If you believe in telekinesis raise my hand.

Telekinesis (or psychokinesis, as I prefer to call it) is, in my opinion, the holy grail of psychic ability.  There has been a lot more scientific research into extra-sensory perception (ESP) than there has been into psychokinesis (PK).  Most "How To" books on psychic abilities don't even provide a definition of psychokinesis, let alone instructions on how to make progress toward acquiring the ability.  There has been recent work in studying micro-PK, or psychokinesis acting on microscopic (even quantum) systems such as random number generators.  While interesting, these test results are not particularly convincing.  Certainly they are not as convincing as the feats of Russian psychic Nina Kulagina (shown in the video above).  The story of Nina Kulagina is a very interesting one and PK was not her only feat.  It was the one she is most famous for, however.

Accusations of trickery aside, I find cases like Kulagina's to be very convincing and not just because objects are moving.  Physical tests were allegedly done on Kulagina throughout her stint of performing PK and they revealed some very interesting things were occurring with her body.  These things included, but were not limited to, exhaustion, shallow pulse, weight loss during her PK sessions, irregular heart beat, high blood sugar, and a disturbed endocrine system.  It's believed by some that the strain of performing PK so often contributed to her death.  At this point I would like to note that Nina Kulagina is not the only well-known telekinetic.  I mention her here because of her popularity which is perhaps rivaled by only Uri Geller (who's surrounding controversy is an entirely different subject).

Personally, out of all psychic phenomena, I find PK to be the most interesting and ostensibly the easiest to verify.  It seems to me that it should be a lot easier to determine if someone is moving something with their mind or using tricks than if they are reading someone's mind or just making some lucky guesses.  I also find it interesting because it's just damn cool.  To me it seems like telepathy or precognition are relatively benign when compared to the ability to move things around with your mind, even if they are just matchsticks and compasses.

There are many theories about how PK might be possible or how a person may perform it but as you might expect there is no published experimental evidence to support these theories.  None that I'm aware of, anyway.  Any correlations between physical phenomena and psychic activity seem to apply to ESP alone, probably because that seems to be the area of psi research that has the most data.  The only relevant correlation that I'm aware of is produced by Wilkinson and Gauld in their observation that there is a small tendency for the days of onset of poltergeist and haunting cases to coincide with days of higher-than-usual geomagnetic activity.  While incredibly interesting, it is not very enlightening as to what allows for psychokinesis to take place.

So this is the challenge with psychokinesis.  There is no accepted theory and no experimental evidence to back up any one theory.  Most, if not all, demonstrations of psychokinesis are either proven to be frauds or are accused of being frauds because of the distaste for psi in the first place.  Combine this with the lack of funding available for parapsychology research and we have a very complex (and difficult) puzzle.

I happen to believe that many cases of "poltergeist" activity actually emanate from a living human being.  The contemporary term for "poltergeist" activity is "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" or RSPK.  I think this reflects the change in thinking toward poltergeist activity.  Many cases of alleged poltergeists seem to surround particular people and abate when the psychological issues of these people are resolved or the individuals reach the end of puberty.

Personally, I'm a believer in PK.  I've had enough personal experiences to be convinced of the reality of PK.  This doesn't mean that I'm any closer to solving the riddle of how it works or how to perform it though.  If you are interested in more information about Nina Kulagina or about learning psychic abilities then please see the links below.  Take care until next time, and if you happen to discover the secret to mastering telekinesis do be sure to share it with me in a comment.

More on Nina Kulagina.
A website with many articles related to learning psychic abilities.