3.7.8: Thought and the Growth of Fungi Cultures

Since the spiritual movement of the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a substantial amount of public interest in the study of alleged psychic phenomena, including extrasensory perception, telepathy, teleportation, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Along with this interest many intellectuals performed investigations to study these phenomena using the scientific method. A study conducted in 1968 considered the question of whether individuals could use thought processes to retard the growth of fungi (Barry 1968).

In a laboratory the fungus Rhizoctonia solani was cultivated in petri dishes with an inoculation made in the center of the dishes the evening before the experimental sessions. The dishes were then placed in a warm incubator with intermittent lighting 12 hours out of the following 24. The experimental conditions were closely controlled in that all possible precautions were taken to ensure that all the petri dishes were subjected to the same conditions so that the only varying factor that could have influenced the growth of the fungus was the psychokinetic one. The authors of the study report that the purity of the fungus, the composition of the culture, the relative humidity, the temperature, and lighting were carefully regulated.

The experimental sessions took place in a room adjoining the incubator where each subject was assigned five experimental dishes and five control dishes. The subjects were asked to exert their metal ability on their experimental dishes, trying to retard the growth of the fungus in them while disregarding the controls. The control dishes were kept in the room for the same length of time so that they were subjected to the same temperature conditions. Each subject was kept approximately 1.5 meters from the dishes. Each session lasted fifteen minutes.

The experimental results were obtained by outlining, on a sheet of thin paper, the boundary of the fungi growth by someone who did not know the aim of the experiment and who did not know which dishes were the control dishes. The outlines were cut out and weighed under conditions of constant temperature and humidity. If the experimental total for the treatment group was less than the control, the session was counted as a success; otherwise, the session was counted as a failure.

Out of 39 trials, there were 33 successes, 3 failures, and 3 where there was no difference between the control and treatment groups. These results can be assessed in terms of what would be expected if there was no effect on the treatment group, where one would expect half of the trials to be successful and half of the trials to be failures. The researchers were able to use statistical calculations to conclude that if there were no effect, then one would observe the results found in the experiment about 1 in 1,000 times. The results led the investigators to conclude that something else must have caused the retardation in fungus growth, namely the treatment condition.

This controlled experiment used a treatment and a control group. According to the details of the experimental design as reported by in the research article, the researchers took every precaution to attempt to treat the fungus cultures used for the treatment group the same as those used for the control group. This control ensured as few confounding factors as possible, and any observed differences should only be attributable to the treatment, which in this case was the thought energy of the participants in the study. The results as reported in the paper are more detailed than are reported here, and it seems that many of the positive results were attributed to a few subjects used in the study, which could indicate that these individuals had a particular gift in this area.

What is interesting is the way the data were treated. Notice that instead of comparing the amount of reduction in the growth of the fungus, any reduction was treated as a success. For most skeptics of this type of research the amount of growth reduction would be very relevant information in determining the strength of the conclusions from the research project. Certainly, when a researcher manipulates the observed data in such a way that not all the information from the experiment is used, it is suggestive of what a more in-depth analysis of the data would reveal. Hence, this example is a research study where the design of the experiment was quite carefully thought out, but the way the results were used creates questions about the results.