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That's ALLLBI rds dot com. Welcome to un Explained Extra with me Richard McClean smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, The Creeping esther Cox, a young woman living in the town of Amherst, Nova Scotia, found herself at the center of a series of peculiar and
terrifying events. For some, these events, which would collectively become known as the Great Amherst Mystery, are among the most convincing examples of a poltergeist haunting ever recorded. For many others. These strange events, despite apparently being witnessed by a number of credible individuals, had merely been concocted by Esther and
possibly others in her family. As many will know, one interpretation of the apparent poltergeist phenomenon is to consider such things as excitable, often malicious entities with an agency of their own. Esther Cox herself claimed that the moving objects, loud bangs, and fires that broke out around her were caused by ghosts. Another interpretation of the apparent poltergeist, however, is the belief that its supposed manifestations are in fact
the result of psychokinetic power. As the lover of science fiction in particular bran to Palmer's thrilling nineteen seventy eight classic The Few, it is this interpretation that I find personally most interesting. The notion of psychokinetic powers, or having the ability to effect objects and systems with the power of the mind alone, has been around for many years. Even as far back as four hundred BC. Shakuni, a character from the Sanskrit epic Maha Barreter, was depicted manipulating
dice using only his will to do so. More recently, characters in stories that possess psychokinetic powers similar to those supposedly displayed by esther Cox have often been, though not exclusively, young women or teenage girls, from Jean Gray in X Men to Stephen King's Carry, and more recently the character
Eleven in Stranger Things. This trope is often laden with the variety of complex and stereotypical implications, from being pejorative depictions of women as hysterical and unable to control their emotions, to being expression of a male fear of powerful and
vengeful girls and women. Such sexist underpinnings are also often found in the literature of psychical research, where adherence to the idea that poltergeists are indeed the result of psychokinesis have tended to favor the view that adolescent girls were the most likely culprits with parapsychology. Like most industries being
largely male dominated, such a perspective is unsurprising. That said, if such powers were to manifest as the consequence of years of trauma, or, as in Estercox's case, as a reaction to a horrific assault, it wouldn't be surprising that women and girls would be the more likely of the cis genders to develop them. In any case, whether you believe in the possibility of such powers or not, the idea that humans could have the potential to exert psychokinesis
remains a potent one. Incredibly, it is also one that has not only been confined to art and parapsychology. It was back in the early autumn of nineteen seventy seven that a student approached Professor Robert John, then dean of America's Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science, with an unusual request. A few days earlier, John had informed his students that a large part of that year's grade would
be apportioned to a project of their own devising. While most students had no trouble getting their projects accepted, the student in question had approached a number of professors to supervise her, but all had refused, declaring her idea to be nothing but pseudoscience. The idea was to attempt a replication of an infamous psychokinesis experiment first devised by German
physicist and parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt in the nineteen sixties. Schmidt had come to Prominance with the outlandish claim that he'd found evidence of the mind's power to manipulate the outcome of a random event generator, although they come in many guises, a random event generator or random number generator is, as the name suggests, a machine designed to generate a random series of events or numbers in order to create results
that cannot be predicted. A basic version of this would be the rolling of a dice, for example, or tossing of a coin. Such machines are invaluable in the study of statistics, among many other applications. Schmidt, however, was the first to use the machines to test for signs of psychokinesis. In one of his more famous experiments, Schmidt used a device that omitted one red and one green light in
a random sequence. Participants were examined to see if they were able to use their minds alone to make one light up more times than the other. According to Schmidt, it was found that, on average, participants were able to influence results to the minute but noticeable degree of two percent deviation from chance. However, Schmidt's apparent results had never been replicated, a vital necessity for something to be accepted scientifically. John's student wanted to see if they could replicate it.
Seeing no reason to prevent them, provided they approached the experiment with all the rigor of any other experiment, John granted them permission to do it. After all, a negative result, as he expected the outcome to be, would be as valuable, if not quite as earth shattering as finding a positive result. So it was with some surprise that John's student claimed
to have replicated Schmidt's original findings. John was, in fact so impressed by the results he decided to set up an entire lab dedicated to similar investigations, and so, in nineteen seventy nine, in a small, cramped basement room of Princeton's Engineering Building, the Princeton Engineering Anomaly's Research Lab, or Pair for short, was created. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's time to take care of yourself.
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get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. Robert John had first attended Princeton as a student, completing first a degree in engineering physics in nineteen fifty one and then his physics PhD in nineteen fifty five. John would go on to join the faculty in nineteen sixty two. It was soon after that the John established the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, with which he oversaw a number of major research programs developing aerospace propulsion systems in
cooperation with NASA and the US Air Force. In fact, much of what John helped develop continues to power spacecraft today. But what Charm was most interested in was consciousness. Though well aware that studying the potential for psychokinesis was at best of fringe science and at worst utter nonsense, since the existence of it would break a number of accepted laws of the universe, he reasoned that if such a thing were to be investigated, he could at least provide
the best of laboratory conditions to do it. For almost thirty years under the guidance of lab manager Brenda Dunne, the pair laboratory investigative primarily mind machine interactions and precognitive remote viewing. A typical experiment for psychokinesis would involve a participant being asked to stare at a random number generator and to think high or low to influence the result.
For remote viewing, participants might be sent to a remote but distinct location and told to think about the characteristics of the place, while another participant in a different location was tested to see if they could pick up anything about where this other person was situated. In investigating the possibility of psychokinesis, the researchers would look constantly to see
if their results were non Gaussian. A Gaussian curve, named after mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss details the average distribution of statistical information that you would ordinarily expect to find in any given experiment. Anything contravening that would suggest that something unusual was actively affecting the result. Often, according to Jan and others at the Pair Laboratory, their experiments did exactly that, supposedly revealing that thoughts alone could physically alter the results
of the random event generators. Critics, however, have pointed out that their results would often only deviate from the norm by a few percent, sometimes as little as nought point nought two percent. Such results would fall significantly below the usual margin of error demanded in similar experiments in order to be certain that they weren't just statistical flukes. As others have pointed out, it may also be the case that there is no such thing as a truly random
event generator. But more fundamentally, even their most seemingly impressive findings failed to be replicated elsewhere, and as such none of their results achieved peer review, since most considered the sheer notion of the peer lab's work to be inconsistent with what are widely considered to be firmly established laws for most science labs. Successful negotiating of the peer review process is what maintains their funding. The Peer Lab was
funded by private investment. It is also worth noting that despite containing the word Princeton, the Pair Lab was only nominally associated with the university, who, along with most of their affiliated scientists, are thought to have been deeply embarrassed by the connection. In two thousand and seven, with funds dwindling and their state of the art equipment no longer quite what it used to be, the Peer Lab closed its doors for good. Professor Jan who died in two
and seventeen, stood by everything they claimed to have discovered. Often, when we think of the idea of psychokinetic power, we imagine some kind of force being generated by our minds, something that can manipulate gravitational or electromagnetic fields, perhaps that can then in turn interact with the atoms or molecules
of the space around us. Many are seduced into the prospect of it by the oft repeated myth that we only use ten percent of our brains, the implication being that if only we could exploit the other ninety percent, who knows what powers we might uncover In reality, As neurologist Barry Gordon of John Hopkins School of Medicine pointed out in Scientific American we in fact use virtually every part of our brain almost all the time, and yet there is little doubt that there is much about the
function of the brain that isn't known, let alone the workings of the quantum mechanical processes that underpin it on a subatomic level. And though we might not ordinarily have the ability to manipulate spaces around us with thoughts alone, thanks to a number of recent developments in neurotechnology, such
a thing may well one day be available to all. Already, Companies such as Nurable and Elon Musk's neurolink are developing ways to measure patterns of electrical brain activity in order to enact physical actions with thought alone, and Facebook are currently developing a system that detects chemical changes in the brain in the hope that it might one day be used to convert our thoughts into type. Such developments are likely only to become more sophisticated and more integrated into
our bodies. It might not be exactly what we had in mind, but one way or another, psychokinesis could be coming to us all. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help supporters, You can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements have Unexplained are produced by me, Richard McClain Smith.
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To make time for you. Teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app or visit telldoc dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t e l a d oc dot com. Slash Unexplained Podcast