>t EN ris T Sy CH HAT ARE 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 Engineering professor Robert Jahn laid his career on the line to test the power of the mind over machines. He thinks he’s onto something. John McCrone reports 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, or the “direction” taken by electrical noise. What is more, some parapsychologists claim to be seeing an anomalous effect. They are reporting a deviation from 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 (*POWERS THE ODDS? 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. 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. The testers were asked to speed up or slow down the rate of decay as displayed 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. Demolition job 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 move 2 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 2 associate professorship and left in noé 3: Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001-9 °° November population are convinced that they per- sonally have experienced premonitions or moments of telepathic understanding. Belief in the psychic seems impossible to 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
TT ever proof were needed against the existence of telepathy, psvchokinesis, precognition or any other form of psvehie power, the gambling halls af Las Vegas seem to provide the perfect p place to find 1
eine a NeEw S CIENTS T sé : -RDP96-00789R003200250001-9 ot 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. 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 failing on a computer screen. 3s Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001 -9 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 26 November 1994
researcher. But Jahn and the smail 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 resting 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. The size of the effect also appeared constant when Jahn tested subjects with a random mechanical cascade. This device is a pinball machine, looking rather like a giant version of the popular Japanese arcade game, pachenko, in which 9000 polystyrene balls are 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 Gaussian bell-shaped distribution. But 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 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. Jahn is not perturbed by such a pattern of results. He says that on the face of it, if psychic powers exist, they should be strongest when subjects are closest to the equipment. 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 misnamed because what is actually 8 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001-9 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. 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 data pool, scoring in the “low intention” xARPKOVed For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001-9 "
NEw S CLEN Tels? s——, Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001 -9 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 Jahn’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 condition falls to chance while “high intention” scoring drops close to the ‘OS probability boundary considered weakly significant in 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 ’ 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 38 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001-9 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. 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 rums 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 ‘Seeptics invited to cheek his work first-hand seem to have left relatively impressed’ investigations. 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. a John McCrone is a science writer specialising in psychology and technology. 26 November 1994
NeEwW S CtlENTIST Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R00320025hi5 Fa ERS Observer noise The study of parapsychology is disturbing because it challenges some of the fundamental principles of the scientific method. In the case of the thought experiments described in your article “Psychic powers: what are the odds?” (26 November), the independence of the experimenter from the experiment is at issue. The separation of the observer from the observed is of course nowhere absolute. At the quantum level the limit is defined by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and by the philosophical speculations of the Copenhagen school. A different type of interaction operates in the “softer” social and medical sciences. An anthropologist, for example, cannot study a cultural group without influencing, and being influenced by, that culture. One day we may have a social- scientific uncertainty principle to define this effect. In considering the attempts to prove psychokinesis such as Robert Jahn is doing, one can -speculate that the observable - effect may never exceed experimental noise. Conceptually, if such phenomena are real they could be influenced not only by the individual actually involved in the experiment but by all interested parties who are thinking about it at the time: the designer of the experiment and all the friends who wish him or her success. On the other hand, sceptics who conduct the identical experiment could equally displace the outcome in 7 January 1995 the opposite direction. Parapsychology may therefore always be impossible to prove. This argument is not new. The efficacy of miracles has been debated for centuries, and proof of their validity has long relied on the presence or absence of “faith”. Another point: if psycho- kinesis does exist it must be weak or the (honest) influence of strong-willed scientists on the outcome of their work would by now be evident, rather than lost in a background of experimental noise. Graham Hagens Hamilton, Ontario, Canada * * * John McCrone’s otherwise well-written article contains one factual error that should perhaps be corrected, namely that when “Jahn ... went public with his research in 1986, he was demoted from dean of the engineering faculty to an associate professorship and left in no doubt that he would have been booted right off campus if it were possible”. In point of fact, we had been publishing and speaking publicly about our research for several years prior to 1986, during which period I served both as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and as Professor of Aerospace Sciences, as is the Princeton custom. While it is true that a number of my faculty and administrative colleagues had expressed reservations about the work, no explicit threats to my retaining either position were ever directly voiced to me. My decision not to seek reappointment as Dean in 1986, after fifteen years in that chair, was based on a number of personal and professional considerations, including my desire to devote more effort to my two research programmes. At that time, I simply returned to a full-time role as (full) professor in my home department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, which position I retain today. No “demotion” was explicitly or implicitly involved; to the contrary, this return has proven professionally and personally advantageous to me. Robert Jahn Princeton University New Jersey Battery blues The limitations imposed on the electric car by the present battery technology (as described in “All charged up and nowhere to go”, 3 December), could be overcome if a more systemic approach were to be made to the design of the car and its energy supply system. Instead of making the batteries an integral part of the car and recharging them on board, it would seem more sensible to make them easily replaceable on filling station forecourts. Payment would be for the net electric charge received. Suitable battery handling equipment could make battery replacement as speedy as refilling a fuel tank. Recharging could be confined to off-peak times and could be carried out more safely and cheaply at filling stations than at home. Battery exchange could be made at unmanned sites, all round the clock; something not realty practical with liquid or gaseous fuels. To obtain the full economic benefits of scale in the early years of electric car technology, the design of batteries should be modular and suitable for all makes and sizes of vehicles, and compatible with handling equipment in all forecourts. No significant “green” effect will result if, as suggested in the article, only rich customers will be able to afford to buy electric vehicles. Governments and local authorities trying to popularise the use of electric vehicles could do so by bearing the capital cost of the batteries, by leasing them to vehicle owners, and by supporting the development of battery exchange sites throughout the counry. Priming the market pump in order to reach the critical sales levels needed for really low cost vehicle production should be needed for only a few years. Fenton Robb Eyemouth, Berwickshire Double whammy As a retired BT engineer with over 40 years experience of street works, to me the most disturbing aspect of the damage to trees by TV cabling is that in many cases the excavations are unnecessary (Forum, 3 December). BT has had for decades in most suburban areas an extensive underground duct system with plenty of space for additional cable—but, as Barry Fox points out in the same issue (Technology), BT is not allowed to compete. Since, as Cyril Bracegirdle says, the cable companies are mainly American owned, this puts the British public on the receiving end of the double whammy of unnecessary environmental damage and seeing the profits from it float over the Atlantic. G. E. Haines Woodbridge, Suffolk British opt-out In brief reply to Bruce Reed’s comments (Letters, 10 December) on my letter of 12 November, even when a British contribution to the European Union budget in respect of research and development is included, the government’s spending on R&D is now less, in real terms, than in 1984/5 by about £1 billion per annum—and sull falling (Forward Look 1994, HMSO). Bruce Reed is right to draw attention to the British Treasury's insistence, unique in the EU, that a proportion of the EU funds returned to Britain for support of R&D should be counted against— and so reduce—Departmental 43 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003200250001-9