Anomalous Princeton lab shuts its doors

The sixth sense, it turns out, may not just be the product of M. Night Shyamalan's imagination.

For the past 28 years, the Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research lab has been researching how machines may be affected by human presence and emotion.

At the end of this year, however, it will close, setting engineering experts abuzz over whether this so-called research is legitimate at all.

"I do not believe that this is serious science, and I'll leave it at that," Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt said. "We have never done that kind of research at Penn, as far as I know."

But PEAR lab manager Brenda Dunne insists that it is not an "ESP" lab, referring to the phenomenon of extra-sensory perception - the ability to know things without being told them, or, in this case, to communicate with machinery.

"Our . focus is on the physical equipment," Dunne said. "How do these random devices perform when a human operator is interacting with them?"

The PEAR lab's rotating staff of five or six people - mostly physicists, engineers and psychologists - has used random event generators to test the effect of human intention on probability.

Past experiments include getting people to alter whether a random number generator produces "high" or "low" numbers and "intending" a robot to move in a certain direction.

"What we have found is that there are very small but statistically very significant differences" when humans interact with the machines, Dunne said.

Penn Psychology professor Paul Rozin pointed out that, while "there is no convincing research for the existence of ESP," that doesn't mean it can't exist.

The lab is closing because Dunne and founder Robert Jahn want to retire and serve as consultants for the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, a group that has been associated with the lab over a number of years, Dunne said. The group plans to focus more on education and outreach, as well as archiving past research.

"We certainly have not been the most popular program on campus, and I think there has been some discomfort among a lot of people in the administration who feel that we're an embarrassment," Dunne said.

Still, "the interest by young people has been incredible," she added.

But are young people as interested in PEAR as PEAR is in young people?

"The news [of the lab's closing] wasn't very big here," said Princeton junior Jim Meza. The lab is "kind of a joke," he added.

And College sophomore Erin Sullivan, who is a Psychology major herself, seemed to agree.

"It's a bogus study, and . it reflects poorly on [Princeton]," Sullivan said. "I think it's ridiculous."

The lab was originally founded by Jahn, former dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, after he was inspired by a student research project on a related subject.

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