Miss Cleo can just make her awesome jerk chicken in the campus cafeteria to earn a living.
Posted on 02/11/2007 3:27:50 PM PST by xcamel
The extrasensory perception lab at Princeton University will be shuttered at the end of the month. Maybe you already knew that.
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory will close after 28 years of studying ESP and telekinesis, research that embarrassed university officials and outraged the scientific community.
PEAR's founder, Robert G. Jahn, said the lab, with its aging equipment and dwindling finances, has done what it needed to do.
"If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will," Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton's engineering school and an emeritus professor, told The New York Times for Saturday editions.
Princeton made no official comment on the lab's closure.
One of the world's top experts on jet propulsion, Jahn was able to buck a research system based on university and government money that uses strenuous peer review. Instead, Jahn estimates he was able to raise more than $10 million in private donations over the years.
A standard experiment at PEAR would have a participant sitting in front of an electric box flashing numbers just above or below 100. Staff would tell the person to either "think high" or "think low" as they watched the display.
PEAR researchers concluded that people could alter the results in such machines about two or three times out of 100,000. Jahn claimed if the human mind could slightly alter a machine, it might be able to be used in other areas of human life, such as healing disease.
who knew!
"Maybe you already knew that."
LOL!
He-he. They should be working for Karl, unless he has already rejected them. It was not telekinesis but telehypnosis that worked so well on the butterfly ballots in '00.
> Jahn claimed if the human mind could slightly alter
> a machine, it might be able to be used in other
> areas of human life, such as healing disease.
... or keeping the funding flowing to your ESP project.
Hmmm. Guess not.
Miss Cleo can just make her awesome jerk chicken in the campus cafeteria to earn a living.
I foreknew it more than a year ago.
LOL, how about the paranormal studies, Bill Murry would be out a job.
Best line of the day!
Sheldrake is a former director of studies for cellular biology at Cambridge University who has shown to a statistical certainty that certain kinds of things generally viewed as "paranormal" are real.
CIA did a lot of research into this in the 70's and 80's. The documents were released under the FOIA a few years back.
Egon is crying now.
L0L!
Venkman burns in hell!
Hey you don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector; they expect results!
One of the biggest problems with ESP research is that they are so focused on the anomalous, that they miss the glaringly obvious axiom: that ESP, by whatever definition, evolved as a normal process to accomplish normal goals. By focusing on abnormal people, they miss the boat.
You want to find somebody with a type of ESP? Then find someone who, when you talk to them, completes your sentences in an impatient manner. That is an example of normal telepathy, again, by whatever means. Importantly, it is what could be called "narrow band communication", as they pick up on very limited abstract data, usually words--but never quite perfectly.
The US Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor spent years trying to get accurate distance telepathy for submarines, but they could never get over the accuracy problem.
The opposite of telepaths, you have people who are gifted empaths. This is a form of "wide band communications", in which someone picks up a slew of information all at once from someone else, enough to have a really good sense of what they are feeling. But what they receive is so unfocused that there is no data, as such, in it. They can only see the forest. Empaths often have a problem in mis-reading other people who give off contradictory signals, and having their own feelings affected by someone else's.
A third and fourth example of normal ESP is called "beckoning", or as someone put it, "If people didn't continually force events to happen, life would be dull indeed." Beckoning is the ability to "pull" things and events into your "personal space", or to "push" the undesirable away from you.
Beckoning is so normal that it is done continuously, if intermittently, throughout the day, at a subconscious level. However, it is also done consciously, and if you are aware of it as a process, you can and may also interfere with its working properly. So it is best done with a relaxed frame of mind.
Interestingly, while people must both push and pull, most people tend to be better at one than the other.
A good example of this was done by a young woman I knew who was sitting at a coffee house. She tried pulling an object into her "space", in her case a plastic cup with water. But she immediately changed it, saying that it was too common, and said she wanted to see a friend she hadn't seen in a week. As part of the process we then changed subjects and chatted about other things for a while, to get our minds off the process and limit interference. But then her friend came walking up, carrying a plastic cup full of water.
Pushing is just as blatant and normal.
One of the most telling examples of ESP is that most people seem to use one of three different "frequencies" to communicate with each other. When two people on a similar band want to communicate, they both attempt to adjust their "tuning" to match each other's "signal." The closer they do this, the more information they can share without distortion.
However, when you get people on two different major frequencies, they have to expend a great deal of energy to make sense to each other. Their I/O is apples and oranges different. Usually they fail in real communication.
It is ironic in our society that there are so many people who don't "get it", no matter who is speaking. But being aware of the difference makes you see it in others. A great example of this was two young men with different frequencies, who had both been at a track meet, one running and the other watching, who were trying to describe the event to a third man, who had not been there.
The two each tried to explain what they had seen on their own frequency, to the puzzlement of the other two; and then the third tried to explain what they had said, which puzzled the first two.
Afterwards, each confided in me that the other two either weren't very smart, or maybe hadn't seen the track meet at all. They just didn't communicate with each other.
Why was it embarrassing to try to understand something that we don't know? If they couldn't find anything, it's fine. To me, this is more like the global warming debate. The majority think global warming is caused by human, so everybody else who tries to show otherwise is seen as 'embarrassing'.
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