{"id":13535,"date":"2022-05-27T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T06:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencefocus.com\/?p=120448"},"modified":"2022-05-27T08:18:10","modified_gmt":"2022-05-27T06:18:10","slug":"the-secret-psychic-experimentation-that-inspired-stranger-things","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/rss_feed\/the-secret-psychic-experimentation-that-inspired-stranger-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The secret psychic experimentation that inspired Stranger Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Stephen Kelly\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Friday, 27 May 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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The new season of Stranger Things<\/em> begins with a flashback sequence set deep in a secret laboratory in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. Children with shaved heads move objects with their minds, project their consciousness to far-off places and eventually, once Eleven gets involved, use their powers for far more sinister reasons. It sounds as far-fetched as you\u2019d expect from a show about extradimensional monsters, but remarkably scenes such as these are inspired by a true story.<\/p>\n

Creators the Duffer Brothers originally based Stranger Things<\/em> around a real-life human experimental programmes such as Project MKUltra and Project Star Gate. Conducted by the CIA in the 1950s, MKUltra\u2019s purpose was to explore the potential of mind-control techniques that could give America an edge in the Cold War. Star Gate, in 1978, centred around the potential development of psychic abilities.<\/p>\n

The programmes involved experimenting with LSD \u2013 which, in the case of MKUltra, was used on American citizens without their knowledge \u2013 alongside researching outlandish concepts such as telepathy, remote viewing (where someone could spy on another location, using their mind) and, of course, psychokinesis.<\/p>\n

Most of Project MKUltra\u2019s records were destroyed after it was shut down in 1977, while declassified information about Project Star Gate is vague and the research itself deemed to have dubious value. Physicist Patrick Johnson<\/a>, an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University, is doubtful that either programme managed to develop a way to move objects with your mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know of no real physical way to make psychokinesis happen in the ways we see it in Stranger Things<\/em>,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we move an object with our hands, the fundamental physics of it all is that the electrons surrounding the atoms in our hands exert a force on the electrons surrounding the atoms in whatever object we are moving around. In order to move our hands to move the object, our brain sends an electrical signal through our muscles which tell our muscles to move.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn principle,\u201d he continues, \u201cwe could embed a device which reads the electrical signals that our brain sends to our hand. That device could then interpret and boost the signal to create a targeted electromagnetic field, which could ionise and manipulate the object in the same way as our brains directing our hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are so many challenges to make this happen, plus it requires mechanical enhancements, but this is the best mechanism I could come up with to approximate psychokinesis as we have seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of humans developing psychokinetic powers \u2013 or rather, people claiming that they have developed or witnessed psychokinetic powers \u2013 is an area of interest to Richard Wiseman<\/a>, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He explains that alleged psychokinetic powers tend to come in three forms: micro, macro and biological.<\/p>\n

\u201cMicro phenomena,\u201d he says, \u201cis trying to influence things like a random number generator on a computer or the roll of a dice, where you have to try to roll a target number. These kinds of studies are enormously problematic and none of their effects have survived the ultimate replication test.\u201d In fact, as Wiseman explains, flawed parapsychology studies have been useful for mainstream psychology and other fields of science.<\/p>\n

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Sadie Sink (top) in Stranger Things<\/em> \u00a9 Courtesy of Netflix<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

\u201cIt has helped uncover problems like doing lots of statistical tests and not reporting them all,\u201d he says, \u201cor reporting aspects of your data instead of all of it.\u201d The biggest change, he says, is the introduction of pre-registration, which is the documentation of elements such as a planned hypothesis before starting research.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese things should be specified in advance and often are not in science. And when you do pre-specify them, suddenly the [parapsychological] effects go away. It\u2019s becoming a big thing in science and flows from parapsychology, where studies were critiqued for all of these things and then people went, \u2018hold on a minute, that\u2019s true of our stuff as well!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Macro, meanwhile, is \u201cthe big stuff, which is moving tables, bending spoons and so on,\u201d says Wiseman. \u201cAnd that stuff is heavily associated with sleight of hand and trickery.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third strand, meanwhile, centres around the idea of people influencing biological systems rather than physical ones. \u201cThis is where you try to influence another person,\u201d Wiseman explains. \u201cAnd some of that stuff is positive, you\u2019re trying to make them feel better. And some of it is where you\u2019re trying to do nasty things to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiseman gives the example of the phenomenon where you feel like you\u2019re being stared at, before then turning around to find someone looking at you. Does that mean that you can impact someone\u2019s biological reaction just through staring at them, or that we possess some sort of sense for things we can\u2019t see?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve done studies where you monitor people\u2019s physiology and they\u2019re stared at at randomly determined times. The question is, does that influence their physiology? We did three of them. The first one was significant. The second one, we messed up on the methodology and the third one, the biggest one, was nonsignificant.\u201d<\/p>\n

That might sound vaguely promising, but Wiseman is keen to stress that, \u201cpersonally, I think the evidence for any of them is fairly weak.\u201d Unless, of course, all the evidence is hidden in a shady laboratory buried deep beneath a sleepy American town.<\/p>\n

About our expert, Patrick Johnson<\/h4>\n

Patrick Johnson is an assistant teaching professor at Georgetown University. He previously taught at Marquette University and William Jewell College after receiving his PhD in physics from Washington University in St Louis.<\/p>\n

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