Mind over matter: Jahn bucks scientific convention

Behind the plain-looking door of E-Quad room D334, is a place that could be taken out of a child's fantasy world.

Giraffes and tigers, carousels and Kit-Kat clocks, baseball bats and cacti, all surround mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Robert Jahn '51.

Though an avid collector and animal lover, at first glance, Jahn appears to be an average engineer. And for the early part of his career, he was.

With his tweed suit, graying hair, wing-tipped shoes and slow speech, Jahn first came to the University in 1962. He started a program in plasma propulsion and became dean of the engineering school.

But all that changed in 1975.

That year, one of Jahn's students presented him with a thesis idea so remarkable that he immediately began his own in-depth study of its implications.

"She came to me with a thesis idea, and she explored it for two years," Jahn said. "After two years, I had to acknowledge that these results were important . . . and someone should be looking into it." Tapping his pen on his lips, Jahn quietly outlined the idea that so piqued — and has kept for the last two decades — his interest: the interaction of the human mind with basic machines.

As part of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program — which he established in 1979 — Jahn and his colleagues have been studying how a person may use thoughts to influence the behavior of machines.

Jahn and his team have been working with a number of different types of machines, ranging from "The Fountain," where the operator influences the height of the water that spurts, to "The Pendulum," where the operator influences the rate of pendulum motion.

Arnold Lettieri, a technical staff member who works with Jahn, said the experiments' results are sometimes surprising.

"When you take these devices and place people in front of them . . . the machines behave differently then you would expect," he said.

And while to some these experiments may seem to be no more than child's play, spend a few hours with these men and the seriousness of these experiments becomes apparent.

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PEAR owes a large part of its success to the financial assistance it has received from non-University sources such as James McDonnell from the former McDonnell-Douglas aerospace technologies corporation.

"Everybody in the business has had trouble finding funding. We've been lucky," Jahn said.

Now, $600,000 and a quarter century later, PEAR has evolved from one student's dream to "the largest and most prestigious program of its kind in the world," according to Jahn.

The science behind the magic

Standing by the blackboard, Jahn described in more detail the nature of the interactions he studies.

Essentially, Jahn said he believes there must be another way of receiving information from the physical world to the conscious mind.

Just as there is a level below the conscious — the unconscious — there is a supplementary level to the tangible — the subtangible. The conscious mind is "talking to" the unconscious mind, and equally, the tangible world is floating atop the vast subtangible world.

Assuming the unconscious knows how to access the subtangible, Jahn said it follows that all four realms must relate with each other in some way.

If one goes deep enough into the mind, there is, Jahn said, "a point where the concepts of space and time are erased . . . and mind and matter meld." Thus, if the subconscious can directly influence the subtangible world, then the conscious should, at the level where all four merge, be able to influence the tangible.

While these theories are interesting, even revolutionary, Jahn reiterated that they are just that — theories. His role in this process is limited to that of an engineer.

"We have decided from the beginning . . . to deal with the physical, not the psychological," he said. "We are not studying the people, we're studying the phenomena."

Despite Jahn's apparent ease with the subject, however, his work has spawned some controversy from others in the scientific field.

"I'd been there and done that, been a dean for 15 years, taught traditional stuff for 30 years . . . I wanted to change," Jahn said. But, he noted, "the ultimate implications were so huge that . . . any old scholar couldn't have done it because of the hostility."

And there has been hostility — to Jahn and to his work, all for one very important reason. Unlike much of modern science, Jahn said subjectivity is the foundation of his work. That fact has led most conventional scientists to raise their eyebrows at his work.

And while the implications of Jahn's work are many and varied, this hostility may spell the end of Jahn's tenure at the University and of the PEAR lab itself.

"It is difficult to justify it in the commercial department," Jahn said."I don't think one can convince people who have an ideological bias against this," he continued. "I probably wasted a lot of effort trying to convert the established community."

But still, Jahn said he does not regret the energy he has devoted to this work.

"I've had so much fun out of it that while I regret that there remains such resistance to this research . . . I get a certain satisfaction in overcoming that hostility," he said.