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SOURCE: EXN.com You are sitting in a chair in an acoustically-shielded room with two halves of a tennis ball taped over your eyes. A red light, placed about a metre in front of you, produces a uniform pinkish visual field while your ears take in the sound of white noise. Seventy-five feet away from you in a second padded and shielded room sits a "sender," concentrating on transmitting what he sees on a video monitor to you. An image starts to form in your mind as you receive this information. It's a brown cow in a golden pasture. No, it's a horse eating from a bale of hay. It's spotted and it seems to be having trouble with his hind leg... It's a common scenario at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh. For the past 14 years, researchers there have been studying psychic phenomena, or what Robert Morris, head of the research unit, calls an "apparent new means of communication or interaction between organisms and their environment beyond those presently understood by a consensus science." It's hard to know what to call it. For some, words like psychic and parapsychology conjure up images of psychics, seers, and the occult - things scientists seriously studying parapsychology don't want to be associated with. Whatever its name, these phenomena can be seen in an extreme form in the powers of the Force. In the fantasy world of Star Wars, those who have the Force strong within them, can instantly sense things that would not be known to them in ways we know of. When Grand Moff Tarkin blows up Princess Leia's adopted planet of Alderaan, Jedi knight Obi-wan Kenobi says, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." They can also physically affect their environment and everything in it by willing it. Remember how the tiny, wrinkled Yoda raised Luke Skywalker's X-wing from the depths of a swamp and onto dry land? Scientists who study parapsychology don't claim effects nearly as powerful as these, but they do report some very strange results that suggest we're missing something in our scientific world view. Back at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, the red lights and white noise described above provide what's called a ganzfeld, or a sensory deprivation chamber. Generally used in psychology experiments on visual imagery, the conditions stimulate your vision and hearing without providing any specific patterns. Now, they're being used by Morris's group. The theory is that if some new form of communication exists, people would be more in tune to picking it up if their senses were cut off from everyday sounds and images. Under such environments, a "sender" is shown one of four 60-second-long video clips chosen randomly by a computer. He is then asked to transmit what he sees to a "receiver" in another room on another floor, 75 feet away. The receiver is asked to describe what images come to mind and is then asked to pick one of the same four video clips that most closely matches his image. If the receiver were to pick the same clip as the sender had "sent" by coincidence, the success rate would be one in four, or 25 per cent. But among 300 participants in the past three years, "we've been finding a 40 per cent success rate," says Morris. A random event generator uses the chaos of electronic noise to produce a random stream of numbers. So what's going on? "It looks to us under pretty tightly controlled conditions, we have very good evidence that some new means of communication is going on." Either that, or there's a flaw in their experiments that hasn't yet been discovered. The field of parapsychology has been dogged by a history of lax experimental procedure, misplaced hopes and outright deception. There are many cases of experimenters who've either fiddled with their results or have been duped by cheating subjects. To overcome such a tainted history, those seriously researching the subject are trying to be a shining model of scientific experimentation. Morris explains that the rooms used by their study participants are regularly checked for acoustical flaws that would allow a sender to send the information through sound. Students of parapsychology also study the psychology of magic and deception to counter fraud. "We try to learn about self-deception, deception by others." A cascade of polystyrene balls are released at the top of this device and fall through a series of pegs. By chance, balls should bounce left as often as it does right and form a bell-shaped distribution at the bottom. In another lab, in the basement of the engineering building at Princeton University, scientists are finding even stranger results. After 20 years of controlled experiments in what they call 'human/machine anomalies,' they're finding that people can influence random events with the power of thought. "Somehow, in these experiments, the results of these interactions - whatever is going on - are having a very slight but definite impact on the way the physical world is working," Brenda Dunne, laboratory manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory told @discovery.ca. "At least in the way a random process in the physical world is working." The researchers used a variety of devices programmed to perform randomly, and then tested to see if thinking it would make them behave not-so-randomly. Over several million trials, the researchers found that the machines produced slightly less-random results when study participants willed them to. The effect is very small - of the order of a few parts in 10,000 on average. But, they are statistically significant and repeatable. "[In] my global opinion, humans don't just stop at their skin," says Roger Nelson, Operations Coordinator. "Consciousness is bigger than the physical body and I believe there is evidence, we have good evidence, that there's an interaction of consciousness with physical systems." The group's research shows an even more puzzling result. A participant can influence a random event even if he or she is thousands of kilometres away from the device. Even more provocative, the effects seemed to transcend time itself. Mental willing produced positive results even when the experiments were performed 73 hours before to 336 hours after the machine operation. So are there any theories to explain such phenomena? "Not at this stage," says Morris. "It looks to us as though it would be some additional, natural means of communication. We don't regard ourselves as being involved in the so-called supernatural." Some scientists hope to explain their studies' strange results through quantum mechanics, a theory that describes behaviour of subatomic particles, including light particles. As for the Princeton group? It suggests that these consciousness-related physical phenomena might be explained using an expanded model of a theory in quantum mechanics, a theory that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. However, both the model and the findings are not exactly welcomed by all scientists. "We have a few colleagues who are vigorously hostile to what we're trying to do," says Robert Jahn, program director, "but by far, the greatest proportion of them ignore us and go on doing their own thing...Ultimately, the proof has to be in the pudding. It has to be in the application. If indeed, we can come to understand these things well enough that pragmatic utilization of them becomes possible, then science will have to pay attention." SOURCE: EXN.com More headlines at www.mindpowernews.com
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