The Field (20 page)

Jahn’s student kept returning with more convincing proof that this phenomenon existed. There was no doubt that the people involved in the studies and the research itself had a certain credibility. He agreed to supervise a two-year project for her, and when she began returning with her own successful results, he found himself making suggestions and trying to refine the equipment.

By the second year of the student’s project, Jahn himself began dabbling in his own RNG experiments. It was beginning to look as though there might be something interesting here. The student graduated and left her RNG work behind, an intriguing thought experiment, and no more, the results of which had satisfied her curiosity. Now it was time to get serious and return to the more traditional line she’d originally chosen for herself. She embarked on what would turn out to be a lucrative career in conventional computer science, leaving in her wake a body of tantalizing data and also a bomb across Bob Jahn’s path that would change the course of his life forever.

Jahn respected many of the investigators into consciousness research, but privately he felt that they were going about it the wrong way. Work like Rhine’s, no matter how scientific, tended to be placed under the general umbrella of parapsychology, which was largely dismissed by the scientific establishment as the province of confidence tricksters and magicians. Clearly what was needed was a highly sophisticated, solidly based research program, which would give the studies a more temperate and scholarly framework. Jahn, like Schmidt, realized the enormous implications of these experiments. Ever since Descartes had postulated that mind was isolated and distinct from the body, all the various disciplines of science had made a clear distinction between mind and matter. The experiments with Schmidt’s machines seemed to be suggesting that this separation simply didn’t exist. The work that Jahn was about to embark on represented far more than resolving the question of whether human beings had the power to affect inanimate objects, whether dice, spoons or microprocesses. This was study into the very nature of reality and the nature of living consciousness. This was science at its most wondrous and elemental.

Schmidt had taken great care to find special people with exceptional abilities who might be able to get especially good results. Schmidt’s was a protocol of the extraordinary – abnormal feats performed by abnormal people with a peculiar gift. Jahn believed that this approach further marginalized the topic. The more interesting question, in his mind, was whether this was a capacity present in every human being.

He also wondered what impact this might have on our everyday lives. From his position as dean of an engineering school in the 1970s, Jahn realized that the world stood poised on the brink of a major computer revolution. Microprocessor technology was becoming increasingly sensitive and vulnerable. If it were true that living consciousness could influence such sensitive equipment, this in itself would have a major impact on how the equipment operated. The tiniest disturbances in a quantum process could create significant deviations from established behavior, the slightest movement send it soaring in a completely different direction.

Jahn knew that he was in a position to make a unique contribution. If this research were grounded in traditional science backed by a prestigious university, the entire topic might be aired in a more scholarly way.

He made plans for setting up a small program, and gave it a neutral name: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, which would thereafter always be known as PEAR. Jahn also resolved to take a low-key and lone-wolf approach by deliberately distancing himself from the various parapsychological associations and studiously avoiding any publicity.

Before long, private funding began rolling in, launching a precedent that Jahn would follow thereafter of never taking a dime of the University’s money for his PEAR work. Largely because of Jahn’s reputation, Princeton tolerated PEAR like a patient parent with a precocious but unruly child. He was offered a tiny cluster of rooms in the basement of the engineering school, which was to exist as its own little universe within one of the more conservative disciplines on this American Ivy League campus.

As Jahn began considering what he might need to get a program of this size off the ground, he made contact with many of the other new explorers in frontier physics and consciousness studies. In the process, he met and hired Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago, who had conducted and validated a number of experiments in clairvoyance.

In Dunne, Jahn had deliberately chosen a counterpoint to himself, which was obvious at first sight by their gaping physical differences. Jahn was spare and gaunt, often neatly turned out in a tidy checked shirt and casual trousers, the informal uniform of conservative academia, and in both his manner and his erudite speech gave off a sense of containment – never a superfluous word or unnecessary gesture. Dunne had the more effusive personal style. She was often draped in flowing clothes, her immense mane of salt-and-pepper hair hung loose or pony-tailed like a Native American. Although also a seasoned scientist, Dunne tended to lead from the instinctive. Her job was to provide the more metaphysical and subjective understanding of the material to bolster Jahn’s largely analytical approach. He would design the machines; she would design the look and feel of the experiments. He would represent PEAR’s face to the world; she would represent a less formidable face to its participants.

The first task, in Jahn’s mind, was to improve upon the RNG technology. Jahn decided that his Random Event Generators, or REGs (hard ‘G’), as they came to be called, should be driven by an electronic noise source, rather than atomic decay. The random output of these machines was controlled by something akin to the white noise you hear when the dial of your radio is between stations – a tiny roaring surf of free electrons. This provided a mechanism to send out a randomly alternating string of positive and negative pulses. The results were displayed on a computer screen and then transmitted on-line to a data management system. A number of failsafe features, such as voltage and thermal monitors, guarded against tampering or breakdown, and they were checked religiously to ensure that when not involved in experiments of volition, they were producing each of their two possibilities, 1 or 0, more or less 50 per cent of the time.

All the hardware failsafe devices guaranteed that any deviation from the normal 50 – 50 chance heads and tails would not be due to any electronic glitches, but purely the result of some information or influence acting upon it. Even the most minute effects could be quickly quantified by the computer. Jahn also souped up the hardware, getting it to work far faster. By the time he was finished, it occurred to him that in a single afternoon he could collect more data than Rhine had amassed in his entire lifetime.

Dunne and Jahn also refined the scientific protocol. They decided that all their REG studies should follow the same design: each participant sitting in front of the machine would undergo three tests of equal length. In the first, they would will the machine to produce more 1s then 0s (or ‘HI’s, as PEAR researchers put it). In the second, they would mentally direct the machine to produce more 0s than 1s (more ‘LO’s). In the third, they would attempt not to influence the machine in any way. This three-stage process was to guard against any bias in the equipment. The machine would then record the operator’s decisions virtually simultaneously.

When a participant pressed a button, he would set off a trial of 200 binary ‘hits’ of 1 or 0, lasting about one-fifth of a second, during which time he would hold his mental intention (to produce more than the 100 ‘1’s, say, expected by chance). Usually the PEAR team would ask each operator to carry out a run of 50 trials at one go, a process that might only take half an hour but which would produce 10,000 hits of 1 or 0. Dunne and Jahn typically examined scores for each operator of blocks of 50 or 100 runs (2,500 to 5,000 trials, or 500,000 to one million binary ‘hits’) – the minimum chunk of data, they determined, for reliably pinpointing trends.
¹⁷

From the outset it was clear that they needed a sophisticated method of analyzing their results. Schmidt had simply counted up the number of hits and compared them to chance. Jahn and Dunne decided to use a tried-and-tested method in statistics called cumulative deviation, which entailed continually adding up your deviation from the chance score – 100 – for each trial and averaging it, and then plotting it on a graph.

The graph would show the mean, or average, and certain standard deviations – margins where results deviate from the mean but are still not considered significant. In trials of 200 binary hits occurring randomly, your machine should throw an average of 100 heads and 100 tails over time – so your bell curve will have 100 as its mean, represented by a vertical line initiated from top of its highest point. If you were to plot each result every time your machine conducted a trial, you would have individual points on your bell curve – 101, 103, 95, 104 – representing each score. Because any single effect is so tiny, it is difficult, doing it that way, to see any overall trend. But if you continue to add up and average your results and are having effects, no matter how slight, your scores should lead to a steadily increasing departure from expectation. Cumulative averaging shows off any deviation in bold relief.
¹⁸

It was also clear to Jahn and Dunne that they needed a vast amount of data. Statistical glitches can occur even with a pool of data as large as 25,000 trials. If you are looking at a binary chance event like coin tossing, in statistical terms you should be throwing heads or tails roughly half the time. Say you decided to toss a coin 200 times and came up with 102 heads. Given the small numbers involved, your slight favouring of heads would still be considered statistically well within the laws of chance.

But if you tossed that same coin 2 million times, and you came up with 1,020,000 heads, this would suddenly represent a huge deviation from chance. With tiny effects like the REG tests, it is not individual or small clusters of studies but the combining of vast amounts of data which ‘compounds’ to statistical significance, by its increasing departure from expectation.
¹⁹

After their first 5000 studies Jahn and Dunne decided to pull off the data and compute what was happening thus far. It was a Sunday evening and they were at Bob Jahn’s house. They took their average results for each operator and began plotting them on a graph, using little red dots for any time their operators had attempted to influence the machine to have a HI (heads) and little green dots for the LO intentions (tails).

When they finished, they examined what they had. If there had been no deviation from chance, the two bell curves would be sitting right on top of the bell curve of chance, with 100 as the mean.

Their results were nothing like that. The two types of intention had each gone in a different direction. The red bell curve, representing the ‘HI’ intentions, had shifted to the right of the chance average, and the green bell curve had shifted to the left. This was as rigorous a scientific study as they come, and yet somehow their participants – all ordinary people, no psychic superstars among them – had been able to affect the random movement of machines simply by an act of will.

Jahn looked up from the data, sat back in his chair and met Brenda’s eye. ‘That’s very nice,’ he said.

Dunne stared at him in disbelief. With scientific rigor and technological precision they had just generated proof of ideas that were formerly the province of mystical experience or the most outlandish science fiction. They’d proved something revolutionary about human consciousness. Maybe one day this work would herald a refinement of quantum physics. Indeed, what they had in their hands was
beyond
current science – was perhaps the beginnings of a new science.

‘What do you mean, “
that’s very nice
”?’ she replied. ‘This is absolutely …
incredible
!’

Even Bob Jahn, in his cautious and deliberate manner, his dislike of being immoderate or waving a fist in the air, had to admit, staring at the graphs sprawled across his dining-room table, that there were no words in his current scientific vocabulary to explain them.

It was Brenda who first suggested that they make the machines more engaging and the environment more cosy in order to encourage the ‘resonance’ which appeared to be occurring between participants and their machines. Jahn began creating a host of ingenious random mechanical, optical and electronic devices – a swinging pendulum; a spouting water fountain; computer screens which switched attractive images at random; a moveable REG which skittled randomly back and forth across a table; and the jewel in the PEAR lab’s crown, a random mechanical cascade. At rest it appeared like a giant pinball machine attached to the wall, a 6-by-10-foot framed set of 330 pegs. When activated, nine thousand polystyrene balls tumbled over the pegs in the span of only 12 minutes and stacked in one of nineteen collection bins, eventually producing a configuration resembling a bell-shaped curve. Brenda put a toy frog on the moveable REGs and spent time selecting attractive computer images, so that participants would be ‘rewarded’ if they chose a certain image by seeing more of it. They put up wood paneling. They began a collection of teddy bears. They offered participants snacks and breaks.

Year in and year out, Jahn and Dunne carried on the tedious process of collecting a mountain of data – which would eventually turn into the largest database ever assembled of studies into remote intention. At various points, they would stop to analyze all they had amassed thus far. In one 12-year period of nearly 2.5 million trials, it turned out that 52 per cent of all the trials were in the intended direction and nearly two-thirds of the ninety-one operators had overall success in influencing the machines the way they’d intended. This was true, no matter which type of machine was used.
²⁰
Nothing else – whether it was the way a participant looked at a machine, the strength of their concentration, the lighting, the background noise or even the presence of other people – seemed to make any difference to the results. So long as the participant willed the machine to register heads or tails, he or she had some influence on it a significant percentage of the time.