Much Ado about Entanglement: A Novel Approach to Test Nonlocal Communication via Violation of ‘Local Realism’

Abstract

Background: The term ‘entanglement’ is often used in recentliterature to help explain an apparent nonlocal communicationwithin a psychophysical context, and is herestrictly taken as equivalent to a violation of what physicistscall ‘local realism’. Methods: Conceptual basics ofnonlocal communication in psychophysical experimentsare introduced in analogy to their usage in quantumphysics to investigate local realism. Violations of local realismare tested using an algorithm adopted from the InformationTheoretic Bell Inequality (ITBI) known to quantumtheory. The algorithm involves a generic distantmentation experiment. Results: An experimental designand an analytical method to test psychophysical entanglementpresumed to be involved in a medical or psychologicalcontext are introduced. The mathematicalfoundations are presented in a didactically simple-to-followapproach. Conclusions: The ITBI can be extendedinto the fields of medicine and psychological science,thereby providing a guideline for researchers to follow inorder to estimate whether or not some kind of ‘action ata distance’ may be real in the phenomenon under investigation.