Mind May Affect Machines

By Kim Zetter


For 26 years, strange conversations have been taking place in a basement lab at Princeton University.

No one can hear them, but they can see their apparent effect: balls that go in certain directions on command, water fountains that seem to rise higher with a wish and drums that quicken their beat.

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Using random event generators -- computers that spew random output -- they have participants focus their intent on controlling the machines' output. Out of several million trials, they've detected small but "statistically significant" signs that minds may be able to interact with machines. However, researchers are careful not to claim that minds cause an effect or that they know the nature of the communication.

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The first REG that researchers used produced high-frequency random noise. Researchers attached circuitry to the device to translate the noise into ones and zeroes. Each participant, following a prerecorded protocol, developed an intention in her or his mind to have the generator alternately spew out more ones, then more zeroes, and then do nothing at all.

The effects were small, but measurable. Since then, the same results have occurred with other experiments, such as one involving a pendulum connected to a computer-controlled mechanism. When the machine releases the pendulum to swing from a set position, participants focus on changing the rate at which the pendulum slows to a stop.

Other experiments involve a drum machine that participants try to control and a mechanical cascade machine, in which a large device drops thousands of small, black polystyrene balls to fall around pegs in a wall and settle into a row of slots at the bottom. Participants try to direct the balls to fall to one side of the row or another.

Participants have been able to direct one out of every 10,000 bits of data measured across all of the tests.

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There is very little that the researchers understand about the phenomenon, but they do know that results aren't affected by distance or time. Participants, for example, can have the same effect on a machine from outside the room or across the country. They can also have the same effect if they have the intention before the REG is turned on or even if they read a book or listen to music while the machine is running.

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Gender matters as well. Men tend to get results that match their intent, although the degree of the effect is often small. Women tend to get a bigger effect, but not necessarily the one they intend. ......Results are also greater if a male and female work together, but same-sex pairs produce no significant results. Pairs of the opposite sex who are romantically involved produce the best results -- often seven times greater than when the same individuals are tested alone.

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"It's almost as if there were two styles or two variables and they are complementary," Dunne said. "(The masculine style) is associated with intentionality. The (feminine style) seems to be associated more with resonance."

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Radin said the phenomenon could be similar to quantum entanglement -- what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" -- in which two particles separated from each other appear to connect without any apparent form of communication.

Or the effect could be caused by something similar to what occurred in experiments conducted in 1963 by neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter. In those experiments, researchers implanted electrodes in participants' motor cortices and sat them next to a carousel slide projector. Participants were told to advance the slides by pressing a button. What they weren't told was that the button was a dummy. The slides actually advanced in response to an amplified signal sent from the participants' brains.

"(The difference is) we're not talking about sending signals from the brain to the machine through a circuit," Jahn said about the Pear experiments. "Whatever is going on, is going by some anomalous route. We don't know the carrier of this information. We only know something about conditions that favor it."

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Jahn thinks that critics err in expecting the phenomena to follow the usual rules of cause and effect. Instead, he thinks they belong in the category of what Carl Jung called "acausal phenomena," which include things like synchronicity.

"They play by more complicated, almost whimsical, elusive rules," Jahn said, "but they play."

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