Computers know how to behave around me. Not all the time, of course. But generally when I walk into a room computers that have been misbehaving for weeks suddenly smarten up their act.

My car, on the other hand, completely lacks this sort of respect. It develops squeaks and hisses with gay abandon. It saves its best behaviour for my mechanic: when I take it for a service, the grinding sound that has haunted me for weeks suddenly disappears – and stays absent until I drive the car home from the garage.

You'd swear that machines can smell fear and ignorance.

Well, it looks like that might just be the case.

Research at a number of institutions, including the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory in New Jersey and the Consciousness Research Division of the University of Nevada, indicates that humans can influence the operation of mechanical devices.

At PEAR, in experiments that have been successfully replicated, subjects 'willed' a Random Event Generator (REG) to come up with more high or low numbers. In fact, the PEAR experiments showed it didn't matter whether the subjects were in the room with the REG or in another country. Even more significant results were gained when pairs of people with strong emotional attachments to one another 'willed' the REG in concert.

D. I. Radin at the University of Nevada has conducted similar research in what he calls DMMI – Direct Mind Machine Interaction. Together with Roger Nelson, Radin has also performed a meta-analysis – an integrated review of all experiments studying the same effect or hypothesis – and found that the results from experiments indicating some sort of mind-matter interaction were not due to chance.

Similarly, four US government research bodies have studied DMMI phenomena and determined that they "merited serious attention by the scientific community" and that there appears to be "an interconnectiveness of the human mind with other minds and with matter."

Now, this is the sort of area which sets the scientific community itching and makes empiricists shout "I wouldn't believe it even if you proved it to be true". But you and I know, no matter what the boffins say, that our computers and other machines we deal with show all the signs of DMMI.

I've seen it over and over again with clients. A computer that has a consistent, repeated error when a client is working with it, will work perfectly as soon as I use it. This is the case even when I perform the exact steps my client has performed.

As soon as I leave the site, however, the same problem reoccurs.

Similarly, I have noticed that things 'go wrong' far more often with fearful clients. And I'm not talking about errors directly attributable to the user's actions. No, it's things like a program producing an entirely new bug when a nervous client, under my supervision, performs the same steps I've used successfully thousands of times.

I'm sure you've noticed similar things in your workplace or home with computers, photocopiers, cars, lawnmowers.

Now, maybe this is all baloney, but it seems to me you'll lose nothing by deciding to adopt a joyful, caring, relaxed approach to your computer. Especially if you're a beginner.

Why not go to your computer now and give it a name; sit in front of it and drink in the special uniqueness of its design and the particularly alluring qualities of its motherboard; whisper sweet nothings to your hard drive; purr to your RAM.

You think I'm joking? Then you haven't met Angelica, Corella, Dora and Ella – my floppy, hard disk, CD-ROM and Zip drives.

© 1997  Rose Vines

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