Planer has written that parapsychologists have to fall back on studies that involve only statistics that are unrepeatable, owing their results to poor experimental methods, recording mistakes and faulty statistical mathematics.Īccording to Planer, “All research in medicine and other sciences would become illusionary, if the existence of PK had to be taken seriously for no experiment could be relied upon to furnish objective results, since all measurements would become falsified to a greater or lesser degree, according to his PK ability, by the experimenter’s wishes.” Planer concluded that the concept of psychokinesis is absurd and has no scientific basis. Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they “do not hold out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of PK” because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent. Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman advocated a similar position.įelix Planer, a professor of electrical engineering, has written that if psychokinesis were real then it would be easy to demonstrate by getting subjects to depress a scale on a sensitive balance, raise the temperature of a waterbath which could be measured with an accuracy of a hundredth of a degree centigrade, or affect an element in an electrical circuit such as a resistor, which could be monitored to better than a millionth of an ampere. Their conclusion, published in a 1987 report, was that there was no scientific evidence for the existence of psychokinesis.Ĭarl Sagan included telekinesis in a long list of “offerings of pseudoscience and superstition” which “it would be foolish to accept (…) without solid scientific data”. The panel criticized macro-PK experiments for being open to deception by conjurors, and said that virtually all micro-PK experiments “depart from good scientific practice in a variety of ways”. The panel heard from a variety of military staff who believed in PK and made visits to the PEAR laboratory and two other laboratories that had claimed positive results from micro-PK experiments. Part of its purpose was to investigate military applications of PK, for example to remotely jam or disrupt enemy weaponry. In 1984, the United States National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the US Army Research Institute, formed a scientific panel to assess the best evidence for psychokinesis. There is a broad scientific consensus that PK research, and parapsychology more generally, have not produced a reliable, repeatable demonstration.Ī panel commissioned in 1988 by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that “despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or ‘mind over matter’ exercises… Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.” There is no convincing evidence that psychokinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience. Psychokinesis experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. Psychokinesis (from Greek ψυχή “ mind” and κίνησις “movement”), or telekinesis (from τηλε- “far off” and κίνηση “movement”), is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Artist conception of spontaneous psychokinesis from 1911 French magazine La Vie Mysterieuse.
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