Found this article.. Hope it provides a few more places for you to look. You're not losing it the software was out there but 1997 was a long time ago.. Happy Hunting.

SOURCE: Toronto Globe and Mail
DATE: June 28, 1997
SECTION: Mind & Matter

by Geoff Olson

Leaving Las Vegas with
gamblers' dream unresolved

PRINCETON University scientist
Brenda J. Dunne is showing a film in
which a squat little robot on three
wheels meanders haphazardly across a
table, its movements controlled by a ran-
dom-event generator. We are at the annual
meeting of the Society for Scientific Explo-
ration, a convocation of lettered scholars
that this year gathered in a Las Vegas hotel
to examine phenomena on the fringe-
UFOs, parapsychology, alternative medical
practices, and the like.

Professor Dunne's R2D2-style robot is the
centrepiece of a series of experiments de-
signed to study what researchers call "hu-
man/machine anomalies. Stated simply
the focus of the work is to determine
whether human subjects can affect the
movements of a mechanical device-push-
ing it toward them or away - merely
through concentration.

"It's controversial, it's true,' says Prof.
Dunne, of Princeton University's Engi-
neering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR). "I
think doing the work at Princeton makes
people pay attention a little bit more than if
it was done somewhere else." Her co-re-
searcher,-Robert Jahn, formed the lab in
1979 when he was dean of engineering to re-
search the role of consciousness in the
physical world.

In their experiments, human subjects at-
tempt to influence the behaviour of a vari-
ety of devices. The researchers say half a
million test runs show ' unmistakable evi-
dence" that machines can be affected by
what is believed to be human consciousness
-or, as PEAR itself puts it: an extremely
minute, but statistically measurable, ability
of the mind to skew the output of electronic
number generators and other devices." It
sounds spooky, in a dry, academic way.

Prof. Dunne's recent work with the robot
was inspired by another researcher's efforts
to detect animal/machine anomalies. A
randomly moving robot was introduced to
newly hatched baby chicks, who im-
printed on the device. The birds were set
in a mesh enclosure in a corner of a room
and the robot was left to ramble. The goal
of the experiment was to determine
.whether the chicks' emotional link with
their cybermother would influence the
robot to stay closer to them. The results
suggested overwhelmingly that the chicks
did have some effect on the machine.

"We don't even use the word psychoki-
nesis, one reason being that the word has
a lot of negative connotations-it's New
Agey," says Prof. Dunne. We just speak of
human/machine anomalies." She adds
that the "psycho" part of psychokinesis is
problematic in itself, and that "kinesis
means an energy or force of some sort,
and we're certainly not dealing with an
energy of any sort that we currently
know."

Prof. Jahn, who also attended the Las
Vegas conference, says data from 13 sepa-
rate experiments over 11 years suggest
that you're looking at less than a part in
a trillion" of the results being due to
chance alone. "That is overwhelming," he
says. There are even gender effects:
Women do better than men in influencing
machines.

The purported phenomenon has a real-
world side. If mind can influence machine,
then it raises real issues for sensitive elec-
tronic controls in aircraft. There are also
the commercial possibilities: At the PEAR
Inc. Web page (http:llwww.pearinc.comI
xpost-sc.html), for example, you can down-
load ShapeChanger software for just
$24.95. The program tests your power with
human/machine anomalies on your home
computer: The object is to will" one pre-
selected image to appear on your monitor
instead of another.

The research has drawn its share of
skepticism. And there's no doubt that con-
clusive proof of human/machine interac-
tions would have the potential of being a
materialist's worst nightmare: that con-
sciousness and cosmos are inextricable.
It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Prin-
ciple -- that the act of observation
changes what is being observed-with a
vengeance.

Prof. Jahn regards his work as having
the potential to offer a new understanding
of the workings of the material world:
"This is the real excitement, I think to us,
that we're not just looking at cute little
anomalies or aberrations within the field
of human/machine interactions. We're see-
ing the floating debris, if you will, that
presages a much more substantial overall
concept of science to include subjective di-
mensions as well as objective dimensions.

Does the theory offer hope for gamblers
longing to beat the odds in Las Vegas?
'"Gamblers throughout history have be-
lieved they could affect the outcome of a
random process like rolling dice or shuf-
fling cards," Prof. Dunne wrote in 1992.
"The phenomenon we're measuring is a
lot more subtle, but it's the same idea and
we've measured it in the laboratory."

But it shows itself only after many
thousands of trials, and the deviations
aren't enough to break casinos. Not unex-
pectedly, I saw no one from the conference
at the gaming tables or slot machines.


Geoff Olson writes on science-related contro-
versies for The Vancouver Courier.


Drew Williamson