Psychokinesis

Psychokinesis, or telekinesis, abbreviated PK or TK respectively,  can be defined as the ability to influence the environment around you through means not using the 5 physical senses.   It can be divided into two categories, Macro-Psychokinesis, and Micro-Psychokinesis.  Macro-Psychokinesis can be defined as the ability to manipulate or move concrete objects, such as a pen, pencil, or book.  Micro-Psychokinesis can be defined as the ability to manipulate chance.  An example of micro-psychokinesis might include manipulating a random number generator to display 1′s instead of 0′s.

What Psychokinesis is Not

Realistic psychokinesis is not lifting a car with your mind. Psychokinesis is not solely used as a parlor trick.  Psychokinesis does not come instantly, and you will probably not impress your friends with it within the first week of practice.  Individuals seeking to learn this ability who care about the amazing attributes of said ability are usually those that are the first to give up.  Individuals seeking to learn the ability with self-discovery in mind, rather than amazing skills, are those who keep with it the longest, with the best outcomes.

Psychokinesis and Skepticism

Currently, many researchers retain a view regarding Psychokinesis(PK) that can only be described as highly skeptical. Many of today’s prominent researchers contend that positive results regarding the existence of phenomena such as Psychokinesis(PK), can mostly be explained by the fact that those who believe in such phenomena are mentally susceptible to an “illusion” such as PK.  For example, skeptics claim that individuals believing in Psychokinesis and proving its legitimacy in terms of personal experience do so and receive positive results almost that can be highly contributed to the effects of “confirmation bias”. Confirmation bias can be defined as the tendency for one to confirm his/her hypothesis, whether or not they are true or false.  An example concerning “confirmation bias” can be seen in a study conducted in 1952, where Richard Kaufman, an individual affiliated with Yale University assigned subjects the task of influencing 8 dice towards their desired outputs, while recording their own scores.  Simultaneously, these recordings were videotaped.  The research study found that those skeptic of psychokinesis were more prone towards making mistakes while recording to make their belief more believable, while those who believed in psychokinesis were more likely to make mistakes favorable to an outcome that said that that psychokinesis exists.  Confirmation bias is said to be the source of such a positive result  regarding dice experiments conducted by J.B. Rhine (Gardner 307).

Another common explanation that prominent skeptical researchers attribute towards belief in Psychokinesis, and towards positive results regarding Psychokinesis research is the fact that many of the effects of Psychokinesis can be reproduced using various means of trickery, such as slight-of-hand.  An example of this being used to simulate Psychokinesis-based abilities can be seen during the 1980′s, when James Randi, a stage magician and scientific skeptic, sent amateur conjurers to the University of Washington’s Psychical research facility, the McDonnell laboratory, who then later reported that these two individuals had successful Psychokinesis ability(Colman 195-196).

View scholarly papers regarding psychokinesis and skepticism.

Positive Research

Although there is a lot of skepticism regarding Psychokinesis(PK), with reason, there are also many pieces of research that are favorable towards the existence of Psychokinesis.  One such example is a positive study done by Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research(PEAR) lab.  The lab was originally opened by the dean of Princeton’s  School of Engineering and Applied Science(Robert G. Jahn), for the purpose of “studying the potential vulnerability of engineering devices and information processing systems to the anomalous influence of the consciousness of their human operators.(1)”  The lab closed in 2007, citing that its original goals have been met, and that according to Jahn and Brenda Dunne, the “databases produced by PEAR provide clear evidence that human thought and emotion can produce measureable influences on physical reality(1)”.

More examples of positive research can be found in our research section, and in Dean Radin’s book, “Entangled Minds“.