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Many Worlds - Single
Particle Interference - Orbitals |
Have I lost you yet? This is a mighty silly web page, no? Anyway, there have been a lot of theories of psi. Very few, if any, make predictions testable by experiment, or explain observed anomalies in the data. Thus..
Extroverted emotional people will make better psi subjects than calm boring people. Individual who by personality and energy level tend to strongly react emotionally and metabolically will show stronger psi effects.
As a test progresses, and becomes boring, as the emotional response to a hit or miss decreases, the size of the probability shift will decrease. (This has been observed, and is known as the decline effect.)
Test subjects who do not get excited by hits, but rather get frustrated by misses, might reduce a negative psi effect. Such a personality would increase the probability of misses. An individual who is equally excited by hits as frustrated by misses might generate no probability shift effect.
A polygraph - recording pulse, respiration and / or skin conductivity - might provide objective evidence of metabolism swing. A polygraph should be able to roughly track the emotional state of the psi subject, monitoring the degree of emotional response and allowing comparison to the observed probability shift.
Biofeedback techniques, where a subject conditions himself to deliberately increase metabolic functions after random target hits, should increase the psi effect.
Most psi experiments have a nominal subject that is consciously trying to predict or alter the random target. The metabolism of the nominal subject is no more or no less relevant than any other individual who is observing the test, who is aware of hits and misses. An extremely emotional and enthusiastic psi tester, working with bland off the street test subjects, is apt to get much better psi effect than a skeptical or methodological researcher working with similar subjects. A psi researcher who gets easily frustrated by failure will blunt the results of even an enthusiastic subject, and could generate a negative psi result.
Mass psi tests with many subjects might be attempted. Psi might be a function of school spirit. One might consider a psi experiment using a gym full of kids led by cheerleaders as an amplifier. After a hit, ask the cheerleaders to maximize metabolism and emotion.
(Metabolic psi modification of reality might be instinctive. Suppose one wished to use metabolic psi to alter the chances of an individual throwing a large ball through a not much larger hoop. Those wishing to increase the odds of a basket would maximize metabolism on seeing the ball go through the hoop. Those wishing to decrease the odds of a basket would minimize metabolism on seeing a hit. This is a commonly observed behavior across many cultures. Might it be evolved and instinctive?)
A repeat of a test psi test is less exciting than an original test, and is less apt to produce significant results.
As the probability shift is determined by emotional and metabolic factors, physical factors are not important. One can separate the subject and the random number generator in distance, in time, and with obstructions between. So long as the subject learns of and/or has opportunity to respond to the hit or miss, none of these alter the size of the probability shift. The mass or complexity of the random target generators are not a factor. One can predict or attempt to modify the target before or after the target is generated. The physical configuration is not as important as personality and the emotional environment. (The above is fairly well established in the literature.)
Schmidt did not find a significant drop off in psi effect as the period between target generation and determination of hit or miss was increased. Anyone who reads the results of a psi test in a parapsychology journal, and responds emotionally to the article, is part of the test, effecting the result. If thousands of people respond emotionally on reading a journal article about a psi test, they might be significantly effecting the test. If a failure to replicate an important result is more frustrating than a successful replication would be exciting, the readers of journal articles could negatively influence an attempt to replicate. Again, there are no boundaries in space or time blocking the psi effect. Anyone who responds emotionally to the target is part of the experiment.
A test which produces weird, strange, innovative and/or unbelievable results is more apt to produce a strong psi effect than a fairly conventional experiment. People present at the experiment or reading about the experiment in a journal are just more apt to respond emotionally. Thus, the weirder the test set up, the stranger the hypothesis, the more unusual an out of the way effect one strives to prove, the more likely one is to succeed in generating a significant effect. However, it is all carnival hokum. The hypothesis might be pure placebo, might have no validity at all, but if people get excited about the hokum, the hokum can contribute to a positive psi result.
I think Ill stop here. Have I cured anyone's headaches? Are they worse? Anyone interested in building an experimental probability-altering machine, drop me a note.
(Next) Some not so deep thoughts.
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Many Worlds - Single
Particle Interference - Orbitals |