Guess what we’re thinking… Twitter to test psychic powers in scientific study
6.1.09 / Daily Mail
Have you ever suspected you could be psychic? Now you can find out thanks to an experiment to be conducted through Twitter.
In the first scientific study to use the social messaging service, experts will investigate ‘remote viewing’ – the psychic ability to identify distant locations.
Thousands of members of the public will be asked to ‘Tweet’ their impressions of a randomly chosen spot in the UK visited by one of the researchers.
Dr Wiseman has asked people to test their extra-sensory perception
Then they will vote for which of five photographs on a website shows where the visitor was standing. The trial will be repeated with visually different locations four times.
If at the end of the experiment the votes correctly identify at least three targets, it will support the existence of extra-sensory perception.
Study leader psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, who specialises in investigating psychic phenomena, said: ‘Personally, I’m sceptical, but three hits would be against odds of one in 125, which would be quite impressive.’
He hopes as many as 10,000 people will take part in the research, being conducted in collaboration with New Scientist magazine.
Prof Wiseman will travel to each target location at 3pm on each day this week and send a message to thousands of participants to ‘Tweet’ their thoughts about his surroundings.
Twenty minutes after sending this message he will transmit another containing a website address on which participants can view photographs of the actual location and four decoys. They will then cast their votes.
Dr Richard Wiseman has conducted a number of experiments testing psychic powers
‘I have staged several mass participation studies over the years, but this is the first to use Twitter,’ said Prof Wiseman.
‘The instant nature of Tweets allows thousands of people to take part in real time, making it perfect for an extra-sensory perception experiment.
‘If the effect does exist then having so many people participate will help detect it.’
Prof Wiseman is not the first scientist to investigate remote viewing.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1970s, the CIA spent 20 million dollars (£12.5 million) conducting remote viewing experiments in a real-life case of the ‘X-files’.
The ‘Stargate Project’ was aimed at conducting ‘psychic spying’ missions against the Soviet Union.
‘The Russians were doing the same thing, and there was evidence from laboratory studies that suggested there might be something going on,’ said Prof Wiseman.
‘The CIA just thought it was worth a try and ran the programme for about 10 years.’
Remote viewing has been linked to astral projection and telepathy, but no-one knows how it might work.
Unlike the CIA, Prof Wiseman will be looking for a group effect rather than individual ability.
This is a phenomenon known as ‘the wisdom of the crowds’.
‘If you have a jar full of jellybeans and you want to know many are in it, you get the most accurate estimate by averaging a number of different people’s estimates,’ said Prof Wiseman.
The results of the experiment should be known on Friday.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury, online editor at New Scientist, said: ‘There have been mass participation experiments since the start of mass communication and this is the next step.
‘If we find some sort of effect then we can get into speculating about how it works.’
You can take part in the experiment by signing up to Twitter and ‘following’ Richard Wiseman
June 3, 2009 at 7:23 pm
This man is a programmed multiple. Look at his eyes closely.
The man is wearing a royal blue shirt, the color of the third eye chakra, which I find to be no coincidence.
My feelings tell me this is an Illuminati sponsored test to see how close to the “great awakening” humanity is, by extrapolating from the results of this experiment the percentage of humanity who now have what is called psychic abilities, compared to other time periods. He basically said so himself.
“If you have a jar full of jellybeans and you want to know many are in it, you get the most accurate estimate by averaging a number of different people’s estimates,’ said Prof Wiseman.
Be alert and ask questions folks. Just who are these people who are doing these “fun!” tests. Where do they come from? What is their background?
And for those who are really into the remote viewing/astral projection stuff, even famed astral projector Robert Monroe said in his book Journeys out of the Body that as far back as 1961, JFK had even an astral projector bodyguard. The government’s interest in this stuff is wild and it is real. And it is not for friendly purposes. How could it be? Think of how free it’d make everyone and how the information has been deliberately hidden from the public for ages.