A few weeks ago I took Wendy's car in for scheduled maintenance. To pass the time, I brought my tablet along so I could read a back issue of the JSE. One of the articles was about a class taught at the University of Colorado in 2010 called Edges of Science.
As part of the class, students took part in an experiment to test practical uses of remote viewing, which is a form of ESP. Basically, every week researchers said to the students: "In two days, you will be shown a picture. Please draw that picture now." The students would do their best to draw the picture, having no idea what it might be.
The researchers had an independent person pick two pictures from a pool of photographs, and randomly assign one to mean "the stock market went up" and the other to mean "the stock market went down". Then a team of judges looked at each of the students' drawings and rated which of the two pictures it most closely resembled. The ratings were tallied up to see which picture (market-going-up or market-going-down) got the most votes. The next day researchers would buy and sell options depending on which picture was selected.
Finally, and this was the most crucial step, two days after students drew their pictures, they were shown the picture corresponding to what the market actually did. They called this the feedback loop. Since the students were trying to predict a future event (being shown a picture), it was critical that the event actually happen, and that the picture matched the actual performance of the stock market.
They did this for 7 weeks, and every week the students correctly predicted how the market would perform. The researchers started off with $10,000 and ended with $26,000. They also pointed out that one week there was a timing delay with their market order, which cost them $12,000. Without that delay, they would have nearly quadrupled their money, from $10K to $38K.
The experiment was limited to 7 weeks because it occurred during the latter part of the semester. Researchers wondered whether such a high success rate could be maintained in the long run. Apparently a number of psychic studies have had good success in the short term, but in the long term have declined in performance until reaching what would be expected from random chance.
I'm curious what they did with the money; the article didn't mention it. I also wonder what other topics the class covered. It sounds like a lot of fun.