Telekinesis / Psychokinesis (PK)

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Telekinesis — later psychokinesis, abbreviated PK — is the claimed ability of the mind to influence physical objects or systems without any known physical means: matter moved, deflected, or disturbed by intention alone.

The two names mark two eras, and the eras are legible in the words themselves. “Telekinesis,” from the Greek tēle and kinēsis, movement at a distance, was coined in 1890 by the Russian psychical researcher Alexander Aksakov — a state councillor who wrote chiefly in German — in his two-volume Animismus und Spiritismus, where it named the contactless operation of objects outside a medium’s body and translated the German Fernwirkung, action-at-a-distance. It is a séance-room word, born among the tables that tilted, the raps that sounded, and the objects that drifted in the dim parlors of the later nineteenth century. “Psychokinesis” is younger and quieter. The American author-publisher Henry Holt set it down in On the Cosmic Relations in 1914; twenty years later J. B. Rhine adopted it at Duke University and abbreviated it PK, preferring it precisely because it carried less of the Spiritualist freight than the older term. Where telekinesis named a visible marvel, psychokinesis named a hypothesis broad enough to cover an imperceptible statistical lean — and so a thing one could carry into a laboratory and test against the arithmetic of chance. The renaming was a relocation of the burden of proof: from the witness who saw a table rise to the investigator who computes whether dice fell true.

The séance laboratory and the cost of saying yes

In the Spiritualist frame, the movements were the work of the dead — the returning spirit lending its will to the wood and the wire. The psychical researchers who pressed into the seance circle increasingly entertained a second possibility: that the force, if force there was, issued from the living medium rather than from any visitor beyond the grave. That shift in attribution is the whole hinge of the subject, the moment the marvel begins to migrate from the spirit toward the mind.

The chemist William Crookes — discoverer of thallium, inventor of the vacuum tube that bears his name — was the most eminent of the investigators. Between 1870 and 1873 he tested the Scottish-born medium Daniel Dunglas Home in a laboratory of his own building, suspending an accordion inside a copper-wire cage beneath the table with Home’s hands held above it, and arranging spring-balance trials to register force where no hand could reach. Crookes reported that the caged instrument played untouched, that it seemed to float without support, and in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874) he concluded that a genuine, unexplained “psychic force” was at work. The conclusion cost him. His peers derided it; later skeptics pressed the dim light and Home’s command over the conditions. Home himself, alone among the celebrated physical mediums, was never publicly caught cheating — a fact that keeps his case unresolved rather than closed, and keeps Crookes’s reputation permanently double, the careful experimentalist and the man who said yes.

Eusapia Palladino, the Neapolitan medium who produced table levitations, curtain movements, and the displacement of objects in the dark, embodied the field’s whole predicament in a single career. A negative investigation by the Society for Psychical Research at Cambridge in 1895 caught her freeing a hand and a foot to do the work a spirit was supposed to do. Yet in 1908 the same society sent three men long practiced in conjuring and fraud detection — Everard Feilding, W. W. Baggally, and Hereward Carrington — to sit with her through eleven sessions at the Hotel Victoria in Naples, and their account, the Feilding Report in the society’s Proceedings (1909), concluded that at least some of what they observed could not be reduced to trickery. She was caught again in America the following year. The honest shape of Palladino is therefore not a verdict but a contradiction held open: a demonstrated cheat who nonetheless persuaded capable, fraud-aware observers when the controls were tightest. She is the paradigm of the mixed medium, and the reason the séance record can be neither salvaged whole nor dismissed whole.

This skeptical strand is not a later overlay on the field but coeval with it. The same decades that produced Crookes and the Feilding Report produced the stage magician Harry Houdini, whose A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) turned a conjurer’s eye on the whole mediumistic trade, and produced the physiologist Charles Richet, a Nobel laureate who coined the word métapsychique and synthesized the European research in his Traité de métapsychique (1922) — a believer in some objective phenomena who nonetheless insisted on controls. Belief and exposure grew up in the same room.

Rhine’s dice and the shrinking marvel

The laboratory word arrived with a laboratory program. In 1934 a young gambler walked into Rhine’s parapsychology group at Duke claiming he could make dice fall as he willed, and Rhine recognized that dice, unlike a table in the dark, come with a chance baseline already built in: one can simply compute what the fall should be and measure the deviation. The team moved from hand-throwing to throwing-cups to mechanical tumblers, rotating the target faces to cancel the bias of the dice’s own drilled pips, and applied the same probability statistics already used for card-guessing. Because the group’s work on extrasensory perception was already under fire, Rhine held the psychokinesis results back for nearly a decade, publishing only in 1943, when he and Louisa E. Rhine reported the first experiment in the Journal of Parapsychology and rested much of the case on a decline pattern — hit rates running highest at the start of a record sheet and falling away down it, a slope they argued no recording error or dice bias should produce. The deeper narrative of that statistical contest, the dice meta-analyses and the random-number era that followed, belongs to the sibling account of psychokinesis; what matters here is the trajectory it traces.

For the marvel kept shrinking. Rhine’s successors refined the target from a tumbling die to the output of an electronic random-number generator driven by a genuinely random quantum source — the radioactive decay registered by a Geiger counter — and asked subjects only to nudge the stream. The claimed effect dwindled accordingly, from a table lifted off the floor to a deviation on the order of one extra bit in ten thousand: not an object that moves but a distribution that leans. The field formalized the distinction it had been sliding along all this time. Macro-PK names the directly observable end — levitations, table-tilting, objects displaced, metal bent — the marvel the eye can catch. Micro-PK names the statistical whisper, an influence on random processes so small that only the accumulated arithmetic of a vast number of trials can claim to see it at all. The history of the subject is the history of that migration: from the macro that could be witnessed and, often, caught, to the micro that can be neither witnessed nor, its critics say, securely found.

The stalemate held at parity

Mainstream physics and psychology do not accept that psychokinesis exists, and the reasons are cumulative rather than single. No demonstration has proved repeatable on demand — the elementary currency of an established effect. The séance-era record is saturated with exposed fraud, from freed feet to magazine cut-outs passed off as the stuff of materialization. And the small statistical anomalies of the laboratory era are charged by critics to ordinary causes: optional stopping, the file-drawer problem in which null results go unpublished and inflate the surviving signal, inadequate randomization, and outright deception — the field’s own emblem of method-failure being the eventual demonstration, by a researcher working inside the Society for Psychical Research itself, that one celebrated experimenter had manufactured hits by inserting digits into his target sequences. The most authoritative institutional verdict, the National Research Council’s 1988 report for the U.S. Army, found no scientific justification, across more than a century of research, for the existence of the phenomena, and recommended the military drop the inquiry.

The parapsychologists answer in kind. They hold that a persistent body of small effects, assembled over more than a century, survives better controls than the critics allow; that the inverse relation between effect size and sample size, which skeptics read as the signature of publication bias, is what one would expect if experimenters run more trials precisely when an effect is faint; and that the recurring “experimenter effect” — results that appear for believing investigators and vanish for skeptical ones — is a genuine psychological variable rather than a mark of artifact. The cleanest single window on the contest is the meta-analytic exchange of 2006, when Bösch, Steinkamp and Boller, combining 380 random-generator studies in Psychological Bulletin, reported a statistically significant but very small overall effect, strongly heterogeneous and inversely tied to sample size, and concluded that publication bias could in principle account for it — to which the proponents replied in the same issue that the effect was real and the heterogeneity meaningful, while a third party judged it nearly impossible to draw any conclusion from the corpus at all. Two readings of one set of numbers, neither able to dislodge the other.

The dispute is well over a century old, and it has not so much closed as quieted. Neither camp can produce the demonstration that would end it: the proponents cannot summon an effect on command, and the critics cannot exhibit the artifact that would explain every result away. What survives is parity — a faint, contested residue set against a documented history of collapse, with no mechanism on either side to break the tie.

The scholarship and the primary record

The primary investigation literature is unusually well preserved, much of it now in the public domain. Crookes’s Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London: J. Burns, 1874) is the foundational macro-PK document of the séance era; Richet’s Traité de métapsychique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922), translated as Thirty Years of Psychical Research (Macmillan, 1923), is its Continental synthesis; the skeptical anchor is Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper, 1924). The most cited single sitting-record is the Feilding, Baggally and Carrington report on Eusapia Palladino in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 23 (1909). The mechanical-engineering lecturer W. J. Crawford ran the most directly quantitative macro-PK program, weighing the forces of the Belfast Goligher circle in The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916) and its sequels before his death in 1920. For the laboratory era, the founding paper is J. B. and Louisa E. Rhine’s “The Psychokinetic Effect: I” (Journal of Parapsychology 7, 1943, pp. 20–43); the decisive skeptical-statistical assessment is Bösch, Steinkamp and Boller’s 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin 132 (4), with its facing replies; and the institutional verdict is the National Research Council’s Enhancing Human Performance (National Academy Press, 1988). The standard critical history of the nineteenth-century milieu remains Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (Cambridge University Press, 1985); the philosophy of the PK claim is anatomized in Stephen Braude’s The Limits of Influence (1986). The Society for Psychical Research’s open Psi Encyclopedia maintains current, sourced articles on the principal mediums and investigators.

Older than either name

The thing both words try to capture is far older than either. Traditions across the world report matter yielding to the holy — the saint raised in prayer, the adept who covers ground no body should cover, objects moved and weather turned — but none of them names it telekinesis, and to read these as early parapsychology is to import a nineteenth-century European category where it does not belong. Each tradition frames the wonder in its own terms, and the terms are not interchangeable.

In the yoga of Patañjali, the supernormal powers — siddhi or vibhūti — are cataloged in the third book of the Yoga-sūtra as by-products of disciplined absorption, among them laghimā, lightness, the root of any yogic rising. They are attainments, ripened from practice, and the text’s own posture toward them is wary: in the Yoga-sūtra’s reckoning the powers are accomplishments to the outward-turned mind but obstacles to the deeper absorption they accompany, things to be passed through rather than prized. The Buddhist iddhi are similarly enumerated and similarly subordinated to liberation. The Tibetan discipline of lung-gom belongs to this register too, though it resists the levitation it is often forced into — its adept does not hover but runs, a buoyant, trance-borne stride that barely touches the earth, a near-flight gait rather than a body suspended in air. The testimony around Indian gurus and their devotees carries the same logic of cultivated power into the modern world.

The Christian register inverts the grammar. Where the yogin acquires, the saint receives: Catholic mystical levitation, the raptus and sublevatio corporis recorded of Joseph of Cupertino and of Teresa of Ávila, is construed as a grace, even an embarrassment — the body lifted as a by-product of the soul’s seizure by God, never a technique the saint exercises and often a thing the saint, like Teresa, begs to have withdrawn. The elevation is passive, unwilled, a sign of union and not a feat of will. The Spiritualist parlor, when it arrived, supplied a third frame again: not attainment, not grace, but the agency of the returning dead, and it was that third frame — and the movement that grew around it, distinct from the Kardecist spiritism of the Continent — that first exposed the marvel to weighing machines and wire cages.

The receptive cousins of the claim followed the same path into the laboratory. Telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing trace the input side of the same alleged faculty, just as the ganzfeld experiments trace the receptive analogue of the random-generator work — psychokinesis being the output, the mind reaching outward into the world rather than receiving from it.

The nineteenth century’s distinctive contribution, then, was neither the phenomenon nor the words but the relocation. The marvel moved out of hagiography, where it had stood as the visible seal of sanctity or the byproduct of yogic discipline, and into the parlor, where it became a spectacle credited to the dead; and then, with Rhine’s renaming, out of the parlor and into the laboratory, where the spirits were dismissed, the saints set aside, and the faculty assigned to the ordinary living mind and asked to perform on demand under controlled light. It is in that last room — the one built expressly to catch it — that the marvel has proved hardest of all to find.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — Isis Unveiled (1877)

→ Related: Spiritualism · William Crookes · Eusapia Palladino · J B Rhine · Modern Ganzfeld Experimental Parapsychology · Psychokinesis · Charles Richet · Harry Houdini · Remote Viewing · Precognition · Telepathy · Spiritism · Catholic Mystical Levitation Raptus Sublevatio Corporis · Indian Guru Devotee Levitation Testimony · Tibetan Buddhist Lung Gom