Sunday School

[UnseenParticipant]

I thought you could find anything on the internet, but I can’t find this.

I distinctly remember on one of NPR’s serious talk shows a discussion of psychokinesis, and they talk ended up centering on experiment that tended to suggest some such ability even if weak.

The experiment consisted of a glass-encased board with a square matrix of evenly-spaced pins standing up starting about halfway down. At the top and middle was a chute of some sort through which suitably- and regularly-sized steel bearings were dropped and fell down into a row of suitably-sized slots at the bottom.

Theoretically, by the time the balls reached the bottom, they should have reached the bottom distributed evenly left to right on average over a relevant number of tries.

It turned (it was alleged) that some people could influence the balls to drop a bit more to one side or the other to a statistically relevant degree.

Since I can find no references to it, I suspect it was a either debunked or turned out to be a fluke.

BTW, did you know that the U.S. government was and may still be funding a project to determine how to make anti-gravity feasible?

In case you don’t know, Sandboxx is a very highly respected and credible channel on military technology. Just look at their many videos. No tinfoil hat stuff there at all.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 5 days ago by  Unseen.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@unseen – My A.I. returned this:

The experiment you’re describing sounds like a variant of a Galton board (also known as a Quincunx), which is a device invented by Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the central limit theorem. In a Galton board, balls are dropped from the top and bounce through an array of pins, with the outcome forming a normal distribution in the bins at the bottom due to the random nature of the bounces.

Your recollection of this being discussed on NPR and associated with psychokinesis or mind-over-matter experiments is intriguing. While the Galton board is typically used to demonstrate principles of probability and distribution, there have been studies and experiments that have claimed to examine psychokinesis, where participants try to influence the outcome of random events—sometimes using devices similar to a Galton board.

One prominent line of research in this area was conducted by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory. PEAR was a well-known lab at Princeton University that conducted experiments on human consciousness affecting random systems, including machines that generated random numbers or events similar to the Galton board scenario you described. They claimed to find small but statistically significant deviations from expected randomness, suggesting that individuals could influence outcomes. However, these results were controversial and met with significant skepticism from the broader scientific community.

Critics of the PEAR experiments and similar studies argue that the observed effects could be due to methodological flaws, biases, or random chance rather than any real psychokinetic ability. As a result, mainstream science generally considers such experiments inconclusive or debunked.

It’s possible that the NPR discussion you remember was referencing this kind of research, possibly tying it into broader conversations about consciousness, probability, and the limits of scientific understanding. However, because such experiments are viewed with skepticism and their results have not been reliably replicated, they are often relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse. This might explain why it’s challenging to find direct references to the specific experiment you recall.

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

…such experiments are viewed with skepticism and their results have not been reliably replicated, they are often relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse. This might explain why it’s challenging to find direct references to the specific experiment you recall.

JB Rhine’s claimed successes were eventually debunked by pointing out that transitory anomalies—even sometimes over a surprising number of instances—are not unexpected but eventually disappear into the background as more and more experiments are made, but he would lose interest at that point, hugging to his breast the anomalies and insisting they were proof.

I continue to be surprised that I can’t find any record of the broadcast I remember, though it may have predated Google and even the Internet by a decade or so. It’s been that long since I listened to public radio broadcasts.

[_Robert_Participant]

If a Galton board is tilted-off just a bit…well, a pinball machine will tell you.

[UnseenParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

If a Galton board is tilted-off just a bit…well, a pinball machine will tell you.

Well, I’m sure a competent scientist would work hard to make sure the experiment was “on the level.”

[_Robert_Participant]

Unseen wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

If a Galton board is tilted-off just a bit…well, a pinball machine will tell you.

Well, I’m sure a competent scientist would work hard to make sure the experiment was “on the level.”

I would not doubt it if they were actually measuring the tolerances of the device itself. Once you make it essentially perfect you will get the expected standard deviation as pre-calculated. After as many trials as you can possibly stand to prove this…..only then do you bring in the mysterious “mind-benders” and let them frown real hard.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

That story expressed a belief in fate.

According to the 4-dimensional shape theory of the universe, all events and the space-time paths between them exist at one “time”, if “time” was dimension no. 5.

So, fate would describe that situation very well.  It’s all hard wired in, but most of us can’t see what is going to happen until it does.

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