playing psi games..

I've spent the past two hours staring at moving balls, orange butterflies, and pictures of injured cartoons in an attempt to tap into my psychokinetic potential. I'm referring to the many psi games that are available online.

The "Ball-drop psychokinetic test" is the first of the games I tried. It's a simple game, albeit badly explained (best approach is to play it once, in order to figure it out). Basically, as the name implies, the game involves a ball that drops through a series of pegs off which it bounces until it lands either to the left or to the right of a white bar. The aim is to try and send the ball either left or right with your mind (the ball's trajectory is set to be completely random, so basically you're trying to make it slightly non-random). I chose to focus on sending the ball to the right. I played the game three times. At the end of each round, I was given a z-statistic and its corresponding interpretation, which described how succesfully I moved the ball in a particular direction with my mind.

In the first round (50 balls), 28 of the balls went to the right, 22 to the left. I thought, wehey! The distribution should have been 25 to the left, 25 to the right!This is a deviation from chance surely! Wryly, the program reported that my PK influence was 'poor'. I guess 50 balls isn't very much statistically speaking. My third round produced similar results.

The second round however was far more interesting: this time I shifted 15 out of 20 balls to the left! This was most certainly a significant deviation from chance! The program agreed that my PK influence had been 'fair'. Of course, I'd actually been trying to shift the ball to the right... does this count as evidence of PK power? Can I still consider myself a budding psycho?

A quick search of the literature reveals that this result, whereby the outcome is opposite to the conscious intent, is termed 'PK-missing'. There has been very little empirical research in this area. However, there has been quite a lot of experimental research into the more generic 'psi-missing' (of which PK-missing is one type) in extrasensory perception (ESP) studies. One of the more well-known experimental studies in ESP, by Gertrude Schmeidler (1952), found that people who were cynical about the existence of ESP (termed "goats"), tended to score below chance level on ESP card-guessing games. Thus, according to this finding (replicated quite succesfully in subsequent experiments) goats tend to 'psi-missing'. She also found that subjects who reported believing in ESP ("sheep") faired above chance in the experiments. This effect is termed the sheep-goat effect. What these findings suggest is that belief and attitude are very important influences on the outcome of ESP experiments. A positive outlook towards the possibility of ESP yields positive results - a negative outlook, negative results. Interesting...

Looking back at my experience of the ball-drop game - can I remember whether I was feeling particularly cynical during the second round of ball-dropping? I really don't know. I think I was feeling cynical throughout...

I take my new findings and apply them to another online psi-game (The Garden, from the Psi-arcade, Institute of Noetic Sciences). This game is better designed (i.e. looks better and more interesting) than the ball-drop game. It is designed 'to test your intuitive abilities', through a series of challenges that take place in a garden. I skip straight to the PK part of the game, in which I have to 'help' an orange butterfly reach a tree with my mind. This time I decide to jot down my feelings and thoughts at the beginning and end of each go.

Overall, my results are unimpressive. Out of 25 attemtps, the butterfly makes it to the tree 13 times. However, look at the results in detail and the picture becomes much more interesting: for the first 14 attempts, during which I made a point of focusing on the butterfly itself, which I tried to 'push' mentally to the tree, it only made it to the tree a total of 4 times. That's 4 out of 14 attempts. This game does not report your z-statistics, and no interpretation is given of your results...but to me, this looks like another case of psi-missing. Friggin amazing, I hear you yawn. But wait: in the next 11 attempts, I make a point of focusing solely on the tree and not on the butterfly flapping around, and the results are worth at least a raised eyebrow: the butterfly makes it 9 times! That's 9/11 success rate. Now I don't need any statistical analysis to know that that result is significant.

Reading back over my notes, I can see that during the first half of the game (when I focused on the butterfly), I started off hopeful, but quite quickly became impatient and cynical as my mental 'pushing' failed to produce results. During the second half, I ignored the butterfly as it flapped around the screen and stared at the tree and told myself "that's the best place to be".

The results, in my opinion, are mildly interesting, but a million light years from even getting an audience with conclusiveness. I'll keep playing the games and repeating the procedures and see if I keep getting similar results...