Psychokinesis: can your mind bend pure randomness?
For half a century, researchers have tested whether focused intention can tip a perfectly random machine. Here is the whole story, from coin flips to quantum physics, and a game that lets you try it yourself.
The experiment, step by step
A coin-flipping machine, a Princeton lab, and a ball you push with your mind.
It all starts with a random number generator
A random number generator is a little machine that flips a coin for you, thousands of times a second. Heads is 0, tails is 1. Out pours an endless stream of 0s and 1s, and because the coin is fair, it stays close to half and half over time.
Not all random number generators are built the same
Normal computers fake it. They take a starting number and compute the "random" stream from it, and the same starting number always produces the same stream. Nobody can predict it without that number, but it was locked in before you sat down. Our experiment needs randomness that is still undecided, and there are two ways to get it.
Option 1: quantum randomness
Shoot tiny particles of light at a half-silvered mirror. Each one either passes through or bounces off, and physics says nothing in the universe decides which until the moment it happens. A detector on each side writes down the 1s and 0s. This is what powers our game.
Option 2: noise from the real world
Your phone can also make true randomness by listening to the world around it: temperature wobbles, sensor noise, fan speed, tiny timing hiccups between events. All that unpredictable mess gets stirred together and cleaned up into random bits.
The Princeton experiment
From 1979 to 2007, Princeton’s PEAR lab asked a simple question: can intention alone tip a random stream? An operator sat with a random event generator and tried to pull it toward more 1s or more 0s, millions of times over, while the lab recorded what the stream actually did.
What the research found
The streams drifted toward what people intended: about 0.2 extra matching bits out of every 1,000. Tiny, but over millions of tries the odds of luck doing that were about 1 in 14,000.
When randomness reacts to the world
The labs caught something stranger too: sudden jumps inside a single stream, right as something big happened around it. Portable generators spiked during ceremonies and concerts when a crowd’s attention locked together, and the Global Consciousness Project reports the same pattern across a worldwide RNG network during major world events.
Some people seem better at it
The effect was not spread evenly. At PEAR, a handful of operators produced far more than their share of the drift, run after run, and Helmut Schmidt saw his strongest results after pre-selecting people who scored well in trial runs. Whatever this ability is, some people appear to have more of it.
Our hypothesis: it can be trained
Remote viewers improve with structured practice and honest feedback, and we think influencing a random stream may work the same way. Nobody has run that experiment at scale. So we built one: this game is a new, ongoing experiment to see whether people get measurably better at influencing an RNG over time.
The game: push the ball with your mind
Our psychokinesis game is that same experiment, made playable. Each bit from a quantum RNG nudges a falling ball: 0 goes left, 1 goes right. Pick a side, focus, and try to hold the ball there. The longer the stream stays on your side, the more a hidden image sharpens.
How rare was your run?
Back to coin flips: 55 heads out of 100 happens about 1 run in 5. Sixty heads is a 1 in 35 event. Seventy is roughly 1 in 25,000. Your results screen scores your stream the same way, as plain odds, so you can see exactly how unusual your run was.
Details that keep it honest
Bits are locked in first
The whole stream is generated and sealed before you see anything, so a run can never cherry-pick lucky bits.
You call your side up front
You pick zeros, ones, or a surprise side each turn before the stream starts. Every stat is measured against that call.
The source is always labeled
Every results screen says whether the run used the quantum source or the local backup. No run pretends to be something it was not.
Scored like the labs
Runs use the same one-tailed tests as laboratory PK research, and report your effect on the same per-1,000-bits scale as PEAR.
Reading your results
Odds rarer than 1 in 20 (a p-value under 0.05) count as significant, the same bar the labs use. Swings against your intention get flagged too: researchers call that psi-missing, and it happens often enough that labs track it as its own result instead of writing it off as bad luck.
One run means little either way. Chance produces the occasional standout, and the effects reported in the research are far too small to show up reliably in a few thousand bits. The signal worth watching is your trend across many runs, which is exactly what this platform collects.
The spike research: from ceremonies to 9/11
The Global Consciousness Project is the largest effort here. Since 1998 it has run hardware RNGs around the world and registers, in advance, which world events it will test. Its most cited deviations came on the morning of September 11, 2001. Across more than 500 pre-registered events, the project reports combined odds of about a trillion to one against chance. Critics dispute the statistical choices, and the debate is ongoing.
Your runs get the same treatment. The momentary spikes chart on your results screen hunts for short, strong swings inside your stream, not just the overall drift.
Go deeper: the research record
Physicist Helmut Schmidt started this line of work in the late 1960s, building random generators from radioactive decay (a quantum process) and asking people to influence which lamps lit up. His above-chance results made hardware RNGs the standard tool of the field, and gave this kind of experiment its name: micro-PK.
The biggest program was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, founded by Princeton's dean of engineering, Robert Jahn, in 1979. Across its benchmark 12-year database, streams drifted with intention by roughly 0.2 extra on-target bits per 1,000, with a composite z-score of 3.8 and a one-tailed p-value near 0.00007, odds of about 1 in 14,000 against chance. High and low intentions also pulled in opposite directions, the pattern this game's cumulative deviation charts are modeled on.
The database was also famously uneven. One prolific participant, known in the literature only as Operator 10, contributed a large slice of PEAR's total effect, and individual operators showed consistent personal patterns in their data. Schmidt's strongest series likewise came from pre-selected high scorers. That unevenness is part of why we treat RNG influence as something individual, and possibly trainable.
Not everyone is convinced. Radin and Nelson's 1989 review of nearly 600 RNG studies found a small, consistent effect. A 2006 meta-analysis by Bösch, Steinkamp, and Boller agreed the pooled effect was statistically significant but argued selective publishing could account for it, and skeptics note that larger studies tend to show smaller effects. The question is open, which is why this game keeps collecting clean, pre-committed runs.
Related topics
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What is remote viewing?
The structured protocol behind this platform
Extrasensory perception
Perception beyond the five senses, studied
Local sidereal time
When psi performance appears to peak
Associative remote viewing
Using psi protocols to predict binary outcomes
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