Mind Over Matter -- in miniature by Mario Varvoglis, Ph.D.
To get started, you don’t need anything fancy -- just a nice, shiny coin. A coin
tumbling through the air has two equally probable outcomes: heads, or tails -- so,
normally, there’s just a 50-50 chance to correctly predict the outcome of the
coin-toss. If you toss it a hundred times, then, by chance alone, the person should call
it right just about half the time, give or take a few. But if your friend does have some
psychic ability then he should be able to beat those odds, and get a much better score --
say, 65 ‘hits’ (correct guesses) in 100 coin tosses.
Now, let’s say he does - what does that mean? Well, for one thing, it might have been
just a lucky streak; there’s a chance, albeit a pretty small one, that that was a
happy coincidence. Alternatively, it may show that he was indeed able to ‘pick
up’ information psychically -- to predict the outcome through ESP -- but not
necessarily force the coin towards that outcome using PK. So we’ve got to up the
ante: we must pick either heads or tails in advance as the ‘target’ outcome, and
then ask him to consistently ‘force’ that outcome upon the poor tumbling coin.
So, you would try, say, 100 coin-tosses with heads as the ‘target,’ 100 tosses
with tails as the target, and 100 ‘control’ tosses, with no target at all. If
toss outcomes keep favoring the selected ‘target’-face -- the one your friend is
currently wishing for -- then you might begin to suspect that something real is going on;
especially if during the ‘no-target’ condition you get pretty close to a 50-50
distribution (showing you have a ‘fair’ coin). |
