The Research This Is Actually Built On

2. PEAR — Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (1979–2007)

Status: real effect claimed, tiny, disputed on methodology

A Princeton University lab run by aerospace engineer Robert Jahn ran tens of millions of trials from 1979 to 2007, testing whether focused human intention could shift the statistical output of random event generators. They reported a real, statistically significant effect — but a tiny one, under 1% deviation from pure chance.

Independent statisticians and the wider scientific community still dispute this on methodology and interpretation — effect sizes this small are exactly where selective reporting, optional stopping, and multiple-comparisons problems tend to produce false positives, and PEAR closed in 2007 without the effect being broadly accepted. We cite this as the origin of the research question, not as proof of anything.

4. Presentiment Research — Radin, Bierman, Jolij

Status: not replicated by independent/skeptical labs

This is the closest research analogue to what a scanner operator would need to be doing: physiological presentiment, the idea that the body reacts, in a small statistical way, to a random future stimulus before it happens. Dean Radin first ran this paradigm in 1997; Dick Bierman (University of Amsterdam, later Groningen) reran it with fMRI; Jacob Jolij (University of Groningen) later ran EEG versions reporting prediction accuracy around 53–55% against a 50% chance baseline.

We cite this area because it's the honest, real research this general idea sits next to — not because it's settled. It isn't. Treat any bioresonance company that tells you this is proven as telling you something false.

6. Voll, Radionics, and Why This Category Has a Trust Problem

Reinhold Voll, a German physician, developed Electroacupuncture According to Voll (EAV) in 1958, measuring skin resistance at acupuncture points on a galvanometer and claiming the readings indicated organ inflammation or degeneration. No EAV or "electrodermal screening" device has ever received full U.S. FDA approval for diagnosing disease; some have only been cleared as simple biofeedback meters, and regulators have repeatedly acted against manufacturers who oversold the diagnostic claims.

EAV itself descends from radionics, pioneered by Albert Abrams in the early 1900s, whose devices claimed to diagnose and cure disease from a blood sample via "electronic oscillations." A blind test arranged by the AMA — testing blood from a healthy person, a dead man, and a rooster — publicly discredited him; he is now the textbook historical example of medical-device quackery. Ruth Drown, influenced by Abrams, built similar devices in the 1940s–50s and was indicted for grand theft in 1963 for treating patients for diseases they didn't have; she died before trial.

More recently, the EPFX — also sold as the QXCI, "Quantum Xrroid" — was marketed in the 1990s as if it definitively read the body's energy. Regulators and, eventually, a criminal fraud case found its actual "reading" mechanism was a random number generator, with none of the diagnostic certainty claimed for it.

We put this history on our own site deliberately. The difference between a device like ours and the EPFX case was never the presence of randomness — plenty of legitimate hardware uses randomness. It's whether the company tells you the truth about what the device is actually doing. That's the bar we're holding ourselves to.

8. Why We Want to Research This With You

Here's a personal one, and we want to be exact about what it is and isn't. Emolio's founder had a Helicobacter pylori infection that, going by symptoms, cleared up during a period of magnet-based frequency work. There was no lab test before and after to confirm it — no breath test, no stool antigen test, nothing that would let us say the infection was actually eliminated rather than having resolved on its own, or that the timing was anything but coincidence.

We are not presenting that as evidence. A single, unconfirmed, self-reported case is worth exactly what it sounds like: a reason to go look, not a result. What we want instead is to actually go look — properly, with real before-and-after lab testing, alongside practitioners and patients willing to document real cases as they happen, good or bad outcomes both published.

If you have a case like this, or you're a practitioner willing to run one with real lab confirmation, we want to hear from you: info@emolio.nl

On the Egely Wheel: What We Saw, and What the Mainstream Explanation Is

What Science Says

Hungarian physicist György Egely ran an earlier, more elaborate version of this at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Central Research Institute for Physics: hundreds of high-school students across three schools tried to rotate water in a Petri dish with their hands, filmed and measured with floating markers (KFKI-1986-94/K, a real institutional preprint -- read it yourself). It's more rigorous than we first gave it credit for -- but Egely's own paper admits the database "is not wide enough" for real statistics, that success correlated heavily with weather, group excitement, and belief in the task, and, tellingly, that skeptical colleagues who succeeded were "not on record." The later commercial "Egely Wheel" is a simplified descendant of this work, and the mainstream physical explanation for a wheel turning near a hand is still thermal convection -- body heat creating a small, real air current.

What Practice Says

Practitioners who use wheels, pendulums, and similar low-friction tools report consistent hand- and intention-dependent movement in their own sessions. Same caveat as everywhere else on this page: reported clinical or personal experience isn't controlled evidence, however consistent it feels to the person holding it.

What Tradition Says

"Life energy" under many names — chi, qi, prana — is one of the oldest and most cross-cultural concepts in human history, independently arrived at across East Asian, South Asian, and other traditions. That doesn't make it physically real, but it's a real, ancient, widely-shared human observation worth taking seriously as a question, not dismissing as invented.

Try It Yourself

Here's our own first-hand account, offered as exactly that — an account, not evidence. Emolio's founder has tried this personally and had others try it too: the wheel turning one direction with one hand and the opposite with the other, and on at least one occasion, appearing to respond from about 3 meters away with focused attention alone, no hand involved. Convection doesn't obviously explain a distance effect or a hand-dependent direction change, which is exactly what makes it worth testing properly — blinded, distance-controlled, airflow ruled out. Build or buy a low-friction wheel, log what you see, and come share it with us.

Want to replicate the original 1986 version instead? Here is the exact setup from the paper, down to the measurements:

• Dish: a glass Petri dish (or similar shallow glass bowl) 14 cm across, filled with plain water to within 1-2 mm of the rim.
• Marker: a small floating marker on the water — the original used a thin triangle of aluminium foil about 1.2 cm across; a small twig or folded paper triangle works too.
• Hand height: generally 1-5 cm above the water surface, never touching the water, the dish, or each other. (One outlier subject worked from 15 cm up and still got a clear 360°/minute rotation, but 1-5 cm is the norm.)
• Hand position: rest your forearms on a support at dish-rim height so your hands stay still — steadiness mattered more than the students expected. Use either the "L" position (one hand flat and horizontal, reaching in over the dish; the other hand vertical, edge-on, on the opposite side) or the "T" position (both hands flat and horizontal, reaching toward each other from opposite sides) — see the figure below.
• Draft control: shield the dish from moving air (a box or enclosure around it) — airflow is the number one false positive.
• What counts as a result: in the paper, a trial only counted as "successful" if the marker visibly rotated at least 30°. It usually took 2-3 minutes of steady concentration before anything moved, often starting with a brief flicker counter-clockwise before settling into a steady clockwise drift. About two-thirds of student attempts showed no movement at all — this is normal, not a sign you are doing it wrong.

Figure 10 from the original paper: the "L" and "T" hand positions, one hand flat and horizontal, the other rotated toward the dish from the opposite side — neither touching the dish, water, or enclosure.

Part of why this category is so thin on rigorous research is a plain economic one, not a conspiracy: a new drug molecule can be patented, which is what funds the large, expensive clinical trials that produce solid evidence. A frequency or a simple physical protocol is much harder to protect that way — specific devices and methods can still be patented, but the underlying principle usually can't be owned the way a drug can, so there's far less commercial incentive to fund the kind of trial that would settle the question either way. The clearest real-world parallel is generic drug repurposing: research consistently finds that already-off-patent drugs with plausible new uses stay chronically under-tested, not because the science looks bad, but because no company captures a return on running the trial. We think the same dynamic applies here, and it's a funding problem worth naming honestly rather than a reason to assume the effect is real.

This section will grow. We're tracking other threads worth researching properly — including older experiments pairing animal subjects with hardware random number generators — and we'll add each one here honestly, with the same rules: real sources, clear caveats, and a bias toward actually testing things over asserting them.

Full Source List

• Psi Encyclopedia — Presentiment
• Psi Encyclopedia — Dick Bierman
• Schwarzkopf (2014), "We should have seen this coming" — critique of presentiment studies
• Ritchie, Wiseman & French (2012) — failed replications of Bem's "Feeling the Future"
• Mossbridge, Tressoldi & Utts (2012) — presentiment meta-analysis (proponent view)
• Quackwatch — Electroacupuncture According to Voll (EAV)
• Science-Based Medicine — electrodermal testing devices and regulators
• Albert Abrams and the AMA blind test
• Ruth Drown — radionics, 1963 indictment
• Holland et al. — oscillating pulsed electric fields on cancer cell lines (preprint)
• Novobiotronics — lab reports
• Peoc'h — chicks' distant psychokinesis (1995, fringe journal)
• Fritz-Albert Popp — biophoton research
• Ultra-weak photon emission — brief review (PMC)
• Egely, "Experimental Investigation of Biologically Induced Energy Transport Anomalies," KFKI-1986-94/K (full preprint, hosted here)
• György Egely — background (promotional source, read critically)