N r~ w S G I E N T I S T I-V E'ngiticeritig professor Robert 'hiliri laid. his career oit the line to test (lie 1)ower of PSYCHIC POWERS MIS AM rM WHAT E ODDSO.? clie Hii.nd over maclifties. Ile thill[CS IIC'S MAW SOMCtllillg. Jolux 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 pronlise of steady, if unspec- tacular, loss is supposed to draw in the punters from the gritty beat 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 balls of Las Vegas seem to provide the perfect place to find it. The odds on every game of chance- from the slot machines in(] 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 seen-is impossible to Approved for Release 2000/08/08 :3.1 shake. But what if someonethinking about these could design futuristic gadgets the perfect laboratory But before we get carried test? A test that away by could settle the matter visions of an effortless, once and for all, thought-driven either revealing believersworld, what is the scientific to be dupes or status of forcing sceptics finallycro- chokinesis -supposed to start taking ability of N M- Y mental powers seriously?to innuence small events. The dream of emi n such an experiment has Psychic experiments with led parapsychol- random ogy-the science of psychicsystems date back to research-to at least the 1930s. experiments which mirrorBut most of the early the very research relied on games of chance which dice or mechanical devices have made the which, because gambling industry so of slight imperfections profitable. of manufacture, Could never be truly random, and which Roll of a dice were also rather susceptible to fraud. Under tightly- controlledReviews of this work conditions, sub- showed that the jects try to influence tighter the controls, the outcome of a the less likely an random event such as experimenter was to report the roll of a dice,,-. an effect. the radioactive decay In the 1970s, Helmut of an atom, the Schmidt of the diffraction pattern of Mind Science Foundation a beam of light, th in San Antonio fall of a cascade of made a major advance polystyrene balls, or with the introduc- the "direction" taken tion of experiments that by electrical noise. used a Geiger What is more, some parapsychologistscounter to measure radioactive decay. claim to be seeing all anomalous effect.-A~The testers were asked to speed up or They are reporting a slaw down the rate of deviation from I decay as displayed chance which is vanishinglyon. the Geiger counter small-just4 without touching a tenth of a per cent-butthe instrument or the when meas- radioactive source, ured over millions of IThen in the 1980s, Robert trials, this faint Jahn, in i l effect multiplies into engineering professor a hugely significanf at Princeton distortion of the apparentUniversity, New Jersey, odds. began studies The results of these using the random white trials have pro- I noise generated - - vided inspiration for tr7757 some apparently by an elec ibili iode. P f t ~s h h into t Demolition job rdV4 - ty o e poss wacky researc " " household appli- r __1 thou ght-controlled ances. Dean Radin, a Jahn's work is currently researcher at the the most University of Nevada, respected of PK studies in Las Vegas says: because of its scale "It may be a small difference,and technical sophistication but if we -althou gh as call find a way of amplifyingwas made plain when Jahn it, we featured in a could build thought-controlledrecent BBC2 TV series, switches. Heretic, his move Perhaps in fifty years into parapsychology has we will. be using horrified Prince- psychokinesis to open ton's authorities. When our garage doors Jahn, a rockel or change channels on propulsion specialist, our TVs." if the 7vent pu lie with his research grapevine is research in 1986, he to be believed, a was demoted from laboratory in one of dean of the engineering the world's biggest faculty to an electronics companies associate pf6fessor9hip alreadX has a team and left ill no GIA-R P96 U789RUU32UU260001-8 26 Nmember [()91 N ic, w S C I E N 'r t s 'r Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-uu7t$UKUU.32UU260oui-ts 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 and 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 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 open excursions And as yet another precaution, the per- helpful when during its calibration formance of subjects questioned trials. is measured against about his re- search. His The generator also has three conditions: subjects first remark safeguards must move the is that common- sense examples against tampering. Subjectsline up for half the such as are normally time; down for half gambling are not a particularly left alone during trialsthe time; and, as a control, good argument and sceptics have they must sit against paranormal by the box, leaving it powers. to perform on Jahn points out that in group situations, its own. Jahn says it such as race is difficult to courses and roulette games, think what kind of equipment many failure - - pe ple would or environmental interference be willing could diffe r ent ' outcomes Jahn has also gone change its direction and these as the subject are likely to l h h cance has to switch between ea each of the ot er out. Then, of course, there three conditions. are the management's wishes to otit, of his lk av to The control over recording consider. data Another confounding seem equally stringent. factor, One com- he 17 believes, plaint against many earlier is the possibility parapsy- of 'l-si- missing" otulte el iticisins chology experiments was where some that people might c Zonsistently subjects could begin get the and end trials opposite of what they as they wanted. By recording try to will. trials Finally, the size of the of his scientific that seemed to be going effect being in the claimed- just a tenth desired direction, and of a per aborting cent-is so small that T sessions once they began it could to produce easily be built into the echilipe b1i I t11J11111ga downward turn using odds on the excuse gambling devices t like slot of having a headache machines. or suddenly feeling uninspired, subjects Tossing a coin Vill could l1 hi i t manipulate an experiment Jahn has also gone out a to create of his way to e a result. But Jahn guarded men against s s eAIJ r counter criticisms of such perils by specifying his scientific the number technique by running I of trials to be completed all his experi- tuidel the cont olled in advance merits under the controlled and insisting that all condi- results be tions of the laboratory. recorded in the final His basic database. In experiment, which he conditions of addition, the initiation has been of each ses- -le running for 14 years, sion and the logging is simple. I of results was built a random event controlled by computer generator- software. roughly, the electronic Not only were results equivalent of tile 1601 automatically 'atol) tossing a coin. A thousand dumped onto tape, but times a the compu- second, the white noise ter printed out a separate produced by paper a diode is sampled and record and subjects wrote its phase up their will produce either a scores in the laboratory's positive or a logbook. negative value. On average,suggested that its outputWith an apparently watertight there should could be design, be an equal split. Jahn affected by something Jahn reported his first gets people to sit as crude as it major batch in front of the generatorbeing given a kick, to of results in 1986 after and will it to more subtle effects completing a produce either more "heads"I ike waving a magnet quarter of a million or "tails". near it or even just experimental trials (a The subjects-or operators,leaning towards the machinetrial consisting of 200 as Jahn and creat- "coiii-flips" in each calls them-can see how ing some sort of weak of the three conditions). well they are capacitance effect This was already doing from a cumulative from the static on a several hundred times line rising or subject's clothing. more data falling on a computer To guard against such than collected by a~y screen. possibilities, other mifto-PK 3 Approved For Release 0 -8 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789ROO32 0026 001 26 November 1994 P96-00789IR0032~260001-8 N AIIPRNYPK~ YA researcher. But Jahn claims that when happening is not a mental Jahn and the subjects sat in interference small team " " tie assembled niacro-PK with a physical event kept on going, front of this three-metre-highbut something and by last roduce sli much more subtle-a distortion C ht of l the illi were able to h d d 14 i J h h d a ev m ce, s p reac g e y a n a year 2" using over 100 -is to the side. different stir deviatioi the laws of statistics Jects. Rmselyu. Jahn is _ - t ic ' - - - ~ results he has on all w dist found are More implausibly still, omeho ort the tFie the effects thin Mat su In brief, three systems seen-ted s T impervious to dis- s The size of the ks nificant ~iect but hi "probability envelope" hl of an outcome. si tin . g y g y effect is about. per cent meaningtance and time. Over How they are supposed 0- - 1- that the past few years, to do so is far - ~' _ _ n tectonic tosses,Jahn has reported the from clear. Jahn has for every thou the results of large- written about how sa ft random event generator scale trials in which such a view ties in with is producing 30 people attempted a quantum me- about one more chanical view of consciousness head or tail in than it should by chance Margitis of Reality, alone. How- coauthored with ever, while microscopic, Brenda Dunne, who manages the effect i the is so constant laboratory. Jahn argues that there is ns that, like onjLLI 0116011 h in 5000 chance i quantum systems, consciousness that Jahn's results I are a statistical appears to have both fluke rather a "particle" and than some kind of anomaly. ellsed oil the ra t a "wave" aspect. Consciousness lb is at So it seems like its most concrete and game, set and particle-like match to the parapsychologists. when involved in ordinary An , rational I thought, but becomes I experiment which fluid and was designed 11 olle 01 to t IV 11 1 meet all the standard ( wave-like when thinking criticisms of is creative psychic research and holistic. Jahn cites has come up with the wave a steady, robust aspect of quantum systems result, Certainly , 11 which V 11 V I I til X ("I Jahn's work appears . allows the systems occasionally to have put . to sceptics, such he- as James Alcock penetrate physical barriers-a p of York University, _iS nomenon familiar to microelectronics Ontario, and tI S 111110St S Ray Hyman of the engineers who have seen University of this effect Oregon-both members with quantum tunnelling of the in which self-appointed i I 1 (11 V- ha I particles can be made policing body, ] dediv to "leap" S the Committee . across insulated junctions. for the Scientific So, by Investigation analogy, the mind might of Claims of be able to the Paranormal (CSICOP)-on reach beyond the brain the I and have 11 1 4r t he onsible S defensive. Yet . a faint resonant influence a-7co-s-e-flook , on the at the . p detail of Jahn's surrounding world. findings still raises some worrying questions. I GII i 1 S, ic(l] lit WS111ts of umbo jumbo Since reporting , his early results in 1986, Jahn Sceptics, however, treat has extended , such talk as the scope of his experiments. inumbo jumbo. They point What he he studies out that, t has found is that for a start, statistics the anomalous are something effect appears that emerge from the astonishingly behaviour of insen- sitive to changing random processes, not circumstances. something The size of the that creates them. Instead, effect, for example, sceptics of the iti it i i i h remains much the to influence the devicesnsens same when instead from as far away v of l s i d see t d e surpr E ng Z y l rather fishy d d PK effect as bein l i testing the influence an . of subjects on an c a ea a '~ an me as Kenya, New g ng , physical process-the Russia. Each subject random thermal would sit down for Suspicions have hardened as sceptics movement of electrons an hour at an agreed ave looked more closely across a transistor time and try to at the fine t junction, for alter output according detail of Jahn's results. example-Jahn to a prearranged Attention has (3,~, asks them ! of the The distance a subject focused on the fact that d was from on( f attern d b h di o-ran . oin p to b e: ' stur affectO a t d t erimental subjects-belie~e_dto e output o h be a a psue h ex to b source. The pseudo-random. o p num ave no er,, e ex ermient seeme t p generator is just end result. a repetitive on tIJ aff_is mathernati- 1'e -y statf-is s t r5ember ot the PEAR laboratoi ~ 4 cal calculation, In another batch of trials so it would seern using the L b I e0 r that tlic'~' i s i almost single-handedly res2onsible for mind is as good at influencing i !s arithinetic same people, Jahn asked them to makeb4_Ahe significant r ults ot the stu ics. - - _ _ _ - _ - as real events. their efforts up to severalJ days before or a s long ago as 1985 by w as no te IT is The size of the after the running of a fel low parapsychologist, effect also appeared the machine. If any- John Palmer of constant when thing, says Jahn, the Jahn tested subjects effect was slightly with ?Durham Un North Carolina, who '- a random mechanical stronger under such extremewrote a report on Jahn's cascade. This conditions. work for the US device is a pinball Jahn is not perturbed Army. One subject-known machine, looking by such a pattern as operator rather like a of results. He says that10-was by far the best giant version on the face of it, performer, and of the popular Japanese arcade if psychic powers exist,this trend has continued. game, paclienko, they should be On the most in .3 1 which 9000 polystyrene strongest when subjects recently available figures, balls are are closest to the operator 10 dropped through equipment. Also it seemshas been involved in a grid of nylon likely that only 15 per cent of pegs, bouncing and skittering feedback on success ratesthe 14 million trials to collect in and the kind of but contributed a bins at the bottom. device being used shouldfull half of the total In an unbiased have an effect. "Successes". If this system, the balls should end But Jahn believes that person's figures are up with a classic micro-PK is taken out of the " GaussiarAMrom9diFcartRel"seBZOOOMLQB,odChAmMP9fikQO7B9ROO320 26WO" scoring in the "low intention ~ 26 November 1994 kJ t" ~ 7 :17 Fp~ Rqlease 2000/08/08 : CIA N v w S C, I E N T I S T Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-ROP96-UM59K00320026000 1-8 The luck of the draw WHILE successful parapsyclial- 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 lie stumbled upo'll an old report of Jahn's research. f Ic ~ says Jahn's methodology sounded impressively solid, which inspired him to mount his own parapsychological re- search. Soon lie discovered that CSICOP meniber, James Alcock, worked at the same university, 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 ill scientific results. 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 makirig 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 inem- 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 lie welcomes the chance to put the record straight. With candour, Jahn people's ability to bend a beam of light and so distort the hiterfereDce 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. says no experimental design call ever rule out fraud. But lie believes that the recording procedures at PEAR are unti- 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. 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 lie 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 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. of poor performers-even psi-missers- at the ' other end who drag the overall numbers down. With oYer 100 subjects, statistically speaking there would have to be a few high-end scorers like operator 10, so no sinister conclusions sbo i d 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, s.olid-state version of his random event generator and over the past year lie 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 -;.line 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 ma never be a siniele, conclusive test ot 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. D John McCrone is a science writer specialising in psychology and techn6lo gy. 38 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 CIA-RDP96-00789ROO3200260001-8 26 Noveiiiber 199