Virtual Reality Gaming System Tests for Telepathy

Big Ben writes "UK scientists have built a virtual computer world designed to test telepathic ability. Approximately 100 participants will take part in the group gaming experiment at the University of Manchester which aims to test whether telepathy exists between individuals using the system. The project will also look at how telepathic abilities may vary depending on the relationships which exist between participants." Note: for their sakes, I hope they succeed in proving anything paranormal's going on — if they can reproduce such a result, it could earn them the $1 million prize long offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Comments

Try the ESP Game

[Falkkin]

The ESP Game (http://www.espgame.org) has been on the web for a couple years now. It pairs you up with a random partner, and your goal is to type the same words as your partner in response to a series of pictures. It's a rather fun game that has convinced some users that they really do have ESP. (The real purpose of the ESP Game is not to discover users' latent psychic abilities, but to utilize human processing power to label images on the Web.)

Re:Tax payer money at work

[mangu]

Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues?

Two hundred years ago such questions would have made sense. Today we know there isn't any mechanism for that. We may not know everything there is to know about the human body, but we do know more than we did two centuries ago.

The fundamental law of nature that will not allow any communications without a physical channel is the theory of information. If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, time would not be unidirectional.

Re:Tax payer money at work

[aardvarkjoe]

So, if the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance, then that tells me that telepathy is possible.

The problem is that, in these "entanglement experiments", no information is being transmitted from the first site to the second. By measuring the state of the first electron, you can instantaneously affect the state of the second electron -- but according to all of the current theories, there is no way to actually use that to communicate. (If that sounds weird ... it is. Quantum theory is rather unintuitive.)

Re:Tax payer money at work

[radtea]

The first said that the human brain works not only on chemical, electrical, and biological principles, but that it also takes advantage of quantum effects.

This is false. Long-range (ie. more than molecular-scale) quantum effects are important only in systems with very low dissipation. The brain is not such an environment on scales larger than a single molecule or so. There is no evidence that any non-trivial quantum effects are important in the brain, and a great deal of evidence that they are not. The speculation that they are is primarily due to Roger Penrose, who is a brilliant mathematician and wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind on the subject.

The second article said we had isolated one quantum effect in the lab, that being entanglement. Through a process, two electrons become "entangled", and when separated experimentally up to 10 km, when the spin on one is changed, the spin on the other is changed immediately--with no speed-of-light delay.

This is false. Neither electron can be said to have a spin that might be changed prior to measurement. But when the spins are measured along the same axis they have the same value (and the joint probability distribution follows the equivalent law for the case when the spins are measured along different axes.) It is simply a mistake to subscribe to the classical notion that both electrons "really have" a spin-value "before" measurement (before in what frame of reference?) and that one of the spin values changes "when" (in what frame of reference?) the other one changes.

Remember: the order of measurement is arbitrary. No one can say which member of an entangled pair was measured "first", and asking the question (in the absense of some operational procedure that provides an unambigous answer) is like asking "How high is up?"

The quantum world is not capable of supporting the weight of classical ontologies, and if you try to view the quantum world through a classical lense you'll wind up far astray. I strongly recommend Heisenberg's "The Physical Principles of Quantum Mechanics" as a reasonably accessible explication of the fundamental problems--of all the founders of modern QM Heisenberg had the most useful combination of deep insight and clear exposition regarding the meaning of the new physics. Bohr may have seen more deeply, but he wrote so opaquely that no one can tell, and Einstein wrote clearly but didn't see so deeply. Heisenberg understood how weird it all was, and was very good at drawing the boundaries that it is a mistake to try to cross, because nothing definable within a classical ontology lies beyond them.