Psychokinesis -- Mind over Matter
Ask any "skeptic" about psychokinesis -- moving objects without
physically touching them -- and they'll tell you, "There's no evidence for
it."
The trouble with psychic powers, runs the conventional
argument, is that if they really existed they would be easily
demonstrable. So how come the psychic crackpots in their laboratories are
obsessed with experiments that measure trivially small variations from chance
expectation?
Comedian Robert Benchley once observed that there
are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of
people in the world, and those who don't. 'I am firmly of the latter opinion,'
he wrote. I wonder if, buried in this old joke, there isn't some insight
into the ceaseless debate between believers and skeptics?
In parapsychology, test subjects in ESP and
psychokinesis experiments fall into two categories known in the jargon of
psychology as either 'sheep' or 'goats'. The somewhat unflatteringly-named
'sheep' are those people who, when asked if they are willing to believe in
paranormal phenomena, declare that they are, while goats are those who declare
that they are not.
It has been known for some decades that sheep
tend to score consistently a little higher than goats -- as though their belief
assists their test scores in some way.
This finding can be interpreted in two ways. A
skeptic can claim that, as the paranormal is all in the mind anyway, it is
hardly surprising if the subject's confidence is given a boost through
self-suggestion. If there really were anything in it, it would be easy to get
evidence in the laboratory. The believer can argue that the skeptic's
self-imposed blindness prevents him or her from attaining their full psychic
potential in trials -- and also from accepting such evidence once it is
obtained.
There is no obvious way to distinguish between
these rival interpretations. But there certainly is a mathematical way of
describing the apparently ephemeral phenomena and of determining whether the
effects are real or imaginary.
Statistically speaking, the ease with which you can measure such effects in the laboratory depends on two factors: the size of
the experimental effect, and the size of the sample, or number of trials used.
When an effect is very strong, you need only a
few trials to expose it, just as you need only a second or two at the dial of
your radio to know that you are tuned in to your local rock-music station.
When signals are weak, however, the amount of data collected becomes critical:
you may need to spend quite a time at your radio dial just to identify the
language of a foreign station.
The problem in the past has been that
Psychokinesis and ESP have rarely been exposed repeatably because they are very
weak effects ranging from less than 1 per cent to only 2 or 3 per cent above
what one would expect due to chance. Note that the important point here is not
the strength of the effect, it is the number of trials compared with that
strength. And what has happened on many occasions over the past fifty years or
so is that parapsychology researchers have carried out experiments with a number
of trials that is either inadequate or marginal in exposing such weak effects.
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Once you get a number of trials that will show up
even a very weak effect, then you can get very clear-cut experimental results --
in any field, not just in parapsychology. For example, in 1986 a large scale
trial was begun in the United States to see if aspirin can help combat heart
disease. What statisticians call the 'effect size' of aspirin is small (only
0.03). If the researchers had studied only 3,000 subjects they would have found
that aspirin is no better than a placebo. But because they had a huge number --
22,000 subjects -- the effect became very obvious immediately: the experimenters
found that there were 45 per cent fewer heart attacks in the experimental group
and they felt the effect so pronounced they could morally no longer withhold aspirin from the control group, and so discontinued
the study.
What has happened in parapsychology in recent
years is a new approach called meta-analysis -- a new way of combining the
results of many different parapsychology studies to make the aggregate results
statistically significant.
Researchers have taken hundreds of small-scale
experiments that, on their own, are incapable of exposing weak paranormal
abilities, and assembled them into a super-experiment that gives the sort of
numbers of test subjects available with the aspirin trials. And when this
aggregation of results in done systematically it shows that -- amazingly -- the
'effect size' of some paranormal abilities is very substantially bigger than
that of the effect size for aspirin and heart disease -- as much as 0.55
(against 0.03).
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.
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 article 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.
