Herb Mertz Interview
The reason this comes up when you ask about statistics and significance is that I happened to be our very first customer. The device showed up, roughly the size of a smartphone, and I plugged it into my computer and started working with it. What I didn't expect was how many years I'd spend before I could stand behind the claim, without hedging, that something real is happening here. The conviction built slowly, through my own sessions with it. I hadn't seen the full body of data at that point, yet experiencing it firsthand was what sold me. Over a long stretch I generated a personal record whose odds of happening by chance come out to about one in a million. I believe in the effect.
Eric asked how the random event generator, or random number generator, actually functions, and what makes it genuinely random.
Mechanically it's simple. The unit has a USB connector, you plug it into a computer, and software puts a visual on the screen that represents the stream of ones and zeros pouring out of it. The display draws a bar that travels across the screen. Produce more ones than zeros and the line drifts downward as it crosses; produce more of the opposite and it climbs. So if your goal is more ones than zeros, you concentrate on pushing that line up, like a rising graph. When it leaves the normal band and pushes into what counts as a significant range, that's your signal: you're generating an effect. It isn't a polished video game, but there's enough feedback that when it responds you catch yourself thinking, wow, that's pretty cool.
What generates the ones and zeros is quantum uncertainty. The hardware is built and shielded so that this quantum noise inside it produces an uncertain result, a one or a zero, drawn from that uncertainty. There's no way, even in principle, to know in advance what the next output will be. There's also no way to push it around by physical means. Aim a heat gun at it, hit it with electromagnetic waves, try whatever you like, and it keeps spitting out a flat 50/50 spread of ones and zeros, the same way a coin lands heads and tails in equal numbers over enough flips. Once every environmental influence is shielded away, you reach a point where, if you can think about it and get it to move, the only thing left doing the work is your mind.