Psychokinesis

1 · What it is

Mind on matter

Psychokinesis (PK) is the claim that intention alone can affect physical things. In stories it means moving objects or bending metal. In the lab it is almost always far smaller.

The usual target is a random number generator (RNG): a device that turns electronic noise into a stream of 0s and 1s, like tossing a coin very fast. If a person aims for more 1s and the machine gives slightly more than half, over very many trials, that is counted as a PK effect.

2 · How people practise it

Intention, alone and together

Practice is mostly intention exercises: holding a wished-for outcome in mind, alone or with others, sometimes at set times so that many people intend at once.

Spoon bending deserves a plain word. It is a stock routine of stage magic, done by sleight of hand, and we know of no controlled study that supports large-scale PK such as moving or bending objects.

3 · What the labs tested

PEAR and the random machines

From 1979 to 2007 the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) had volunteers sit in front of RNGs and try to push the output high or low, over millions of trials. It reported very small shifts in the direction people intended.

To test that, PEAR and two German groups, in Freiburg and Giessen, ran a joint replication with the same kind of machine.

The Global Consciousness Project runs RNGs around the world and looks for changes in their output during major world events.

4 · Where it’s contested

Smaller with every check

The three-lab replication failed on its main measure: the results matched chance.

In 2006 Holger Bösch and colleagues pooled 380 RNG studies. They found an effect, but a tiny one, and the smallest studies had the biggest effects: a pattern that publication bias, studies left in the drawer when they find nothing, could produce on its own. Dean Radin and colleagues disputed that reading in a reply.

Even inside the Global Consciousness Project the data have been questioned. Peter Bancel, who analysed them for years, argued that they do not fit the idea of a “global consciousness field”.