Q. If psychic powers like psychokinesis or precognition really exist
why is there no credible laboratory evidence for them?
A. In 1986 a medical study was conducted in the US to test the effectiveness
of aspirin in helping those with heart trouble. Had the researchers
restricted their study to 3,000 test subjects they would have found that aspirin
was no better than a placebo.
But because they had an unprecedented 22,000 people in the study they
discovered almost at once that aspirin had an overwhelmingly powerful curative
value -- in fact if you take an aspirin a day it will cut your chance of a heart
attack by a massive 45%, almost in half.
The reason for this curious result is that what statisticians call the
'effect size' of aspirin is very small (0.03). Even though aspirin is a
lifesaver that is now prescribed automatically to every coronary victim, its
effect could not be observed in clinical trials until there was a large enough
sample -- and it has taken more than 100 years for the effect to be discovered.
Something very similar appears to be the case with paranormal phenomena. The
studies conducted in the past with a few hundred or a few thousand subjects
produced marginal results that were not much better than chance expectation --
just like aspirin.
In recent
years a new approach called meta-analysis has enabled parapsychologists to
combine the
results of many different studies to make the aggregate results
statistically significant.
Some of the most outstanding results so far have
come from meta-analysis of experiments like those carried out by Robert Jahn and
Roger Nelson of
the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) programme at Princeton
University, where researchers have accumulated years of statistical trials on
microscopically small psychokinetic effects -- known in the jargon of the
paranormal business as Micro-PK.
Test subjects are asked to try to consciously
influence electronic devices whose output should be random, rather like an
electronic version of coin tossing.
horror movies, your password.
In December 1989 Dean Radin of Princeton's
Psychology Department and Roger Nelson of the PEAR lab published a paper on the
meta-analysis of micro-PK experiments not, as might be expected, in a
parapsychology journal but in the respected physics journal Foundations of
Physics. Their paper was entitled, 'Evidence for consciousness-related
anomalies in random physical systems.' In their analysis, Radin and Nelson
tracked down 152 reports describing 597 experimental studies and 235 control
studies by 68 different investigators involving the influence of consciousness
on microelectronic systems.
Radin and Nelson's studies showed that the
aggregate of all these trials dramatically provided powerful evidence for micro-PK.
For they found that the odds against the overall result being the result of
chance was 1 in 1035.
To understand how unlikely it is that this result
was obtained by chance, it is like finding a lottery ticket in the street,
finding that it is the winning ticket and you have won first prize of millions
-- and then continuing to find the winning lottery in the street every week for
a thousand years.
That such findings continue to be dismissed shows more clearly
than anything could that the "skeptics" are not evaluating the data
with extra care -- they are in denial.
