Rachel links to an amazing WIRED Magazine article (oops! her link's bad, so I'm linking it) on a study that showed that people may be able to affect the performance of computers with their minds, simpy by forming an intent. The effect was small but measurable and statistically significant. (The lab's masters are careful to say they've only shown a correlation, not proven an effect.)
It doesn't matter if participants are in or outside the room or across the country. And they don't have to put in a lot of mental effort, straining and grunting. Just form the intent, then read a book. It still happens.
Men and women seem to affect the outcome differently. The most powerful effect emanates from "pairs of the opposite sex who are romantically involved" -- "often seven times greater than when the same individuals are tested alone." (Note: try this with gay people.)
Environmental conditions -- such as room temperature -- also don't matter, but the tester's mood and attitude do. It helps, for example, if the participant believes he or she can affect the machine.
Sound too-too woo-woo? The lab, called PEAR, for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, is directed by Princeton professor emeritus Robert Jahn, a physicist and former dean of the university's engineering school. It isn't funded by the University, but by private donors --
like James S. McDonnell, founder of McDonnell Aircraft (later McDonnell Douglas and now part of Boeing), Laurance Rockefeller and John Fetzer, former owner of the Detroit Tigers baseball team and CEO of Fetzer broadcasting.Jahn said McDonnell was concerned with how critical electronic systems could be vulnerable to the mindset of human operators under stress.
"McDonnell said he couldn't in good conscience put a young man in the cockpit of an F-18 and assume that all of the highly sophisticated equipment was totally invulnerable to the stress that the pilot would be under in combat or other emergencies," Jahn recalled. "He wanted some research to judge how much he needed to harden that equipment to make it invulnerable to that influence."
Government intelligence, defense and space agencies also have shown interest in the lab's research, which Jahn said he has freely shared.
I don't know about you, but my mind is blown. There's some evidence that people can do this with other people, but with machines?? Yow.
Of course there are skeptics:
The lab has many detractors who have found fault with Pear's methodologies and dismiss the work as entertainment, comparing the results to motorists who wish for a red light to turn green and think that because the light changes they caused it.
See what you think! (Hey, could this be why my car has starter trouble only when I'm really stressed out and in a hurry?)
- amba
A skeptical take on all this.
A general point worth remembering: psychic research has a history of false positives being generated by small, innocent mistakes. Example: one experiment had people talk about what images came to mind as they tried to "remote view" a distant location. This was done with different locations over several days, one per day. Transcripts and info on the sites were provided to judges, who had a high rate of sucess matching the two without knowing the correct matches.
Only they did know the correct ones. The transcripts contained hints as to what days they were made on. When these were edited out, sucess in matching fell to chance rate.
Good cautionary tale. Until the larger scientific community is won over, I'm thinking it's bogus.
Posted by: Chris Hallquist | July 23, 2005 at 09:31 PM