johannes hagel and margot tschapke- the local event detector (led)- an experimental setup for an...
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Hagel & Tschapke
The Parapsychological Association Convention 2004 379
THE LOCAL EVENT DETECTOR (LED) AN EXPERIMENTAL
SETUP FOR AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF CORRELATIONS
BETWEEN COLLECTIV EMOTIONAL EVENTS AND RANDOMNUMBER SEQUENCES
Johannes Hagel, Margot Tschapke
Institut fr Psycho-Physik (IPP), Kln
ABSTRACT
In this contribution we describe a conceptually new unit for the generation of sequences of binary numbers. It is
based on a two oscillator system in which a low frequency component with frequency f1 samples an alternating
oscillation of a larger frequency f2. The successive results of the sampling are directly used as binary outputsequence and consequently the binary numbers appear with the period of the low frequency oscillator. In
addition this oscillator shows a frequency variation which is large (f1 = 10 % from mean value) as compared to
usual circuits generating electrical oscillations. This is achieved by choosing the working point of an RC circuit
such as to be located in the non linear part of the transistors characteristics. This implicates that the output
sequence consists of random strings of binary numbers which are irregularly interrupted by sub-sequences
containing an over amount of binary zeros or ones. By over amount we define a significant local deviation of
the actual distribution from an expected Bernoullian distribution of 1-s and 0-s (more than two sigma from
expectation related to the initial point of the deviation).
Like in the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) of Roger Nelson (1997) we found that resonant deviations
frequently occur synchronous to emotionally charged events in the spatial neighbourhood (local Kln area) of
our institute. This relates as well to important local events in and around Kln as well as to more global events of
which one may suppose that they are of emotional importance for large parts of the local population too. The
presumably local character of the effect becomes even more visible if we are dealing for example with importantsports events (like football matches in the local stadium) In contrary, equally important events for a local
population in large distances (e.g. a heavy traffic accident in Geneva) never showed the described synchronous
deviation. Finally we found indications that there appears a certain experimenter effect, meaning that repeatedly
we registered resonant excitations at the very instant of the occurrence of emotional important events concerning
ourselves.
INTRODUCTION
Following Hagel & Tschapke (2004) a sequence of binary numbers can be generated by the following
method: An electrical or electronic oscillator generates a series of impulses with low frequency which are
transformed into short pulses of light generated by a light emitting diode (LED). As indicated in Fig. 1 these
light pulses arrive at a receiver placed in 2 meters distance from the light source. The receiver is coupled to asecond independent oscillator generating an exactly symmetrical rectangular oscillation. A special circuit
(sampler) decides if the incoming light impulse arrives during a HIGH or LOW level part of the rectangular
oscillation. In the first case the output is the binary number 1 while in the second case a 0 is produced.
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Fig. 1: Two oscillator system for the generation of binary number sequencers
The first oscillator is constructed in such a way that it has a strong frequency variation of about 10 %
from its nominal value f1 = 1 Hz. This is realized by running the unit near a cutoff condition where the non
linear behavior of the underlying circuit becomes chaotic and unpredictable. The second oscillator (running
at 120 Hz) produces a highly symmetric (equal lengths of high and low status precision 50ns) rectangular
oscillation. Since the two oscillators are assumed to be physically independent and due to the random
frequency variation in f1 the binary output sequence of the system becomes random in general. In general it
follows a Binomial distribution as has been confirmed by simulation (Hagel, 2004). However, due to the
non linear variation of f1 it happens repeatedly that there appear transient strings of light impulses with a
nearly constant frequency (due to unstable equilibrium states in chaotic systems (Lichtenberg, 1983)). If inaddition this nearly constant frequency value is in resonance with the second oscillator in the sense that a
mathematical relation holds of the form
N f1 = f2 ; N .... integer number
then there appears a departure from randomness in the sense that the cumulative difference between 1
and 0 events escapes from what would be the statistical expectation in a really random system. Such
resonant deviations by themselves are NOT to be seen as anomalous; they occur with a certain probability
being inversely proportional to the ratio f1/f2 and to the amount of frequency variation f1 of the first
oscillator. In the GCP of Roger Nelson (1997) the interpretation is that there exist correlations between
random number generators and emotional states which let the RNGs deviate from expectation. In our LED
experiment these deviations are considered natural but we assume that there exists a correlation between
their occurrences in time and the emotional states. In spite of this difference in interpretation the method
of data analysis in LED is equivalent to the one of the GCP meaning that we identify the occurrences of
deviations by excursions of the cumulative differences from Bernoullian expectation. Due to the complexity
of the frequency oscillations of the first oscillator it is practically impossible to perform a strict statistical
analysis of the described resonance crossings and therefore to determine strictly the average number of
deviations per time unit. To overcome this drawback we performed a computer simulation of the non linear
effects in the first oscillator using as input the measured non linear characteristics of the electronic circuit.
The detailed results are presently prepared for publication (Hagel, 2004). The main outcome of the
simulations is that for the parameters given in the subsequent section we expect a deviation from an
unperturbed Bernoullian distribution of more than Z = 2 every 48 hours in average. This agrees well with
our present observations. The binary numbers are stored continuously and the cumulative difference (CD)
between the number of 0 and 1 events is computed and stored in addition. The CD is then investigated
and checked for departures from expectation linked to the random strings. We believe that the LED set up
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can be considerably more sensible to correlation effects (if there are any) than a single classical RNG in the
GCP: Consider a classical RNG (e.g. based on radioactive decay) supposedly correlating with an external
emotional event. Let us imagine that this correlation is very weak and causes just a single binary number
to occur instead of the second possible number (e.g. 0 instead of 1) which would have occurred in case of noexternal event. Then such a single flip would certainly not show up as a significant deviation of the RNG
output - the effect would be not detectable. In our scheme however, such a weak correlation effect in
principle can redirect the sensible non linear (chaotic) frequency walk of the first oscillator in such a way
(butterfly effect) that a resonance condition as described above is hit and a measurable deviation is
generated in due course.
Fig. 2 shows the actual experimental arrangement in our Kln laboratory (Hagel & Tschapke, 2004).
Actually our experiment consists of a sequential configuration of three samplers where the first sampler is
triggered by the first oscillator (left of Fig. 2). The second sampler is triggered by a 1 output of the first
sampler and the third sampler is triggered by a 1 output of the second sampler. The 1 outputs of the
first and second sampler are coded as short pulses of light so that the three samplers are coupled optically
like the first oscillator and the first sampler. The frequency of 120 Hz for the second oscillator linked to the
first sampler has been chosen to obtain an average frequency of resonant departures from randomness of 48
hours obtained from simulation (Hagel, 2004). From this description it follows that the output of the first
sampler has a balanced probability distribution for 0 and 1 (P(0) = P(1) = ) while the second and third
output sequences are unbalanced meaning that P(0) = for the second output and P(0) = 7/8 for the third
output. The frequencies of the second oscillators connected to samplers 2 and 3 are running at 60 Hz and
30 Hz because the average output frequency of 1 at the first sampler is equal to f1 / 2 and the average
output frequency of 1 of the second sampler is f1 / 4. In this way we arrive at the same average frequency
relations between the input signal and the frequency of the second oscillators for every of the three units.
The three sequences of random numbers and the exact time of their occurrence are constantly registered on
a PC. From these explanations it becomes clear that the second and third sampler are dependent from each
other in the following way:
Output of the first / second sampler = 0 implies Output of the second / third sampler = 0Output of the first / second sampler = 1 implies Output of the second / third sampler = 0 or 1
The reason for using three instead of only one unit is to test the following idea:
If there exists a correlation between RNGs and external events, then unbalanced binary RNGs tend to correlate better
with events of long time scales than with events of short scales.
This is supposed to be due to the fact that the variation with time of the output sequence of a binary
balanced RNG is larger than the one of a unbalanced one.
The intention of the experiment is to investigate if there exist correlations between the behavior of the
binary number sequence generated by the described apparatus and emotionally charged events in the
environment of this unit or if these correlations do occur equally strong for distant events.
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Fig.2: Schematic view of the LED experiment in the IPP Kln
In the experiment described we intend to answer to the following two questions:
1. With the single unit as described above is it possible to observe correlations between emotionallycharged events and transitions between random behavior and nonrandom excursions of the system?
2. Can we find a certain local effect? This means to answer the question if the physical distance of theevents from our experimental unit do influence the measured results.
Finally it should be clearly noted that we understandour contribution as an exploratory study undertaken by our
Kln laboratory. The preliminary results described in this paper can therefore possibly be used for the
generation of hypothesis rather than to test already generated ones. Testing such a hypothesis still has to be
undertaken by subsequent investigations. Since to our opinion the scientific investigations of anomalous
effects is too much biased on non local concepts, we explicitly favored the investigation of local influences,
where local means spatial vicinity of source and receiver.
METHODS
Generation and registration of the binary sequencesThe unit described in the introduction runs with short interruptions since March 2003 and the binary
sequences obtained are stored on one separate file for each day. As an example we show the first few lines of
such a file:Date: 5. 6.2003
Starting time: 21:20: 0
1 1 1 0 0.435483 0.435483
2 0 0 0 1.068499 1.503983
3 0 0 0 1.031184 2.535167
4 1 1 0 1.058888 3.594055
5 0 0 0 1.043781 4.637836
6 0 0 0 1.120108 5.757943
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The first column contains the number of light pulses from the low frequency oscillator. The second,
third and fourth columns represent the three binary outputs from the balanced and the two unbalanced
sequences. The fifth column indicates the time interval (in sec) between the last and the present impulse (we
use the mounting flank of each impulse as a reference). Finally the last column indicates the total timeelapsed at the mounting flank of the present impulse.
At the end of each day (=24 hours after opening a one day file) the files are closed and copied
automatically to a diskette. Then the results are evaluated using software on a separate computer in our
laboratory.
Evaluation of the results
The evaluation procedure is done in the following steps:
1. By using appropriate Software Tools we compute the cumulative differences along the day first by fixingthe beginning of the file as reference (CD(0) = 0). This is done for all three sequences of binary
numbers. In addition the period of the low frequency oscillator is tracked as function of time as well.
Second, if a possible deviation of the CDs starts at a given instant of time we also can fix the beginningof the Z=2 parabola to this instant of time as it is frequently done in the GCP data evaluation.
2. The cumulative differences for the three sequences of numbers are tested and inspected for deviationsfrom randomness. Following the usual method we look for deviations of more than 2 standard
deviations () from expectation assuming that the random part of the binary sequences follows a
Bernoullian distribution.
3. We check for correlations between the occurrence of departures form randomness and global as well aslocal events of which we assume that they are of emotional importance for many people. To be precise,
we check as well for events that could be previewed (like big sports or religious events) as for non
predictable events like catastrophes, crimes, accidents etc.
4. Finally we check for an experimenter effect. By this we mean a possible correlation of the unit withpersonal emotional states. In this case we put weight to strong emotions that are localizable in time to
high precision like emotional reactions to good or bad news.
RESULTS
General remarks
It is evident that testing a hypothetical indicator for emotionally charged events inside and around a big
city like Kln in the center of an highly populated industrial zone is not a trivial task specially if the
mechanism for the assumed correlation is still unknown. We have to take into account that emotionally
charged events take place at all times. Since we do not know how emotional states can interact with chaotic
or random systems we may only apply heuristic models about such a type of anomalous interactions. Hence
we assume that emotional events synchronously concerning a large group of individuals cause a strongereffect and will more probably correlate with a transition from random to resonant behavior of LED. On the
other hand we can regulate the sensitivity of LED (meaning the average frequency of transitions between
chaotic and resonant strings) by adjusting the frequency relation between the two oscillators. The results
shown in the following chapter have been obtained with a frequency relation of 1:120. With this relation we
obtained statistical curves in about 50 % of all days. This number agrees well with the result of computer
simulation which we applied to the two oscillator system of LED (Hagel, 2004). For the remaining half we
observed significant departures from randomness which to 50 % could be supposedly correlated to
emotional events concerning the local population. For the remaining 50 % we could not attribute an event
but it is practically certain that considering the low manpower of our institute we simply overlooked a
considerable fraction. On the other hand we only observed a low fraction of important events concerning
the local population which did not take place synchronous to a measurable deviation from randomness.
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Sports events and their correlation with LED
There are few events that can trigger synchronous states of emotion in such an effective way like sports
and specially football. Hence it is obvious for an experiment like LED to choose football matches as apossible target. They have the advantage to be announced in advance and it is absolutely certain that a big
number of people (40000 60000) are present in the local arena. The following figure shows a typical plot
of cumulative differences as produced by LED during an important local game:
Fig. 3: Cumulative Differences for the three output sequences of LED during an important football match in the Rhein Energie
arena of Kln
The abscissa shows the number of hours passed (0-24) since the starting time (15:47) of the current day
(28-th April 2003). A transition from random to resonant behavior is visible at 20:37, a few minutes after
the start of a very important match of the local football team, the FC-Kln. It was this match which decided
about upgrading the team from the second to the first league of the German mastership and it was won by
the FC! The observed deviation of the first sequence (balanced probabilities for 1 and 0 green curve)
reached a deviation of about 1.5 at the end of the match and continued to rise to 2 for more than 1
hour. In fact, thousands of people after the match formed a large procession of a length up to 3 km singing
and walking through the city of Kln. The CDs of the unbalanced sequences show a similar but much less
pronounced behavior. The second strong deviation starting at 8:15 on the following day could beinterpreted as a collective emotional reaction to the morning news about the FC-Kln having achieved the
upgrade.
It has to be mentioned that only local matches or matches of local importance that have been transmitted in
television showed considerable effects. Matches of different teams outside Kln did not significantly influence
the CDs of LED.
Local Reaction to a spectacular plane accident in Africa
As a further example (in favour of the existence of locality) we show the CDs of LED on the 8 May 2003.
Between 19:00 and 22:00 (local time of Kln) there happened a tragic accident near Kinshasa. The door of a
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plane opened a few minutes after take-off in 2000 meters above ground. As consequence 250 passengers
have been thrown out of the plane by the stream of air and died.
Fig. 4: The CDs of LED during and after a serious plane accident in Africa
As can be seen, the event itself which must have generated very strong local emotional states near and in
Kinshasa did not generate significant reactions of LED. However at the instant of time of first news about
the accident reaching Germany (and thus Kln) we see a strong reaction. As before, the balanced oscillator
shows the most distinct reaction.
The experimenter effect
The Institute of Psycho Physics (IPP) is located in the house in which one of the authors (M. Tschapke)
lives her private life and runs the experiments. If the assumption of a correlation between emotional states
and the behavior of LED is correct as well as the one of a dependence on the physical distance of emotional
states and our experiment, then we must be aware that also personal emotional events concerning the
experimenter can correlate with LED. In this sense the experimenter and the experiment form a closed unit.
In fact we found several (5-10) cases in which such a correlation appears with very high precision. Up to
today such results occurred exclusively in the case of an extraordinary strong emotional movement of the
experimenter. Fortunately for some of these events we have very precise information about the instant of
time of occurrence (phone calls or personal messages) so that a detailed analysis was possible. In Fig.5 we
show one such example. On March 17-th, 2003 exactly at 13:20 some news of very emotional content
reached M. Tschapke from our institute: At this instant of time her brother informed her that his wife will
have a baby. M. Tschapke described her reaction by a very strong positive emotion setting in rapidly and
lasting for a few hours.
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Fig. 5: Strong deviation of LED at the instant of time of a emotionally charged news
Based on this information we decided to investigate this case in more detail: In order to understand therapid excursion at 13:20 we plotted the frequency of the first oscillator as function of time over an interval
of several hours before and after the event (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6: Frequency of the first oscillator as function of time
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Every point in this figure corresponds to the averaged frequency over the 200 last periods of the first
oscillator. While the average frequency was nearly constant for at least 6 hours (1016 hours after start), a
sudden descend of the frequency sets in three hours before the instant of the good news. As a matter of fact
the center of crossing of the frequency curve with the resonance condition125 f1 = f2 = 120 Hz! f1 = 0.96 Hz
appears exactly at the critical instant and in this way causes the observed deviation. This can be understood
at least as one possible mechanism of correlation between emotional events and random processes.
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
A new type of binary number generator (LED) based on a two oscillator system has been described. It
consists of a low frequency electronic oscillator with chaotic frequency variations and a higher frequency
oscillator generating symmetric rectangular oscillations. The output sequence consists of interleaved strings
of random number sequences and resonant sequences leading to departures from randomness. We
investigated the question if transitions between random and resonant behavior are related to localemotionally charged events in the city of Kln.
Since the beginning of the long term experiment we found that strongly emotional events in and around
Kln (like sports events) do occur synchronous to observed transitions of LED.
It is clear that the hypothesis about a local character in the correlations of the two oscillator system and
emotional events is still speculative. At the time we have too few supporting data from LED to state more
than a certain doubt about an exclusively non local nature of such correlations.
However, there are some observations that might indicate that there exists a certain local component:
1. Important sports events outside of Kln - e.g. in Essen (80 km) or Dortmund (120 km) - did not showup in our results even if they were of emotional importance to the population of theses cities.
2. Events like severe accidents outside Kln and even Europe did show up at the occasion of the newsabout these events reaching Germany (and Kln). The most impressive example of such an event isshown in Fig. 4.
3. Severe accidents in the local area of Geneva (Switzerland) the second seat of our institute which didnot make their way into international news distribution did never show any effect on LED.
It is also evident that there exists an alternative hypothesis which could explain these local effects:
Large events like football matches or similar imply various physical effects in the neighborhood of their
occurrence. These are e.g. propagation of micro-seismic waves or electrical perturbations due to a large local
energy consumption etc. These are clearly local effects, they can in principle affect the LED arrangement
and they all follow an inverse distance law. So they could in principle account for an explanation of 1. It will
however not be so evident to explain the delay effect described in 2. since news transmissions about distant
serious accidents will not generate seismic waves like a local match and no significant changes in local energy
needs. Evidently we tried everything in the range of our possibilities to avoid external physical influences to
act on the two oscillator system: The first oscillator is enclosed into a hermetic metallic box to avoid theimpact of external electrical fields. All oscillators and electronic equipment are mounted on massive tables
by using gum feet with small cross sections in order to damp seismic vibrations. Finallyevery single oscillator
has a separate electrical power supply of which all are stabilized voltage sources of improved quality.
It was a striking observation that even strong emotional events occurring to the experimenter seem to
show up in the cumulative differences of the binary output sequences. However, the critical question must
be asked if these deviations are caused by a local influence of the experimenter or by a more general non
local influence just through his expectation on the results of the entire experiment. This seems to be a very
fundamental question in the whole GCP (and LED) studies and should be discussed in more detail:
Evidently if we investigate a new and unknown type of interaction it becomes difficult to distinguish
between an effect independent of the experimenter and one caused by him. This is equally true for the
GCP/LED studies as well as for all kinds of experiments aiming for the understanding of paranormal
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information transfer (telepathy etc...). We believe that one important factor in favor of a local effect is the
unexpectedness of the events under consideration. It is certainly correct that messages like the announced
birth of a baby are received in any part of a large city every day. And many of these messages reach their
targets in an unexpected way. Hence if the assumed correlation effects in LED belonging to such messageswere primarily non local would this not mean that we should observe deviations nearly at any instant? On
the other side there is also an important argument in favor of a non local behavior: As pointed out in the
abstract the average number of deviations in time agrees well with the expected value from computer
simulation of the two oscillator system. It seems that only the temporal arrangement of the deviations is
chosen by the system in such a way that the observed agreement between external emotional states comes
together.
Independent of the final solution to this seemingly contradictory problem we had the chance to study
these coincidences in much detail and we could identify resonance crossings caused by a slow frequency
walk of the first oscillator to play an important role. In this way we could uncover the basic mechanism of
the observed transitions between random and resonant behavior of LED.
However, it remains still unclear by what property of the system such resonant crossings in random
systems appear synchronous to emotional events. An answer to this question would probably help to explain the
phenomenon of synchronistic events described by C.G. Jung and in how far this fascinating and exciting
effect is of non local or local nature.
REFERENCES
Hagel, J. (2004). Numerische Simulation eines chaotischen Zwei Oszillatoren Systemes ohne physikalische Koppelung,
Publication in preparation.
Hagel, J. & Tschapke, M. (2004) Der Local Event Dedector (LED) Ein neue experimentelle Anordnung zum Hinweis
auf Korrelationseffekte unter dem Auftreten lokaler emotional geladener Zustnde, submitted for publication to
Zeitschrift fr Anomalistik
Lichtenberg, A. J. & Liebermann, M. A. (1983). Regular and Stochastic motion, Springer Verlag, New York, Heidelberg,
Berlin.
Nelson, R. D. (1997). Multiple field REG/RNG recordings during a global event. The electronic Journal for Anomalous
Phenomena (eJAP), 1997. http://www.psy.uva.nl/eJAP
Nelson, R. D. (2003). Private Communication
Address for correspondence:Johannes Hagel,
Institut fr Psycho-Physik (IPP), Stttgerhofweg 6B,
50858 Kln Junkersdorf, Germany.
E-mail: [email protected]