A Gas Discharge Device for Investigating Focussed Human Attention

Back in the late 1970s at Stanford, physicist William Tiller built a quirky little device — a gas-filled cell teetering just below the point where electricity would arc across it — and asked about 50 people to simply focus their minds on it. The results were wild: nearly everyone who concentrated on the device caused it to fire off electrical pulses at dramatically higher rates, roughly 20,000 times above baseline. Even more striking, wrapping it in Faraday cages, metal foils, and magnetic shielding did absolutely nothing to block the effect. When people held their hands near the device but deliberately thought about math instead, nothing happened. But when they focused mentally from a distance without any hand involvement, the effect kicked right in. No known energy source — infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, electric or magnetic fields — could explain what was going on. This was an early and methodical attempt to show that human attention alone might physically influence matter, and the systematic ruling out of conventional explanations makes it a particularly intriguing piece of the puzzle.