Do the spirits move you?

Focuses on the growing enchantment of Americans with all things paranormal. Psychic readings; Role of science in the sudden surge of interest in the paranormal; Research on mind over matter. INSET: I was a psychic spy.

By Jill Neimark, published on September 01, 1996

"The results are surprisingly positive," notes Walsh. Marcello Truzzio, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of Michigan, agrees. "Some areas have borne up remarkably well when they are re-analyzed?'

The O.J. Simpson Effect

Mind over matter emerges as the most electrifying area of research. It seems that human intention can influence machines--even at a distance, when no influence seems possible. Researchers are both enthralled and puzzled by the data, which makes no sense. Studies thus far have examined machines that randomly produce positive or negative electrical pulses, or measure random radioactive decay, or randomly generate numbers. By concentrating, subjects try to influence the machines in one direction or another. After more than 14 million trials, Jahn has found a constant, significant influence of humans on the performance of machines, and the odds of this happening are 1 in 5,000. Other studies have shown that people can influence not only the random generator they are concentrating on, but hidden generators they don't even know about.

The actual shift is small, but to' understand it requires a stunning leap of perspective. Something is at work here that indicates our world may be far more fluid and interconnected than we ever imagined. Inspired by Jahn's research, Padin tested five different random generators on October 4, 1995, the day the O. J. Simpson verdict was delivered. At 10 A.M. Pacific time, when 44 million Americans were tuned in to television and radio, the random generators all became significantly less random. The shift lasted for 50 seconds. Padin believes that "the movement of mind does affect matter. It influences everything you can imagine, including mind itself. If 44 million minds are focused on one thing, that coherence spreads out, and influences even machines."

Other researchers have tried to find flaws in the studies. "We've wondered if influence varies with distance, or with data rate, or with the voltage of the machine," says physicist Michael Ibison, Ph.D., a visiting scholar at PEAR. "It doesn't." So, says Ibison, you start musing on the mysteries o[ quantum physics, where mind and matter don't seem so separate and divided. "When cooled to zero degrees Kelvin," he says, "matter exhibits very weird behavior at great distances, as if the whole system is a single, unified, unbroken, organic thing, and instantaneous changes are visible everywhere. But that's still just a metaphor. All we really know is that what you are thinking now can actually be correlated with what is happening over there in a machine."

Or in another mind. Perhaps the strangest phenomenon in the world of parapsychology research is the fact that a researcher who is a "believer" will get positive results while a skeptical researcher will often come up with nothing. One would assume the believers are simply skewing their data by interpreting them with a generous and uncritical eye. But these absolutely contradictory findings have occurred even when researchers double up on the same study.

Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., an anthropologist who is research director at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a think tank, conducted an experiment with psychologist Richard Wiseman, Ph.D., at Cambridge University. "It was a study in remote staring," recalls Schlitz, "with a closed-circuit TV setup." In this type of study, two people are put into separate rooms. A video camera is pointed at one person and connected to a television monitor in the other room. Half the time, at random intervals, the camera is on and the person in the second room can see an image of the first person. During the "on" times, the second person stares at the image and tries to mentally get the attention of the first.

"I did two such experiments with physicist Ed May, and got significant results in both," says Schlitz. "Richard [Wiseman] is a skeptic, and wasn't able to replicate my results, so he invited me over [to England] to run the same experiment at the same time. Everything was identical. I worked with half the people and got significant results, and he got no effect. I wonder what this means about the mind of the researcher and how that may influence data."

Schlitz suggests that the whole notion of a truly double-blind procedure, the supposed hallmark of pristine science, is questionable. "Can any experimenter be truly objective and detached from his object of inquiry?" she wonders.

It's possible, then, that the world we live in truly is a web without a weaver, that each strand in that web vibrates alone, and yet in consonance with the whole. As science inches along that web with its newly designed studies, we seem to illuminate a strand here, a strand there, just as real rainwater and light bring a spider's silk into sudden, brilliant relief when you wander onto your back porch on a summer morning.

I think back to the clairvoyant who years ago described to me exactly where I felt pain in my body. He told me that he was able to travel back in time, and one day I asked him to try this. I wanted to know about my first year of life, when my mother suffered from agoraphobia and couldn't leave the house. He was still for a long time and then asked, "Did you move when you were three?" I nodded; we'd moved from a town house to a ranch house. Again he was still. But then he shook his head. "Something is stopping me. I can't go back to before you were three." Make of it what you wish; I believed him. He knew more than he should, but not as much as I wanted.