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SCIENTIST
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PER OUR
Discussion
GROG
Engineering professor Robert
Jahn laid his career on the
line to test the power of
PSYCHIC POWERS
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
the mind over machines. Ile
thinks he's onto something.
John McCrone 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:
"97.4-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 unspec-
tacular, loss is supposed to draw in the
punters from the gritty heat of the Las
Vegas 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 in coins and barely waiting for
the clacking reels to come to rest.
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 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-
sonally 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 parapsychol-
ogy-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, sub-
jects 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, org
the "direction" taken by electrical noise.
What is more, some parapsychologists
In the 1970s, Helmut Schmidt of the
Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio
made a major advance with the introduc-
tion of experiments that used a Geiger
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 3 slow down the rate of decay as displayed
chance which is vanishingly small- just
a tenth of a per cent-but when meas-
ured over millions of trials, this faint
effect multiplies into a hugely significant
distortion of the apparent odds.
The results of these trials have pro-
vided inspiration for some apparently
wacky research into the possibility of
"thought-controlled" household appli-
ances. Dean Radin, a researcher at the
University of Nevada, in Las Vegas says:
"It may be a small difference, but if we
can find a way of amplifying it, we
could build thought-controlled switches.
Perhaps in fifty years we will be using
psychokinesis to open our garage doors
or change channels on our TVs." If the
research grapevine is to be believed, a
laboratory in one of the world's biggest
electronics companies already has a team
thinking about these futuristic gadgets.
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.
are these truely Random!
on the Geiger counter without touching
the instrument or the radioactive source.
Then in the 1980s, Robert Jahn, an
'engineering professor at Princeton
University, New Jersey, began studies
using the random white noise generated
by an electrical diode.
How do you
15
7
Demolition job
prove something
randet
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 moves
into parapsychology has horrified Prince-
ton's authorities. When Jahn, a rocket
propulsion specialist, went public with his
research in 1986, he was demoted from
dean of the engineering faculty to an
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-
chologists-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 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.
easily.
comitetul
7
7
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 experi-
ments under the controlled condi-
tions 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 perform-
ance 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 gen-
erator 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 some-
times 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
'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
+:
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 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 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 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, but 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 any other micro-PK
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Hastepart
Peoplem
devue
who
Luca
to
inflames
any they ?
Artifacts
Short
big are
they statistically
significant.
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. 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 Alcock
of York University, Ontario, and
Ray Hyman 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 closer look at the
detail of Jahn's findings still raises
some worrying questions.
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.
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 psuedo-random
source. The pseudo-random number
generator is just a repetitive mathemati-
cal calculation, so it would seem that the
mind is as good at influencing arithmetic
as real events.
ky __ w/o /cnowlege
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 dis-
tance and time. Over the past few years,
Jahn has reported the results of large-
scale trials in which 30 people attempted
Attention has
focused on the fact
that one of the
experimental
subjects-is almost
single-handedly
responsible for the
significant results of
the studies'
to influence the devices from as far away
as Kenya, New Zealand, England and
Russia. Each subject would sit down for
an hour at an agreed time and try to
alter output according to a prearranged/
pattern. The distance a subject was from
the experiment seemed to have no affect"
on the end result.
In another batch of trials using the l
same people, Jahn asked them to make,
their efforts up to several days before or
after the running of the machine. If any-
thing, says Jahn, the effect was slightly
stronger under such extreme conditions.
The size of the effect also appeared
constant when Jahn tested subjects with º
a random mechanical cascade. This
device is a pinball machine, looking
Jahn is not perturbed by such a pattern
rather like a giant version of the popular J { of results. He says that on the face of it,
Japanese arcade game, pachenko, in 3 {if psychic powers exist, they should be
which 9000 polystyrene balls are
strongest when subjects are closest to the
Cequipment. 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
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
GaussianApprovedForRelease:2000/08/08cdCIARDP96:00789R003200260004-18 scoring in the "low intention"
26 November 1994
Where is this ? ]
37
77
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 me-
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-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 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 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.
1 guy.
"This was noted as long ago as 1985 by
a fellow parapsychologist, John Palmer of
? Durham University, North Carolina, who
wrote a report on Jahn's work for the US
Army. One subject-known as operator
10-was by far the best performer, and
this trend has continued. On the most
recently available figures, operator 10
has been involved in only 15 per cent of
the 14 million trials but contributed a
full half of the total "successes". If this
person's figures are taken out of the
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NEW
SCIENTIST
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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 Jeffers, a physicist at
York
University,
Ontario,
says his curiosity was piqued
when he stumbled upon an
old report of Jalin's research.
He - says Jahn's methodology
sounded impressively solid,
which inspired him to mount
his own parapsychological re-
search. Soon he discovered that
CSICOP member, James Alcock,
worked at the same university,
and this helped when producing
a strong experimental design.
Jeffers'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 equiva-
lent 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 mini-
ature random noise generators
and Jeffers is planning further
investigations.
not
,
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 Ilyman 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. Theoreti-
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 chance.
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 one in a
thousand, it would not take much to
distort Jahn's results.
Little of this speculation has been
discussed openly by CSICOP mem-
bers-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 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-outs and
subjects' entries in the logbook. Jalın
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
Sceptics invited
to check his work
first-hand seem to
have left relatively
impressed'
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
Box), 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.
!
7
John McCrone is a science writer specialising
in psychology and technology.
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