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Researchers Use Twitter to Investigate Sixth Sense

by Caleb Johnson on June 2, 2009 at 02:59 PM



According to the Daily Mail, eesearchers are planning to use Twitter in their investigation of remote viewing, or the psychic ability to identify distant locations.

In what the Daily Mail reports to be the first scientific study involving the microblogging service, Professor Richard Wiseman will travel to a different location in the U.K. each day this week. At 3:00 p.m. every day, Wiseman will tweet, asking thousands of participants to tweet their thoughts about his surroundings. Twenty minutes after his initial tweet, Wiseman will link participants to a Web site hosting five landscape photographs, only one of which will picture his actual location. Participants will then vote on the photographs.

Wiseman claims that theories supporting extra-sensory perception would gain validity if voters were to collectively pinpoint his location at least three out of the seven days, due to the statistical unlikelihood of such an event.

Wiseman told the Daily Mail he hopes 10,000 people will participate in the study, which is being conducted in part by New Scientist Magazine.

"The instant nature of tweets allows thousands of people to take part in real time, making it perfect for an extra-sensory perception experiment," Wiseman told the Daily Mail.

It is hard to say what results this experiment will yield. Whether or not it proves psychic abilities, though, the study could help legitimize Twitter, and other social networking sites, as valuable tools for the scientific community. [From: The Daily Mail]

Tags: esp, microblogging, psychic, social networking, SocialNetworking, top, twitter

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