Research into ‘psi’ abilities (telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, etc.) remains on the fringes of science, with common arguments against such phenomena often coming down to the unscientific nature of how people come to believe in them – skeptics say that people often fall into the trap of selective thinking, making note of the times that something strange happened to them, and forgetting the many times that something did not.
The best way around such concerns is to do scientific testing of any suggested psi abilities, though sometimes that can be a little tricky if you’re on your own. Enter a newly proposed mobile app – “Am I a Psychic?” – created by college student Dominic Parker, who is currently seeking funds on Kickstarter to complete the project:
This app is the first mobile application in the history of psychical research that is actually fun to play and actually tests your ability! There has never been anything like this before in science, which is what makes it so exciting and fun to be a part of. “Am I Psychic?” is the fruition of almost two years of planning, development and marketing.
The user can choose to play our games using either the extra sensory perception (ESP) mode or using the psychokinesis (PK) mode. Each offers the user a different and unique approach to proving their psychic ability. The ESP mode allows the user to choose between 6 options. Using psychic ability the user attempts to guess the future. Once the option is chosen, let the PRNG do the work and afterward the user can check a mathematical (but not boring) graph and see if they’re psychic. The PK mode has the user choose a time limit and one of six options. Then the user attempts to mentally influence the PRNG to pick the chosen option. Once the time limit has expired the user can view a mathematical (did I say not boring?) graph and both visually and scientifically see if they’re psychic.
In this ‘big data’ era, another upside of the app is that it will allow users to consent to allowing the results from each of their tests to be collected and analysed as part of a larger set, with possible later publication of the results in an academic research paper. (I’m hoping this consent query will be done pre-test, otherwise the ‘file-drawer effect‘ would make the results totally unscientific).
