasks over several weeks. Compare stable teams, reshuffled teams, and asynchronous controls. Log messages, task state, response times, and role changes. **Measures:** Network entropy, mutual predictability, topic persistence, repair time after disagreement, individual HRV during sessions, and optional synchronized EEG for a small laboratory subset. **Predictions:** Stable groups may develop persistent interaction motifs. The test is whether those motifs generalize to held-out sessions and exceed matched null networks—not whether they constitute a group mind. **Metaversalist interpretation:** Distributed intelligence may be studied as an emergent property of relations. **Critical controls:** Privacy-preserving logs, preregistered graph metrics, null-model generation, attrition analysis, facilitator effects, no inference of private mental states from communication traces. --- ## E7 — Circadian and Geophysical Covariates **Question:** Do coherence measures covary with environmental variables after ordinary biological confounds are controlled? **Design:** Longitudinally record EEG or simplified wearable measures, HRV, sleep, light exposure, activity, stress, medication, caffeine, local weather, geomagnetic indices, solar-wind data, and time of day. **Predictions:** Any claimed geophysical association must survive adjustment for sleep, season, location, temperature, barometric pressure, social schedule, and multiple testing. A preregistered null result is informative. **Metaversalist interpretation:** This is a covariance screen, not a cosmic-substrate test. **Critical controls:** Large sample, repeated measures, independent analysis, negative-control variables, out-of-sample prediction, correction for autocorrelation and shared time trends. --- ## E8 — Cosmic-Substrate Tests **Question:** Is there a reproducible residual signal that requires a neutrino or non-electromagnetic substrate explanation? **Prerequisite:** A quantitative model specifying the carrier, coupling mechanism, expected signal, energy range, timing, directionality, and effect size. Without this, the experiment is not falsifiable. **Design:** Coordinate with qualified particle-physics laboratories and use independent neutrino, gamma, environmental, EEG, and autonomic instrumentation. Treat PTOLEMY, IceCube-Gen2, KM3NeT, DUNE, and related facilities as institutional partners or data sources—not hobby substitutes. **Success criterion:** A preregistered signal replicates across instruments and laboratories, predicts held-out data, and remains after ordinary electromagnetic, thermal, circadian, social, and statistical explanations are exhausted. **Failure criterion:** The result disappears under better controls, fails replication, or is explained by known environmental or biological variables. **Safety:** No home-built high-voltage, radiation, vacuum, or strong-field apparatus without qualified supervision and formal safety review. --- ## Shared analysis standard Every experiment should publish the hypothesis, primary outcome, exclusion criteria, sample-size rationale, randomization, preprocessing pipeline, null model, correction for multiple comparisons, and replication plan before inspecting the decisive results. Separate **data**, **interpretation**, and **metaphor** in the final report.