Parapsycology and science

The following is from an "About.com" article on the paranormal. http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa062298.htm

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Paranormal Meets Physics

Scientists at Princeton University and other respected institutions are beginning to prove that ESP and telekinesis are real, measurable phenomena.

"If you consider the world an extension of yourself, it becomes a better place."

"The only way I can explain the phenomenon is that it's occurring... outside of space and time."

"Consciousness is the ground of all being."

"The universe is one and we are one with it."

These are not proclamations from the latest Zen philosophy self-help book, nor passages from The Celestine Prophecy, nor quotes from a Marianne Williamson seminar. They are not even remarks from some Uri Geller video. These are statements from respected, mainstream scientists, engineers, and researchers, respectively: Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR); John Haaland, president and CEO of Mindsong Inc., an electronics firm developing mind-matter machines; Amit Goswami, professor of Physics at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon; and Victor Stenger, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii.

Have all these respected scientists and engineers suddenly fallen under the influence of some New Age cult? Hardly. But they are converts of another kind, perhaps, since they are on the cutting edge of serious ESP and psychokinesis research - mind over matter. Not too long ago, if one brought up the subjects of ESP or telekinesis to a scientist, they would have readily been dismissed as "paranormal" and relegated to the purview of "fringe science" and unworthy of serious investigation. This stuff was considered unprovable, and left to the imaginations of New Age gurus and others thought of as wackos. This is not to fault those scientists; it's their job to be skeptical and to be able to prove, as best they can, whether or not something is true or likely.

Now science is doing just that with regard to some forms of ESP and telekinesis. Research conducted at Princeton University and other research laboratories around the world is confirming that thought alone can influence random events. With the aid of computers, sensitive instrumentation, and robotics, science now has the tools with which to test and measure the subtle influences of the human mind and reveal how it can possibly affect inanimate objects, electronics, and perhaps other human minds. The implications are astounding and far-reaching.

Science is beginning to shake hands with the paranormal.

Mind Over Machine

Mind over matter.The PEAR lab at Princeton, under the direction of Professor Robert Jahn, uses a random event generator (REG) to conduct their trials. The REG is, essentially, a kind of electronic coin flipper that, if left alone, would generate as many heads as tails over a number of coin flips. However, PEAR's volunteers - normal people who do not claim to have any ESP powers whatever - are able to influence the REG to come up with more heads than tails, or vice versa. Certainly, they cannot make it come up heads every time, but the data shows that the influence is statistically relevant and much greater than chance. This is done without the benefit of electrodes attached to the head or any other kind of connection. More remarkable still, the volunteers do not even have to be in the same room with the REG. The lab in Princeton has produced results from volunteers as far away as Hungary and Brazil that are the same as those who are sitting just a few feet from the machine. Distance is irrelevant.

Jahn, Dunne, and their colleagues at PEAR don't know how or why people are able to influence their machines, they just know that they are. What's more, they have demonstrated that when using two volunteers who have an emotional attachment, the effects on the REG are even greater. The emotion of love seems to have a more powerful effect. This fact has prompted Dunne to theorize that the conscious human mind creates some kind of "resonance" with the surrounding world that lessens some of its randomness. "One form of this resonance," Dunne told Wired magazine, "is what we know as love. This emotional bond - the 'being on the same wavelength' - somehow reduces the entropy in the world a little bit. And random processes seem to reflect this reduction by showing a more organized physical reality."

Tricks with Chicks

This conscious or unconscious influence on the world isn't just a hidden power of the human mind either. Animals have also been shown to have an effect on machinery. In an experiment set up by René Peoc'h and the Swiss Fondation Marcel et Monique Odier de Psycho-Physique, a cage of chicks was able to influence the meanderings of a robot better than people were. The robot, a self-propelled little device called a Tychoscope, was programmed to wander in a random manner around an enclosed room. When the cage of chicks was added to the room, however, the robot's behavior changed dramatically, spending much more time in the half of the room where the chicks were. Did the chicks will the robot to stay near them? Possibly, because the chicks had a motive. One group of chicks in the experiment had been "imprinted" with the sight of the Tychoscope - in other words, it was the first thing they saw when they hatched. So it could be that they just wanted "mommy" near. For another group of chicks, the room was darkened and a candle was placed on the Tychoscope. Bringing the robot to their side of the room also brought light to the chicks.

A Quantum Effect

These are just two of the more dramatic experiments that are bearing out the reality of consciousness over matter. And it's interesting that these findings are being made at the same time that scientific research is proving the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics, which is showing that the mere observation of subatomic particles can affect how they behave. Are the Princeton experiments demonstrating some kind of biological quantum effect that we do not yet understand? Is the human brain - and the brain of each living creature, for that matter - a quantum device? Is the collective unconscious proposed by analytical psychologist Carl Jung and others actually a quantum effect?

That the conscious minds of living things can influence our reality has, of course, fantastic implications:

* Perhaps this is how evolution, in conjunction with natural selection, is actually directed.

* It may explain the "power of prayer."

* It may explain how animal instinct and group behavior works. (ESP in humans may be a dormant form of instinct that we can sometimes tune in to.)

* That we do, even in some small degree, create our own reality. Our destiny is literally in our own minds.

* Our minds, under certain circumstances, could create the effects attributed to poltergeists, ghosts, and a host of other so-called paranormal phenomena.

* That love is stronger than evil.

* That we are, in scientific fact, one with the universe.

Of course, all those mystics, yogi masters, religious nuts, paranormal junkies, and New Age thinkers have known all this is true for quite some time. It's just that now science is proving it. And once this truth is widely known and accepted by human beings, then we will have a powerful tool with which to change our world. This is just the beginning.

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