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Way back in the dark ages of mid 2007, I wrote about what I saw as a looming period of technical enlightenment. This vision has not waned. The channels of information I have at my fingertips continue to provide me with extraordinary pieces of insight and development, time and again.
Radio has been around for some time, but only recent developments have enabled me to pick the shows that appeal to me, download them to my sunglasses, and lead a eye-wear fashion parade while I ride to work. While trend envy is an obvious side effect of my choice of lens-flipping glasses, it's also the only reason I get to listen to quality radio programs like All In The Mind on ABC Radio National and Dr Karl on Triple J.
One segment on Dr Karl the other day caught my attention. Renowned skeptic Michael Shermer was guest question answerer. One of the callers brought up the experiments conducted by Robert Jahn at the PEAR laboratory. The caller was adamant that Mr Jahn had conducted robust and objective experiments over many years that consistently showed a random signal emitted from a machine could be influenced by the thoughts of humans. While they had heard of the experiments, neither Dr Karl nor Mr Shermer were familiar enough with the work to offer much comment, beyond some general skepticism.
15 years ago that would have been that. I would have forgotten Jahn did any experiments or what their significance was. Not any more. Not only is Jahn's biography and laboratory details a web site away, more importantly the scientific papers the group produced are freely available for anyone to review. In particular, a thorough report, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, documents the findings of an experiment to see if the thoughts of humans remote to a random number generator could influence that generator.
The real power here is that there is nothing stopping me, Joe Nobody, from repeating Jahn's experiments and publishing the results to the world (perhaps even submitting to a journal that wasn't set up to document paranormal events). How positively empowering it is to think that anyone with access to an Internet enabled computer has the potential to turn scientific endeavour on its head. A repeated experiment that corroborated findings showing correlation between human thought and machine output would be simply staggering.
Incidentally, I'm not going to follow up Jahn's work, but this snippet of the paper linked above might whet someone's appetite. The numbers are the output of a random number generator with mean 100, as a participant hundreds of miles away tried to influence it with their mind high and low.
Apart from Jahn's work, a couple of other snippets of information that have blown my mind recently:
1) Researches at the University of Washington planted electrodes on individual neurons in the motor cortex of monkey brains and connected them via a computer to muscles in the monkey's wrist. They then temporarily paralysed the normal signal path that controlled the monkey's wrist and found that within a couple of weeks the monkeys had learnt to deftly control their wrist with the artificial nerve path. The computer simply counted the frequency of pulses occurring in the monitored neurons and translated that to electrical signals to the muscles. The ramifications for enabling movement in paraplegics are striking. Link.
2) A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory in Switzerland successfully demonstrated a method of deciphering the faint electromagnetic radiation emitted from the cord that connects a regular keyboard to computer. From up to 20 metres away they could determine the keys pressed on the keyboard, which suggests there's some appreciation to be given to the seemingly benign amount of radiation our regular activities generate. Link.
3) A horse got its head stuck in a tree. NSFW. Link.
