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Speaker 1: That's ALLLBI rds dot com. Welcome to un Explained Extra
Speaker 1: with me Richard McClean smith, where for the weeks in
Speaker 1: between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for
Speaker 1: one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show.
Speaker 1: In last week's episode, The Creeping esther Cox, a young
Speaker 1: woman living in the town of Amherst, Nova Scotia, found
Speaker 1: herself at the center of a series of peculiar and
Speaker 1: terrifying events. For some, these events, which would collectively become
Speaker 1: known as the Great Amherst Mystery, are among the most
Speaker 1: convincing examples of a poltergeist haunting ever recorded. For many others.
Speaker 1: These strange events, despite apparently being witnessed by a number
Speaker 1: of credible individuals, had merely been concocted by Esther and
Speaker 1: possibly others in her family. As many will know, one
Speaker 1: interpretation of the apparent poltergeist phenomenon is to consider such
Speaker 1: things as excitable, often malicious entities with an agency of
Speaker 1: their own. Esther Cox herself claimed that the moving objects,
Speaker 1: loud bangs, and fires that broke out around her were
Speaker 1: caused by ghosts. Another interpretation of the apparent poltergeist, however,
Speaker 1: is the belief that its supposed manifestations are in fact
Speaker 1: the result of psychokinetic power. As the lover of science
Speaker 1: fiction in particular bran to Palmer's thrilling nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: classic The Few, it is this interpretation that I find
Speaker 1: personally most interesting. The notion of psychokinetic powers, or having
Speaker 1: the ability to effect objects and systems with the power
Speaker 1: of the mind alone, has been around for many years.
Speaker 1: Even as far back as four hundred BC. Shakuni, a
Speaker 1: character from the Sanskrit epic Maha Barreter, was depicted manipulating
Speaker 1: dice using only his will to do so. More recently,
Speaker 1: characters in stories that possess psychokinetic powers similar to those
Speaker 1: supposedly displayed by esther Cox have often been, though not exclusively,
Speaker 1: young women or teenage girls, from Jean Gray in X
Speaker 1: Men to Stephen King's Carry, and more recently the character
Speaker 1: Eleven in Stranger Things. This trope is often laden with
Speaker 1: the variety of complex and stereotypical implications, from being pejorative
Speaker 1: depictions of women as hysterical and unable to control their emotions,
Speaker 1: to being expression of a male fear of powerful and
Speaker 1: vengeful girls and women. Such sexist underpinnings are also often
Speaker 1: found in the literature of psychical research, where adherence to
Speaker 1: the idea that poltergeists are indeed the result of psychokinesis
Speaker 1: have tended to favor the view that adolescent girls were
Speaker 1: the most likely culprits with parapsychology. Like most industries being
Speaker 1: largely male dominated, such a perspective is unsurprising. That said,
Speaker 1: if such powers were to manifest as the consequence of
Speaker 1: years of trauma, or, as in Estercox's case, as a
Speaker 1: reaction to a horrific assault, it wouldn't be surprising that
Speaker 1: women and girls would be the more likely of the
Speaker 1: cis genders to develop them. In any case, whether you
Speaker 1: believe in the possibility of such powers or not, the
Speaker 1: idea that humans could have the potential to exert psychokinesis
Speaker 1: remains a potent one. Incredibly, it is also one that
Speaker 1: has not only been confined to art and parapsychology. It
Speaker 1: was back in the early autumn of nineteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: that a student approached Professor Robert John, then dean of
Speaker 1: America's Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science, with an
Speaker 1: unusual request. A few days earlier, John had informed his
Speaker 1: students that a large part of that year's grade would
Speaker 1: be apportioned to a project of their own devising. While
Speaker 1: most students had no trouble getting their projects accepted, the
Speaker 1: student in question had approached a number of professors to
Speaker 1: supervise her, but all had refused, declaring her idea to
Speaker 1: be nothing but pseudoscience. The idea was to attempt a
Speaker 1: replication of an infamous psychokinesis experiment first devised by German
Speaker 1: physicist and parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt in the nineteen sixties. Schmidt
Speaker 1: had come to Prominance with the outlandish claim that he'd
Speaker 1: found evidence of the mind's power to manipulate the outcome
Speaker 1: of a random event generator, although they come in many guises,
Speaker 1: a random event generator or random number generator is, as
Speaker 1: the name suggests, a machine designed to generate a random
Speaker 1: series of events or numbers in order to create results
Speaker 1: that cannot be predicted. A basic version of this would
Speaker 1: be the rolling of a dice, for example, or tossing
Speaker 1: of a coin. Such machines are invaluable in the study
Speaker 1: of statistics, among many other applications. Schmidt, however, was the
Speaker 1: first to use the machines to test for signs of psychokinesis.
Speaker 1: In one of his more famous experiments, Schmidt used a
Speaker 1: device that omitted one red and one green light in
Speaker 1: a random sequence. Participants were examined to see if they
Speaker 1: were able to use their minds alone to make one
Speaker 1: light up more times than the other. According to Schmidt,
Speaker 1: it was found that, on average, participants were able to
Speaker 1: influence results to the minute but noticeable degree of two
Speaker 1: percent deviation from chance. However, Schmidt's apparent results had never
Speaker 1: been replicated, a vital necessity for something to be accepted scientifically.
Speaker 1: John's student wanted to see if they could replicate it.
Speaker 1: Seeing no reason to prevent them, provided they approached the
Speaker 1: experiment with all the rigor of any other experiment, John
Speaker 1: granted them permission to do it. After all, a negative result,
Speaker 1: as he expected the outcome to be, would be as valuable,
Speaker 1: if not quite as earth shattering as finding a positive result.
Speaker 1: So it was with some surprise that John's student claimed
Speaker 1: to have replicated Schmidt's original findings. John was, in fact
Speaker 1: so impressed by the results he decided to set up
Speaker 1: an entire lab dedicated to similar investigations, and so, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, in a small, cramped basement room of
Speaker 1: Princeton's Engineering Building, the Princeton Engineering Anomaly's Research Lab, or
Speaker 1: Pair for short, was created. Are you always taking care
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Speaker 1: phone or video. Therapy Appointments are available seven days a
Speaker 1: week from seven am to nine pm local time. If
Speaker 1: you feel overwhelmed sometimes maybe you feel stressed or anxious,
Speaker 1: depressed or lonely, or you might be struggling with a
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Speaker 1: to facilitating great therapeutic matches, so they make it easy
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Speaker 1: visit teledoc dot com forward slash Unexplained podcast today to
Speaker 1: get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. Robert
Speaker 1: John had first attended Princeton as a student, completing first
Speaker 1: a degree in engineering physics in nineteen fifty one and
Speaker 1: then his physics PhD in nineteen fifty five. John would
Speaker 1: go on to join the faculty in nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: It was soon after that the John established the Electric
Speaker 1: Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, with which he oversaw a
Speaker 1: number of major research programs developing aerospace propulsion systems in
Speaker 1: cooperation with NASA and the US Air Force. In fact,
Speaker 1: much of what John helped develop continues to power spacecraft today.
Speaker 1: But what Charm was most interested in was consciousness. Though
Speaker 1: well aware that studying the potential for psychokinesis was at
Speaker 1: best of fringe science and at worst utter nonsense, since
Speaker 1: the existence of it would break a number of accepted
Speaker 1: laws of the universe, he reasoned that if such a
Speaker 1: thing were to be investigated, he could at least provide
Speaker 1: the best of laboratory conditions to do it. For almost
Speaker 1: thirty years under the guidance of lab manager Brenda Dunne,
Speaker 1: the pair laboratory investigative primarily mind machine interactions and precognitive
Speaker 1: remote viewing. A typical experiment for psychokinesis would involve a
Speaker 1: participant being asked to stare at a random number generator
Speaker 1: and to think high or low to influence the result.
Speaker 1: For remote viewing, participants might be sent to a remote
Speaker 1: but distinct location and told to think about the characteristics
Speaker 1: of the place, while another participant in a different location
Speaker 1: was tested to see if they could pick up anything
Speaker 1: about where this other person was situated. In investigating the
Speaker 1: possibility of psychokinesis, the researchers would look constantly to see
Speaker 1: if their results were non Gaussian. A Gaussian curve, named
Speaker 1: after mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss details the average distribution of
Speaker 1: statistical information that you would ordinarily expect to find in
Speaker 1: any given experiment. Anything contravening that would suggest that something
Speaker 1: unusual was actively affecting the result. Often, according to Jan
Speaker 1: and others at the Pair Laboratory, their experiments did exactly that,
Speaker 1: supposedly revealing that thoughts alone could physically alter the results
Speaker 1: of the random event generators. Critics, however, have pointed out
Speaker 1: that their results would often only deviate from the norm
Speaker 1: by a few percent, sometimes as little as nought point
Speaker 1: nought two percent. Such results would fall significantly below the
Speaker 1: usual margin of error demanded in similar experiments in order
Speaker 1: to be certain that they weren't just statistical flukes. As
Speaker 1: others have pointed out, it may also be the case
Speaker 1: that there is no such thing as a truly random
Speaker 1: event generator. But more fundamentally, even their most seemingly impressive
Speaker 1: findings failed to be replicated elsewhere, and as such none
Speaker 1: of their results achieved peer review, since most considered the
Speaker 1: sheer notion of the peer lab's work to be inconsistent
Speaker 1: with what are widely considered to be firmly established laws
Speaker 1: for most science labs. Successful negotiating of the peer review
Speaker 1: process is what maintains their funding. The Peer Lab was
Speaker 1: funded by private investment. It is also worth noting that
Speaker 1: despite containing the word Princeton, the Pair Lab was only
Speaker 1: nominally associated with the university, who, along with most of
Speaker 1: their affiliated scientists, are thought to have been deeply embarrassed
Speaker 1: by the connection. In two thousand and seven, with funds
Speaker 1: dwindling and their state of the art equipment no longer
Speaker 1: quite what it used to be, the Peer Lab closed
Speaker 1: its doors for good. Professor Jan who died in two
Speaker 1: and seventeen, stood by everything they claimed to have discovered. Often,
Speaker 1: when we think of the idea of psychokinetic power, we
Speaker 1: imagine some kind of force being generated by our minds,
Speaker 1: something that can manipulate gravitational or electromagnetic fields, perhaps that
Speaker 1: can then in turn interact with the atoms or molecules
Speaker 1: of the space around us. Many are seduced into the
Speaker 1: prospect of it by the oft repeated myth that we
Speaker 1: only use ten percent of our brains, the implication being
Speaker 1: that if only we could exploit the other ninety percent,
Speaker 1: who knows what powers we might uncover In reality, As
Speaker 1: neurologist Barry Gordon of John Hopkins School of Medicine pointed
Speaker 1: out in Scientific American we in fact use virtually every
Speaker 1: part of our brain almost all the time, and yet
Speaker 1: there is little doubt that there is much about the
Speaker 1: function of the brain that isn't known, let alone the
Speaker 1: workings of the quantum mechanical processes that underpin it on
Speaker 1: a subatomic level. And though we might not ordinarily have
Speaker 1: the ability to manipulate spaces around us with thoughts alone,
Speaker 1: thanks to a number of recent developments in neurotechnology, such
Speaker 1: a thing may well one day be available to all. Already,
Speaker 1: Companies such as Nurable and Elon Musk's neurolink are developing
Speaker 1: ways to measure patterns of electrical brain activity in order
Speaker 1: to enact physical actions with thought alone, and Facebook are
Speaker 1: currently developing a system that detects chemical changes in the
Speaker 1: brain in the hope that it might one day be
Speaker 1: used to convert our thoughts into type. Such developments are
Speaker 1: likely only to become more sophisticated and more integrated into
Speaker 1: our bodies. It might not be exactly what we had
Speaker 1: in mind, but one way or another, psychokinesis could be
Speaker 1: coming to us all. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained
Speaker 1: and would like to help supporters, You can now go
Speaker 1: to Unexplained podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations,
Speaker 1: no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All
Speaker 1: elements have Unexplained are produced by me, Richard McClain Smith.
Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes and feel
Speaker 1: free to get touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding
Speaker 1: the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have
Speaker 1: an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You
Speaker 1: can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or
Speaker 1: Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com.
Speaker 1: Forward Slash Unexplained. Now it's time to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1: To make time for you. Teledoc gives you access to
Speaker 1: a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling
Speaker 1: your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or
Speaker 1: video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time,
Speaker 1: seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most
Speaker 1: insurance or employers. Download the app or visit telldoc dot com,
Speaker 1: Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t
Speaker 1: e l a d oc dot com. Slash Unexplained Podcast