The Bial Foundation, created in 1994 by Portuguese pharmaceutical company Bial, supports scientific study of the human being in both physical and spiritual aspects. It funds neuroscience, psychophysiology and parapsychology, and also promotes research projects through grants, symposia and an online documentation centre and database.
- Since 1994, the foundation has awarded biennial grants, gradually increasing to the current maximum of €60,000, and has supported more than 800 projects in 29 countries.
- About 30% of its grants go to parapsychology, with a further 19% spanning parapsychology and psychophysiology.
- Since 1996, its Behind and Beyond the Brain symposia have brought neuroscientists and parapsychologists together, while its online repository and database widen access to funded research.
Research Funding
Bial’s first grants were made in 1994 and have been made biennially ever since. Each is worth up to €60,000. The foundation has supported more than 800 projects by more than 1600 researchers and centres in 29 countries. More than 2,000 papers have been published, many of them in leading journals. About 30% of grants are awarded for parapsychological research and 19% for research that spans parapsychology and psychophysiology. A list of grant recipients across countries, by year, is available on the noted web page.1Bial (2023).
The Bial website has recently been overhauled and the grants section expanded. Each round of grants page gives the researcher(s) for each grant, the host institution, the title of the research and a link to the results once completed.2E.g., 2022 Grants. The breakdown of grant statistics is available on the website as a downloading PDF file.
Symposia
Since 1996, Bial has held biennial symposia under the heading ‘Behind and Beyond the Brain’, a platform for Bial-funded researchers in neuroscience and parapsychology to present their findings. Topics covered include placebo effects, healing and meditation, mind-matter interactions, sleep and dreams, intuition and decision-making, memory, exceptional experiences, emotions and, the most recent, enhancing the mind. Details are available on the website. Participants have included:
Miguel Castelo-Branco (Coimbra)
Axel Cleeremans (Brussels)
António Damásio (Los Angeles)
Hoyt Edge (Florida)
Peter Fenwick (London)
Eberhard Fetz (Washington)
Fernando Gil (Sorbonne)
Allan Hobson (Harvard)
Jerome Kagan (Harvard)
Irving Kirsch (Boston)
Lorenza Colzato (Leiden)
Stephen Kosslyn (San Francisco)
Stephen Laberge (Stanford)
Dietrich Lehmann (Zurich)
Fernando Lopes da Silva (Amsterdam)
Edwin May (Palo Alto),
Robert Morris (Edinburgh)
Dean Radin (Nevada)
Alcino Silva (Los Angeles)
Ian Stevenson (Virginia)
Robert Stickgold (Harvard)
Documentation and Database
In 2014, Bial launched the documentation centre which serves as its document repository, including references, and downloadable research papers. Editions of the Bial Award, ‘Behind and Beyond the Brain’ symposia and grants for scientific research are all accessible and downloadable in most cases.
The foundation’s database includes information regarding projects in the fields of psychophysiology and parapsychology that have been supported by the Foundation since its inception in 1994 to the present time. This information is retrievable by keyword or more advanced searches. The database also indicates which documents are indexed in the various academic sources: SCOPUS and ISI Web of Science.
Michael Duggan
Literature
Bial (2023). Grants: Grants programme for scientific research. [Web page.]