PRINCETON: Local firm explores mind over matter

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Wednesday, October 20, 2010 10:59 AM EDT
By Victoria Hurley-Schubert, Staff Writer

  Ever get that feeling that someone is staring at you? Ever wonder how you got that feeling?

   Psyleron provides products for the public and researchers to explore mind-matter effects, such as the sense of knowing someone is staring at you.

   ”That kind of sense, where does it come from?” said Herb Mertz, chairman of the board and co-founder of Psyleron. “It’s a mechanism we don’t understand and has to do with the mind’s influence on things.”

   The Princeton-based company’s main product is the $189 mind lamp, an electric lamp with a random-event generator built in. When plugged in, the lamp throws off a white light before it cycles through eight colors. The theory behind the lamp is that users can influence what color the lamp turns by thinking about one of the eight colors.

   ”We produce devices that people use to explore the idea that the mind can influence the physical world,” said John Valentino, CEO and co-founder of Psyleron. “Our goal is to put this stuff out there and let people play with it themselves, rather than taking our word for it.”
   Quantum-level probabilistic events drive the lamp to change color. “We are taking something that science says should be totally random, and we have evidence that suggests it’s not actually random, that people’s thoughts influence it,” Mr. Valentino said.

   ”You can think of this lamp as a person that’s being stared at and it’s reacting to someone staring at it by doing something,” added Mr. Mertz. “If you’ve had the experience of being stared at you can imagine what it’s like to be that lamp and having someone intend it to be a certain color.”

   Psyleron is a for-profit company and a non-profit research cooperative. As a private company, it chooses not to disclose profits.

   The Harrison-street business is based on the findings of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, which was founded in 1979 at Princeton University and spent more than 28 years studying the interaction of the mind with sensitive random physical devices.

   ”The whole idea behind the PEAR lab was if you put this process in a research context, where you can measure the significance,” said Mr. Mertz, who spent most of his career at PEAR and has been interested in the power of the mind since childhood. “You may say maybe it’s just coincidence, but when you measure it statistically by how often it goes to the color people say they want it to go to ... we can quantify how probable it was that people really did have an influence.

   ”The point of the research is to try to quantify these coincidences to a level where it can be shown they’re not coincidence or more often than not they don’t seem to be coincidences,” he said.

   ”Part of the reason behind Psyleron was to enable other people to conduct their own research, similar to what PEAR did, and come to their own conclusions about this without having to go through the expense and effort of settnig it up on their own,” said Mr. Valentino. “PEAR found an interesting result from a research standpoint, and we’re trying to make it possible for other people to figure it out for themselves.”

   The mind lamp has been on the market since 2008, when the company moved to Princeton from Bethlehem, Pa.

   Anther product Psyleron offers to the public is SyncTXT, a subscription-based text message service. The service sends text messages written by the subscriber at random times from a random-event generator.

http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/20...927025.txt

Products here:
http://www.psyleron.com/