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Hi Karl,
I found an excerpt from Lynn McTaggart's Living the Field course that talks about mind over machines and random event generators that may be helpful to this discussion. http://www.livingthefield.com/
“Mind Over Machine
The simplest way to test the power of human intention is to see if human consciousness can affectmachinery that is governed by a probabilistic system. In the 1970s, Helmut Schmidt, a physicist and researcher at Boeing Aeronautics, produced the first ‘random number generator', a 20th-century version of the flip of a coin, the movements of which were based on a system of random radioactive atomic decay. These are machines with an output consisting of perfectly random activity that, in physics, is viewed as a state of ‘disorder'.
If it can be shown that participants in a study have altered some element of the machine's output-even ever so slightly-they would have shifted the odds of something happening or altered the tendency of a system to behave in a certain way. Some information transfer or ordering mechanism would be going on-what physicists term ‘negative entropy', or negentropy' for short-the move away from randomness or disarray.
It's like persuading a person at a crossroads, momentarily undecided about taking a walk, to head down one road rather than another. They would, in other words, have created order. The most persuasive of these studies has been designed and carried out by former dean of engineering Robert Jahn, at the Princeton Anomalies Engineering Research (PEAR) laboratory at Princeton University. Jahn refined and improved Schmidt's original equipment, determining that his random event generators, or REGS (pronounced with a hard ‘G'), should be driven by an electronic noise source rather than atomic decay. The random movement of these machines (to either heads or tails) is controlled by a randomly alternating frequency of positive and negative pulses. Their output is utterly random and without any inherent order so, according to the laws of probability, they can be expected to produce either heads or tails approximately 50 per cent of the time.
The most common configuration is a computer screen that is randomly alternating two images-say, cowboys and Indians. Over hundreds of thousands of studies, Jahn has decisively demonstrated that human intention can influence these random electronic devices to produce more of one image, as specified by the participant (more Indians than cowboys, say).1
In 1987, a combined analysis of all the REG experiments-more than 800- carried out by some 68 investigators showed that experimenters could affect the machine so that it gave the desired result 51 per cent of the time instead of the expected 50 per cent. In some of Schmidt's experiments, certain individuals had shifted the odds to 54 per cent.2
Although 51 or 54 per cent doesn't sound like much of an effect, statistically speaking, it's a giant step. If you combine all the studies into what is called a ‘metaanalysis', the odds of this overall score occurring are a trillion to one.3 The US National Research Council also concluded that the REG trials could not be explained by chance.4
An ‘effect size' is a figure which resembles the actual size of change or outcome in a study. It is arrived at by factoring in such variables as the number of participants and the duration time of the test. The overall effect size of the PEAR database was 0.2 per hour.5 The PEAR effect sizes are considered small, whereas the overall REG studies are considered small-to-medium. However, these effect sizes are far larger than those of many drugs deemed to be highly successful in medicine. For instance, the effect of aspirin in preventing heart disease is 0.032-about 10 times smaller than the PEAR effect size.
A simple way to understand effect sizes is to convert it into the number of persons surviving out of 100 people in a medical emergency. An effect size of 0.2 means that 20 more people than expected out of 100 will survive.
To give some hypothetical idea of the magnitude of the PEAR effect size, let's say that, with a certain type of heart operation, one-third of patients usually survive. Now, say that patients undergoing this operation are given a new drug with an effect size of 0.3-about the size of the PEAR effect. Offering the drug on top of the operation would virtually double the survival rate, so that two-thirds of patients undergoing the procedure will live. An additional effect size of 0.3 would turn a medical treatment that had been lifesaving less than half the time into one that worked in a majority of cases. Lynne McTaggart
1 Behav Brain Sci, 1987; 10: 600-1 2 Broughton RS. Parapsychology: The Controversial Science. NY: Ballantine Books, 1991:177 3 Radin D. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. NY: HarperEdge, 1997: 140 4 Found Phys, 1989; 19 (12): 1499-514 5 PEAR Technical Note 94003, 1994; September
The mothers of intention
Humans are not the only living beings with influence over the physical world. Using a variation of Jahn's REG machines, a French scientist named René Peo'ch carried out an ingenious experiment with baby chicks. As soon as they were born, a movable REG was ‘imprinted' on them as their ‘mother'. The robot was then placed outside the chicks' cage and allowed to move about freely while Peo'ch tracked its path. After a time, the evidence was clear - the robot was moving toward the chicks more than it would do if it were wandering randomly. The desire of the chicks to be near their mother was an ‘inferred intention' that appeared to be having an effect in drawing the machine nearer.
Peo'ch carried out a similar study with baby rabbits. He placed a bright light on the movable REG that the baby rabbits found abhorrent. When the data from the experiment were analyzed, it appeared that the rabbits were successfully willing the machine to stay away from them.”
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