Striking it rich by Michael Prescott

Skeptics sometimes say that if psychic powers were real, people would use them to win the lottery. The usual rejoinder is that maybe psychic powers just don't work that way. But there's another possible reply: Maybe some people do use psi to win the lottery, and we just haven't noticed.

Although psi seems to be latent in nearly everyone, it appears to be robust in only a few. So we would expect that only a small number of people would be winning the lottery through the exercise of psychic talents. Moreover, it seems that even people with strong psychic abilities are often unaware of how to use them, or even that they are using them. They may feel vaguely that they use their intuition or follow a hunch or just feel it in their gut. So we would expect that people who win the lottery via psi might not attribute their winnings to anything other than luck.

Is there any way, then, to distinguish genuine chance from psi, as far as the lottery is concerned? There might be. If a small group of people could repeatedly beat the odds, winning big prizes again and again, it might signal that something more than chance is involved.

Guess what? There are such people. Here's a news story about two of them.

One of the repeat winners is Joan Ginther, who won the lottery jackpot four times - in 1993, 2006, 2008, and 2010. The odds of winning were never better than 1 in 900,000 and ran as low as 1 in 15.8 million for the 1993 ticket. She's raked in a total of $20.4 million so far. She now lives in Las Vegas (one wonders how her luck holds up in the casinos) but, according to another article, won her prizes in Texas while living at a remote ranch where she carefully guarded her privacy. The second article says that she has a degree in math and was known to buy a lot of tickets, implying that she used some kind of system. Maybe she did, but if it generated four jackpot wins, it must have been one heck of a system.

Then there's a Canadian man, Segura Ndabene, who has won five jackpots in five years. CBS News provides more details. Since 2004, Ndabene has won the following prizes: $1 million, $100,000, $1 million, $50,000, and now $17 million. Total: $19.5 million.

Philadelphia Inquirer article lists a number of repeat winners and tries to explain it all in terms of chance. I agree that chance can explain cases where the same person wins twice, especially if one of the two prizes is relatively small. For instance, the Inquirer article mentions a North Carolina man who won $10,000 one year and $3 million the next. Well, sure, that could be pure chance.

But when the same person wins three or four times or more - garnering major prize money each time - this explanation starts to look a bit strained.

The Inquirer also notes archly that one man, who won $81,000 on three separate picks, attributed his success to guidance from the spirit of his dead wife. Clearly the article's author thinks little of this explanation, but maybe this kind of statement hints at a genuine psychic component to the winner's unusual luck. More on this particular winner, who played the lottery for years but only started winning the year after his wife died, is found here.

Could psi be involved in some of these cases? Or do some people actually have a system rooted in mathematics that allows them to pick winning numbers? Or does it really come down to that all-purpose explanation, random chance?

I don't know. Neither does anyone else. Which is why I don't think much of the argument that psi can't exist because it's never been used to win the lottery. For all we know, it has indeed been used that way by a gifted few.

Michael Prescott

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Reproduced by kind permission of Michael Prescott

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