Stevesgoal is generally a very down to earth self improvement blog, avoiding most of the more esoteric adventures that other personal developmenet sites seem to go on. My new feature – “Steveslab” is about as far out as this site will get, testing my theories and then reporting back on the results.

One thing that has always interested me is the power of intetion – in other words, does the desire for something to be done or something to happen have any actual effect on the outcome? From my perspective there must be some effect even if it is only caused by psychological factors. We all know, or should be now, that a happy positive outlook is much more likely to lead to success than a negative one, if for nothing else than that negative people tend to sabotage their own success.

The other component that could be ascribed to the power of intention is some sort of actual universal phenomena, described by many as the “law of attraction” which says that what we concentrate on comes into our lives. This obviously presupposes some sort of paranormal phenomena, although I dislike the term and would call it outside the known physical reality – paranomal conjures up too much ghosty type stuff for my liking.

Anyway, its hard to say if this second componenet, the non psychological one, has any real bearing. Up until recently I would have said that this compenent was not real and any percieved results were due to wishful thinking. However, after a recent foray onto the Princeton website (Princeton.edu) and reading over the latest research from PEAR – the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, I am unsure what to think.

They have been conducting experiments which measure a persons ability to effect entropy. Entropy is the natural rate of change or decay of a system as it falls into disorder. All system tend towards greater entropy or chaos as they age, at least thats how the theory goes. The PEAR team measure entropy by using a random number generator based on radioactive decay, not a pseudo computer random generator and tested people’s ability to alter the output of the generator.

Whilst on an individual level the results were nothing amazing, when taken as a whole, over a number of years the experiment has revealed a very distinct bias in entropy that can be caused by the humna mind. Now, I don’t know if this due to some flaw in the logic of the experimnet, a poor analysis of the statistical data or due to some explainable phenomena, but if it is not, then this is the clearest proof ever that people’s intentions do effect their physical relationship.

As such I think we should all reconsider the importance of positive thinking and visualisation in our lives. I hope to have some sort of small experiment for Steveslab to try fairly soon!