The alleged power of mind over matter is a common enough theme in the self-help genre. In its ‘weak’ form it appears as techniques like positive thinking, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and the use of confidence-building affirmations. All of the above are premised on the understanding that mental shifts translate into effects in the real world, but they are always mediated through changes in your behaviour: in other words shifts in attitude alter what you do and how you respond and it is your actions that ultimately change your life for the better. Nothing too fancy or esoteric going on here, folks: just plain old common-sense pathways of cause and effect that sit reasonably comfortably within our traditional view of the world.

But there is a second, far more challenging ‘strong position’ of mind over matter that recurs in a surprising number of self-help books, courses and presentations. According to this genre, the mind has innate metaphysical powers to manipulate reality in ways that lie far beyond any current, orthodox understanding of the way the physical world works. Buckle up, gentle reader: we are now entering the twilight zone of the paranormal.

The concept of controlling aspects of the world remotely and manifesting our desires by literally willing them into being is, as the author of the bestseller The Secret keeps reminding us, a very old idea. Some psychologists would argue that its ancient pedigree is due to the fact that it is likely to originate in early infancy as a universal, primitive fantasy. The helpless human baby counteracts its intuitive sense of dependency by conceiving itself, in the words of an exuberant Leonardo DiCaprio on the prow of the Titanic, as ‘King of the World’. The narcissism of infancy is usually well supported by direct experience. Hungry? Send up the distress flare and any half-attentive carer will be on hand to feed you. Nappy feeling a bit soggy and clammy? No worries: just make your displeasure known and Dad will be along in a jiffy for a quick change. In our culture, when you are tiny you call the shots. Everyone rushes around trying to meet your needs and if you are being well looked after there is scant evidence to suggest that the world does not revolve around you, especially when your brain and understanding are too underdeveloped to grasp the whys and wherefores of how this all happens. Is it any wonder that the notion that the cosmos might be equally accommodating once we grow older remains such an alluring prospect?

I’m going to be picking on The Secret for a while because although it is by no means the only self-help book built on the foundation of these kinds of ideas, its huge commercial success lies in part in that it presents them in a remarkably pure (some might say blatant) form. It therefore offers a particularly transparent and instructive insight into the way the strong version of the mind-over-matter position operates.

The principles of The Secret – which according to author Rhonda Byrne have been known and practised by creative pioneers and leaders throughout history – amount to picturing the universe as a kind of cosmic Argos. And please don’t think this is some disparaging metaphor I’ve dreamt up for humorous effect. It’s pretty much precisely the one used in the book by Dr Joe Vitale, who cheerfully explains:

‘It’s like having the universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, “I’d like to have this experience and I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.” It is You placing your order with the Universe. It is really that easy.’

Who knew? Apart, of course, from Plato, Bacon, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein obviously – the latter two of whom would doubtless be turning in their graves to be associated with the rather dubious metaphysics of all this. Someone really ought to tell the starving children of Africa and the oppressed peoples of the world that they need to buck up their ideas and start ordering the right things.

The ‘Law of Attraction’ upon which The Secret is based apparently states that we inevitably draw to ourselves the things with which we fill our minds because, as Byrne assures us, ‘unfathomable magnetic power is emitted through your thoughts’. The implication one might read into this is that each and every one of us is entirely responsible for our own fate. In my personal opinion, the idea that some of us might be willing suffering and disaster upon ourselves is a pretty repugnant doctrine. As a psychologist, I fully accept that we all have self-destructive urges and I frequently encounter people who seem unconsciously bent on sabotaging their lives. However, surely conjuring up a tsunami, famine or plague lies beyond even the most pathological of us?

Books like The Secret are full of authoritative proclamations about the nature of man and reality that are just not in any way backed up, as far as I can see, by satisfactory evidence. And the brilliant catch of it is that the very nature of the claims makes them irrefutable. This belief system (and that is what it is) can account for every outcome with impunity. If you don’t get what you ordered then that’s because at some level you haven’t really focused your thinking or committed your mind to the desired outcome to the exclusion of all other possibilities. You may think you psychically ordered that Series 5 BMW in racing green, but the fact it hasn’t materialised means either (a) the timing isn’t right yet or (b) unconsciously you actually didn’t want it so your order was cancelled – sorry about that, or (c) your lack of belief left you focused on your state of not having the car in your life yet, and unfortunately the universe obligingly manifested precisely that: you not having the car! Basically you got distracted, you didn’t really know your own mind or you didn’t have enough faith. Whichever way you look at it, you are at fault, not the system. Suddenly the feel-good factor in all of this is draining away pretty fast. But of course, remember if you are thinking ‘guilt trip’ or ‘disillusionment’ right now, Rhonda and her friends can’t be held accountable if that’s exactly what you get.

It is undeniable that discoveries in the realm of quantum mechanics have completely transformed our understanding of the nature of reality over the last few decades. Scientists like Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, Dirac and Witten have established beyond all reasonable doubt that the universe is far stranger than we could ever possibly have imagined. The philosophical implications of theories like quantum entanglement, string theory or even the notion that things can exist simultaneously in more than one state are mind-boggling and leave us constantly falling down intellectual rabbit holes into a wonderland of truly bizarre and surreal possibilities. The ordered clockwork of Newton’s elegant universe has been smashed to bits so irretrievably we could be forgiven for concluding that in the strange and counterintuitive landscape of particle physics all bets are off and anything is now possible.

But this is precisely the point. Just because something seems theoretically possible, as the lyricist Ira Gershwin reminds us, ‘it ain’t necessarily so’. However, the metaphysics of self-help often doesn’t trouble itself with that finicky distinction. If the dots don’t quite join up yet, well, never mind: the fact that such possibilities even exist show we’re clearly in the right ballpark. Didn’t Arthur C. Clark famously once say that magic is just technology we don’t quite understand yet? Maybe if we just throw around a bit of choice scientific terminology and broadly sketch out the territory then that’ll be quite sufficient to convince a gullible reader. We can’t all be particle physicists after all. Too many speakers and writers towards the more esoteric end of the self-help spectrum rely rather too heavily on the truth of the refreshingly honest and reliably brilliant Richard Feynman who commented: ‘I think I can safely say nobody understands quantum mechanics.’

The self-help gurus throw down the gauntlet ...

But while it’s playing fast and loose to try and recruit quantum physics to bolster the strong form of the mind-over-matter argument, it may come as something of a shock to discover that there is a whole body of carefully collected, rigorously analysed data that actually does – albeit by a very slim margin. Over the last 30 years, experiments have been repeated time and time again under the most stringent controlled conditions that are consistently supportive of the hypothesis that people can indeed remotely change the outcome of physical events using the power of their minds.

The story begins in 1979 with Robert Jahn, who was the Dean of Princeton University’s prestigious School of Engineering and Applied Science. He set up a programme to investigate the possibility that human consciousness might be interacting with machines, causing them to function in ways that appeared to defy the balance of probability. At the heart of the research run at the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) lab was endless trials using random number generators. When left to their own devices, these machines electronically produce either a one or a zero in a completely random sequence, a bit like flipping a coin. And, as with flipping a coin, you would expect ones and zeros to come up in approximately equal numbers once you repeat your exercise enough times.

However, what Professor Jahn and his colleagues found was that when people concentrated on willing the generator to produce more ‘heads’ or fewer ‘tails’ they were able to skew the results (albeit ever so slightly) away from the pattern predicted by pure chance. The shifts were minuscule – equivalent to demonstrating that on average people were able to influence the outcome of two events out of every 10,000 above chance. Not great odds admittedly, and the paltry scale of the effect alone has naturally invited scepticism from baying critics who feel that there must be some other explanation for the results. However, the results were statistically significant and the more trials they did throughout the years (and they did millions), the more these tiny fluctuations persisted, eventually leading colleagues of Jahn to conclude that the odds were less than a trillion to one that the overall pattern of results from two decades of work was itself due to a freak occurrence.

Now, for the strong version of the mind-over-matter position the PEAR results are both good and bad news. Good news insofar as any consistently demonstrable effect, however small, genuinely supports the idea that it may be possible for people to affect the physical world with their minds. The bad news, however, is that the effects are so infinitesimally small that, even if genuine, one cannot begin to imagine how they might have the least meaningful impact on our lives. We’re a long way from telekinetically flinging knives around the kitchen like Sissy Spacek in Carrie or even bending the odd spoon.

In the individual studies we are looking at a hit rate of barely two-hundredths of a single percentage above chance (50.02 per cent). I’m not being mean but it’s practically a slither of nothing and would mean absolutely nothing had it not then occurred thousands of time more. To argue that this research proves that books like The Secret are on to something amounts to saying that your lucky find of a 20-pence piece on the street this morning means you will now be able to pick all the winning lottery numbers in the EuroMillions draw.

Interestingly, although PEAR closed its doors in 2007, it paved the way for the Global Consciousness Project that is currently using random event generators to novel and even more controversial effect. Dr Roger Nelson and colleagues collate the data from approximately 70 of these boxes placed in locations all over the world. What he has apparently found is extraordinary. He is not instructing anyone to try and influence anything, but by combining and cross-referencing the continual flow of results from the boxes he has discovered that the law of averages seems to get significantly ruffled during periods that coincide with major world events. Around the time a plane flies into the Twin Towers you get a blip in the random distribution of the ones and the noughts. Princess Diana dies and you get a significant peak. What Nelson’s team believes is that in some way the boxes are responding to emotive experiences shared by millions of people that amount to ripples in a shared global consciousness.

This is all very bizarre stuff, but while the scientific community has understandably raised a collective eyebrow at the claims of the Global Consciousness team, thus far it has struggled to provide a satisfactory alternative account for its data. One fairly compelling criticism is that the group has broken the golden rule of statistics which says that if you sift through data looking for correlations long enough you will inevitably find them (so perhaps Rhonda Byrne is right after all: you do get what you expect!). Cynics argue that the fact these probabilistic anomalies coincide with the timing of certain world events is just coincidental; after all, the world is a busy place and there is a lot going on at any particular moment. The chances of finding a momentous event that coincides with your statistical glitch, they argue, is therefore reasonably high. However, it is much more of a challenge to explain why these admittedly delicate fibrillations in the flow of chance appear to be happening simultaneously in several independent boxes at the same time.

And if all this doesn’t read like an X Files script already, a further jaw-dropping twist is that Nelson’s team claims sometimes these statistical anomalies occur just before the events to which they are assumed to refer. That’s right: a few hours in advance. If the team’s hypothesis that this process is driven by something human beings are doing is correct, and assuming that the fluctuations do indeed correspond to the events in question, this would mean that people are unconsciously anticipating those events before they happen. In effect these boxes are predicting the future. Allegedly, data from the random event generators scattered throughout the world anticipated the Twin Towers attack by four hours and also the Asian tsunami. How strange would this be if true? We would have to rip up everything we know about time, consciousness and material physics. But then again, how many of us had the more mundane experience of thinking about someone just before they ring or we bump into them in the street?

Spookily, in 2010 a research team at Cornell University also generated disconcerting evidence that we may be able to see into the future. Psychologist Daryl Bem used the technique of reverse priming to demonstrate what look like precognitive abilities. In normal priming, if you show someone a negative word followed by a positive image it will take people slightly longer to identify the image as a positive one because there is a mild interference effect. Their ‘negative association’ schemas are up and running already so it’s not so easy for the brain to access positive material. This is a well-established effect. However, what Bem found was that if you reversed the whole process and showed people a positive image first and only afterwards showed them a negative stimulus, they still took longer to identify the positive image than a control group, even though the interference effect technically hadn’t yet occurred! In trials subjects have also performed better than average at detecting the presence of an image behind closed curtains, but only when what was concealed was particularly salacious or stimulating.

Of course, going back to the Global Consciousness team results, it must be stressed that once again we are considering tiny fluctuations in the balance of probability that would be virtually undetectable if not cross-referenced with data streams from the other boxes. And why chance should be so sensitive to outpourings of human emotion is another question altogether. However, for self-help adherents of the ‘strong’ mind-over-matter school, the Global Consciousness data does introduce the theoretical possibility that under certain conditions our minds could have some psychic impact upon the physical world.

I have neither the statistical skill, the anorak nor the time to evaluate Nelson’s data with any authority, but if you are intrigued by all of this, as I was, I suggest you have a look at the Global Consciousness project website for yourself. Time and scientific hard graft will tell how seriously we should be taking all this.

Interestingly, Nelson and colleagues claim that the largest blips in probability coincide with events that evoke empathy or compassion. Fear-based events apparently do not register as strongly, and the Global Consciousness team has wondered whether this is because emotions like pain, fear and terror tend to turn us inwards, making us self-focused and thereby isolating us from other people, whereas emotions like compassion incline us to ‘connect’ with others, thereby presumably amplifying the potential impact on the probability fields of the cosmos.

This might fit quite well with data reported from Lynne McTaggart’s Intention Experiments, which she bills as one of the largest scale mind-over-matter investigations ever conducted. Apparently thousands of volunteers have signed up to her web-based experiments and again the results reported so far are certainly thought-provoking. Whether they provoke you to wonder or ridicule is another matter.

Author and speaker Lynne McTaggart is, of course, a true believer in the power of mind over matter and positions herself as someone attempting to bridge the existing gaps between science and spirituality. To her credit, although not formally trained as a scientist, she is well informed and does not shy away from data that does not fit with her preferred view of the world. One of the refreshing things about her is that, while she accepts psychic influence as given, she is pretty dismissive of attempts to use it to order up new cars or widescreen TVs. Her spirituality focuses her on more altruistic goals like psycho­kinetically purifying water supplies and promoting peace between warring countries. Let’s turn now to some of the more striking findings of the Intention Experiment.

Gardeners who put their prize-winning marrows down to chatting away to them while they grow might be fascinated to discover that McTaggart’s most impressive results concern the use of intention to promote the germination and growth of plants. Working in conjunction with Dr Gary Schwartz from the University of Arizona, she came up with an elegant and carefully controlled experimental design. In the experimental conditions McTaggart’s volunteers allegedly beamed the intention for one of four selected sets of seeds to grow by ‘at least 3cm by the fourth day of growing’. McTaggart reports that, on average, seeds receiving these waves of intention ended up 8mm higher than the controls. The statistical analysis of the results gave only a 0.7 per cent probability that this result occurred by chance which is pretty good going (or growing?). However, as far as I am aware, these results have not yet been replicated or the findings submitted to any academic peer-reviewed journal.

Also of interest is an experiment in which McTaggart’s army of volunteers tried to influence events in the northern stronghold of the Tamil Tigers in Wanni, Sri Lanka after 25 years of bloody civil war. The claim is that, after an initial striking increase in the levels of violence following the week of focused intention in September 2010, the death rate of casualties fell by 74 per cent and injuries by 48 per cent in the following week, completely bucking the general trends of weekly violence data provided by Dr Kumar Rupesinghe of the Sri Lankan Foundation for Co-existence. McTaggart goes on to speculate about the possible connection between key events that occurred around that time (such as the recapturing of the Elephant Pass) and the final expulsion of the separatist guerrillas and liberation of the Wanni territories some three months later.

Now McTaggart is the first to acknowledge the possibility that these results may be entirely down to coincidence, and the impossibility of applying the kind of controlled conditions you can aspire to in a laboratory setting mean we will probably never really know what was going on. However, at the very time the Peace Intention experiment was conducted, Roger Nelson’s random number generators were once again flicking gently away from their baseline counts. Now that’s spooky.

So where does this leave us? Well, it certainly doesn’t preclude the very real possibility that the strong form of mind over matter might still be complete nonsense. The results of all this painstaking research could still be due to the effects of chance, experimental static, conspiracy, or could even be a testimony to the subtle power of experimenter bias.

However, even if we suspend our natural disbelief and accept these phenomena at face value, I would point out that none of this amounts to a convincing case for the grandiose claims of many self-help books, seminars and tapes. It would appear that even if we do have latent psychic powers they are very far from formidable. What influence we supposedly have seems only to very faintly bias processes that are going on all around us anyway – plants growing, diodes switching on and off in random number generators, rival political factions grappling for supremacy. And that’s with lots of us all simultaneously bending our attention towards the same object.

The scale of the reported effects is mostly pretty feeble, insofar as no supernatural intervention is required to explain the processes involved. Apparently, even when lots of us unite together, our combined mental efforts produce no more than statistical blips on devices with hair-trigger sensitivity to psychokinetic disturbance. People like Uri Geller, who claim to be able to suspend laws of nature, are thankfully comparatively rare – a fact that should perhaps also give us pause for thought.

To judge from the data collected so far, trying to reorganise the universe using the psychokinetic resources of a single mind, however focused, is akin to trying to redirect the course of a speeding car by blowing gently on the bonnet. If you really want that BMW or glossy new kitchen you would probably do better to make a plan, work hard at your job or take out a loan. My strong suspicion is that if you order one up using mind power alone you may be waiting for a long, long time.