The Barnstorm Effect (Psychic Powers)

Great Debates
1

In Kurt Vonnegut’s story the “The Barnstorm Effect” the main character, Professor Barnstorm unlocks the key to telekenisis through a simple mental exercise.

The more he practices, the more powerful he gets, until his mental powers are equal to the atom bomb.

He starts by rolling 12 double sixes in a row with a pair of dice.

This afternoon my wife and I were playing RISK which is played with 3 dice (It’s snowing so I didn’t go to work.) I noticed that triple sixes seemed to come up more often than they should (three sixes is the most desirable role of the dice in RISK.)

So when we were done I rolled all three dice 100 times, while concentrating on triple sixes. I got them four times. That’s one in 25, when the odds say it should be one in 216.

Clearly this proves that I have telekinetic powers. If I practice, I can strengthen my telekinetic muscles, win Randi’s million dollars, clean up in Vegas, kill my enemies with brain embolisms, and rule the world.

Who wants to be my friend?

Maybe before I begin my plans for world conquest, I should consider the possibility of a statistical fluke, or that Risk gives you loaded dice (say it ain’t so.) Maybe I should do the experiment again just to be sure.

Still, Carl Sagan who was a pretty skeptical guy thought there was enough evidence of people being able to exert a very small influence on certain random events such as dice and randomly generated numbers from a computer that further investigation was warranted.

Anybody care to argue with me and risk psychic anhiliation?

Often wrong… NEVER in doubt

2

I’ll argue with you, since my brother once called 26 coin flips correctly in a row. Obviously his psychic powers are superior. Make obeisance before me or suffer his wrath!

3

Just a quibble: the name of the story you mentioned is “Report on the Barnhouse Effect”. Barnhouse does not have a natural skill, btw; he discovers a certain sequence of thoughts that ‘activate’ his telekinetic powers.

I remember this story well (well, fairly well). When I was a kid I read it in one of sister’s high school literature textbooks. I think it may have been the story that first turned me on to science fiction.

4

George:

Point taken. It’s been a while since I read the story.

Gaudere:

Dice are much harder to manipulate then simply calling a coin. I had 216 possibilities to manage on each roll he only has two. Still 26 in a row is impressive.
I’ll just pledge conditional fealty until my powers grow and I can overthrow your unjust rule, okay?

Well, there’s two scientific proofs of telekinetic powers. We must be on to something.

5

The odds for my brother’s feat are 1:67,108,864, I believe. I don’t know statistical figuring well enough to want to try to parse our your odds, though. Disclaimer: My brother’s “psychic coin calling” happened quite some time ago and I am almost certainly exaggerating the actual numbers due to faulty memory. I remember that the odds were pretty high though. And no, I don’t really think it means anything and I don’t remember if he made a series of incorrect calls before his streak, though I suspect he did (that would change the odds).

6

Don’t worry, I’m not to impressed with my feat either. I just want to see if anybody knows about this and what the arguments are on both sides.

7

Don’t think that no one is studying this! Princeton University has a very obscure little research department called Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) that spends hours watching test subjects try to psychically influence random events. In their words: "The observed effects are usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they are statistically repeatable and compound to highly significant deviations from chance expectations.

From what I’ve read, I’m a believer. It’s about time we start devoting some serious scientific effort to such psychic phenomena. If we can find a way to stimulate/encourage these latent abilities, who knows what new worlds will lay open to us!

8

The six is actually the lightest side of the die. Isn’t the one opposite it? That would be the heaviest. The odds, however miniscule they are, would be that the six comes up more often than the other numbers.

The most Invisible poster in the history of the boards. Posting invisibly since sept 1999.

9

What’s to argue, Scylla? Your sample size is obviously a bit small, and you always used the same dice. Try it with different dice and do it a few tens of thousands of times and then we’ll talk. :slight_smile:

10

Are your dice the cheap kind with the hollowed-out pips? If so, six tends to come up slightly more often than any other number. The six has six hollows on its side, making it the lightest side. The side opposite the six has only one hollow, making it the heaviest.

Use Vegas dice, with sharp edges and painted rather than hollowed spots. They’re a touch more random.

11

Yes, these are the cheap white dice that came with the game. They probably won’t let me use these in Vegas.

DavidB:

Apparently I don’t have to redo my experiment, as Meara shows in her link some seemingly real statistical anomalies. Is this more Uri Geller type BS being perpetrated by Princeton, a badly designed experiment, or is man mildly telekinetic?

12

Hmmm – the first step would seem to be a simple chi-square analysis on the dice. Of course, you will have to either have someone else do the rolling or promise not to attempt to influence the rolls with your massive psychic powers. Then, it would be helpful if you repeated the experimet while shifting your “target point” to match a randomized preset distribution. (i.e: 1st roll try for 125, 2nd roll try for 236, etc.)

Oh, wait – you wanted argument not testing, didn’t you?

never mind.

The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*

13

Controlling dice/coins etc. by telekinetic power would take much more concentration than is thought. Telekenetic power, being the abitility to control the kinetic movement of objects with the mind, would require that the person be able to know how the die (dice, coin) was oriented in the air first before they would be able to control it and make the outcome in their favour. Just willing double sixes won’t work. Chalk it all up to coincidence, and an amazing demonstration of the law of probabilities that a die is just as likely to come up 6 as it is any other number on any subsequent (or simultaneous) toss, regardless of what the other dice have rolled.

Goldang it’s cold!

14

I have several friends who’ve been through the engineering department at Princeton, and they’re all a little embarassed by this PEAR thing. And IIRC it is really the baby of this one guy Jahn, though maybe some other people have gotten involved since I last asked about it.

AFAIK no one has actually disproved the man’s claims. However I should point out that he is finding very slight deviations from pure chance, and he is finding them by having people try to influence a random number generator putting out thousands or even millions of numbers per second. Subjects are asked to bias them towards odd numbers, say, or something like that. This way, the number of trials is huge and can be done on a reasonable time scale so that very slight effects can be measured.

As you all know, I’m sure, it’s a lot harder to get a truly random sequence of numbers than you might at first think. The problem is that you have to have a “seed number” that truly IS random. Then you, for instance, take that digit of pi or some other transcendental, and your random numbers are then the subsequent digits of pi (or e or sqrt2 or whatever).

Getting a seed number that is truly random is hard. You need some repeatable physical process with multiple outcomes where the probability is evenly distributed over each outcome, and this has to remain true when the process is carried out under the conditions of a computer (varying temperature, humidity, voltage fluctuations, etc.) A more recent approach to the problem with some PCs is to use the human user to generate the seed number - measuring the exact time between mouse clicks, say, and using the thousandths of a second place. Your mouse clicking is pretty random at that scale of precision, so this works reasonably well.

At any rate, there are some subtle technical difficulties with using Jahn’s approach, and it would take a real electrical engineer to critique it properly. I expect a lot of objections could be countered with the proper controls. Jahn says he has plugged the holes, and I repeat: no one has disputed Jahn’s results, as far as I know. I’m not sure how hard anyone has tried (Randi may be a good magician, but this requires a good engineer). He (Jahn) doesn’t seem to be one of the typical legion of crackpots in this field (he is, apparently, a reasonably talented engineer). If he’s mistaken, I expect it is a sincere mistake. Nevertheless, his effect is so marginal and the experiments open to enough suspicion that I will remain skeptical until the results have found more common currency in other people’s hands.

15

I’ve never spoken with anyone who’s expressed embarrassment over the PEAR project, though most Princetonians will look at you blankly and ask “PEAR? What’s that?” The one PEAR researcher I know is quite intelligent and generally very skeptical, so I don’t imagine they’ve got their heads in the sand. More likely, this just is a very small effect.

Of course, such tiny forces can still have significant applications if understood correctly. Gravity doesn’t do much to a pair of marbles, but is quite moving on a planetary scale. It would be phenomenal if researchers could identify the source of these psychic effects, people who seem to have more of the power, environmental conditions which encourage it, and how it scales when used collectively.

What I don’t understand is the urge to ridicule these scientists’ work. Enough individuals have claimed experience with psychic power that it’s worth investigating thoroughly, even if only to disprove.

16

I’m not going to ridicule their work - they seem to be at least somewhat serious, as opposed to all the crackpots who do “ESP research”.

OTOH, I’m betting their results are going to end up being explained by experimental error. It’s hard to critique what they’re doing exactly, given only the cursory info on their web site. But things like this…

…tend to give one just a wee bit of pause. They can influence the results after the operation of the device? I think not! Something seems amiss.

Anyway, if such an effect were found, it would be exceptional enough that it really would need to be independently confirmed by multiple sets of independent researchers before one might say there’s something actually going on.

–
peas on earth

17

Gaudere wrote:

And are you sure your brother wasn’t trying to impress you with a new trick he learned? Say, tossing the coin, and appearing to call heads or tails “in the air” when in fact he called it just as the coin was touching down and he could glimpse which side hit first?