PSYCHIC POWERS: WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

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• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00789R003200260001-8
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• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
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• Publication Date: November 26, 1994
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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~, PSYCHIC~PO~ERS
WHAT ARE THE ODDS .
th.e rrtind ovex? machines. IIe
t;hinlis he's onto sometlting.
John McCronc reports
IN THE lobby of the Flamingo Hilton, Las
Vegas, slot machines-one armed
bandits-stretch in serried ranks to the
far horizon. Hanging over the machines
nearest the entrance stands a sign stating:
"974-the hottest slot percentage in
town". With characteristic American
bluntness, the Flamingo's management
tell customers that the machines have
been adjusted to cream off "only" 2.6
cents of every dollar they spend.
This promise of steady, if wtspec-
tacular, loss is supposed to draw in the
punters from the gritty heat of the Las
Uegas strip. And attract them it does. So
impatient are they to shed their money
at the guaranteed rate that. they feed
adjacent machines ~ with both hands,
shovelling irr coins and barely waiting for
the clacking reels to come to rest.
If ever proof were needed against the
existence a.f telepathy, psychokinesis,
precognition or any other form of psychic
power, the gambling halls of Las Uegas
seem to provide the perfect place Co 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-turte~i to fi-actions of a pcr cent.
Judging by the faces masked in concen-
tration, 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 per-
sonallyhave experienced premonitions or
moments of telepathic understanding.
Belief in the sychic seems im ossible to
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l3ngin.cet?itig professox? Robert
Jahn laid his cax?cer ort the
shake. But what if someone could design thinking about these futuristic gadgets.
the perfect laboratory test? A test that But before we get carried away by
could. settle the matter once and for all, visions of an effortless, thought-driven
either revealing believers to be dupes or world, what is the scientific status of
forcing sceptics finally to start taking micro- s chokinesis-supposed ability of
mental powers seriously? The dream of tie mrn to uz uence small events.
such an experiment has led parapsychol- Psychic experiments with random
ogy-the science of psychic research-to systems date back to at least the 1930s.
experiments which mirror the very But most of the early research relied on
games of chance which have made the dice or mechanical devices which, because
gambling industry so profitable. of slight imperfections of manufacture,
Roll of a dice could never be truly random, and which
were also rather susceptible to fraud.
Under tightly-controlled conditions, sub- Reviews of this work showed that the
jects try to influence the outcome of a tighter the controls, the less likely an
random event such as the roll of a dice, experimenter was to report an effect.
the radioactive decay of an atom, the In the 1970s, Helmut Schmidt of the
diffraction pattern of a beam of light, th Mind Science Foundation in San. Antonio
fall oi' a cascade of polystyrene balls, or made a major advance with the introduc-
the "direction" taken by electrical noise. tion of experiments that used a Geiger
What is more, some parapsychologists counter to measure radioactive decay
claim to 'be seeing an anomalous effect.~The testers were asked to speed up or
They are reporting a deviation from slew down the rate of decay as displayed
chance which is vanishingly small-jttst~ on the Geiger counter without touching
a tenth of a per cent-bttt when mews- the instrument or the radioactive source,
ured over millions of trials, this faint`~Then in the 1980s, Robert Jahn, an
effect multiplies into a hugely significant engineering professor at Princeton
distortion of the apparent odds. University, New Jersey, began studies
The results of -these trials have pro- ~ usi.ng the random white noise generated
vided inspiraxion for some apparently by an electricaTc~de. Near ~ h?.~`:'x t i
wacky research into the possibility of ,,,,.e,~"', .
"thought-controlled" household a.ppli- Demolition job Pry sa ~
antes. Dean Raclin, a researcher at the Jahn's work is currently the most
University of Nevada, in Las Vegas says: respected of PK studies because of its scale
"IC may be a small difference, bttt if we and technical sophistication-although as
can find a way of amplifying it, we was made plain when Jahn featured in a
could build thought-controlled switches. recent BBC2 TV series, Heretic, his move
Perhaps in fifty years we will. be using into parapsychology has horrified Prince-
psychokinesis to open our garage doors ton's authorities. When Jahn, a rocket,
or change channels on our TVs." If the propulsion specialist, went public with his,
research grapevine is to be believed, a research in 1986, he was demoted from
laboratory in one of the world's biggest- dean of the engineering faculty to any,
electronics tom antes ahead has a team associate professorship and left in no
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doubt that he would have been booted
right off campus if it were possible.
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 depart-
ment, 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 parapsy-
clrologists-is surprisingly open and
helpful when questioned about his re-
search. His first remark is that common-
sense examples such as gambling are not
a particularly good argument against
paranormal powers. Jahn paints out
that in group situations, such as race
courses and roulette games, many
people would be willing different
outcomes arr t ese are r cl e~y to
canceleach other out. Then, of
course, there are the management's
wishes to consider.
Another confounding factor, he
believes, is the possibility of " ~si-
missing" where some people might
co` nsrstently 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 experi-
ments under the controlled condi-
tions of the laboratory. His basic
experiment, which he has been
running for 14 years, is simple. IIe
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".
1'he subjects-or operators, as Jahn
calls them-can see how well they are
doing from a cumulative lure rising or
falling on a computer screen.
The most common criticism of this ldnd
of experiment is that either the machine
's robabl not trul random in~orm-
ance or that the recor ing o t e resu is
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 gen-
erator does not seem to be in question.
Measured over many days and millions of
readings, its output leas 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 some-
times stray quite a way from the mean,
and Jahn's generator produced the
expected member 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 jttst
leaning towards the machine and creat-
ing 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 vari-
ous warning bells and temperature
gauges. But more importantly, the sam-
pling 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 per-
formance 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 ow~r. Jahn says it is difficult to
think what ]find 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 com-
plaint against many earlier parapsy-
chology 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 ses-
sion and the logging of results was
controlled by computer software.
Not only were results automatically
dumped onto tape, bttt the compu-
ter 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 ariy other micro-PK
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researcher. But Jahn and the small team
he assembled kept on going, and by last
year Jahn had reached 14~_mi~llion t~-~'a1s
using over 100 different su ~ect~ s. -
? In brief, t i'~T e results he has found are
tiny but highly significant. The size of the
effect is about 0.1 per cent meaning that
for every thousan e ectronic tosses, the
random event generator is producing
about one more head or tail than
it shoulcl by chance alone. How-
ever, 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 Alcoclc
of York University, Ontario, and
Ra~Hy_ma_n of the University of
Oregon-both members of the
self-appointed policing body,
the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP)-on the
defensive. Yet a c oser ook at the
detail of Jahn's findings still raises
Borne worrying gttestions.
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 insen-
sitive to changing circumstances.
Jahn claims that when subjects sat in happening is not a mental interference
front of this tlu'ee-metre-high "macro-PIC" with a physical event but something
device, tl.rey were able to produce slight much more subtle-a distortion of
deviations to the side. the laws of statistics t iemselves. Jahn
More implausibly still, the effects on all thinks t tat su ejects somehow distort the
three systems seemed impervious to dis- "probability envelope" of an outcome.
tance and time. Over the past few years, Mow they are supposed to do so is far
Jahn has reported the results of large- from clear. Jalm has written about how
scale trials in which 30 people attempted such a view ties in with a quantum me-
The size of the effect, for example, "
remains much the same when instead of ~,+~to influence the devices from as far away
testing the influence of subjects on a d as Kenya, New Zealand, England and
physical process-the random thermal ~' Russia. Each subject would sit down for
movement of electrons across a transistor ~ an hour at an agreed time and try to
junction, for example-Jahn. asks them alter output according to a prearranged
chanical 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-]ilce when thinking is creative
and Holistic. Jahn cites the wave
aspect of quantum systems which
allows the systems occasionally to
penetrate physical barriers-a phe-
nomenon 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 Fislty.
Suspicions have hardened as sceptics
ave looked more closely at the fine
detail of Jahn's results. Attention has
to disturb the output of a psuedo-random `~ pattern. The distance a subject was frotri focused on the fact that one of the
source. The pseudo-random number ~ the experiment seemed to have no affectU experimental subjects-believed to be a
generator is just a repetitive mathemati-
cal calculation, so it would seem that the
mind is as good at influencing arithmetic
In another batch of trials using the L almost single-handedly responsible for
as real events. ~ their efforts up to several days before ors is was note as ong ago as 1985 by
The size of the effect also appeared"`- after the running of the machine. If any- a fellow parapsychologist, John Palmer of
constant when Jahn tested subjects with ~ thing, says Jalltl, the effect was slightly `~ Durham University, North Carolina, who
a random mechanical cascade. This 3 stronger under such extreme conditions. ~ wrote a report on Jahn's work for the US
device is a pinball machine, looking ~ Jahn is not perturbed by such a pattern Arrny. One subject-known as operator
rather like a giant version of the popular of results. He says that on the face of it, 10-was by far the best performer, and
Japanese arcade game, pacltenko, ind if psychic powers exist, they should be this trend has continued. On the most
which 9000 polystyrene balls . are strongest when subjects are closest to the recently available figures, operator 10
dropped through a grid of nylon pegs, equipment. Also it seems likely that has been involved in only 15 per cent of
bouncing and skittering to collect in bins feedback on success rates and the kind of the 14 million trials but contributed a
at the bottom. In an unbiased system, the device being used should have an effect, full half of the total "successes". If this
balls should end a with a classic But Jahn believes that micro-PK is person's figures are taken out of the
GaussianA-~IK~f~~l~~l~t~i ~leB~u000/1~ltQ$r~dC1161~~P9~1~071B9~ti0a1?~0 a~6:0~b18 scoring in the "low intention"
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The luck of the draw
WHILE successful parapsychol-
ogy 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 Jei~fers, a physicist at
York University, Ontario,
says his curiosity was piqued
when he stumbled upon an
old report o# Jalrn's research.
He ? says Jahn's methodology
sounded impressively solid,
which inspired him to mount
ltis own parapsychological re-
search. Soon he discovered that
CSICOP member, James Alcock, '
.worked at the same tmiversity,
and this helped when producing
a strong experimental design.
Jeffers's .idea. was to test
condition falls to chance while "high
intention" scoring drops close to the
?05 probability boundary considered
weakly significant in scientific results.
Sceptics like Alcock and I.lyman say
naturally it is a serious concern that staff
at P1;AR have. been acting as guinea pigs
in their own experiments. But it becomes
positively alarming if one of the staff-
with intimate ]cnowledge of the data
recording and processing procedures-is
malting 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. 'I'hcoreti-
cally, 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 base-
line result has stuck unnaturally close to
a zero deviation from cltance.
In noting these results, Jahn himself
has remarked that what makes the situa-
tion 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 on.e in a
thousand, it would not take much to
distort Jalm's results.
~Littl~ of this speculation has been
discussed openly by CSICOP mem-
bers-to do so would be virtually to
accuse Jalur'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 d,ane~ r~ n?r ri,P
people's ability to bend a beam After testing over 80 people
of light .and so distort the -including self-proclaimed
interference pattern created as psychics-Jeffers found only
it passed through a diffraction chance results.
slit. Jeffers says. the experiment Jahn himself admits that he
was a straight optical equiva- expected Jeffers's experiment
lent. of Jahn's polystyrene -ball to work and was puzzled when
cascade, except that becausq he ' it did not. Jahn has since lent
used photons, subjects were. Jeffers one of ,his new mini-
dealh,gwith "zillions" of events ature random noise generators
per second and so he expected and Jeffers is planning further
any effect to'show up quickly:. investigations.
says no experimental design can ever
rule out fraud. But he believes that the
recording procedures at PEAR are unu-
sually tight and any fiddling with results
would have to be systematic because it
would have to include the laboratory's
computer database, the print-oats and
subjects' entries in the logbook. Jahn
adds that sceptics have had a long-
standing 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-ntissers-
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 sliottld be
drawn from that fact alone.
As to the "too perfect" baseline, Jelin
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
leas 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 carne
doubts work the other way. If a
scientist produces negative results (see
Box), then the parapsychologists may
be the ones to start talking about
incompetence and faulty procedures.
Recent experience su ests there
may never e a srmp e, cons usive test
of the existence o s c is owers.
However, Ja ut's wor c oes seem to
narrow the boundaries somewhat, for if
such abilities exists, then their effects
appear tnicroscopicallycmall. 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. ^
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