Computer mindgame

An American talk show host urged me never to call myself a psychic: “That conjures pictures of a woman in a head-dress…

Somehow that pesky processor knows when you’re up against a deadline.Most people put it down to coincidence or Murphy’s Law – “If anything can go wrong – it will!” But Princeton University’s brilliant professor of engineering Robert G Jahn had a dazzling insight: he saw that an operator’s mind could influence the machinery and set out to test his theory.Jahn’s unit, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), spent more than a decade monitoring volunteers – people without any paranormal history – as they stared at a computer displaying random zeroes and ones on creen. The number sequence was not pre-programmed – the machine did not know in advance what the next digit would be. Jahn told his experimenters to will the number one to appear more often. And it did.The evidence was overwhelming, the testing conditions utterly rigorous. Ordinary people could direct their thoughts at a computer and force it to respond. The odds against achieving this by chance were calculated at 1,000 billion to one against.Everything a computer does boils down to zeroes and ones. All its calculations are binary, using just those two digits. So if your mind is influencing the number sequence, the sums will go wrong … and the PC could crash. Naturally the greatest danger occurs when your mindwaves are at their wildest, under stress, close to deadlines.To prevent this, use my simple relaxation mindgame. Close your eyes and visualise a glass bowl, filled by two taps which are gently dripping numbers cut from tissue paper. One drops green zeroes, the other blue ones. They flutter gently into the bowl, always falling where they should, with no breeze to ruffle them.It’s a calm image, controlled and precise. Your computer will thank you for it.