Scientists at Princeton University believe that the human mind can influence machines. Animals can, too, they suspect. Now, when's the last time you -- or your parrot -- said something nice to your computer?

"Come on, sweetheart, you can do it. Oh, now, show me what you're made of. Thaaat's it!"

I am alone in a room with a woman I've met barely an hour ago. She is talking softly, seductively, in a voice that is both sweet and persuasive. Not to me, mind you. She is directing her words to an ugly electronic box with a red digital display -- saccharine mutterings that other people might reserve for a sick child, or a particularly weak puppy.

Brenda Dunne, the manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory, is giving me a demonstration of how she might 'will' a random events generator (REG) to come up with more high than low numbers. She is somehow using the power of her mind to achieve that result. Not to mention her voice. She coos. She crows. She coaxes.

In case you were wondering: Dunne, a developmental psychologist, is hardly the mad scientist type. But she is doggedly after what might turn out to be the Holy Grail of physics: establishing that human consciousness can change the performance characteristics of machines. Mind over matter, as it were.

The work at PEAR lab has consistently shown that 'normal' volunteers -- not people who purport to have any psychic powers -- can indeed influence the behaviour of micro-electronic equipment with their minds, with their consciousness. This is done without the benefit of electrodes and wires, and without anyone being permitted to give the machine a good whack.

A hundred-plus volunteers have produced a total of several million REG trials during the eighteen years of the lab's existence, and obtained results that are tiny, but statistically significant. Meaning: not attributable to chance. They didn't even have to sweettalk the machine into its deviations, the way Dunne has just done. Some of the 'operators' merely stare broodingly at the display, focusing the power of their minds to beat the silicon into submission. Others let their thoughts wander, or even read a book. Two-thirds of the volunteers have been able to produce effects in the REG in the direction they had intended, a fact that flies in the face of statistical probability.

The effects that the volunteers accomplish are very small, but no less amazing. "The operators are roughly altering one bit in one thousand," explains Michael Ibison, a British mathematical physicist who has come to work at PEAR for a few years, after stints at Siemens, IBM and Agfa. "That means, if you had a coin toss, psychokinesis could affect one of those coin tosses if you tossed a thousand times."

The metaphor is apt. The REG, in its simplest form, is nothing more than an electronic coin flipper. It is designed to come up with as many heads as tails, and that is precisely what the carefully calibrated instrument does when humans leave it alone. But sit an operator in front of it, and more often than not, the REG obligingly produces slightly more heads than tails -- or vice versa, correlating with the operator's pre-stated intentions.

Another surprising finding occurred when Dunne and her team asked couples to interact with the REG. The effects that were generated by two people with a mutual emotional attachment were quite a bit larger than those produced by an 'unattached' pair of operators.