9781422280133

A t the end of the 1979 film Stalker by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, a young girl named Monkey stares down the length of a table on which three glasses are placed. One by one the glasses move toward the edge of the table.The last falls to the floor.There are no visible wires, strings, or other mechanisms that would help propel the glasses; it seems that Monkey has used only the power of her mind. The scene depicts the phenomenon of psychokinesis , also known as telekinesis or PK: the ability to move physical objects using mind power alone. While the example above comes from a science fiction film, there are some people who attest that this phenomenon is real.A 2006 survey by Baylor University found that over 28 percent of participants believed in the possibility of telekinesis. Skeptical Science Although researchers have done tests to see if telekinesis is real, there is very little scientific evidence to support it. In the 1930s and ’40s, a scientist from Duke University named J. B. Rhine conducted a series of experiments to see whether subjects could influence the outcomes and positions of rolled dice by their minds alone. At first his findings seemed to suggest a correlation between the workings of human consciousness and physical matter, but other researchers had difficulty replicating his exper-

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