Did I just discover a psychic power for improving my internet speed? I should be able to market this somehow...
I vaguely recall coming across some research back when I was in high school (so like 10+ years ago) about psychic influence on computers. IIRC they had a random generator program and had the study group focus on trying to manipulate the results using only their mind.
They apperantly had some success. With the study group repeatedly having a higher occurrence of the target result than the control group.
It was of course, so fringe science that it makes crypto-zoologists studying dragons seem mainstream. And since there haven't been any psychic breakthroughs in those 10 years it was probably bogus. But it still makes you wonder...
Theoretically, our brains use electromagnetic impulses to communicate between neurons, generating a weak electromagnetic field around our bodies, so our presence could actually influence electronic devices to some extent. So, if we had a technology that could read changes in our electromagnetic fields and find some way in which humans can naturally and deliberately affect the field we generate, we could use that as a sort of user input.
I have a book that talks about that kind of research(I got it for $1, what a steal
), including that particular experiment. And yeah, a group of people concentrating on altering a RNG, and the results showed a significant shift in the bell curve in the direction the group was concentrating on.
It also talked about various experiments in remote viewing, including declassified CIA experiments. In a
lot of these cases, supposedly, a person was given only geographic coordinates, and could apparently sketch a fairly accurate diagram and floorplan of a (often secret) site at those coordinates. One humorous incident from these experiments was when someone drew a sketch of a different secret facility a few miles down the road than the one they were supposed to scry.
There was a chapter about kinesis, but unfortunately
macrokinesis(basically, spoon-bending and Vader-choking) sounded like it turned out to be a bunch of bullocks. Microkinesis, manipulating things like microbes and RNGs, seemed plausible(in the context of the other stuff).
One interesting thing was that from all the experiments, most of them that were run by people who believed it was true the results showed that it might just be, while most of the ones that were run be people who that it was a bunch of crap the results showed that it probaby was crap.