Spiritual movement: the fact that spirit is superior to matter

Scientific evidence about the mental ability to move objects or bend spoons is still elusive. Oman Zhenniyev | Shutterstock) "Who is a psychic? Hands up! "

This is an old joke, but there are several claimed spiritual powers, including foreknowledge (knowing the future) and telepathy (describing things in distant places). But for pure impression, it is difficult to overcome mental movement, that is, the ability to move objects through mental power. This word comes from Greek "thought" and "movement", also known as PK or electric drive.

Fictional psychodynamics is easy to find: popular X-Men comics and movie series include the character jean grey, and its power includes extra sensory perception and psychological movement. In 2009, the movie Push tells the story of a group of young Americans with various psychological abilities uniting to fight against a dark American institution with their supernatural power.

Although many Americans believe in psychological ability (according to the Baylor religious survey in 2005, about 15% believe it), scientific evidence shows that its existence is still elusive. Some people even associate spiritual movement with the spiritual world. For example, some reports about ghosts, such as pranks, are not the performance of the dead at all, but the unconscious release of a person's mental anger or anxiety.

If people can move daily things with their minds, it should be easy to prove: who doesn't like a latte sent by a spiritual barista from across the counter and just floats it in your hand with gestures? Of course, this will not happen. Instead, researchers focus on what they call "micro PK", that is, the operation of very small objects. The idea is that if the ability exists, its power is obviously very weak. Therefore, the less physical energy is applied to the object, the more obvious the physical movement effect of the object is. For this reason, laboratory experiments usually focus on some common things, such as trying to make the dice fall on a certain number at a speed higher than the accidental rate, or affecting a computerized random number generator.

Due to this change in methodology, psychomotor experiments rely more on complex statistical analysis; For example, the question is not whether a person can bend a spoon or tip a glass with his mind, but whether they can make coins appear more than 50% of the time and do thousands of experiments in one process.

Idealism and the idea that people can move objects through spiritual power have attracted people for centuries, although it was not considered as a scientifically proven ability until the end of 19. This happened in the heyday of early religious idealism, when psychics claimed that when they touched the dead in an event, objects would suddenly and mysteriously move, float or fly in a dark room, as if they had never been touched by human hands. Although many people believe-ironically, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes-this is all a scam. The derailed psychic tried everything, from hidden wires to black accomplices, to make objects look motionless.

As the public gradually becomes wise and becomes an illusion, this phenomenon gradually fades out of people's sight. In the1930s and1940s, when a researcher named J.B. Rhein of Duke University became interested in the idea that people could influence the outcome of random events with their brains, this view was revived again. The Rhine River began with the roll of dice, requiring the subjects to influence the results through the power of their brains. Although his research results are mixed and have little impact, it is enough to convince him that something mysterious has happened. Unfortunately, other researchers in Rheinische Zeitung failed to copy his findings and found many mistakes in his method.