Hagel & Tschapke

THE LOCAL EVENT DETECTOR (LED) AN EXPERIMENTAL SETUP FOR AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF CORRELATIONS BETWEEN COLLECTIV EMOTIONAL EVENTS AND RANDOM NUMBER 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 output sequence 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 important sports 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 a second 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 in addition 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 380 Proceedings of Presented Papers

Hagel & Tschapke 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 no external 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 = 0 Output 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 emotionally charged 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 the events from our experimental unit do influence the measured results. Finally it should be clearly noted that we understand our 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 sequences

The 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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Hagel & Tschapke 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 time elapsed 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

1. The evaluation procedure is done in the following steps: By using appropriate Software Tools we compute the cumulative differences along the day first by fixing the 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 beginning of 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 deviations from 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 as local 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 with personal 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 stronger effect 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. The Parapsychological Association Convention 2004 383

The local event detector (LED)

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 a possible 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 be interpreted 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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Hagel & Tschapke 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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The local event detector (LED)

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 the rapid 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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Hagel & Tschapke 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 condition 125 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 local emotionally 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 show up 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 news about these events reaching Germany (and Kln). The most impressive example of such an event is shown in Fig. 4. 3. Severe accidents in the local area of Geneva (Switzerland) the second seat of our institute which did not 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 the impact 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. Finally every 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 The Parapsychological Association Convention 2004 387

The local event detector (LED) 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 messages were 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: cephir@netcologne.de

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