Psychic powers what are the odds?
IN THE lobby of the Flamingo Hilton, This promise of steady, if unspectacular, loss is
supposed to draw in the punters from the gritty heat of the If ever proof were needed against the existence of
telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition or any other form of psychic power,
the gambling halls of Las Vegas seem to provide the perfect place to find it.
The odds on every game of chance - from the slot machines and crap games to
the blackjack and roulette tables - have been fine-tuned to fractions of a
per cent. Judging by the faces masked in concentration, it can hardly be said
that the gamblers are not exerting every psychic effort to win. And yet still
the cash flows into the pockets of the casino owners in an even, predictable
stream. Despite such everyday evidence, people continue to
believe in the power of the mind. Public opinion polls commonly find that as
many as a quarter of the population are convinced
that they personally have experienced premonitions or moments of telepathic
understanding. Belief in the psychic seems impossible to shake. But what if
someone could design the perfect laboratory test? A test that could settle
the matter once and for all, either revealing believers to be dupes or
forcing sceptics finally to start taking mental
powers seriously? The dream of such an experiment has led parapsychology -
the science of psychic research - to experiments which mirror the very games
of chance which have made the gambling industry so profitable. Roll of a dice Under tightly-controlled conditions, subjects try to
influence the outcome of a random event such as the roll of a dice, the
radioactive decay of an atom, the diffraction pattern of a beam of light, the
fall of a cascade of polystyrene balls, or the "direction" taken by
electrical noise. What is more, some parapsychologists claim to be seeing an
anomalous effect. They are reporting a deviation from chance which is
vanishingly small - just a tenth of a per cent - but when measured over
millions of trials, this faint effect multiplies into a hugely significant
distortion of the apparent odds. The results of these trials have provided inspiration
for some apparently wacky research into the possibility of
"thought-controlled" household appliances. Dean Radin, a researcher
at the But before we get carried away by visions of an effortless,
thought-driven world, what is the scientific status of micro-psychokinesis -
supposed ability of the mind to influence small events. Psychic experiments with random systems date back to at
least the 1930s. But most of the early research relied on dice or mechanical
devices which, because of slight imperfections of manufacture, could never be
truly random, and which were also rather susceptible to fraud. Reviews of
this work showed that the tighter the controls, the less likely an
experimenter was to report an effect. In the 1970s, Helmut Schmidt of the Mind Science
Foundation in Demolition job Jahn's
work is currently the most respected of PK studies because of its scale and
technical sophistication - although as was made plain when Jahn featured in a recent BBC2 TV series, Heretic, his
move into parapsychology has horrified Even in the safety of his Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory funded by the McDonnell Foundation and
the Fetzer Institute, in the basement of the
engineering department, Jahn has had to face a
barrage of criticism from former colleagues and other sceptics.
Some dismissed his results as being caused by faulty laboratory equipment, others have even suggested that they could be
the result of fraud. There is also a constant demand for Jahn
to clearly define the mechanism that converts thought to action. Despite this rough treatment by fellow academics, Jahn - like most parapsychologists - is surprisingly open
and helpful when questioned about his research. His first remark is that
commonsense examples such as gambling are not a particularly good argument
against paranormal powers. Jahn points out that in
group situations, such as race courses and roulette games, many people would
be willing different outcomes and these are likely to cancel each other out.
Then, of course, there are the management's wishes to consider. Another confounding factor, he believes, is the
possibility of "psi-missing" where some people might consistently
get the opposite of what they try to will. Finally, the size of the effect
being claimed - just a tenth of a per cent - is so small that it could easily
be built into the odds on gambling devices like slot machines. Tossing a coin Jahn
has also gone out of his way to counter criticisms of his scientific
technique by running all his experiments under the controlled conditions of
the laboratory. His basic experiment, which he has been running for 14 years,
is simple. He built a random event generator - roughly, the electronic
equivalent of tossing a coin. A thousand times a second, the white noise
produced by a diode is sampled and its phase will produce either a positive
or a negative value. On average, there should be an equal split. Jahn gets people to sit in front of the generator and
will it to produce either more "heads" or "tails". The
subjects - or operators, as Jahn calls them - can
see how well they are doing from a cumulative line rising or falling on a
computer screen. The most common criticism of this kind of experiment is
that either the machine is probably not truly random in performance or that
the recording of the results leaves too much scope for mistakes and even
plain fraud. Jahn has gone to great lengths to
counter these possibilities. The design of the random event generator does not seem
to be in question. Measured over many days and millions of readings, its
output has been perfectly well-behaved - even to the point where it throws up
the occasional "excursion" into apparently significant deviations
from chance. If left to run long enough, a properly random system should
sometimes stray quite a way from the mean, and Jahn's
generator produced the expected number of such excursions during its
calibration trials. The generator also has safeguards against tampering.
Subjects are normally left alone during trials and, sceptics
have suggested that its output could be affected by something as crude as it
being given a kick, to more subtle effects like waving a magnet near it or
even just leaning towards the machine and creating some sort of weak
capacitance effect from the static on a subject's clothing. To guard against such possibilities, Jahn has fitted the generator with various warning bells
and temperature gauges. But more importantly, the sampling method does not
rely on the raw output of the noise diode. Instead, the definition of what
counts as a head or tail is alternated with each trial, so a positive signal
will be counted as a head on one trial, but a tail the next. This added twist
would cancel out any inherent bias that the equipment might develop during
the course of an experiment. Switching the polarity criteria a thousand times
a second would also seem to rule out any deliberate, or even inadvertent,
tampering by subjects. Controlling conditions And as yet another precaution, the performance of subjects
is measured against three conditions: subjects must move the line up for half
the time; down for half the time; and, as a control, they must sit by the
box, leaving it to perform on its own. Jahn says it
is difficult to think what kind of equipment failure or environmental
interference could change its direction as the subject has to switch between
each of the three conditions. The control over recording data seem
equally stringent. One complaint against many earlier parapsychology
experiments was that subjects could begin and end trials as they wanted. By
recording trials that seemed to be going in the desired direction, and
aborting sessions once they began to produce a downward turn using the excuse
of having a headache or suddenly feeling uninspired, subjects could
manipulate an experiment to create a result. But Jahn
guarded against such perils by specifying the number of trials to be
completed in advance and insisting that all results be recorded in the final
database. In addition, the initiation of each session and the logging of
results was controlled by computer software. Not
only were results automatically dumped onto tape, but the computer printed
out a separate paper record and subjects wrote up their scores in the
laboratory's logbook. With an apparently watertight design, Jahn reported his first major batch of results in 1986
after completing a quarter of a million experimental trials (a trial
consisting of 200 "coin-flips" in each of the three conditions).
This was already several hundred times more data than collected by any other
micro-PK researcher. But Jahn and the small team he
assembled kept on going, and by last year Jahn had
reached 14 million trials using over 100 different subjects. In brief, the results he has found are tiny but highly
significant. The size of the effect is about 0.1 per cent, meaning that for
every thousand electronic tosses, the random event generator is producing
about one more head or tail than it should by chance alone. However, while
microscopic, the effect is so constant that there is only a 1 in 5000 chance
that Jahn's results are a statistical fluke rather
than some kind of anomaly. So it seems like game, set and match to the
parapsychologists. An experiment which was designed to meet all the standard
criticisms of psychic research has come up with a steady, robust result.
Certainly Jahn's work appears to have put sceptics, such as James Alcock
of Since reporting his early results in 1986, Jahn has extended the scope of his experiments. What he
has found is that the anomalous effect appears astonishingly insensitive to
changing circumstances. The size of the effect, for example, remains much the
same when instead of testing the influence of subjects on a physical process
- the random thermal movement of electrons across a transistor junction, for
example - Jahn asks them to disturb the output of a
pseudo-random source. The pseudo-random number generator is just a repetitive
mathematical calculation, so it would seem that the mind is as good at
influencing arithmetic as real events. The size of the effect also appeared constant when Jahn tested subjects with a random mechanical cascade.
This device is a pinball machine, looking rather like a giant version of the
popular Japanese arcade game, pachenko, in which
9000 polystyrene balls are dropped through a grid of nylon pegs, bouncing and
skittering to collect in bins at the bottom. In an unbiased system, the balls
should end up with a classic Gaussian bell-shaped distribution. But Jahn claims that when subjects sat in front of this
three-metre-high "macro-PK" device, they
were able to produce slight deviations to the side. More implausibly still, the effects on all three
systems seemed impervious to distance and time. Over the past few years, Jahn has reported the results of large-scale trials in
which 30 people attempted to influence the devices from as far away as In another batch of trials using the same people, Jahn asked them to make their efforts up to several days
before or after the running of the machine. If anything, says Jahn, the effect was slightly stronger under such extreme
conditions. Jahn
is not perturbed by such a pattern of results. He says that on the face of
it, if psychic powers exist, they should be strongest when subjects are
closest to the equipment. Also it seems likely that feedback on success rates
and the kind of device being used should have an effect. But Jahn believes that micro-PK is misnamed because what is actually
happening is not a mental interference with a physical event but something
much more subtle - a distortion of the laws of statistics themselves. Jahn thinks that subjects somehow distort the
"probability envelope" of an outcome. How they are supposed to do so is far from clear. Jahn has written about how such a view ties in with a
quantum mechanical view of consciousness in Margins of Reality, coauthored
with Brenda Dunne, who manages the laboratory. Jahn
argues that, like quantum systems, consciousness appears to have both a
"particle" and a "wave" aspect. Consciousness is at its
most concrete and particle-like when involved in ordinary rational thought,
but becomes fluid and wave-like when thinking is creative and holistic. Jahn cites the wave aspect of quantum systems which
allows the systems occasionally to penetrate physical barriers - a phenomenon
familiar to microelectronics engineers who have seen this effect with quantum
tunnelling in which particles can be made to
"leap" across insulated junctions. So, by analogy, the mind might
be able to reach beyond the brain and have a faint resonant influence on the
surrounding world. Mumbo jumbo Sceptics,
however, treat such talk as mumbo jumbo. They point out that, for a start,
statistics are something that emerge from the behaviour of random processes, not something that creates
them. Instead, sceptics see the surprising
insensitivity of the claimed PK effect as being rather fishy. Suspicions have hardened as sceptics
have looked more closely at the fine detail of Jahn's
results. Attention has focused on the fact that one of the experimental
subjects - believed to be a member of the PEAR laboratory staff - is almost
single-handedly responsible for the significant results of the studies. This was noted as long ago as 1985 by a fellow
parapsychologist, John Palmer of Sceptics
like Alcock and Hyman say naturally it is a serious
concern that staff at PEAR have been acting as guinea pigs in their own
experiments. But it becomes positively alarming if one of the staff - with
intimate knowledge of the data recording and processing procedures - is
making such a huge contribution to the "successful" results. Adding fuel to the controversy, sceptics
have pointed to the strange behaviour of the
baseline condition results. Theoretically, the baseline condition should show
the same gently wandering pattern as the calibration trials which separately
validated the generator's performance, with occasional excursions into areas
of apparent significance. Instead, the baseline result has stuck unnaturally
close to a zero deviation from chance. In noting these results, Jahn
himself has remarked that what makes the situation even odder is that when
the baseline statistics and the high and low scores are all added together,
the result is a well-behaved Gaussian distribution. It is almost as if the
extra hits found in the high and low scores had been taken from what would
otherwise have been outliers of the baseline condition. Alcock
says this is exactly the sort of pattern that might be expected if some sort
of data sorting had been going on. Given an effect size of just one in a
thousand, it would not take much to distort Jahn's
results. Little of this speculation has been discussed openly by
CSICOP members - to do so would be virtually to accuse Jahn's
laboratory of fraud, and sceptics admit they have
no proof of that. Alcock also stresses that Jahn is widely respected and such alterations need not be
deliberate, they could happen as the result of honest mix-ups. Jahn,
however, says he is well aware there has been a whispering campaign and he
welcomes the chance to put the record straight. With candour,
Jahn says no experimental design can ever rule out
fraud. But he believes that the recording procedures at PEAR are unusually
tight and any fiddling with results would have to be systematic because it
would have to include the laboratory's computer database, the print-outs and
subjects' entries in the logbook. Jahn adds that sceptics have had a longstanding invitation to check his
work first-hand and the few that have dropped by seem to have left relatively
impressed. Into the unknown Jahn
admits that operator 10 - whom he insists must remain anonymous - has been
responsible for a large proportion of the significant findings. But he makes
two points. First, at least four or five other of the 100 subjects show a
more powerful effect than operator 10. What is different is that they have
been involved in far fewer trials. Jahn says if
these better performers had been able to do as many runs
as operator 10 - and if the strength of their effects persisted - then
operator 10's results would have dropped away into the background. His second point is that when the contributions of all
the operators are plotted, they form a smooth continuum. Just as there are a
few high performers like operator 10 at one end of the spectrum, so there are
an equal number of poor performers - even psi-missers
- at the other end who drag the overall numbers down. With over 100 subjects,
statistically speaking there would have to be a few high-end scorers like
operator 10, so no sinister conclusions should be drawn from that fact alone. As to the "too perfect" baseline, Jahn says this fits in neatly with his argument that what
subjects are doing is bending statistics rather than having a direct
influence on physical events. It seems that, in the short term, subjects can
pull the scoring in one direction. But this has to be balanced by a shortfall
in later extreme scores. However, in the end, says Jahn,
sceptics will always be able to dismiss positive
results from a parapsychology experiment. Suspicions of fraud, faulty
machinery or plain mistaken recording of data can never be completely
countered. Jahn says the only way forward is to
have the same experiment replicated by other laboratories. This is why he has
recently built a cheap, solid-state version of his random event generator and
over the past year he has been farming them out to other interested
investigators. Yet even replications may not be the answer, given the
strength of entrenched views. Hardened sceptics are
just as likely to find reasons to suspect a successful replication. And, of
course, the same doubts work the other way. If a scientist produces negative
results (see "The luck of the draw"), then the parapsychologists
may be the ones to start talking about incompetence and faulty procedures. Recent experience suggests there may never be a simple,
conclusive test of the existence of psychic powers. However, Jahn's work does seem to narrow the boundaries somewhat,
for if such abilities exists, then their effects appear microscopically
small. They also seem quite bizarrely resistant to the constraints of time,
place and logic. Knowing what science is not looking for, at least is knowing something. The luck of the draw WHILE successful parapsychology experiments grab
attention, failures to find a result rarely get any press. But one recent
experiment - modelled closely on Robert Jahn's micro-PK studies - is worth mentioning. Stan Jeffers, a physicist at Jeffer's
idea was to test people's ability to bend a beam of light and so distort the
interference pattern created as it passed through a diffraction slit. Jeffers
says the experiment was a straight optical equivalent of Jahn's
polystyrene ball cascade, except that because he used photons, subjects were
dealing with "zillions" of events per second and so he expected any
effect to show up quickly. After testing over 80 people - including
self-proclaimed psychics - Jeffers found only chance results. Jahn
himself admits that he expected Jeffers's experiment to work and was puzzled
when it did not. Jahn has since lent Jeffers one of
his new miniature random noise generators and Jeffers is planning further
investigations. |