All in the mind

Get creative with a pioneer funder of parapsychology and psychophysiology research

For many researchers working from home during Covid-19 lockdowns, the passage of time has seemed unusually elastic. For Marc Wittmann, a researcher of time perception at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, such temporal flexibility is normal.

In 2018, Wittmann won a grant from the Bial Foundation for research on time perception after meditation. The foundation, set up in 1994 by the Portuguese pharmaceutical company Bial in conjunction with the Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities, “pursues a scientifically rigorous approach to some of the more debated and often neglected areas of psychophysiology and parapsychology”.