The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World
Lynne McTaggart
Ever wondered if your intentions, prayers or wishes have a real, calculable effect on the world? Here, from Lynne McTaggart, groundbreaking author of ‘The Field’, comes riveting accounts of scientific investigations and real case histories with evidence that we are all connected and our intentions can be harnessed as a collective force for good.For the last 40 years renegade scientists, experimenting with the limits of quantum physics, have made seemingly impossible discoveries. 1966: a lie-detector expert accidentally discovers that plants can read thoughts. 1982: meditating Buddhist monks in the Himalayas turn their bodies into a human furnace. 1994: a psychologist's experiments reveal a stream of light flowing from healers during healing.These events form part of an extraordinary scientific story and revolutionary discovery - that thought is a thing that affects other things.In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart, author of the international bestseller The Field, joins forces with a team of international, renowned scientists to test the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets - animal, plant and human.The Intention Experiment is a truly revolutionary book that invites you, the reader, to take part in the greatest intention experiment in history. The results of McTaggart's 'global laboratory' started with the focused intention that made a geranium leaf glow to evidence to show that group intention is powerful enough to affect targets more than 5000 miles away and may even affect global warming.These remarkable results prove human thought and intention has the power to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our communities and improve the planet. This book also shows you how to harness that power to make changes in your own life.
USE YOUR THOUGHTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD
The Intention Experiment
LYNNE MCTAGGART
For Anya
A master of intention
Contents
God is afoot, magic is alive … magic never died
Magic is Alive, Leonard Cohen
Preface (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
THIS BOOK REPRESENTS A PIECE of unfinished business that began in 2001 when I published a book called The Field. In the course of trying to find a scientific explanation for homeopathy and spiritual healing, I had inadvertently uncovered the makings of a new science.
During my research, I stumbled across a band of frontier scientists who had spent many years re-examining quantum physics and its extraordinary implications. Some had resurrected certain equations regarded as superfluous in standard quantum physics. These equations, which stood for the Zero Point Field, concerned the extraordinary quantum field generated by the endless passing back and forth of energy between all subatomic particles. The existence of the Field implies that all matter in the universe is connected on the subatomic level through a constant dance of quantum energy exchange.
Other evidence demonstrated that, on the most basic level, each one of us is also a packet of pulsating energy constantly interacting with this vast energy sea.
But the most heretical evidence of all concerned the role of consciousness. The well-designed experiments conducted by these scientists suggested that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our bodies – a highly ordered energy with the capacity to change physical matter. Directing thoughts at a target seemed capable of altering machines, cells and, indeed, entire multicelled organisms like human beings. This mind-over-matter power even seemed to traverse time and space.
In The Field I aimed to make sense of all the ideas resulting from these disparate experiments and to synthesize them into one generalized theory. The Field created a picture of an interconnected universe and a scientific explanation for many of the most profound human mysteries, from alternative medicine and spiritual healing to extrasensory perception and the collective unconscious.
The Field apparently hit a nerve. I received hundreds of letters from readers who told me that the book had changed their lives. A writer wanted to depict me as a character in her novel. Two composers wrote musical compositions inspired by it, one of which was played on the international stage. I was featured in a movie, What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, and on the What The Bleep Do We Know!? Calendar, released by the film’s producers. Quotes from The Field became the centrepiece of a printed Christmas card.
However gratifying this reaction, I felt that my own journey of discovery had hardly left the station platform. The scientific evidence I had amassed for The Field suggested something extraordinary and even disturbing: directed thought had some sort of central participatory role in creating reality.
Targeting your thoughts – or what scientists ponderously refer to as ‘intention’ and ‘intentionality’ – appeared to produce an energy potent enough to change physical reality. A simple thought seemed to have the power to change our world.
After writing The Field, I puzzled over the extent of this power and the numerous questions it raised. How, for instance, could I translate what had been confirmed in the laboratory for use in the world that I lived in? Could I stand in the middle of a railway track and, Superman-style, stop the 9:45 to Paddington with my thoughts? Could I fly myself up to fix my roof with a bit of directed thought? Would it now be possible to cross doctors and healers off my list of essential contacts, seeing as I might now be able to think myself well? Could I help my children pass their maths tests just by thinking about it? If linear time and three-dimensional space didn’t really exist, could I go back and erase all those moments in my life that had left me with lasting regret? And could my one puny bit of mental input do anything to change the vast catalogue of suffering on the planet?
The implications of this evidence were unsettling. Should we be minding every last thought at every moment? Was a pessimist’s view of the world likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Were all those negative thoughts – that ongoing inner dialogue of judgement and criticism – having any effect outside our heads?
Were there conditions that improved your chances of having a better effect with your thoughts? Would a thought work any old time or would you, your intended target and indeed the universe itself have to be in the mood? If everything is affecting everything else at every moment, doesn’t that counteract and thereby nullify any real effect?
What happens when a number of people think the same thought at the same time? Would that have an even larger effect than thoughts generated singly? Was there a threshold size that a group of like-minded intenders had to reach in order to exert the most powerful effect? Was an intention ‘dose dependent’ – the larger the group, the larger the effect?
An enormous body of literature, starting with Think and Grow Rich,1 (#ulink_f06f7f05-67f7-5820-9ee0-c01f4e98344f) by Napoleon Hill, arguably the first self-actualization guru, has been generated about the power of thought. ‘Intention’ has become the latest New Age buzzword. Practitioners of alternative medicine speak of helping patients heal ‘with intention’. Even Jane Fonda writes about raising children ‘with intention’.2 (#ulink_8ad54d26-7b07-5ad2-b2ba-bddf91d2e8c6)
What on earth, I wondered, was meant by ‘intention’? And how exactly can one become an efficient ‘intender’? The bulk of the popular material had been written off the cuff – a smattering of Eastern philosophy here, a soupçon of Dale Carnegie there – with very little scientific evidence that it worked.
To find answers to all of these questions, I turned, once again, to science, scouring the scientific literature for studies on distant healing or other forms of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. I sought out international scientists who experimented with how thoughts can affect matter. The science described in The Field had been carried out mainly in the 1970s; I examined more recent discoveries in quantum physics for further clues.
I also turned to those people who had managed to master intention and who could perform the extraordinary – spiritual healers, Buddhist monks, Qigong masters, shamans – in order to understand the transformational processes they underwent to be able to use their thoughts to powerful effect. I uncovered myriad ways that intention is used in real life – in sports, for instance, and during healing modalities such as biofeedback. I studied how native populations incorporated directed thought into their daily ritual.
I then began to dig up evidence that multiple minds trained on the same target magnified the effect produced by an individual. The evidence was tantalizing, mostly gathered by the Transcendental Meditation organization, suggesting that a group of likeminded thoughts created some sort of order in the otherwise random Zero Point Field.
At that point in my journey, I ran out of pavement. All that stretched before me, as far as I could tell, was uninhabited open terrain.
Then one evening, my husband Bryan, a natural entrepreneur in most situations, put forward what seemed to be a preposterous suggestion: ‘Why don’t you do some group experiments yourself?’
I am not a physicist. I am not any kind of scientist. The last experiment I had conducted had been in a 10th grade science lab.
What I did have, though, was a resource available to few scientists: a potentially huge experimental body. Group intention experiments are extraordinarily difficult to perform in an ordinary laboratory. A researcher would need to recruit thousands of participants. How would he find them? Where would he put them? How would he get them all to think the same thing at the same time?
A book’s readers offer an ideal self-selected group of likeminded souls who might be willing to participate in testing out an idea. Indeed, I already had my own large population of regular readers with whom I communicated through e-news and my other spin-off activities from The Field.
I first broached the idea of carrying out my own experiment with dean emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering Robert Jahn and his colleague, psychologist Brenda Dunne, who run the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research (PEAR) laboratory, both of whom I had got to know through my research for The Field. Jahn and Dunne have spent some 30 years painstakingly amassing some of the most convincing evidence about the power of directed intention to affect machinery. They are absolute sticklers for scientific method, no-nonsense and to the point. Robert Jahn is one of the few people I have ever met who speaks in perfect, complete sentences. Brenda Dunne is equally perfectionist about detail in both experiment and language. I would be assured of no sloppy protocol in my experiments if Jahn and Dunne agreed to be involved.
The two of them also have a vast array of scientists at their disposal. They head the International Consciousness Research Laboratory, many of whose members are among the most prestigious scientists performing consciousness research in the world. Dunne also runs PEARTree, a group of young scientists interested in consciousness research.
Jahn and Dunne immediately warmed to the idea. We met on numerous occasions and kicked around some possibilities. Eventually, they put forward Fritz-Albert Popp, assistant director of the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) in Neuss, Germany, to conduct the first intention experiments. I knew Fritz Popp through my research for The Field. He was the first to discover that all living things emit a tiny current of light. As a noted German physicist recognized internationally for his discoveries, Popp would also be a stickler for pristine scientific method.
Other scientists, such as psychologist Gary Schwartz of the Biofield Center at the University of Arizona, Marilyn Schlitz, vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dean Radin, IONS’ senior scientist, and psychologist Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, have also offered to participate.
I do not have any hidden sponsors of this project. The website and all our experiments will be funded by the proceeds of this book or grants, now and in the future.
Scientists involved in experimental research often cannot venture beyond their findings to consider the implications of what they have uncovered. Consequently, when assembling the evidence that already exists about intention, I have tried to consider the larger implications of this work and to synthesize these individual discoveries into a coherent theory. In order to describe in words concepts that are generally depicted through mathematical equations, I have had to reach for metaphoric approximations of the truth. At times, with the help of many of the scientists involved, I have also had to engage in speculation. It is important to recognize that the conclusions arrived at in this book represent the fruits of frontier science. These ideas are a work in progress. Undoubtedly new evidence will emerge to amplify and refine these initial conclusions.
Researching the work of people at the very forefront of scientific discovery again has been a humbling experience for me. Within the unremarkable confines of a laboratory, these largely unsung men and women engage in activities that are nothing short of heroic. They risk losing grants, academic posts and, indeed, entire careers groping alone in the dark. Most scratch around for grant money to enable them to carry on.
All advancements in science are somewhat heretical, each important new discovery partly, if not completely, negating the prevailing views of the day. To be a true explorer in science – to follow the unprejudiced lead of pure scientific inquiry – is to be unafraid to propose the unthinkable, and to prove friends, colleagues and scientific paradigms wrong. Hidden within the cautious, neutral language of experimental data and mathematical equation is nothing less than the makings of a new world, which slowly takes shape for all the rest of us, one painstaking experiment at a time.
Lynne McTaggart, June 2006
Notes - Preface
1 (#ulink_d82aa8c8-f230-5672-badb-5ebabf461102). N. Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Andrew Carnegie Formula for Money Making, New York: Ballantine Books (reissue edn), 1987.
2 (#ulink_d82aa8c8-f230-5672-badb-5ebabf461102). J. Fonda, My Life So Far, London: Ebury Press, 2005: 571.
Introduction (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT is no ordinary book, and you are no ordinary reader. This is a book without an ending, for I intend for you to help me finish it. You are not only the audience of this book, but also one of its protagonists – the primary participants in cutting-edge scientific research. You, quite simply, are about to embark on the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history.
The Intention Experiment is the first ‘living’ book in three-dimensions. The book, in a sense, is a prelude, and the ‘contents’ carry on well beyond the time you finish the final page. In the book itself, you will discover scientific evidence about the power of your own thoughts, and you will then be able to extend beyond this information and test further possibilities through a massive, ongoing international group experiment, under the direction of some of the most well-respected international scientists in consciousness research. Through The Intention Experiment’s website (www.theintention experiment.com), you and the rest of the readers of this book will be able to participate in remote experiments, the results of which will be posted on the site. Each of you will become a scientist at the hub of some of the most daring consciousness experiments ever conducted.
The Intention Experiment rests on an outlandish premise: thought affects physical reality. A sizeable body of research exploring the nature of consciousness, carried on for more than 30 years in prestigious scientific institutions around the world, shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the simplest machines to the most complex living beings.1 (#ulink_d3dcebcc-de44-510f-9363-4b2b643a9aa1) This evidence suggests that human thoughts and intentions are an actual physical ‘something’ with the astonishing power to change our world. Every thought we have is a tangible energy with the power to transform. A thought is not only a thing; a thought is a thing that influences other things.
This central idea, that consciousness affects matter, lies at the very heart of an irreconcilable difference between the world view offered by classical physics – the science of the big, visible world – and that of quantum physics – the science of the world’s most diminutive components. That difference concerns the very nature of matter and the ways it can be influenced to change.
All of classical physics, and indeed the rest of science, is derived from the laws of motion and gravity developed by Isaac Newton in his Principia, published in 1687.2 (#ulink_69afb398-b292-50ca-a75b-2bd2d2d7918b) Newton’s laws described a universe in which all objects moved within the three-dimensional space of geometry and time according to certain fixed laws of motion. Matter was considered inviolate and self-contained, with its own fixed boundaries. Influence of any sort required something physical to be done to something else – a force or collision. Making something change basically entailed heating it, burning it, freezing it, dropping it or giving it a good swift kick.
Newtonian laws, science’s grand ‘rules of the game’, as the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once referred to them,3 (#ulink_3640256e-b187-5d12-b6d5-ed58f9db1bcb) and their central premise, that things exist independently of each other, underpin our own philosophical view of the world. We believe that all of life and its tumultuous activity carries on around us, regardless of what we do or think. We sleep easy in our beds at night, in the certainty that when we close our eyes, the universe doesn’t disappear.
Nevertheless, that tidy view of the universe as a collection of isolated, well-behaved objects got dashed in the early part of the twentieth century, once the pioneers of quantum physics began peering closer into the heart of matter. The tiniest bits of the universe, those very things that make up the big, objective world, did not in any way behave themselves according to any rules that these scientists had ever known.
This outlaw behaviour was encapsulated in a collection of ideas that became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, after ?the place where the forceful Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his brilliant protégé, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, formulated the likely meaning of their extraordinary mathematical discoveries. Bohr and Heisenberg realized that atoms are not little solar systems of billiard balls but something far more messy: a tiny cloud of probability. Every subatomic particle is not a solid and stable thing, but exists simply as a potential of any one of its future selves – or what is known by physicists as a ‘superposition’, or sum, of all probabilities, like a person staring at himself in a hall of mirrors.
One of their conclusions concerned the notion of ‘indeterminacy’; that you can never know all there is to know about a subatomic particle all at the same time. If you discover information about where it is, for instance, you cannot work out at the same time exactly where it is going or at what speed. They spoke about a quantum particle as both a particle – a congealed, set thing – and a ‘wave function’ – a big smeared-out region of space and time, any corner of which the particle may occupy. It was akin to describing a person as comprising the entire street where he lives.
Their conclusions suggested that, at its most elemental, physical matter isn’t solid and stable – indeed, isn’t an anything yet. Subatomic reality did not resemble the solid and reliable state of being described to us by classical science, but an ephemeral prospect of seemingly infinite options. So capricious seemed the smallest bits of nature that the first quantum physicists had to make do with a crude symbolic approximation of the truth – a mathematical range of all possibility.
At the quantum level, reality resembled unset jelly.
The quantum theories developed by Bohr, Heisenberg and a host of others rocked the very foundation of the Newtonian view of matter as something discrete and self-contained. They suggested that matter, at its most fundamental, could not be divided into independently existing units and indeed could not even be fully described. Things had no meaning in isolation, but only in a web of dynamic interrelationship.
The quantum pioneers also discovered the astonishing ability of quantum particles to influence each other, despite the absence of all those usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force occurring at a finite velocity. Once in contact, particles retained an eerie remote hold over each other. The actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one subatomic particle instantaneously influenced the other, no matter how far they were separated.
At the subatomic level, change also resulted through dynamic shifts of energy; these little packets of vibrating energy constantly traded energy back and forth to each other like ongoing passes in a game of basketball, a ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing that gave rise to an unfathomably large basic layer of energy in the universe.4 (#ulink_2cd220f4-f44c-538b-a46d-d09f535cac35)
Subatomic matter appeared to be involved in a continual exchange of information, causing constant refinement and subtle alteration. The universe was not a storehouse of static, separate objects, but a single organism of interconnected energy fields in a constant state of becoming. At its infinitesimal level, our world resembled a vast network of quantum information, with all its component parts constantly on the phone.
The only thing dissolving this little cloud of probability into something solid and measurable was the involvement of an observer. Once these scientists decided to have a closer look at a subatomic particle by taking a measurement, the subatomic entity that existed as pure potential would ‘collapse’ into one particular state.
The implications of these early experimental findings were profound: living consciousness somehow was the influence that turned the possibility of something into something real. The moment we looked at an electron or took a measurement, it appeared that we helped to determine its final state. This suggested that the most essential ingredient in creating our universe is the consciousness that observes it. Several of the central figures in quantum physics argued that the universe was democratic and participatory – a joint effort between observer and observed.5 (#ulink_dbf6cc32-1829-56ac-aaf7-30c6e979c28a)
The observer effect in quantum experimentation gives rise to another heretical notion: that living consciousness is somehow central to this process of transforming the unconstructed quantum world into something resembling everyday reality. It suggests not only that the observer brings the observed into being, but also that nothing in the universe exists as an actual ‘thing’ independently of our perception of it.
It implies that observation – the very involvement of consciousness – gets the jelly to set.
It implies that reality is not fixed, but fluid, or mutable, and hence possibly open to influence.
The idea that consciousness creates and possibly even affects the physical universe also challenges our current scientific view of consciousness, which developed from the theories of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes – mind is separate and somehow different from matter – and eventually embraced the notion that consciousness is entirely generated by the brain and remains locked up in the skull.
Most modern workaday physicists shrug their shoulders over this central conundrum: that big things are separate, but the tiny building blocks they are made up of are in instant and ceaseless communication with each other. For half a century, physicists have accepted, as though it makes perfect sense, that an electron behaving one way subatomically somehow transmutes into ‘classical’ (that is, Newtonian) behaviour once it realizes it is part of a larger whole.
In the main, scientists have stopped caring about the troublesome questions posed by quantum physics, and left unanswered by its earliest pioneers. Quantum theory works mathematically. It offers a highly successful recipe for dealing with the subatomic world. It helped to build atomic bombs and lasers, and to deconstruct the nature of the sun’s radiation. Today’s physicists have forgotten about the observer effect. They content themselves with their elegant equations and await the formulation of unified Theory of Everything or the discovery of a few more dimensions beyond the ones that ordinary humans perceive, which they hope will somehow pull together all these contradictory findings into one centralized theory.
Thirty years ago, while the rest of the scientific community carried on by rote, a small band of frontier scientists at prestigious universities around the globe paused to consider the metaphysical implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation and the observer effect.6 (#ulink_1d382990-d69d-59f1-9a99-e1858280eb11) If matter was mutable, and consciousness made matter a set something, it seemed likely that consciousness might also be able to nudge things in a particular direction.
Their investigations boiled down to a simple question: if the act of attention affected physical matter, what was the effect of intention – of deliberately attempting to make a change? In our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might be not only creators, but also influencers.7 (#ulink_61bede7d-d906-5514-8802-b3f6f6ec786b)
They began designing and carrying out experiments, testing what they gave the unwieldy label of ‘directed remote mental influence’ or ‘psychokinesis’, or, in shorthand, ‘intention’ or even ‘intentionality’. A textbook definition of intention characterizes it as ‘a purposeful plan to perform an action, which will lead to a desired outcome’,8 (#ulink_e005e4a6-a5f8-502c-a91b-87c7e7bd10d1) unlike a desire, which means simply focusing on an outcome, without a purposeful plan of how to achieve it. An intention was directed at the intender’s own actions; it required some sort of reasoning; it required a commitment to do the intended deed. Intention implied purposefulness: an understanding of a plan of action and a planned satisfactory result. Marilyn Schlitz, vice-president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and one of the scientists engaged in the earliest investigations of remote influence, defined intention as ‘the projection of awareness, with purpose and efficacy, toward some object or outcome’.9 (#ulink_8a85f036-0bb6-5b25-aa5f-3b2d61498603) To influence physical matter, they believed, thought had to be highly motivated and targeted.
In a series of remarkable experiments, these scientists provided evidence that thinking certain directed thoughts could affect one’s own body, inanimate objects and virtually all manner of living things, from single-celled organisms to human beings. Two of the major figures in this tiny subgroup were former dean of engineering Robert Jahn at the Princeton Anomalies Engineering Research (PEAR) laboratory at Princeton University and his colleague Brenda Dunne, who together created a sophisticated, scholarly research programme grounded in hard science. Over 25 years, Jahn and Dunne led what became a massive international effort to quantify what is referred to as ‘micro-psychokinesis’, the effect of mind on random-event generators (REGs), which perform the electronic, twenty-first century equivalent of a toss of a coin.
The output of these machines (the computerized equivalent of heads or tails) was controlled by a randomly alternating frequency of positive and negative pulses. Because their activity was utterly random, they produced ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ each roughly 50 per cent of the time, according to the laws of probability. The most common configuration of the REG experiments was a computer screen randomly alternating two attractive images – say, of cowboys and Indians. Participants in the studies would be placed in front of the computers and asked to try to influence the machine to produce more of one image – more cowboys, say – then to focus on producing more images of Indians, and then to try not to influence the machine in either direction.
Over the course of more than two and a half million trials Jahn and Dunne decisively demonstrated that human intention can influence these electronic devices in the specified direction,10 (#ulink_628d101d-d981-578d-bbab-baab43ce4093)and their results were replicated independently by 68 investigators.11 (#ulink_28346f98-8114-556d-90df-e851a2bcc241)
While PEAR concentrated on the effect of mind on inanimate objects and processes, many other scientists experimented with the effect of intention on living things. A diverse number of researchers demonstrated that human intention can affect an enormous variety of living systems: bacteria, yeast, algae, lice, chicks, mice, gerbils, rats, cats and dogs.12 (#ulink_8a498327-0ee1-512d-8425-989440e2d73b)A number of these experiments have also been carried out with human targets; intention has been shown to affect many biological processes within the receiver, including gross motor movements and those in the heart, the eye, the brain and the respiratory system.
Animals themselves proved capable of acts of effective intention. In one ingenious study by René Peoc’h of the Fondation ODIER in Nantes, France, a robotic ‘mother hen’, constructed from a moveable random-event generator, was ‘imprinted’ on a group of baby chicks soon after birth. The robot was placed outside the chicks’ cage, where it moved around freely, as its path was tracked and recorded. Eventually, it was clear that the robot was moving towards the chicks two and a half times more often than it would ordinarily; the ‘inferred intention’ of the chicks – their desire to be close to their mother – appeared to affect the robot, drawing it closer to the cage. In over 80 similar studies, in which a lighted candle was placed on a movable REG, baby chicks kept in the dark, finding the light comforting, managed to influence the robot to spend more time than normal in the vicinity of their cage.13 (#ulink_b02ee5ee-85fa-502f-b025-a5887b6f0342)
The largest and most persuasive body of research has been amassed by William Braud, a psychologist and the research director of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and, later, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Braud and his colleagues demonstrated that human thoughts can affect the direction in which fish swim, the movement of other animals such as gerbils, and the breakdown of cells in the laboratory.14 (#ulink_4f96dfb5-2103-5b79-8c29-f092d562286e)
Braud also designed some of the earliest well-controlled studies of mental influence on human beings. In one group of studies, Braud demonstrated that one person could affect the autonomic nervous system (or fight-or-flight mechanisms) of another.15 (#ulink_3148a20a-941c-5dde-bb8b-342b4b8df4d2) Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a measure of skin resistance and shows an individual’s state of stress; a change of EDA usually occurs if someone is stressed or made uncomfortable in some way.16 (#ulink_d9f8563c-2c16-54bf-841f-8677bdbfc309) Braud’s signature study tested the effect on EDA of being stared at, one of the simplest means of isolating the effect of remote influence on a human being. He repeatedly demonstrated that people were subconsciously aroused while they were being stared at.17 (#ulink_87406f94-fac8-5aaf-adb7-f09e22bb7254)
Perhaps the most frequently studied area of remote influence concerns remote healing. Some 150 studies, of variable scientific rigour, have been carried out,18 (#ulink_c816981d-c1f9-5720-8d90-709548e966cf) and one of the best designed was conducted by the late Dr Elisabeth Targ. During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, she devised an ingenious, highly controlled pair of studies, in which some 40 remote healers across America were shown to improve the health of terminal AIDS patients, even though the healers had never met or been in contact with their patients.19 (#ulink_0e4ce242-609f-54e6-b06f-6ce3529243f7)
Even some of the most rudimentary mind-over-matter experiments have had tantalizing results. One of the first such studies involved attempts to influence a throw of the dice. To date, some 73 studies have examined the efforts of 2500 people to influence more than two and a half million throws of the dice, with extraordinary success. When all the studies were analysed together, and allowances made for quality or selective reporting, the odds of the results occurring by chance alone were 1076 (1 followed by 76 zeros) to one.20 (#ulink_d7dfbe83-ee16-53a7-8e27-96abae1ac3af)
There was also some provocative material about spoon bending, that perennial party trick made popular by psychic Uri Geller. John Hasted, a professor at Birkbeck College at the University of London, had tested this with an ingenious experiment involving children. Hasted suspended latch keys from the ceiling and placed the children 3 to 10 feet away from their target key, so that they could have no physical contact. Attached to each key was a strain gauge, which would detect and register on a strip chart recorder any change in the key. Hasted then asked the children to try to bend the suspended metal. During the sessions, he observed not only the keys swaying and sometimes fracturing, but also abrupt and enormous spikes of voltage pulses up to 10 volts – the very limits of the chart recorder. Even more compelling, when children had been asked to send their intention to several keys hung separately, the individual strain recorders noted simultaneous signals, as though the keys were being affected in concert.21 (#ulink_0bc751d6-3c50-5d15-871c-2add70606a27)
Most intriguing, in much of the research on psychokinesis, mental influence of any variety had produced measurable effects, no matter how far the distance between the sender or what point in time he generated his intention. According to the experimental evidence, the power of thought transcended time and space.
By the time these revisionists were finished, they had torn up the rule book and scattered it to the four winds. Mind in some way appeared to be inextricably connected to matter and, indeed, was capable of altering it. Physical matter could be influenced, even irrevocably altered, not simply by force, but through the simple act of formulating a thought.
Nevertheless, the evidence from these frontier scientists left three fundamental questions unanswered. Through what physical mechanisms do thoughts affect reality? At the time of this writing, some highly publicized studies of mass prayer showed no effect. Were certain conditions and preparatory states of mind more conducive to success than others? How much power did a thought have, for good or ill? How much of our lives could a thought actually change?
Most of the initial discoveries about consciousness occurred more than 30 years ago. More recent discoveries in frontier quantum physics and in laboratories around the globe offer answers to some of those questions. They provide evidence that our world is highly malleable, open to constant subtle influence. Recent research demonstrates that living things are constant transmitters and receivers of measurable energy. New models of consciousness portray it as an entity capable of trespassing physical boundaries of every description.
Intention appears to be something akin to a tuning fork, causing the tuning forks of other things in the universe to resonate at the same frequency.
The latest studies of the effect of mind on matter suggest that intention has variable effects that depend on the state of the host, and the time and the place where it originates. Intention has already been employed in many quarters to cure illness, alter physical processes and influence events. It is not a special gift but a learned skill, readily taught. Indeed, we already use intention in many aspects of our daily lives.
A body of research also suggests that the power of an intention multiplies, depending upon how many people are thinking the same thought at the same time.22 (#ulink_22482e0d-5d10-5e62-ad02-452a1841864f)
The Intention Experiment consists of three aspects. The main body of the book (chapters 1–12) attempts to synthesize all the experimental evidence that exists on intention into a coherent scientific theory of how intention works, how it can be used in your life and which conditions optimize its effect.
The second portion of the book (chapter 13) offers a blueprint for using intention effectively in your own life through a series of exercises and recommendations for how best to ‘power up’. This portion is also an exercise in frontier science. I am not an expert in human potential, so this is not a self-help manual, but a journey of discovery for me as well as you. I have extrapolated this programme from scientific evidence describing those circumstances that created the most positive results in psychokinetic laboratory experiences. We know for certain that these techniques have generated success under controlled experimental laboratory conditions, but I cannot guarantee they will work in your life. By making use of them, you will, in effect, engage in an ongoing personal experiment.
The final section of the book (chapters 14 and 15) consists of a series of personal and group experiments. Chapter 14 outlines a series of informal experiments on the use of intention in your own life for you to carry out individually. These mini ‘experiments’ are also intended to be pieces of research. You will have the opportunity to post your results on our website and share them with other readers.
Besides these individual experiments, I have also designed a series of large group experiments to be carried out by the readers of this book (chapter 15). With the aid of our highly experienced scientific team, The Intention Experiment will conduct periodic large-scale experiments to determine whether the focused intention of its readers has an effect on scientifically quantifiable targets.
All it requires is that you read the book, digest its contents, log on to the website (www.theintentionexperiment.com) and, after following the instructions and exercises at the back of this book, send out some highly specific thoughts, as and when described on the site. The first such studies will be carried out by the German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, vice-president of the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany (www.lifescientists.de), and his team of seven, psychologist Gary Schwartz and his colleagues at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Website experts have collaborated with our scientific team to design log-on protocols to enable us to identify which characteristics of a group or aspects of their thoughts produce the most effective results. For each intention experiment, a target will be selected – a specific living thing or a population where change caused by group intention can be measured. We have started with algae, the lowliest of subjects (see chapter 12), and, with every experiment, we will move on to an increasingly complex living target.
Our plans are ambitious: to tackle a number of societal ills. One eventual human target might be patients with a wound. It is known and accepted that wounds generally heal at a particular, quantifiable rate with a precise pattern.23 (#ulink_cc00b8a1-4896-54b6-940c-672baad650bc) Any departure from the norm can be precisely measured and shown to be an experimental effect. In that instance, our aim would be to determine whether focused group intention will enable wounds to heal more quickly than usual.
Naturally, you don’t have to participate in our experiments. If you don’t wish to get involved, you can read about the intention experiments of others, and use some of that information to inform how you use intention in your life.
Please do not casually participate in the experiments. In order for the experiment to work properly, you must read the book and digest its contents fully beforehand. The experimental evidence suggests that those who are the most effective have trained their minds, much as athletes train their muscles, to maximize their chances of success.
In order to discourage uncommitted participation, The Intention Experiment website contains a complicated password comprising some words or ideas from the book (which will change slightly every few months). In order to be part of the experiment, you will have to log on with the password and you will have to have read the book and understood it.
The website (www.theintentionexperiment.com) has a running clock (set to US Eastern Standard Time and Greenwich Mean Time). At a particular moment on a date specified on the website, you will be asked to send a carefully worded, detailed intention, depending on the target site.
Once finished, the results of the experiments will be analysed and data-crunched by our scientific team, examined by a neutral statistician, and then published on the website and in subsequent printings of this book. The website will thus become the living sequel to the book you are holding in your hands. You simply need to consult the website periodically for announcements of the date of every experiment.
Hundreds of well-designed studies of group intention and remote mental influence have demonstrated significant results. Nevertheless, it might be the case that our experiments will not produce demon-strable, measurable effects, at first or indeed ever. As reputable scientists and objective researchers, we are duty-bound to report the data we have. As with all science, failure is instructive, helping us to refine the design of the experiments and the premises that they are based upon.
As you read this book, keep in mind that this is a work of frontier science. Science is a relentless process of self-correction. Assumptions originally considered as fact must often ultimately be discarded. Many – indeed, most – of the conclusions drawn in this book are bound to be amended or refined at a later date.
By reading this book and participating in its experiments you may well contribute to the world’s knowledge, and possibly further a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the world works. Indeed, the power of mass intention may ultimately be the force that shifts the tide towards repair and renewal of the planet. When combined with hundreds of thousands of others, your solitary voice, now one barely audible note, could transmute into a thunderous symphony.
My own motive for writing The Intention Experiment was to make a statement about the extraordinary nature and power of consciousness. It may prove true that a single collective, directed thought is all it takes to change the world.
Notes - Introduction
1 (#ulink_09991f7f-2f04-5bec-a9bb-411390b3aaf5). For a complete description of these scientists and their findings, consult L. McTaggart, The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, London: HarperCollins, 2001.
2 (#ulink_b6c272d4-ec38-59fb-83d9-d6809489cc7e). The full title of Newton’s major treatise is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a name that offers a nod to its philosophical implications, although it is always referred to reverentially as the Principia.
3 (#ulink_b2527f72-22bb-5300-a8f0-d08885c57e32). R. P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: The Fundamentals of Physics Explained, London: Penguin, 1995: 24.
4 (#ulink_b28c9ac8-ad01-570d-9e9d-e3eeb5fa89d8). McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
5 (#ulink_12d68c13-f4c1-5e3a-b491-ad3d8d9a9519). Eugene Wigner, the Hungarian-born American physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the theory of quantum physics, is one of the early pioneers of the central role of consciousness in determining reality and argued, through a thought experiment called ‘Wigner’s friend’, that the observer, ‘the friend’, might collapse Schrödinger’s famous cat into a single state or, like the cat itself, remain in a state of superposition until another ‘friend’ comes into the lab. Other proponents of ‘the observer effect’ include John Eccles and Evan Harris Walker. John Wheeler is credited with espousing the theory that the universe is participatory: it only exists because we happen to be looking at it.
6 (#ulink_54b6d147-7de1-51a8-849a-caee84010a2f). McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
7 (#ulink_6c8279d6-7c03-5acb-a63b-ebd22b0bdf39). E. J. Squires, ‘Many views of one world – an interpretation of quantum theory’, European Journal of Physics, 1987; 8: 173.
8 (#ulink_87472338-513e-5fc3-8651-829b55e54205). B. F. Malle et al., Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
9 (#ulink_87472338-513e-5fc3-8651-829b55e54205). M. Schlitz, ‘Intentionality in healing: mapping the integration of body, mind, and spirit’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1995; 1 (5): 119–20.
10 (#ulink_17f54f12-93ec-51f6-9c0a-498f3fecd173). R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with prestated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11: 345–67.
11 (#ulink_17f54f12-93ec-51f6-9c0a-498f3fecd173). R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences’, op. cit.; Dean Radin and Roger Nelson, ‘Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems’, Foundations of Physics, 1989; 19 (12): 1499–514; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 116–17.
12 (#ulink_5452bb2a-84f5-51ec-a370-4bbc5b0fd457). These studies are itemized in great detail in D. Benor, Spiritual Healing, Volume 1, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 1992.
13 (#ulink_b3851bae-63a8-518f-8d7f-810aa023a2a5). Rene Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinetic action of young chicks on the path of a “illuminated source”’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (2): 223; R. Peoc’h, ‘Chicken imprinting and the tychoscope: An Anpsi experiment’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1988; 55: 1; R. Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinesis experiments with human and animal subjects upon a robot moving at random’, The Journal of Parapsychology, September 1, 2002.
14 (#ulink_949af020-04df-59da-b576-99df8aa1cd15). William G. Braud and Marilyn J. Schlitz, ‘Consciousness interactions with remote biological systems: anomalous intentionality effects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1991; 2 (1): 1–27; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 128–9.
15 (#ulink_b27c2163-b638-59a5-a827-314d541e60ac). Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing: assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.
16 (#ulink_b27c2163-b638-59a5-a827-314d541e60ac). William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz, ‘A methodology for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1989; 3 (1): 43–63.
17 (#ulink_b27c2163-b638-59a5-a827-314d541e60ac). W. Braud et al., ‘Further studies of autonomic detection of remote staring: replication, new control procedures and personality correlates’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1993; 57: 391–409; M. Schlitz and S. LaBerge, ‘Autonomic detection of remote observation; two conceptual replications’, in D. Bierman (ed.), Proceedings of Presented Papers: 37 Annual Parapsychological Association Convention, Amsterdam, Fairhaven, Mass.: Parapsychological Association, 1994: 465–78.
18 (#ulink_41286938-5518-5342-8e2a-70a3d9ff1176). D. Benor, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 2001.
19 (#ulink_41286938-5518-5342-8e2a-70a3d9ff1176). F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small scale study’, Western Journal of Medicine, 1998; 168 (6): 356–63. For a full description of the studies, see McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 181–96.
20 (#ulink_7fb51ae3-15b9-57dd-b8ad-885968b01b45). Psychologist Dean Radin conducted a meta-analysis in 1989 at Princeton University of all known dice experiments (73) published between 1930 and 1989. They are recounted in his book Entangled Minds, New York: Paraview, 2006: 148–51.
21 (#ulink_96f0e864-57fe-56c0-aefc-f1088c9d8de2). J. Hasted, The Metal Benders, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, as cited in W. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation; Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publications, 1997: 13.
22 (#ulink_008e693f-209e-51a5-bd77-8baaec1e53c1). McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 199.
23 (#ulink_a13dc7e7-a354-5405-a1b7-412284ef689a). W. W. Monafo and M. A. West, ‘Current recommendations for topical burn therapy’, Drugs, 1990; 40: 364–73.
PART ONE (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
The Science of Intention (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
A human being is part of the whole, called by us
‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He
experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as
something separated from the rest – a kind of
optical delusion of his consciousness.
Albert Einstein
CHAPTER ONE (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
Mutable Matter (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
FEW PLACES IN THE GALAXY are as cold as the helium-dilution refrigerator in Tom Rosenbaum’s lab. Temperatures in the refrigerator – a boiler-sized circular apparatus with a number of cylinders – can descend to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, almost 273°C below freezing – three thousand times colder than the farthest reaches of outer space. For two days, liquid nitrogen and helium circulate around the refrigerator, and then three pumps constantly blasting out gaseous helium take the temperature down to the final rung. Without heat of any description, the atoms in matter slow to a crawl. At this scale of coldness, the universe would grind to a halt. It is the scientific equivalent of hell freezing over.
Absolute zero is the preferred temperature of a physicist like Tom Rosenbaum. At 47, as a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Chicago and former head of the James Franck Institute, Rosenbaum was in the vanguard of experimental physicists who liked exploring the limits of disorder in condensed-matter physics, the study of the inner workings of liquids and solids when their underlying order was disturbed.1 (#ulink_482c722f-559e-5382-8f15-aa832741ce94) In physics, if you want to find out how something behaves, the best way is simply to make it uncomfortable and then see what happens. Creating disorder usually involves adding heat or applying a magnetic field to determine how it will react when disturbed and also to determine which spin position – or magnetic orientation – the atoms will choose.
Most of his colleagues in condensed-matter physics remained interested in symmetrical systems such as crystalline solids, whose atoms are arranged in orderly array, like eggs in a carton, but Rosenbaum was drawn to strange systems that were inherently disordered – to which more conventional quantum physicists referred disparagingly as ‘dirt’. In dirt, he believed, lay exposed the unprobed secrets of the quantum universe, uncharted territory that he was happy to navigate. He loved the challenge posed by spin glasses, strange hybrids of crystals, with magnetic properties, technically considered slow-moving liquids. Unlike a crystal, whose atoms point in the same direction in perfect alignment, the tiny magnets associated with the atoms of a spin glass are wayward and frozen in disarray.
The use of extreme coldness allowed Rosenbaum to slow down the atoms of these strange compounds enough to observe them minutely, and to tease out their quantum mechanical essence. At temperatures near to absolute zero, when their atoms are nearly stationary, they begin taking on new collective properties. Rosenbaum was fascinated by the recent discovery that systems disorderly at room temperature display a conformist streak once they are cooled down. For once, these delinquent atoms begin to act in concert.
Examining how molecules behave as a group in various circumstances is highly instructive about the essential nature of matter. In my own journey of discovery, Rosenbaum’s laboratory seemed the most appropriate place to begin. There, at those lowest temperatures where everything occurs in slow motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the universe might be revealed. I was looking for evidence of ways in which the components of our physical universe, which we think of as fully realized, are capable of being fundamentally altered. I also wondered whether it could be shown that quantum behaviour like the observer effect occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of the everyday. What Rosenbaum had discovered in his refrigerator might offer some vital clues as to how every object or organism in the physical world, which classical physics depicts as an irreversible fact, a finalized assemblage only changeable by the brute force of Newtonian physics, could be affected and ultimately altered by the energy of a thought.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the universe can only flow from a state of greater to lesser energy. We throw a stone into a river and the ripple it makes eventually stops. A cup of hot coffee left standing can only grow cold. Things inevitably fall apart; everything travels in a single direction, from order to disorder.
But this might not always be inevitable, Rosenbaum believed. Recent discoveries about disordered systems suggested that certain materials, under certain circumstances, might counteract the laws of entropy and come together rather than fall apart. Was it possible that matter could go in the opposite direction, from disorder to greater order?
For ten years Rosenbaum and his students at the James Franck Institute had been asking that question of a small chunk of lithium holmium fluoride salt. Inside Rosenbaum’s refrigerator lay a perfect chip of rose-coloured crystal, no bigger than the head of a pencil, wrapped in two sets of copper coils. Over the years, after many experiments with spin glasses, Rosenbaum had grown very fond of these dazzling little specimens, one of the most naturally magnetic substances on earth. This characteristic presented the perfect situation in which to study disorder, but only after he had altered the crystal beyond recognition into a disordered substance.
He had first instructed the laboratory that grew the crystals to combine the holmium with fluorine and lithium, the first metal on the periodic table. The resulting lithium holmium fluoride salt was compliant and predictable – a highly ordered substance whose atoms behaved like a sea of microscopic compasses all pointing north. Rosenbaum then had wreaked havoc on the original salt compound, instructing the lab to rip out a number of the atoms of holmium, bit by bit, and replace them with yttrium, a silvery metal without such natural magnetic attraction, until he was left with a strange hybrid of a compound: a salt called lithium holmium yttrium tetrafluoride.
By virtually eliminating the magnetic properties of the compound, Rosenbaum eventually had created spin-glass anarchy – the atoms of this Frankenstein monstrosity pointing any way they liked. Being able to manipulate the essential property of elements like holmium by creating weird new compounds so cavalierly was a little like having ultimate control over matter itself. With these new spin-glass compounds, Rosenbaum could virtually change the properties of the compound at will; he could make the atoms orientate in a particular direction, or freeze them in some random pattern.
Nevertheless, his omnipotence had a limit. Rosenbaum’s holmium compounds behaved themselves in some regards, but not in others. One thing he could not do was to get them to obey the laws of temperature. No matter how cold Rosenbaum made his refrigerator, the atoms inside them resisted any sort of ordered orientation, like an army refusing to march in step. If Rosenbaum was playing God with his spin glasses, the crystal was Adam, stubbornly refusing to obey His most fundamental law.
Sharing Rosenbaum’s curiosity about the strange property of the crystal compound was a young student called Sayantani Ghosh, one of his star PhD candidates. Sai, as her friends called her, a native of India, had graduated with a first-class honours degree from Cambridge, after which she had chosen Tom’s lab for her doctoral programme in 1999. Almost immediately, she had distinguished herself by winning the Gregor Wentzel Prize, given each year by the University of Chicago’s physics department to the best first-year graduate student teaching assistant. The slight 23-year-old, who at first glance appeared abashed, hiding behind her copious dark hair, had soon impressed her peers and teachers alike with her bold authority, a rarity among science students, and her ability to translate complex ideas to the level an undergraduate could comprehend. Sai shared the distinction of winning the coveted prize with only one other woman since its inception 25 years before.
According to the laws of classical physics, applying a magnetic field will disrupt the magnetic alignment of a substance’s atoms. The degree to which this happens is the salt’s ‘magnetic susceptibility’. The usual pattern with a disordered substance is that it will respond to the magnetic field for a time and then plateau and tail off, as the temperature drops or the magnetic field reaches a point of magnetic saturation. The atoms will no longer be able to flip in the same direction as that of the magnetic field and so will begin to slow down.
In Sai’s first experiments, the atoms in the lithium holmium yttrium salt, as predicted, grew wildly excited with the application of the magnetic field. But then, as Sai increased the field, something strange began to happen. The more she turned up the frequency, the faster the atoms continued to flip over. What is more, all the atoms, which had been in a state of disarray, began pointing in the same direction and operating as a collective whole. Then, small clusters of about 260 atoms aligned, forming ‘oscillators’, spinning collectively in one direction or another. No matter how strong the magnetic field that Sai applied, the atoms remained stubbornly aligned with each other, acting in concert. This self-organization persisted for 10 seconds.
At first, Sai and Rosenbaum thought these effects might have something to do with the strange effects of the remaining atoms of holmium, known to be one of the very few substances in the world with such long-range internal forces that in some quarters it was described and worked out mathematically as something existing in another dimension.2 (#ulink_b7c1cd3e-8018-5a30-91c6-eff3096e526b) Although they didn’t understand the phenomenon they had observed, they wrote up their results, which were published in the journal Science in 2002.3 (#ulink_63cede17-084e-52f1-81f8-7e76510eb760)
Rosenbaum decided to carry out another experiment to attempt to isolate the property in the crystal’s essential nature that had enabled it to override such strong outside influences. He left the study’s design to his bright young graduate student, suggesting only that she create a computerized three-dimensional mathematical simulation of the experiment she had intended to carry out. In experiments of this nature on such tiny matter, physicists must rely on a computerized simulation to confirm mathematically the reactions they are witnessing experimentally.
Sai spent months developing the computer code and building her simulation. The plan was to find out a bit more about the salt’s magnetic capability, by applying two systems of disorder to the crystal chip: higher temperatures and a stronger magnetic field.
She prepared the sample by placing it in a little 2.4 x 4.8 cm copper holder, then wrapped two coils around the tiny crystal: one a gradiometer, to measure its magnetic susceptibility and the direction of spin of the individual atoms, and the other to cancel out any random flux affecting the atoms inside.
A connection attached to her PC would enable her to change the voltage, the magnetic field or the temperature, and would record any changes whenever she altered one of the variables by the tiniest degree.
She began lowering the temperature, a fraction of a kelvin (K) at a time, and then began applying a stronger magnetic field. To her amazement, the atoms kept aligning progressively. Then she tried applying heat, and discovered they again aligned. No matter what she did, in every instance the atoms ignored the outside interference. Although she and Tom had flushed out most of the compound’s magnetic component, of its own volition, as it were, it was turning into a larger and larger magnet.
That’s weird, she thought. Perhaps she should take more data, just to ensure they had encountered nothing strange in the system.
She repeated her experiment over six months until the early spring of 2002, when her computer simulation was finally complete. One evening, she mapped the results of the simulation on a graph, and then she superimposed the results from her actual experiment. It was as though she had drawn a single line. There on the computer screen was a perfect duplicate: the diagonal line formed from the computer simulation lay exactly over the diagonal line created from the results of the experiment itself. What she had witnessed in the little crystal was not an artefact, but something real that she had now reproduced in her computer simulation. She had even mapped out where the atoms should have been on the graph, had they been obeying the usual laws of physics. But there they were in a line: a law completely unto themselves.
She wrote Rosenbaum a guarded email late that evening: ‘I’ve got something interesting to show you in the morning.’ The following day, they examined her graph. There was no other possibility, they both realized; the atoms had been ignoring her and instead were controlled by the activity of their neighbours. No matter whether she blasted the crystal with a strong magnetic field or an increase in temperature, the atoms overrode this outside disturbance.
The only explanation was that the atoms in the sample crystal were internally organizing and behaving like one single giant atom. All the atoms, they realized with some alarm, must be entangled.
One of the strangest aspects of quantum physics is a feature called ‘non-locality’, also poetically referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr discovered that once subatomic particles such as electrons or photons are in contact, they remain cognizant of and influenced by each other instantaneously over any distance forever, despite the absence of the usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force or energy. When entangled, the actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one will always influence the other in the same or the opposite direction, no matter how far they are separated. Erwin Schrödinger, another one of the original architects of quantum theory, believed that the discovery of non-locality represented no less than quantum theory’s defining moment – its central property and premise.
The activity of entangled particles is analogous to a set of twins being separated at birth, but retaining identical interests and a telepathic connection forever. One lives in Colorado, and the other in London. Although they never meet again, both like the colour blue. Both take a job in engineering. Both like to ski; in fact when one falls down and breaks his right leg at Vale, his twin breaks his right leg at precisely that moment, even though he is 4000 miles away, sipping a latte at Starbucks.4 (#ulink_b6bd2568-8017-53c3-bd91-ef9b6f6e4891) Albert Einstein refused to accept non-locality, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spukhafte Fernwirkungen’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’. This type of instantaneous connection would require information travelling faster than the speed of light, he argued through a famous thought experiment, which would violate his own special relativity theory.5 (#ulink_92aaca17-e3dd-5dd1-a497-c96b4ec79438) Since the formulation of Einstein’s theory, the speed of light (299,792,458 metres per second) has been used as the absolute limiting factor on how quickly one thing can affect something else. Things are not supposed to be able to affect other things faster than the time it would take the first thing to travel to the second thing at the speed of light.
Nevertheless, modern physicists, such as Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris, have demonstrated decisively that the speed of light is not an absolute outer boundary in the subatomic world. Aspect’s experiment, which concerned two photons fired off from a single atom, showed that the measurement of one photon instantaneously affected the position of the second photon6 (#ulink_fd9883a1-405a-5421-a7ef-5e145cfce3a9) so that it has the same or opposite spin or position (as IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett once put it, ‘opposite luck’).7 (#ulink_d5968318-8e18-52af-8d81-cedcd754a638) The two photons continued to talk to each other and whatever happened to one was identical to, or the very opposite of, what happened to the other. Today, even the most conservative physicists accept non-locality as a strange feature of subatomic reality.8 (#ulink_72ed4c74-b2bc-59c8-a16a-545576dfaf97)
Most quantum experiments incorporate some test of Bell’s Inequality. This famous experiment in quantum physics was carried out by John Bell, an Irish physicist who developed a practical means to test how quantum particles really behaved.9 (#ulink_ba343954-7fa2-5063-ab44-6d4e79b4afbe) This simple test required that you get two quantum particles that had once been in contact, separate them and then take measurements of the two. It is analogous to a couple named Daphne and Ted who have once been together but are now separated. Daphne can choose one of two possible directions to go in and so can Ted. According to our commonsense view of reality, Daphne’s choice should be utterly independent of Ted’s.
When Bell carried out his experiment, the expectation was that one of the measurements would be larger than the other – a demonstration of ‘inequality’. However, a comparison of the measurements showed that both were the same and so his inequality was ‘violated’. Some invisible wire appeared to be connecting these quantum particles across space, to make them follow each other. Ever since, physicists have understood that when a violation of Bell’s Inequality occurs, it means that two things are entangled.
Bell’s Inequality has enormous implications for our understanding of the universe. By accepting non-locality as a natural facet of nature we are acknowledging that two of the bedrocks on which our world view rests are wrong: that influence only occurs over time and distance, and that particles like Daphne and Ted, and indeed the things that are made up of particles, only exist independently of each other.
Although modern physicists now accept non-locality as a given feature of the quantum world, they console themselves by maintaining that this strange, counter-intuitive property of the subatomic universe does not apply to anything bigger than a photon or electron. Once things got to the level of atoms and molecules, which in the world of physics is considered ‘macroscopic’, or large, the universe started behaving itself again, according to predictable, measurable, Newtonian laws.
With one tiny thumbnail’s worth of crystal, Rosenbaum and his graduate student demolished that delineation. They had demonstrated that big things like atoms were non-locally connected, even in matter so large you could hold it in your hand. Never before had quantum non-locality been demonstrated on such a scale. Although the specimen had been only a tiny chip of salt, to the subatomic particle, it was a palatial country mansion, housing a billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10
) atoms. Rosenbaum, ordinarily loathe to speculate about what he could not yet explain, realized that they had uncovered something extraordinary about the nature of the universe. And I realized they had discovered a mechanism for intention: they had demonstrated that atoms, the essential constituents of matter, could be affected by non-local influence. Large things like crystals were not playing by the grand rules of the game, but by the anarchic rules of the quantum world, maintaining invisible connections without obvious cause.
In 2002, after Sai wrote up their findings, Rosenbaum polished up the wording and sent off their paper to Nature, a journal notorious for conservatism and exacting peer review. After four months of responding to the suggestions of reviewers, Ghosh finally got her paper published in the world’s premier scientific journal, a laudatory feat for a 26-year-old graduate student.10 (#ulink_af5d1b0e-c858-5f3b-93a4-ea58e78f20cb)
One of the reviewers, Vlatko Vedral, noted the experiment with a mix of interest and frustration.11 (#ulink_04bf5132-d8af-5b0c-9a2c-442d3a65be09) A Yugoslav who had studied at Imperial College, London, during his country’s civil war and subsequent collapse, Vedral had distinguished himself in his adopted country and been chosen to head up quantum information science at the University of Leeds. Vedral, who was tall and leonine, was part of a small group in Vienna working on frontier quantum physics, including entanglement.
Vedral first theoretically predicted the effect that Ghosh and Rosenbaum eventually found three years later. He had submitted the paper to Nature in 2001, but the journal, which preferred experiment to theory, had rejected it. Eventually, Vedral managed to publish his paper in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics journal.12 (#ulink_d7c30323-3db8-5dd5-b862-fe023f6b6e40) After Nature decided to publish Ghosh’s study, its editors threw him a conciliatory bone. They allowed him to be a reviewer on the paper, and then offered him a place in the same issue to write an opinion piece on the findings.
In the article, Vedral allowed himself some speculation. Quantum physics is accepted as the most accurate means of describing how atoms combine to form molecules, he wrote, and since molecular relationship is the basis of all chemistry, and chemistry is the basis of biology, the magic of entanglement could well be the key to life itself.13 (#ulink_78c34689-f5a3-54b3-95bf-c840d76aee6c)
Vedral and a number of others in his circle did not believe that this effect was unique to holmium. The central problem in uncovering entanglement is the primitive state of our technology; isolating and observing this effect is only possible at the moment by slowing atoms down so much in such cold conditions that they are hardly moving. Nevertheless, a number of physicists had observed entanglement in matter at 200 K, or –73°C – a temperature that can be found on Earth in some of its very coldest places.
Other researchers have proved mathematically that everywhere, even inside of our own bodies, atoms and molecules are engaged in an instantaneous and ceaseless passing back and forth of information. Thomas Durt of Vrije University in Brussels demonstrated through elegant mathematical formulations that almost all quantum interactions produce entanglement, no matter what the internal or surrounding conditions. Even photons, the tiniest particles of light emanating from stars, are entangled with every atom they meet on their way to earth.14 (#ulink_1c2335b5-a8d0-555a-900d-6602a7d44c59) Entanglement at normal temperatures appears to be a natural condition of the universe, even in our bodies. Every interaction between every electron inside of us creates entanglement. According to Benni Reznik, a theoretical physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, even the empty space around us is heaving with entangled particles.15 (#ulink_e8b2912c-438a-5eb2-95b6-f56c4e404a8a)
The English mathematician Paul Dirac, an architect of quantum field theory, first postulated that there is no such thing as nothingness, or empty space. Even if you tipped all matter and energy out of the universe and examined all the ‘empty’ space between the stars you would discover a netherworld world teeming with subatomic activity.
In the world of classical physics, a field is a region of influence, in which two or more points are connected by a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. However, in the world of the quantum particle, fields are created by exchanges of energy. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one reason that quantum particles are ultimately unknowable is because their energy is always being redistributed in a dynamic pattern. Although often rendered as tiny billiard balls, subatomic particles more closely resemble little packets of vibrating waves, passing energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball. All elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy through what are considered temporary or ‘virtual’ quantum particles. These are believed to appear out of nowhere, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant, causing random fluctuations of energy without any apparent cause. Virtual particles, or negative energy states, do not take physical form, so we cannot actually observe them. Even ‘real’ particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy, which briefly emerge and disappear back into the underlying energy field.
These back-and-forth passes, which rise to an extraordinarily large ground state of energy, are known collectively as the Zero Point Field. The field is called ‘zero point’ because even at temperatures of absolute zero, when all matter theoretically should stop moving, these tiny fluctuations are still detectable. Even at the coldest place in the universe, subatomic matter never comes to rest, but carries on this little energy tango.16 (#ulink_2e65f325-f353-500e-9781-25fe574d0038)
The energy generated by every one of these exchanges between particles is unimaginably tiny – about half a photon’s worth. However, if all exchanges between all subatomic particles in the universe were to be added up, it would produce an inexhaustible supply of energy of unfathomable proportions, exceeding all energy in matter by a factor of 10
, or 1 followed by 40 zeros.17 (#ulink_98888f59-d5eb-5020-9f40-1fe7db61b957) Richard Feynman himself once remarked that the energy in a cubic metre of space was enough to boil all the oceans of the world.18 (#ulink_eb4ba042-0424-5d28-b688-02a6d2a60eef)
After the discoveries of Heisenberg about Zero Point energy, most conventional physicists have subtracted the figures symbolizing Zero Point energy from their equations. They assumed that, because the Zero Point Field was ever present in matter, it did not change anything and so could be safely ‘renormalized’ away. However, in 1973, when trying to work out an alternative to fossil fuel during the petrol crisis, American physicist Hal Puthoff, inspired by the Russian Andrei Sakharov, began trying to figure out how to harness the teeming energy of empty space for transport on earth and to distant galaxies. Puthoff spent more than 30 years examining the Zero Point Field. With some colleagues, he had proved that this constant energy exchange of all subatomic matter with the Zero Point Field accounts for the stability of the hydrogen atom, and, by implication, the stability of all matter.19 (#ulink_0978ccc0-8884-543e-b2e1-0759a8912e56) Remove the Zero Point Field and all matter would collapse in on itself. He also demonstrated that Zero Point energy is responsible for two basic properties of mass: inertia and gravity.20 (#ulink_969e900f-07e4-5028-bcd0-f57bc8591b71) Puthoff also worked on a multimillion-dollar project funded by Lockheed Martin and a variety of American universities, to develop Zero Point energy for space travel – a programme that finally went public in 2006.
Many strange properties of the quantum world, like uncertainty or entanglement, could be explained if you factored in the constant interaction of all quantum particles with the Zero Point Field. To Puthoff, science’s understanding of the nature of entanglement was analogous to two sticks stuck in the sand at the edge of the ocean, about to be hit by a huge wave. If they both were knocked over, and you did not know about the wave, you would think that one stick was affecting the other and call it a non-local effect. The constant interaction of quantum particles with the Zero Point Field might be the underlying mechanism for non-local effects between particles, allowing one particle to be in touch with every other particle at any moment.21 (#ulink_eeb75f63-4361-520a-b54e-a2897da8795a)
Benni Reznik’s work in Israel with the Zero Point Field and entanglement began mathematically with a central question: what would happen to a hypothetical pair of probes interacting with the Zero Point Field? According to his calculations, once they began interacting with the Zero Point Field, the probes would begin talking to each other and ultimately become entangled.22 (#ulink_b9a6be70-2230-5302-8ef3-5b915a69874d)
If all matter in the universe were interacting with the Zero Point Field, it meant, quite simply, that all matter was interconnected and potentially entangled throughout the cosmos through quantum waves.23 (#ulink_0a9b1e24-98c0-538d-8a6d-2929b30d8b53) And if we and all of empty space are a mass of entanglement, we must be establishing invisible connections with things at a distance to ourselves. Acknowledging the existence of the Zero Point Field and entanglement offers a ready mechanism for why signals being generated by the power of thought can be picked up by someone else many miles away.
* * * Sai Ghosh had proved that non-locality existed in the large building blocks of matter and the other scientists proved that all matter in the universe was, in a sense, a satellite of a large central energy field. But how could matter be affected by this connection? The central assumption of all of classical physics is that large material things in the universe are set pieces, a fait accompli of manufacture. How can they possibly be changed?
Vedral had an opportunity to examine this question when he was invited to work with the renowned quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger. Zeilinger’s Institute for Experimental Physics lab at the University of Vienna was at the very frontier of some of the most exotic research into the nature of quantum properties. Zeilinger himself was profoundly dissatisfied with the current scientific explanation of nature, and he had passed on that dissatisfaction and the quest to resolve it to his students.
In a flamboyant gesture, Zeilinger and his team had entangled a pair of photons from beneath the River Danube. They had set up a quantum channel via a glass fibre and run it across the river bed of the Danube. In his lab, Zeilinger liked to refer to individual photons as Alice and Bob, and sometimes, if he needed a third photon, Carol or Charlie. Alice and Bob, separated by 600 metres of river and nowhere in sight of each other, maintained a non-local connection.24 (#ulink_69fbf090-2c85-5c8c-a6f6-7beb96ddd76c)
Zeilinger was particularly interested in superposition, and the implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation – that subatomic particles exist only in a state of potential. Could objects, and not simply the subatomic particles that compose them, he wondered, exist in this hall-of-mirrors state? To test this question, Zeilinger employed a piece of equipment called a Talbot Lau interferometer, developed by some colleagues at MIT, using a variation on the famous double-slit experiment of Thomas Young, a British physicist of the nineteenth century. In Young’s experiment, a beam of pure light is sent through a single hole, or slit, in a piece of cardboard, then passes through a second screen with two holes before finally arriving at a third, blank screen.
When two waves are in phase (that is, peaking and troughing at the same time), and bump into each other – technically called ‘interference’ – the combined intensity of the waves is greater than each individual amplitude. The signal gets stronger. This amounts to an imprinting or exchange of information, called ‘constructive interference’. If one is peaking when the other troughs, they tend to cancel each other out – called ‘destructive interference’. With constructive interference, when all the waves are wiggling in synch, the light will get brighter; destructive interference will cancel out the light and result in complete darkness.
In the experiment, the light passing through the two holes forms a zebra pattern of alternating dark and light bands on the final blank screen. If light were simply a series of particles, two of the brightest patches would appear directly behind the two holes of the second screen. However, the brightest portion of the pattern is halfway between the two holes, caused by the combined amplitude of those waves that most interfere with each other. From this pattern, Young was the first to realize that light beaming through the two holes spreads out in overlapping waves.
A modern variation of the experiment fires off single photons through the double slit. These single photons also produce zebra patterns on the screen, demonstrating that even single units of light travel as a smeared-out wave with a large sphere of influence.
Twentieth-century physicists went on to use Young’s experiment with other individual quantum particles, and held it up as proof that quantum physics had Through-the-Looking-Glass properties: quantum entities acted wavelike and travelled though both slits at once. Fire a stream of electrons at the triple screens, and you end up with the interference patterns of alternating light and dark patches, just as you do with a beam of light. Since you need at least two waves to create such interference patterns, the implication of the experiment is that the photon is somehow mysteriously able to travel through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself when it reunites.
The double-slit experiment encapsulates the central mystery of quantum physics – the idea that a subatomic particle is not a single seat but the entire stadium. It also demonstrates the principle that electrons, which exist in a hermetic quantum state, are ultimately unknowable. You could not identify something about a quantum entity without stopping the particle in its tracks, at which point it would collapse to a single point.
In Zeilinger’s adaptation of the slit experiment, using molecules instead of subatomic particles, the interferometer contained an array of slits in the first screen, and a grating of identical parallel slits in the second one, whose purpose was to diffract (or deflect) the molecules passing by. The third grating, turned perpendicular to the beam of molecules, acted as a scanning ‘mask’, with the ability to calculate the size of the waves of any of the molecules passing through, by means of a highly sensitive laser detector to locate the positions of the molecules and their interference patterns.
For the initial experiment, Zeilinger and his team carefully chose a batch of fullerene molecules, or ‘buckyballs’ made of 60 carbon atoms. At one nanometre apiece, these are the behemoths of the molecular world. They selected fullerene not only for its size but also for its neat arrangement, with a shape like a tiny symmetrical football.
It was a delicate operation. Zeilinger’s group had to work with just the right temperature; heating the molecules just a hair too much would cause them to disintegrate. Zeilinger heated the fullerenes to 900 K so they would create an intense molecular beam, then fired them through the first screen; they then passed through the second screen before making a pattern on the final screen. The results were unequivocal. Each molecule displayed the ability to create interference patterns with itself. Some of the largest units of physical matter had not ‘localized’ into their final state. Like a subatomic particle, these giant molecules had not yet gelled into anything real.
The Vienna team scouted out some other molecules that were double the size and oddly shaped to see if geometrically asymmetric molecules also demonstrated the same magical properties. They settled on gigantic fluorinated American football-shaped molecules of 70 carbon atoms and pancake-shaped tetraphenylporphyrin, a derivative of the biodye present in chlorophyll. At more than 100 atoms apiece, both of these entities are among the largest molecules on the planet. Again, each one created an interference pattern with itself.
Zeilinger’s group repeatedly demonstrated that the molecules could be two places at once, which meant that they remained in a state of superposition even at this large scale.25 (#ulink_2b25ebdd-285f-5d00-af42-24c223527880) They had proved the unthinkable: the largest components of physical matter and living things exist in a malleable state.26 (#ulink_5142b262-3caa-517e-92b2-406237628a7c)
Sai Ghosh didn’t often think about the implications of her discovery. She was content with the knowledge that her experiment had made a very nice paper, and might help along her career as an assistant professor involved in research into miniaturization, the direction she believed quantum mechanics was heading. Occasionally, she allowed herself to speculate that her crystal might have proved something important about the nature of the universe. But she was only a postgraduate student. What did she, after all, really know about how the world worked?
But to me, Ghosh’s research and Zeilinger’s work on the double-slit experiment represent two defining moments in modern physics. Ghosh’s experiments show that an invisible connection exists between the fundamental elements of matter, which is often so strong that it can override classical methods of influence, such as heat or a push. Zeilinger’s work demonstrated something even more astonishing. Large matter was neither something solid and stable nor something that necessarily behaved according to Newtonian rules. Molecules needed some other influence to settle them into a completed state of being.
Theirs were the first evidence that the peculiar properties of quantum physics do not simply occur at the quantum level with subatomic particles, but also in the world of visible matter. Molecules also exist in a state of pure potential, not a final actuality. Under certain circumstances, they escape Newtonian rules of force and display quantum non-local effects. The fact that something as large as a molecule can become entangled suggests that there are not two rule books – the physics of the large and the physics of the small – but only a single rule book for all of life.
These two experiments also hold the key to a science of intention – how thoughts are able to affect finished, solid matter. They suggest that the observer effect occurs not simply in the world of the quantum particle but also in the world of the everyday. Things no longer should be seen to exist in and of themselves but, like a quantum particle, only in relationship. Co-creation and influence may be a basic, inherent property of life. Our observation of every component in our world may help to determine its final state, which suggests that we are likely to be influencing every large thing we see around us. When we enter a crowded room, when we engage with our partners and our children, when we gaze up at the sky, we may be creating and even influencing at every moment. We can’t yet demonstrate this at normal temperatures; our equipment is still too crude. But we already have some preliminary proof: the physical world – matter itself – appears to be malleable, susceptible to influence from the outside.
Notes - Chapter 1: Mutable Matter
1 (#ulink_4487a0d6-0538-5562-a14a-3061b65b5ec8). All personal information about Tom Rosenbaum and Sai Ghosh and their studies have been culled from multiple interviews conducted in February and March 2005.
2 (#ulink_8e3c335b-9ca5-5483-be8e-761c78df095a). This was the solution posed by Giorgio Parisi at Rome in 1979.
3 (#ulink_8e3c335b-9ca5-5483-be8e-761c78df095a). S. Ghosh et al., ‘Coherent spin oscillations in a disordered magnet’, Science, 2002; 296: 2195–8.
4 (#ulink_6cd3200c-ca17-5dd0-85e6-f7e8bdab1636). Once again, I am indebted to Danah Zohar for her easy-to-digest description of quantum non-locality, which appears in D. Zohar, The Quantum Self, London: Bloomsbury, 1991: 19–20.
5 (#ulink_6cd3200c-ca17-5dd0-85e6-f7e8bdab1636). A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, ‘Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?’ Physical Review, 1935; 47: 777–80.
6 (#ulink_a90ceed8-891a-5122-8d0a-26fd4ec54c0b). A. Aspect et al., ‘Experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities using time-varying analyzers’, Physical Review Letters, 1982; 49: 1804–7; A. Aspect, ‘Bell’s inequality test: more ideal than ever’, Nature, 1999; 398: 189–90.
7 (#ulink_a90ceed8-891a-5122-8d0a-26fd4ec54c0b). Science Fact: Scientists achieve ‘Star Trek’-like feat – The Associated Press, December 10, 1997, posted on CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9712/10/beam. me. up. ap.
8 (#ulink_a90ceed8-891a-5122-8d0a-26fd4ec54c0b). Non-locality was considered to be proven by Aspect et al.’ s experiments in Paris in 1982.
9 (#ulink_7c963393-c24f-5cd1-b749-52b546399afc). J. S. Bell, ‘On the Einstein-Poldolsky-Rosen paradox’, Physics, 1964; 1: 195–200.
10 (#ulink_73730227-46cc-5b70-af4f-b331fdda60e0). S. Ghosh et al., ‘Entangled quantum state of magnetic dipoles’, Nature, 2003; 435: 48–51.
11 (#ulink_e0807c3d-9cfd-58d1-bfff-b9c8d601c1ca). Details of Vedral’s views and experiments the result of multiple interviews, February, October and December 2005.
12 (#ulink_ac7abaff-7f50-5850-9481-0b454258451e). C. Arnesen et al., ‘Thermal and magnetic entanglement in the 1D Heisenberg Model’, Physical Review Letters, 2001; 87: 017901.
13 (#ulink_4baddbd2-570d-5ed6-84f8-f101cec925e8). V. Vedral, ‘Entanglement hits the big time’, Nature, 2003; 425: 28–9.
14 (#ulink_499d8c9b-0ca6-5226-8c86-3f8d638dbe53). T. Durt, interview with author, April 26, 2005.
15 (#ulink_499d8c9b-0ca6-5226-8c86-3f8d638dbe53). B. Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, Foundations of Physics, 2003; 33: 167–76; Michael Brooks, ‘Entanglement: The weirdest link’, New Scientist, 2004; 181 (2440): 32.
16 (#ulink_0c476474-0782-5cce-9182-c4b720814a28). John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000: 216.
17 (#ulink_ba778b76-a3d3-5f6f-8852-21b3e2ce598b). Erwin Laszlo, The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdiscipinary Unified Theory, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1995: 28.
18 (#ulink_ba778b76-a3d3-5f6f-8852-21b3e2ce598b). A. C. Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’ Ad Astra, May–June 1996; 13–15.
19 (#ulink_99ca8245-eebe-560b-9581-02d428fcc832). Harold Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation-determined state’, Physical Review D, 1987; 35: 3266.
20 (#ulink_99ca8245-eebe-560b-9581-02d428fcc832). B. Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force’, Physical Review A, 1994; 49 (2): 678–94; Bernhard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Physics of the zero-point field: implications for inertia, gravitation and mass’, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1997; 20: 99–114.
21 (#ulink_2770154f-4a48-5437-8769-ff7142b8d015). Various interviews with Hal Puthoff, 1999–2000.
22 (#ulink_33639208-0140-5a87-a0bb-eacd2cb454b2). Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, op. cit.
23 (#ulink_40b1d61c-2613-5057-888d-c138a3749031). McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 35–6.
24 (#ulink_05763be0-d284-5918-8903-435c88d395a5). J. Resch et al., ‘Distributing entanglement and single photons through an intra-city, free-space quantum channel’, Optics Express, 2005; 13 (1): 202–9; R. Ursin et al., ‘Quantum teleportation across the Danube’, Nature, 2004; 430: 849.
25 (#ulink_e0845148-d7c5-59be-9ea7-21923616db77). M. Arndt et al., ‘Wave–particle duality of C60 molecules’, Nature, 1999; 401: 680–2; doi: 10.1038/44348.
26 (#ulink_e0845148-d7c5-59be-9ea7-21923616db77). A. Zeilinger, ‘Probing the limits of the quantum world’, Physics World, March 2005 (online journal: http://www.physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/3/5/1).
CHAPTER TWO (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
The Human Antenna (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
IN 1951, AT THE AGE OF SEVEN, Gary Schwartz made a remarkable discovery. He had been trying to get a good picture on the family’s television set. The recently acquired black and white Magnavox set encased behind the doors of its boxed walnut console fascinated him, not because of the people in the moving pictures so much as the means by which they arrived in his living room in the first place. The mechanisms of the relatively new invention remained a mystery, even to most adults. Television, like any other electrical gadget, was something the precocious child longed to take apart and understand. This passion had already found expression with the worn-out radios given to him by his grandfather. Ignatz Schwartz sold replacement tubes for televisions and radios in his drug store in Great Neck, Long Island, and those that were beyond repair were handed over to his grandson to disassemble. In a corner of Gary’s bedroom lay a mass of experimental debris – tubes, resistors and the carcasses of radios heaped on the cosmetic display racks he had borrowed from his grandfather – the first signs of what would become a lifelong fascination with electronics.
Gary knew that the way you twisted the rabbit-ear antenna on top of the television would determine the clarity of the picture. His father had explained that television sets were powered by something invisible, similar to radio waves, that flew through the air and were somehow translated into an image. Gary had even carried out some rudimentary experiments. When you stood somewhere between the antenna and the television, you could make the picture go away. When you touched the antenna in certain ways, you made the picture clearer.
One day, on a whim, Gary unscrewed the antenna and placed his finger on the screw where the cable had been. What had been a mass of squiggles and static noise on the screen suddenly coalesced into a perfect image. Even at that young age, he had understood that he had witnessed something extraordinary about human beings: his body was acting like a television antenna, a receiver of this invisible information. He tried the same experiment with a radio – substituting his finger for the antenna, and the same thing happened. Something in the makeup of a person was not unlike the rabbit ears that helped produce his television image. He too was a receiver of invisible information, with the ability to pick up signals transmitted across time and space.
Until he was 15, however, he could not visualize what these signals were made of. He had learned to play the electric guitar and had often wondered what unseen influences allowed the instrument to create different sounds. He could play the same note, middle C, and yet produce more of a treble or bass sound, depending on which way he turned the knob. How was it possible that a single note could sound so different? For a science project, he created multiple-track recordings of his music and then located a company in upstate New York that had equipment designed to analyse the frequency of sound. When he fed his recordings into the equipment, it quickly deconstructed the notes down to their essence. Each note registered as a batch of squiggles across the screen of the cathode-ray tube in front of him – a complex mix of hundreds of frequencies representing a blend of overtones that would subtly change when he turned the knob to treble or bass. He knew that these frequencies were waves, represented on the monitor as a sideways S, or sine curve, like a skipping rope held at both ends and wriggled, and that they had periodic oscillations, or fluctuations, similar to the waves on Long Island Sound. Every time he spoke, he knew he generated similar frequencies through his voice. He remembered his early television experiments and wondered whether a field of energy pulsated inside him and shared a kinship with sound waves.1 (#ulink_9c324fa0-46f0-50a5-873d-b1840eadfa95)
Gary’s childhood experiments may have been rudimentary, but he had already stumbled across the central mechanism of intention. Something in the quality of our thoughts was a constant transmission, not unlike a television station.
As an adult, Schwartz, still a bustling dynamo of enthusiasms, found an outlet in psychophysiology, then a fledgling study of the effect of the mind on the body. By the time he had accepted a post at the University of Arizona, which was known for encouraging freedom of research among its faculty, he had grown fascinated by biofeedback and the ways in which the mind could control blood pressure and a variety of illnesses – and the powerful physical effect of different types of thoughts.2 (#ulink_f6d83b6e-9b63-5de5-a42c-71997804b76a)
One weekend in 1994, at a conference on the relationship between love and energy, he sat in on a lecture by physicist Elmer Green, one of the pioneers of biofeedback. Green, like Schwartz, had grown interested in the energy being transmitted by the mind. To examine this more closely, he had decided to study remote healers and to determine whether they sent out more electrical energy than usual while in the process of healing.
Green reported in his lecture that he had built a room whose four walls and ceiling were entirely made of copper, and were attached to microvolt electroencephalogram (EEG) amplifiers – the kind used to measure the electrical activity in the brain. Ordinarily, an EEG amplifier is attached to a cap with imbedded electrodes, each of which records separate electrical discharges from different places in the brain. The cap is placed on a person’s head, and the electrical activity picked up is displayed on the amplifier. EEG amplifiers are extraordinarily sensitive, capable of picking up the most minute of effects – even one-millionth of a volt of electricity.
In remote healing, Green suspected that the signal produced was electrical and emanated from the healer’s hands. The copper wall acted like a giant antenna, magnifying the ability to detect the electricity from the healers and enabling Green to capture it from five directions.
He discovered that, whenever a healer sent healing, the EEG amplifier often recorded it as a huge surge of electrostatic charge, the same kind of the build up and discharge of electrons that occurs after you shuffle your feet along a new carpet and then touch a metal doorknob.3 (#ulink_17145a2b-5ab5-5475-b4e2-33ad32f65f8a)
In the early days of the copper wall experiment, Green had been faced with an enormous problem. Whenever a healer so much as wriggled a finger, patterns got recorded on an EEG amplifier. Green had had to work out a means of separating out the true effects of healing from this electrostatic noise. The only way to do so, as he saw it, was to have his healers remain perfectly still while they were sending out healing energy.
Schwartz listened to the talk with growing fascination. Green was discarding what might be the most interesting part of the data, he thought. One man’s noise was another man’s signal. Does movement, even the physiology of your breathing, create an electromagnetic signal big enough to be picked up on a copper wall? Could it be that human beings were not only receivers of signals but also transmitters?
It made perfect sense that we transmitted energy. A great deal of evidence had already proved that all living tissue has an electric charge. Placing this charge in three-dimensional space caused an electromagnetic field that travelled at the speed of light. The mechanisms for the transmission of energy were clear, but what was unclear was the degree to which we sent out electromagnetic fields just by simple movements and whether our energy was being picked up by other living things.
Schwartz was itching to test this out for himself. After the conference, he contacted Green for advice about how to build his own copper wall. He rushed to Home Depot, which did not stock copper shielding but did have aluminium shielding, which could also act as a rudimentary antenna. He purchased some two by fours, placed them on glass bricks so that they would be isolated from the ground, and used them to assemble a ‘wall’. After he had attached the wall to an EEG amplifier, he began playing around with the effects of his hand, waving it back and forth above the box. As he suspected, the amplifier tracked the movement. His hand movements were generating signals.4 (#ulink_02f39480-0284-5cd8-9a23-4f8c95e3b043)
Schwartz began demonstrating these effects in front of his students in his faculty office, making use of a bust of Einstein for dramatic effect. With these experiments, he made use of an EEG cap, with its dozens of electrodes. When not picking up brain signals, the cap will register only noise on the amplifier.
During his experiments, Schwartz placed the EEG cap on his Einstein bust, and turned on just a single electrode channel on the top of the cap. Then he moved his hand over Einstein’s head. As though the great man had suddenly experienced a moment of enlightenment, the amplifier suddenly came alive and produced evidence of an electromagnetic wave. But the signal, Schwartz explained to his students, was not a sudden brain wave emitted from the lifeless statue – only the tracking of the electromagnetic field produced by his arm’s movement. It seemed indisputable: his body must be sending out a signal with every single flutter of his hand.
Schwartz got more creative with his experiments. When he tried the same gesture from three feet away, the signal diminished. When he placed the bust in a Faraday cage, an enclosure of tightly knit copper mesh that screens out electromagnetic fields, all effect disappeared. This strange energy resulting from movement had all the hallmarks of electricity: it decreased with distance, and was blocked by an electromagnetic shield.
At one point, Schwartz asked one of the students to stand with his left hand over Einstein’s head, with his right arm extended towards Schwartz, who was sitting in a chair three feet away. Schwartz moved his arm up and down. To the amazement of the other students, Schwartz’s movement was picked up by the amplifier. The signal had passed through Schwartz’s body and travelled through the student. Schwartz was still generating the signal, but this time, the student had become the antenna, receiving the signal and transmitting it to the amplifier, which acted as another antenna.
Schwartz realized he had hit upon the most important point of all his research. Simple movement generated electrical charge, but, more important, it created a relationship. Every movement we make appears to be felt by the people around us. The implications were staggering. What if he were admonishing a student? What might be the physical effect on the student of wagging his finger while shouting ‘Don’t do that’? The student might feel as if he were getting shot with a wave of energy. Some people might even have more powerful positive or negative charges than others. In Elmer Green’s copper wall experiment, all sorts of equipment malfunctioned in the presence of Roslyn Bruyere, a famous healer.
Schwartz was onto something fundamental about the actual energy that human beings emit. Could the energy of thought have the same effect as the energy of movement outside the thinker’s own body? Did thoughts also create a relationship with the people around us? Every intention towards someone else might have its own physical counterpart, which would be registered by its recipient as a physical effect.
Like Schwartz, I suspected the energy generated by thoughts did not behave in the same way as the energy generated by movement. After all, the signal from movement decreased over distance, much like ordinary electricity. With healing, distance appeared to be irrelevant. The energy of intention, if indeed there were any, would have to be more fundamental than that of ordinary electromagnetism – and lie somewhere, perhaps, in the realm of quantum physics. How could I test the energetic effects of intention? Healers, who appeared to be sending more energy than normal through their healing, offered an obvious place to start.
Elmer Green demonstrated in his research that an enormous surge of electrostatic energy occurred during healing. When a person is simply standing still, his or her breathing and beating heart will produce electrostatic energy of 10–15 millivolts on the EEG amplifiers; during activities requiring focused attention, such as meditation, the energy will surge up to 3 volts. During healing, however, Green’s healers produced voltage surges up to 190 volts; one produced 15 such pulses, which were 100,000 times higher than normal, with smaller pulses of 1–5 volts appearing on each of the four copper walls. On investigating the source of this energy, Green discovered that the pulses were coming from the healer’s abdomen, called dan tien and considered the central engine of internal energy in the body in Chinese martial arts.5 (#ulink_cc37aafb-c62d-5ce4-a558-55322cc0db0c)
Stanford University physicist William Tiller constructed an ingenious device to measure the energy produced by healers. The equipment discharged a steady stream of gas and recorded the exact number of electrons pulsing out with the discharge. Any increase in voltage would be captured by the pulse counter.
In his experiment, Tiller asked ordinary volunteers to place their hands about six inches from his device and hold a mental intention to increase the count rate. In the majority of more than 1000 such experiments, Tiller discovered that, during the intention, the number of recorded pulses would increase by 50,000 and remain there for 5 minutes. These increases would occur even if a participant was not close to the machine, so long as he or she held an intention. Tiller concluded that directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over remote distance.6 (#ulink_6ce63ad0-652b-5d13-8a53-bbc2e6f404b1)
I found two other studies measuring the actual electrical frequencies emitted by people using intention. One study measured healing energy and the other examined energy generated by a Chinese Qigong master during times that he was emitting external Qi, the Chinese term for energy or the life force.7 (#ulink_f43e6f02-0eb4-5e89-911e-6d4aa2e69181) In both instances, the measurements were identical: frequency levels of 2–30 hertz were being emitted by the healers.
This energy also seemed to change the molecular nature of matter. I discovered a body of scientific evidence examining chemical changes caused by intention. Bernard Grad, an associate professor of biology at McGill University in Montreal, had examined the effect of healing energy on water that was to be used to irrigate plants. After a group of healers had sent healing to samples of water, Grad chemically analysed the water by infrared spectroscopy. He discovered that the water treated by the healers had undergone a fundamental change in the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen in its molecular makeup. The hydrogen bonding between the molecules had lessened in a similar manner to that which occurs in water exposed to magnets.8 (#ulink_8d0dc60b-28f6-5018-9fbc-410d28b9fadb) A number of other scientists confirmed Grad’s findings; Russian research discovered that the hydrogen–oxygen bonds in water molecules undergo distortions in the crystalline microstructure during healing.9 (#ulink_a799274f-426b-5875-8124-b2d901cbf107)
These kinds of changes can occur simply through the act of intention. In one study, experienced meditators sent an intention to affect the molecular structure of water samples they were holding throughout the meditation. When the water was later examined by infrared spectrophotometry, many of its essential qualities, particularly its absorbance – the amount of light absorbed by the water at a particular wavelength – had been significantly altered.10 (#ulink_40d69b62-ac1b-5cca-9797-03f47843b154) When someone holds a focused thought, he may be altering the very molecular structure of the object of his intention.
In his research, Gary Schwartz wondered whether intention only manifested as electrostatic energy. Perhaps magnetic energy also played a role. Magnetic fields naturally had more power, more ‘push–pull’ energy. Magnetism seemed the more powerful and universal energy; the earth itself is profoundly influenced by its own faint pulse of geomagnetic energy. Schwartz remembered a study carried out by William Tiller, in which psychics had been placed inside a variety of devices that block different forms of energy. They had performed better than usual in a Faraday cage, which filters out only electrical energy, but they performed worse when placed in a magnetically shielded room.11 (#ulink_321bd787-2f7a-54b9-9ba1-007c9c51400f)
From these early studies, Schwartz gleaned two important implications: healing may generate an initial surge of electricity, but the real transfer mechanism may be magnetic. Indeed, psychic phenomena and psychokinesis could be differentially influenced, simply through different types of shielding. Electrical signals might interfere, while magnetic signals enhance the process.
To test this latest idea, Schwartz was approached by a colleague of his, Melinda Connor, a post-doctoral fellow in her mid-forties with an interest in healing. The first hurdle was finding an accurate means of picking up magnetic signals. Measuring tiny low-frequency magnetic fields is tricky, requiring the use of expensive and highly sensitive equipment called a SQUID, or superconducting quantum interference device. A SQUID, which can cost up to four million dollars, ordinarily occupies a specially constructed room that has been magnetically shielded in order to eliminate ambient radiating noise.
The best Schwartz and Connor could come up with on their limited budget was a poor man’s SQUID – a small handheld, battery-operated three-axis digital gaussmeter originally designed to measure electromagnetic pollution by picking up extra-low-frequency (ELF) magnetic fields. The gaussmeter was sensitive enough to pick up one-thousandth of a gauss, a very faint pulse of a magnetic field. In Schwartz’s mind, this level of sensitivity was more than adequate to do the job.
It occurred to Connor that the way to measure change in low-frequency magnetic fields was to count the number of changes in the meter reading over time. When simply recording ambient stable magnetic fields, the device will only deviate slightly – by less than one-tenth of a gauss. However, in the presence of an oscillating magnetic field – with periodic changes in frequency – the numbers will keep moving, from, say, 0.6 to 0.7 to 0.8, and back down to 0.6. The greater and more frequent the change, which would be recorded by the number of changes in the dials, the more likely it is that the magnetic field has been affected by a source of directed energy.
Connor and Schwartz gathered together a group of practitioners of Reiki, the healing art developed a century ago in Japan. They took measurements near each hand of all the healers during alternating periods while they were ‘running energy’ and then during times they were at rest, with their eyes closed. Next, the pair assembled a group of ‘master healers’ with a substantial track record of successful, dramatic healings. Again, Connor and Schwartz took magnetic field measurements near each hand, while the master healers were running energy and at rest. Then, they compared the Reiki measurements with measurements they had taken of people who had not been trained in healing.
Once Schwartz and Conner had analysed the data, they discovered that both groups of healers demonstrated significant fluctuations in very low pulsations of a magnetic field, emanating from both hands. A huge increase in oscillations in the magnetic field occurred whenever a healer began to run energy. However, the most profound energy increase surged from their dominant hands. The control group of people who were not trained healers did not demonstrate the same effect.
Then Schwartz compared effects from the Reiki group with those of the master healers and discovered another enormous difference. The master healers averaged close to a third more magnetic-field changes per minute than the Reiki healers.12 (#ulink_113581b1-62ac-5d4f-b724-0a42e76f73ee)
The study results seemed clear. Schwartz and Connor had their proof that directed intention manifests as both electrostatic and magnetic energy. But they also discovered that intention was like playing the piano; you need to learn how to do it, and some people do it better than others.
In considering what this all meant, Gary Schwartz thought of the phrase often used by medical doctors, usually in emergency situations: when you hear hoof beats, don’t think zebras. In other words, when you are trying to diagnose someone with physical symptoms, first rule out all the most likely causes, and only then consider more exotic possibilities. He liked to approach science in the same way and so he questioned his own findings: Could the healers’ increase in magnetic field oscillations during healing simply be the result of certain peripheral biophysical changes? Muscle contractions generate a magnetic field, as do changes in blood flow, the increasing or decreasing dilation of blood vessels, the body’s current volume of liquid or even the flow of electrolytes. Skin, sweat glands, change of temperature, neural induction – all generate magnetic fields. His guess was that healing resulted from a summation of multiple biological processes that are mediated magnetically.
But the possibility that healing might be a magnetic effect did not explain long-distance remote healing. In some instances, healers sent healing from thousands of miles away and the effect did not decay with distance. In one successful study of AIDS patients who improved through remote healing, the 40 healers involved in the study sent the healing to the San Francisco patients from locations all across America.13 (#ulink_adc60340-d882-5831-9cad-009b5e8109a9) Similar to electrical fields, magnetic fields decrease with distance. The magnetic and electrical effects were likely to be some aspect of the process, but not its central one. It was likely to be closer to a quantum field, possibly more akin to light.
Schwartz began to consider the possibility that the mechanism creating intention originated with the tiny elements of light emitted from human beings. In the mid-1970s, a German physicist named Fritz-Albert Popp had stumbled upon the fact that all living things, from the most basic of single-celled plants to the most sophisticated of organisms like human beings, emitted a constant tiny current of photons – tiny particles of light.14 (#ulink_ffdb6cf6-99fc-576f-aa3e-70e93171bb22) He labelled them ‘biophoton emissions’ and believed that he had uncovered the primary communication channel of a living organism – that it used light as a means of signalling to itself and to the outside world.
For more than 30 years, Popp has maintained that this faint radiation, rather than biochemistry, is the true driving force in orchestrating and coordinating all cellular processes in the body. Light waves offered a perfect communication system able to transfer information almost instantaneously across an organism. Having waves, rather than chemicals, as the communication mechanism of a living being also solved the central problem of genetics – how we grow and take final shape from a single cell. It also explains how our bodies manage to carry out tasks with different body parts simultaneously. Popp theorized that this light must be like a master tuning fork setting off certain frequencies that would be followed by other molecules of the body.15 (#ulink_b97266aa-32c0-591d-9e65-83b8c7934750)
A number of biologists, such as the German biophysicist Herbert Fröhlich, had proposed that a type of collective vibration causes proteins and cells to coordinate their activities. Nevertheless, all such theories were ignored until Popp’s discoveries, largely because no equipment was sensitive enough to prove they were right.
With the help of one of his students, Popp constructed the first such machine – a photomultiplier that captured light and counted it, photon by photon. He carried out years of impeccable experimentation that demonstrated that these tiny frequencies were mainly stored and emitted from the DNA of cells. The intensity of the light in organisms was stable, ranging from a few to several hundred photons per second per square centimetre surface of the living thing – until the organism was somehow disturbed or ill, at which point the current went sharply up or down. The signals contained valuable information about the state of the body’s health and the effects of any particular therapy. Cancer victims had fewer photons, for instance. It was almost as though their light were going out.
Initially vilified for his theory, Popp was eventually recognized by the German government and then internationally. Eventually he formed the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB), composed of 15 groups of scientists from international centres all around the world, including prestigious institutions like CERN in Switzerland, Northeastern University in the USA, the Institute of Biophysics Academy of Science in Beijing, China, and Moscow State University in Russia. By the early twenty-first century, the IIB numbered at least 40 distinguished scientists from around the globe.
Could it be that these were the frequencies that mediated healing? Schwartz realized that if he was going to carry out studies of biophoton emissions, first he had to figure out how to view these tiny emissions of light. In his laboratory, Popp developed a computerized mechanism attached to a box in which a living thing, such as a plant, could be placed. The machine could count the photons and chart the amount of light emitted on a graph. But those machines only recorded photons in utter pitch blackness. Up until then, it had been impossible for scientists to witness living things actually glowing in the dark.
As Schwartz mulled over the kind of equipment that would allow him to see very faint light, he thought of state-of-the-art supercooled charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras on telescopes. This exquisitely sensitive equipment, now used to photograph galaxies deep in space, picks up about 70 per cent of any light, no matter how faint. CCD devices were also used for night-vision equipment. If a CCD camera could pick up the light from the most distant of stars, it might also be able to pick up the faint light coming off living things. However, this kind of equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and usually had to be cooled to temperatures only 100 degrees above absolute zero, to eliminate any ambient radiation emitted at room temperature. Cooling the camera down also helped to improve its sensitivity to faint light. Where on earth was he going to get hold of this kind of high-tech equipment?
Kathy Creath, a professor of optical sciences at Schwartz’s university, who shared his fascination with living light and its possible role in healing, had an idea. As it happened, she knew that the department of radiology at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Tucson owned a low-light CCD camera, which they used to measure the light emitted from laboratory rats after being injected with phosphorescent dyes. The Roper Scientific VersArray 1300 B low-noise, high-performance CCD camera was housed in a dark room inside a black box and above a Cryotiger cooling system, which cooled temperatures to –100°C. A computer screen displayed its images. It was just what they were looking for. After Creath approached the director of the NSF project, he generously agreed to allow the two of them access to the camera during its down time.
In their first test, Schwartz and Creath placed a geranium leaf on a black platform. They took fluorescent photographs after exposures of up to five hours. When the computer displayed the final photograph, it was dazzling: a perfect image of the leaf in light, like a shadow in reverse, but in incredible detail, each of its tiniest veins delineated. Surrounding the leaf were little white spots, like a sprinkling of fairy dust – evidence of high-energy cosmic rays. With his next exposure, Schwartz used a software filter to screen out the ambient radiation. The image of the leaf was now perfect.
As they studied this latest photograph on the screen of the computer in front of them, Schwartz and Creath understood that they were making history. It was the first time a scientist had been able to witness images of the light actually emanating from a living thing.16 (#ulink_fc194888-21ac-5fa4-acfc-8e537645d6c9)
Now that he had equipment that captured and recorded light, Schwartz was finally able to test whether healing intention also generated light. Creath got hold of a number of healers, and asked them to place their hands on the platform underneath the camera for 10 minutes. Schwartz’s first crude images showed a rough glow of large pixilations, but they were too out of focus for him to analyse them. Next he tried placing the healers’ hands on a white background (which reflected light) rather than on a black background (which absorbed light). The images were breathtakingly clear: a stream of light flowed out of the healers’ dominant hands, almost as though it were flowing from their fingers. Schwartz now had his answer about the nature of conscious thought: healing intention creates waves of light – and, indeed, among the most organized light waves found in nature.
The theory of relativity was not Einstein’s only great insight. He had had another astonishing realization in 1924, after correspondence with an obscure Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, who had been pondering the then-new idea that light was composed of little vibrating packets called photons. Bose had worked out that, at certain points, photons should be treated as identical particles. At the time nobody believed him – nobody but Einstein, after Bose sent him his calculations.
Einstein liked Bose’s proofs and used his influence to get Bose’s theory published. Einstein also was inspired to explore whether, under certain conditions or certain temperatures, atoms in a gas, which ordinarily vibrated anarchically, might also begin to behave in synchrony, like Bose’s photons. Einstein set to work on his own formula to determine which conditions might create such a phenomenon. When he reviewed his figures, he thought he had made a mistake in his calculations. According to his results, at certain extraordinarily low temperatures, just a few kelvin above absolute zero, something really strange would begin to happen: the atoms, which ordinarily can operate at a number of different speeds, would slow down to identical energy levels. In this state, the atoms would lose their individuality and both look and behave like one giant atom. Nothing in his mathematical armamentarium could tell them apart. If this were true, he realized, he had stumbled upon an entirely new state of matter, with utterly different properties from anything known in the universe.
Einstein published his findings,17 (#ulink_073a4f89-5a81-5ff5-b27b-6f89455a10ad) and lent his name to the phenomenon, called a Bose–Einstein condensate, but he was never convinced that he had been right. Nor were other physicists, until more than 70 years later when, on 5 June 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA, a programme sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder, managed to cool a tiny batch of rubidium atoms down to 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.18 (#ulink_be898f90-8718-5b8c-8c5b-4d7cda8a6cce) It had been quite a feat, requiring trapping the atoms in a web of laser light and then magnetic fields. At a certain point, a batch of some 2000 atoms – measuring about 20 microns, about one-fifth the thickness of a single piece of paper – began behaving differently from the cloud of atoms surrounding them, like one smeared-out single entity. Although the atoms were still part of a gas, they were behaving more like the atoms of a solid.
Four months later, Wolfgang Ketterle from Massachusetts Institute of Technology replicated their experiment, but with a form of sodium, for which he, as well as Cornell and Wieman, won the 2001 Nobel prize.19 (#ulink_6a328d8d-d384-5733-b976-048f08e7189f) Then a few years after that, Ketterle and others like him were able to reproduce the effect with molecules.20 (#ulink_b1fcfe03-5dcb-5290-8942-a555dfa613b6)
Scientists believed that a form of Einstein and Bose’s theory could account for some of the strange properties they had begun to observe in the subatomic world: superfluidity, when certain fluids can flow without losing energy, or even spontaneously work themselves out of their containers; or superconduction, a similar property of electrons in a circuit. In superfluid or superconductor states, liquid or electricity could theoretically flow at the same pace forever.
Ketterle had discovered another amazing property of atoms or molecules in this state. All the atoms were oscillating in perfect harmony, similar to photons in a laser, which behave like one giant photon, vibrating in perfect rhythm. This organization makes for an extraordinary efficiency of energy. Instead of sending a light about 3 metres, the laser emits a wave 300 million times that far.
Scientists were convinced that a Bose–Einstein condensate was a peculiar property of atoms and molecules slowing down so much that they are almost at rest, when exposed to temperatures only a fraction above the coldest temperatures in the universe. But then Fritz-Albert Popp and the scientists working with him made the astonishing discovery that a similar property existed in the weak light emanating from organisms. This was not supposed to happen in the boiling inner world of the living thing. What is more, the biophotons he measured from plants, animals and humans were highly coherent. They acted like a single super-powerful frequency, a phenomenon also referred to as ‘superradiance’.
The German biophysicist Herbert Fröhlich had first described a model in which this type of order could be present and play a central role in biological systems. His model showed that, with complex dynamic systems like human beings, the energy within created all sorts of subtle relationships, so that it is no longer discordant.21 (#ulink_bce34bd7-5b18-507b-823d-cf240d6188ac) Living energy is able to organize to one giant coherent state, with the highest form of quantum order known to nature. When subatomic particles are said to be ‘coherent’, or ‘ordered’, they become highly interlinked by bands of common electromagnetic fields, and resonate like a multitude of tuning forks all attuned to the same frequency. They stop behaving like anarchic individuals and begin operating like one well-rehearsed marching band.
As one scientist put it, coherence is like comparing the photons of a single 60-watt light bulb to the sun. Ordinarily, light is extraordinarily inefficient. The intensity of light from a bulb is only about 1 watt per square centimetre of light – because many of the waves made by the photons destructively interfere with and cancel out each other. The light per square centimetre generated by the sun is about 6000 times stronger. But if you could get all the photons of this one small light bulb to become coherent and resonate in harmony with each other, the energy density of the single light bulb would be thousands to millions of times higher than that of the surface of the sun.22 (#ulink_383cf02a-a32c-5944-9b0b-6a4270b2517a)
After Popp made his discoveries about coherent light in living organisms, other scientists postulated that mental processes also create Bose–Einstein condensates. British physicist Roger Penrose and his partner, American anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff from the University of Arizona, were in the vanguard of frontier scientists who proposed that the microtubules in cells, which create the basic structure of the cells, were ‘light pipes’ through which disordered wave signals were transformed into highly coherent photons and pulsed through the rest of the body.23 (#ulink_0d3a0656-75c0-5146-937a-d5c470b828c7)
Gary Schwartz had witnessed just this coherent photon stream emanating from the hands of healers. After studying the work of scientists like Popp and Hameroff, he finally had his answer about the source of healing: if thoughts are generated as frequencies, healing intention is well-ordered light.
Gary Schwartz’s creative experiments revealed to me something fundamental about the quantum nature of thoughts and intentions. He and his colleagues had uncovered evidence that human beings are both receivers and transmitters of quantum signals. Directed intention appears to manifest as both electrical and magnetic energy and to produce an ordered stream of photons, visible and measurable by sensitive equipment. Perhaps our intentions also operate as highly coherent frequencies, changing the very molecular makeup and bonding of matter. Like any other form of coherence in the subatomic world, one well-directed thought might be like a laser light, illuminating without ever losing its power.
I was reminded of an extraordinary experience Schwartz once had in Vancouver. He had been staying in the penthouse apartment suite of a downtown hotel. He had awakened at 2 a.m., as he often did, and had walked out to the balcony to have a look at the spectacular view of the city to the west, framed by the mountains. He was surprised to see how many hundreds of homes along the peninsula below him still had their lights on. He wished he had a telescope handy to see what some of the people were doing up at this late hour. But of course, if any of them had their own telescope, they would be able to see him standing there in the nude. An odd thought suddenly came to him of his own naked image flying into each window. But maybe the idea was not so fanciful. After all, he was emitting a constant stream of biophotons, all travelling at the speed of light; each photon would have travelled 186,000 miles one second later, and 372,000 miles one second after that.
His light was not unlike the photons of visible light emanating from stars in the sky. Much of the light from distant stars has been travelling for millions of years. Starlight contains a star’s individual history. Even if a star had died long before its light reached earth, its information remains, an indelible footprint in the sky.
He then had a sudden image of himself as a ball of energy fields, a little star, glowing with a steady stream of every photon his body had ever produced for more than 50 years. All the information he had been sending from the time he was a young boy in Long Island, every last thought he had ever had, was still out there, glowing like starlight. Perhaps, I thought, intention was also like a star. Once constructed, a thought radiated out like starlight, affecting everything in its path.
Notes - Chapter 2: The Human Antenna
1 (#ulink_a66c08bb-32fc-52d7-bbe8-95592c3f4ee1). All personal details about Gary Schwartz and his discoveries result from multiple interviews with him and the author, March–June 2006.
2 (#ulink_203d4730-a35d-5341-ba4d-b96a8c49665b). H. Benson et al., ‘Decreased systolic blood pressure through operant conditioning techniques in patients with essential hypertension’, Science, 1971; 173 (3998): 740–2.
3 (#ulink_60d0afd0-3c6e-5dc8-abd2-dd6ae888085b). E. E. Green, ‘Copper wall research psychology and psychophysics: subtle energies and energy medicine: emerging theory and practice’, Proceedings, First Annual Conference, International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), Boulder, Colorado, 21–25 June 1991.
4 (#ulink_d6f244a1-19c3-573a-aa01-b0114916f91e). This research was eventually published as G. Schwartz and L. Russek, ‘Subtle energies – electrostatic body motion registration and the human antenna-receiver effect: a new method for investigating interpersonal dynamical energy system interactions’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1996; 7 (2): 149–84.
5 (#ulink_0c1410ca-7640-52b6-9d49-e1ae2ed7d625). E. E. Green et al., ‘Anomalous electrostatic phenomena in exceptional subjects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1993; 2: 69; W. A. Tiller et al., ‘Towards explaining anomalously large body voltage surges on exceptional subjects, Part I: The electrostatic approximation’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (3): 331.
6 (#ulink_f637f1d4-38b2-5db3-aaa0-9514f8594be3). William A. Tiller, ‘Subtle energies’, Science & Medicine, 1999, 6 (3): 28–33.
7 (#ulink_2ea67581-faaf-5133-8bb3-02b43065a9b5). A. Seto et al., ‘Detection of extraordinary large biomagnetic field strength from the human hand during external qi emission’, Acupuncture and Electrotherapeutics Research International, 1992; 17: 75–94; J. Zimmerman, ‘New technologies detect effects in healing hands’, Brain/Mind Bulletin, 1985; 10 (2): 20–3.
8 (#ulink_1ffa05d4-1621-5b4f-82f4-063166518c18). B. Grad, ‘Dimensions in “Some biological effects of the laying on of hands” and their implications’, in H. A. Otto and J. W. Knight (eds.), Dimension in Wholistic Healing: New Frontiers in the Treatment of the Whole Person, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979: 199–212.
9 (#ulink_1ffa05d4-1621-5b4f-82f4-063166518c18). L. N. Pyatnitsky and V. A. Fonkin, ‘Human consciousness influence on water structure’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (1): 89.
10 (#ulink_e77af084-6312-55cb-9d0e-02f4f547afbb). G. Rein and R. McCraty, ‘Structural changes in water and DNA associated with new physiologically measurable states’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1994; 8 (3): 438–9.
11 (#ulink_ebb50aca-f342-5789-8cf5-7e9cb581713c). W. Tiller would eventually write about the effect of shielding psychics in his book Science and Human Transformation, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 1997: 32.
12 (#ulink_a5afc4b5-c22b-5c46-9ba8-88d5a01fafb0). M. Connor, G. Schwartz et al., ‘Oscillation of amplitude as measured by an extra low frequency magnetic field meter as a biophysical measure of intentionality’. Paper presented at the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, Tucson, Arizona, April 2006.
13 (#ulink_f78e553c-3b56-5d6c-a3f6-1596a08d5ea2). Sicher, Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study’, op. cit.
14 (#ulink_b8f0d0ec-294a-5843-bc98-13afec58176d). See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39, for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
15 (#ulink_67971085-df9f-5097-83f8-d292f0ce03ce). S. Cohen and F.-A. Popp, ‘Biophoton emission of the human body’, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology, 1997; 40: 187–9.
16 (#ulink_126ec998-c2e6-5bc9-913b-f22fceaf0161). K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tell us about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–50.
17 (#ulink_3b0369be-1e51-51aa-9d07-24393d32c68f). S. N. Bose, ‘Planck’s Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese’, Zeitschrift für Physik, 1924; 26: 178–81; A. Einstein, ‘Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases [Quantum theory of ideal monoatomic gases]’, Sitz. Ber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (Berlin), 1925; 23: 3.
18 (#ulink_3b0369be-1e51-51aa-9d07-24393d32c68f). C. E. Wieman and E. A. Cornell, ‘Seventy years later: the creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate in an ultracold gas’, Lorentz Proceedings, 1999; 52: 3–5.
19 (#ulink_76805e33-7af9-5ec9-802b-6a4ac0c1e6ee). K. Davis et al., ‘Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms’, Physical Review Letters, 1995; 75: 3969–73.
20 (#ulink_76805e33-7af9-5ec9-802b-6a4ac0c1e6ee). M. W. Zwierlein et al., ‘Observation of Bose-Einstein condensation of molecules’, Physical Review Letters, 2003; 91: 250401.
21 (#ulink_6a52245b-11f1-5577-b162-57b65f79d4c7). H. Fröhlich, ‘Long range coherence and energy storage in biological systems’, Int. J. Quantum Chem., 1968; II: 641–9.
22 (#ulink_719d581f-28a5-5bc6-ac92-c14bc06a6fea). For this entire example, see Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, op. cit.: 196.
23 (#ulink_2aae0012-6fe5-5217-a9b1-5a24bf65266e). M. Jibu et al., ‘Quantum optical coherence in cytoskeletal microtubules: implications for brain function’, Biosystems, 1994; 32: 195–209; S. R. Hameroff, ‘Cytoplasmic gel states and ordered water: possible roles in biological quantum coherence’, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Advanced Water Sciences Symposium, Dallas, Texas, 1996.
CHAPTER THREE (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
The Two-Way Street (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
CLEVE BACKSTER WAS AMONG THE FIRST to propose that plants are affected by human intention – a notion considered so preposterous that it was ridiculed for 40 years. Backster achieved his notoriety from a series of experiments that purported to demonstrate that living organisms read and respond to a person’s thoughts.
Plant telepathy interested me less than a tangential discovery of his that has been sidelined amid all his adverse publicity: evidence of a constant two-way flow of information between all living things. Every organism, from bacteria to human beings, appears to be in perpetual quantum communication. This relentless conversation offers a ready mechanism by which thoughts can have a physical effect.
This discovery resulted from a silly little diversion in 1966; Backster, at the time a tall, wiry man with a buzz cut and a great deal of childlike enthusiasm, was easily distracted. He often carried on working in his suite of offices when the rest of his staff had gone home and he could finally focus without the constant interruptions of colleagues and the tumultuous daytime activity of Times Square, four storeys below.1 (#ulink_bf1106c0-2327-5b5b-977a-0615cf942fa3)
Backster had made his name as the country’s leading lie-detector expert. During the Second World War, he had been fascinated by the psychology of lying, and the use of hypnosis and ‘truth serum’ interrogation in counter-intelligence, and he had brought these twin fascinations to bear in refining the polygraph test to a high psychological art. He had launched his first programme with the CIA for counter-intelligence several years after the war, and then went on to found the Backster School of Lie Detection, still the world’s leading school teaching polygraph techniques some 50 years after it first opened its doors.
One morning in February, after working all night, Backster was taking a coffee break at 7 a.m. He was about to water the Dracaena and rubber plant in his office. As he filled up his watering can, he wondered if it might be possible to measure the length of time it would take water to travel up the stem of a plant from the roots and reach the leaves, particularly in the Dracaena, a cane plant with an especially long trunk. It occurred to him that he could test this by connecting the Dracaena to one of his polygraph machines; once the water reached the spot between the electrodes, the moisture would contaminate the circuit and be recorded as a drop in resistance.
A lie detector is sensitive to the slightest change in the electrical conductivity of skin, which is caused by increased activity of the sweat glands, which in turn are governed by the sympathetic nervous system. The polygraph galvanic skin response (GSR) portion of the test displays the amount of the skin’s electrical resistance, much as an electrician’s ohmmeter records the electrical resistance of a circuit. A lie detector also monitors changes in blood pressure, respiration, and the strength and rate of the pulse. Low levels of electrical conductivity indicate little stress and a state of calm. Higher electrodermal activity (EDA) readings indicate that the sympathetic nervous system, which is sensitive to stress or certain emotional states, is in overdrive – as would be the case when someone is lying. A polygraph reading can offer evidence of stress to the sympathetic nervous system even before the person being tested is consciously aware of it.
In 1966, the state-of-the-art technology consisted of a set of electrode plates, which were attached to two of a subject’s fingers, and through which a tiny current of electricity was passed. The smallest increases or decreases in electrical resistance were picked up by the plates and recorded on a paper chart, on which a pen traced a continuous, serrated line. When someone lied or in any way experienced a surge of emotion (such as excitement or fear), the size of the zigzag would dramatically increase and the tracing would move to the top of the chart.
Backster sandwiched one of the long, curved leaves of the Dracaena between the two sensor electrodes of a lie detector and encircled it with a rubber band. Once he watered the plant, what he expected to see was an upward trend in the ink tracing on the polygraph recording paper, corresponding to a drop in the leaf ’s electrical resistance as the moisture content increased. But as he poured in the water, the very opposite occurred. The first part of the tracing began heading downward and then displayed a short-term blip, similar to what happens when a person briefly experiences a fear of detection.
At the time Backster thought he was witnessing a human-style reaction, although he would later learn that the waxy insulation between the cells in plants causes an electrical discharge that mimics a human stress reaction on polygraph instruments. He decided that if the plant were indeed displaying an emotional reaction, he would have to come up with some major emotional stimulus to heighten this response.
When a person takes a polygraph test, the best way to determine if he is lying is to ask a direct and pointed question, so that any answer but the truth will cause an immediate, dramatic stress reaction in his sympathetic nervous system: ‘Was it you who fired the two bullets into Joe Smith?’
In order to elicit the equivalent of alarm in a plant, Backster knew he needed somehow to threaten its well-being. He tried immersing one of the plant’s leaves in a cup of coffee, but that did not cause any interesting reaction on the tracing – only a continuation of the downward trend. If this were the tracing of a human being, Backster would have concluded that the person being monitored was tired or bored. It was obvious to him that he needed to pose an immediate and genuine threat: he would get a match and burn the electroded leaf.
At the very moment he had that thought, the recording pen swung to the top of the polygraph chart and nearly jumped off. He had not burned the plant; he had only thought about doing so. According to his polygraph, the plant had perceived the thought as a direct threat and registered extreme alarm. He ran to his secretary’s desk in a neighbouring office for some matches. When he returned, the plant was still registering alarm on the polygraph. He lit a match and flickered it under one of the leaves. The pen continued on its wild, zigzag course. Backster then returned the matches to his secretary’s desk. The tracing calmed down and began to flat-line.
He hadn’t known what to make of it. He had long been drawn to hypnosis and ideas about the power of thought and the nature of consciousness. He had even performed a number of experiments with hypnosis during his work with the Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the CIA, as part of a campaign designed to detect the use of hypnosis techniques in Russian espionage.
But this was something altogether more extraordinary. This plant, it seemed, had read his thoughts. It wasn’t even as though he particularly liked plants. This only could have occurred if the plant possessed some sort of sophisticated extrasensory perception. The plant somehow must be attuned to its environment, able to receive far more than pure sensory information from water or light.
Backster modified his polygraph equipment to amplify electrical signals so that they would be highly sensitive to the slightest electrical change in the plants. He and his partner, Bob Henson, set about replicating the initial experiment. Backster spent the next year and a half frequently monitoring the reactions of the other plants in the office to their environment. They discovered a number of characteristics. The plants grew attuned to the comings and goings of their main caretaker. They also maintained some sort of ‘territoriality’ and so did not react to events in the other offices near Backster’s lab. They even seemed to tune in to Pete, his Doberman Pinscher, who spent his days at the office.
Most intriguing of all, there seemed to be a continuous two-way flow of information between the plants and other living things in their environment. One day, when Backster boiled his kettle to make coffee, he found he had put in too much water. But when he poured the residue down the sink, he noticed that the plants registered an intense reaction.
The sink was not the most hygienic; indeed, his staff had not cleaned the drain for several months. He decided to take some samples from the drain and examine them under a microscope, which showed a jungle of bacteria that ordinarily lives in the waste pipes of a sink. When threatened by the boiling water, had the bacteria emitted a type of mayday signal before they died, which had been picked up by the plants?
Backster, who knew he would be ridiculed if he presented findings like these to the scientific community, enlisted an impressive array of chemists, biologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and physicists to help him design an airtight experiment. In his early experiments, Backster had relied upon human thought and emotion as the trigger for reactions in the plants. The scientists discouraged him from using intention as the stimulus of the experiment, because it did not lend itself to rigorous scientific design. How could you set up a control for a human thought – an intention to harm, say? The orthodox scientific community could easily pick holes in his study. He had to create a laboratory barren of any other living things besides the plants to ensure that the plants would not be, as it were, distracted.
The only way to achieve this was to automate the experiment entirely. But he also needed a potent stimulus. He tried to think of the one act that would stir up the most profound reaction, something that would evoke the equivalent in the plants of dumbfounded horror. It became clear that the only way to get unequivocal results was to commit the equivalent of mass genocide. But what could he kill en masse that would not arouse the ire of anti-vivisectionists or get him arrested? It obviously could not be a person or a large animal of any variety. He did not even want to kill members of the usual experimental population, like rats or guinea pigs. The one obvious candidate was brine shrimp. Their only purpose, as far as he could tell, was to become fodder for tropical fish. Brine shrimp were already destined for the slaughterhouse. Only the most ardent anti-vivisectionist could object.
Backster and Henson rigged up a gadget that would randomly select one of six possible moments when a small cup containing the brine shrimp would invert and tip its contents into a pot of continuously boiling water. The randomizer was placed in the far room in his suite of six offices, with three plants attached to polygraph equipment in three separate rooms at the other end of the laboratory. His fourth polygraph machine, attached to a fixed valve resistor to ensure that there was no sudden surge of voltage from the equipment, acted as the control.
Microcomputers had yet to be invented, as Backster set up his lab in the late sixties. To perform the task, Backster created an innovative mechanical programmer, which operated on a time-delay switch, to set off each event in the automation process. After flipping the switch, Backster and Henson would leave the lab, so they and their thoughts would not influence the results. He had to eliminate the possibility that the plants might be more attuned to him and his colleague than a minor murder of brine shrimp down the hallway.
Backster and Henson tried their test numerous times. The results were unambiguous: the polygraphs of the electroded plants spiked a significant number of times just at the point when the brine shrimp hit the boiling water. Years after he had made this discovery – and after he became a great fan of Star Wars – he would think of this moment as one in which his plants picked up a major disturbance in the Force, and he had discovered a means of measuring it.2 (#ulink_a4dbd2f4-eb56-5fc3-88f0-4f0784807b97) If plants could register the death of an organism three doors away, it must mean that all life forms were exquisitely in tune with each other. Living things must be registering and passing telepathic information back and forth at every moment, particularly at moments of threat or death.
Backster published the results of his experiment in several respected journals of psychic research and gave a modest presentation before the Parapsychology Association during its tenth annual meeting.3 (#ulink_c47eda0a-5ec4-57fe-8017-41db3aa68375) Parapsychologists recognized Backster’s contribution and replicated it in a number of independent laboratories, notably that of Alexander Dubrov, a Russian doctor of botany and plant physiology.4 (#ulink_1e95f9eb-a5c9-587a-94e1-2a4e39c6c786) It was even glorified in a bestselling book, The Secret Life of Plants.5 (#ulink_880f6ea3-23fa-5ff2-8942-283468c92ea7) But among the mainstream scientific community, his research was disparaged as ludicrous, largely because he was not a traditional scientist, and he was ridiculed for what became known as ‘The Backster Effect’. In 1975, Esquire magazine even awarded him one of its 100 Dubious Achievement Awards: ‘Scientist claims yogurt talks to itself’.6 (#ulink_99bc1f8b-2ded-5a08-83ec-c825c41dd197)
Nonetheless, over the next 30 years Backster ignored his critics and stubbornly carried on with his research, as well as his polygraph business, eventually amassing file drawers full of studies of what he referred to as ‘primary perception’. A variety of plants that had been hooked up to his polygraph equipment showed evidence of a reaction to human emotional highs and lows, especially threats and other forms of negative intention – as did paramecia, mould cultures, eggs and, indeed, yogurt.7 (#ulink_3106f4af-8f8a-5129-a432-1319d022fc2b)Backster even demonstrated that bodily fluids such as blood and semen samples taken from himself and his colleagues registered reactions mirroring the emotional state of their hosts; the blood cells of a young lab assistant reacted intensely the moment he opened a Playboy centrefold and caught sight of Bo Derek in the nude.8 (#ulink_2a421a1b-f43e-5783-bb16-24366a565ccb)
These reactions were not dependent on distance; any living system attached to a polygraph reacted similarly to his thoughts, whether he was in the room or miles away. Like pets, they had become attuned to their ‘owner’. These organisms were not simply registering his thoughts; they were communicating telepathically with all the living things in their environment. The live bacteria in yogurt displayed a reaction to the death of other types of bacteria and even evidenced a desire to be ‘fed’ with more of its own beneficial bacteria. Eggs registered a cry of alarm and then resignation when one of their number was dropped in boiling water. Plants appeared to react in real time to any break in continuity with the living beings in their environment. They even appeared to react at the moment when their caretakers, who were away from the office, decided to return.9 (#ulink_0e41ab15-34a7-5d37-b062-9ef39f8de23a)
His major difficulty was designing experiments that could demonstrate an effect scientifically. Even though his laboratory experiments were now entirely automated, when he left the office, the plants would remain attuned to him, no matter now far away he went. If Backster and his partner were at a bar a block away during an experiment, he would discover that the plants were not responding to the brine shrimp, but to the rising and falling animation of their conversations. It got so difficult to isolate reactions to specific events that eventually he had to design experiments that would be carried out by strangers in another lab.
Repeatability remained another big problem. Any tests required spontaneity and true intent. He had discovered this when the famous remote viewer Ingo Swann had come to visit him at his lab in October 1971. Swann wanted to repeat Backster’s initial experiment with his Dracaena. As expected, the plant’s polygraph began to spike when Swann imagined burning the plant with a match. He tried it again, and the plant reacted wildly, then stopped.
‘What does that mean?’ Swann asked.
Backster shrugged. ‘You tell me.’
The thought that occurred to Swann was so bizarre that he was not sure whether to say it aloud. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, ‘that it has learned that I’m not serious about really burning its leaf? So that it now knows it need not be alarmed?’
‘You said it, I didn’t,’ Backster replied. ‘Try another kind of harmful thought.’
Swann thought of putting acid in the plant’s pot. The needle on the polygraph again began to zigzag wildly. Eventually, the plant appeared to understand that Swann was not serious. The polygraph tracing flat-lined. Swann, a plant lover who was already convinced that plants were sentient, was nevertheless shocked at the thought that plants could learn to differentiate between true and artificial human intent: a plant learning curve.10 (#ulink_aae89997-8603-5b72-9caf-a70b54f5cf00)
Although certain questions remain about Backster’s unorthodox research methods, the sheer bulk of his evidence argues strongly for some sort of primary responsiveness and attuning, if not sentience, present in all organisms, no matter how primitive. But for my purposes, Backster’s real contribution was his discovery of the telepathic communication carrying on between every living thing and its environment. Somehow, a constant stream of messages was being sent out, received and replied to.
Backster had to wait some years to discover the mechanism of this communication, which became apparent when physicist Fritz-Albert Popp discovered biophotons.11 (#ulink_2dc2aa8a-3216-5c7a-b475-cbb8066c6668) At first Popp believed that a living organism used biophoton emissions solely as a means of instantaneous, non-local signalling from one part of the body to another – to send information about the global state of the body’s health, say, or the effects of any particular treatment. But then Popp grew intrigued by the most fascinating effect of all: the light seemed to be a communications system between living things.12 (#ulink_87ff309c-eb89-551e-b5a1-39edd3e12f42) In experiments with Daphnia, a common water flea, he discovered that female water fleas were absorbing the light emitted from each other and sending back wave interference patterns, as though they had taken the light sent to themselves and updated it with more information. Popp concluded that this activity may be the mechanism enabling fleas to stay together when they swarm – a silent communication holding them together like an invisible net.13 (#ulink_95f23b14-dd39-527b-9c69-6968a1776c59)
He decided to examine the light emissions between dinoflagellates, luminescent algae that cause phosphorescence in seawater. These single-celled organisms sit somewhere between an animal and a plant in the evolutionary scale; although they are classified as a plant, they move like a primitive animal. Popp discovered that the light of each dinoflagellate was coordinated with that of its neighbours, as if each were holding aloft a tiny lantern on cue.14 (#ulink_921383d8-a33d-5444-b760-e01d4dc4b64c) Chinese colleagues of Popp’s who had tried positioning two samples of the algae so that they could ‘see’ each other through a shutter also found that the light emissions from each sample were synchronous. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed a highly sophisticated means of communication. There was no doubt that the two samples were signalling to each other.15 (#ulink_5ecfa08b-ac18-5347-be20-10259289c4bd)
These organisms also appeared to be registering light from other species, although the greatest synchronicities occurred between members of the same species.16 (#ulink_20956448-3bb6-5599-90e5-43fae5944ef9) Once the light waves of one organism were initially absorbed by another organism, the first organism’s light would begin trading information in synchrony.17 (#ulink_f3ee375e-3b41-57fb-9986-6f32bd5a6f20) Living things also appeared to communicate information with their surroundings. Bacteria absorbed light from their nutritional media: the more bacteria present, Popp found, the greater the absorption of light.18 (#ulink_8127bf89-693a-53d0-bcff-4146c5e14f80) Even the white and yolk of an egg appear to communicate with the shell.19 (#ulink_dd9336be-a901-5b81-bc36-1799bce73f68)
This communication carries on, even if an organism is cut into pieces. Gary Schwartz cut up a batch of string beans, placed them between 1 millimetre and 10 millimetres apart, and then used the NSF CCD camera he had borrowed to take a series of photographs of the sections. Using software to enhance the light between the beans, he discovered so much light between the sections that it appeared as though the bean were whole again. Even though the string beans had been severed, the individual sections carried on their communication to the rest of the vegetable.20 (#ulink_fd28a1c1-0324-554e-8cae-27b9f514a4b1) This may be the mechanism accounting for the feeling described by amputees with phantom limb sensations. The light of the body still communicates with the energetic ‘footprint’ of the amputated limb.
Like Backster, Popp discovered that living things are exquisitely in tune with their environment through these light emissions. One of Popp’s colleagues, Professor Wolfgang Klimek, the head of the Ministry of Research for the German government, devised an ingenious experiment to examine whether creatures such as algae were aware of past disturbances in their environment. He prepared two containers of seawater, and shook one of them. After 10 minutes, when the water in the shaken container had settled down, he placed samples of dinoflagellates in the two vessels. Those algae exposed to the shaken water suddenly increased their photon emissions – a sign of stress. The algae appeared to be aware of the slightest change in their environment – even a historical change – and responded with alarm.21 (#ulink_9efc04fe-ffae-5e40-9772-c3f6cf0f9c23)
Another of Popp’s colleagues, Eduard Van Wijk, a Dutch psychologist, wondered how far this influence extended. Did a living thing register information from the entire environment, and not simply between two communicating entities? When a healer sends out healing intention, for instance, how far does his field of influence extend? Would he only affect his target, or would his aim have a shotgun effect, affecting other living organisms around the target?
Van Wijk placed a jar of Acetabularia acetabulum, another simple algae, near a healer and his patient, then measured the photon emissions of the algae during healing sessions and periods of rest. After analysing the data, he discovered remarkable alterations in the photon count of the algae. The quality of emissions significantly changed during the healing sessions, as though the algae were being bombarded with light. There also seemed to be changes in the rhythm of the emissions, as though the algae had become attuned to a stronger source of light.
During his initial research, Popp had discovered a strange reaction to light by a living thing. If he shone a bright light on an organism, after a certain delay, the organism would shine more brightly itself with extra photons, as if it were rejecting any excess. Popp called this phenomenon ‘delayed luminescence’, and assumed it was a corrective device to help the organism maintain its level of light at a delicate equilibrium. In Van Wijk’s experiment, the photon emissions of algae showed highly significant shifts from normal, when plotted on a graph. Van Wijk had generated some of the first evidence that healing light may affect anything in its path.22 (#ulink_d628e97b-6b38-575f-99e1-c7511ae6aeed)
Gary Schwartz’s associate Melinda Connor then demonstrated that intention has a direct effect on this light. For her study she clipped leaves from geranium plants, carefully matching them in pairs for size, health, placement on the plant and access to light and close to identical photon emissions. She asked each of 20 master energy healers to send intentions to one of each pair of leaves, first to reduce emissions and then to increase them. In 29 of the 38 sessions designed to decrease emissions, the light was significantly lowered in the treatment leaves, and in 22 of the 38 trials intending to increase the light, the healers caused a significantly greater glow.23 (#ulink_62137c0e-2c03-5b57-9187-2ed6adcac19f)
Sometimes a physical jolt to the system triggers a shock of realization. For physicist Konstantin Korotkov, his insight resulted from a fall off a roof. It was the winter of 1976, and Korotkov, who was 24 at the time, had been celebrating a birthday with some friends. Korotkov liked to celebrate outside, whatever the weather. He and his friends had been drinking vodka on the roof. Korotkov was given to expansive gestures, and during a moment of gaiety, threw himself off the roof onto what he thought was a deep bed of snow, which he assumed would cushion his fall. But hidden beneath the snow lay hard stone. Korotkov broke his left leg and landed in the hospital for months.24 (#ulink_eba5ea96-d8b0-5a49-9a74-a1419c7e3a0f)
During his long recovery, Korotkov, a conventional professor of quantum physics at St Petersburg State Technical University in Russia, pondered on a lecture on Kirlian effects and healing that he had attended earlier that year. He had been so intrigued that he wondered if he could improve on what Kirlian claimed to be doing: capturing someone’s life energy on film.
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was an engineer who had discovered in 1939 that photographing living things that had been exposed to a pulsed electromagnetic field would capture what many have termed the human ‘aura’. When any conductive object (like living tissue) is placed on a plate made of an insulating material, such as glass, and exposed to high-voltage, high-frequency electricity, a low current results that creates a corona discharge, a halo of coloured light around the object that can be captured on film. Kirlian claimed that the state of the aura reflected the person’s state of health; changes in the aura were evidence of disease or mental disturbance.
The Soviet scientific mainstream ignored Kirlian until the 1960s, when the Russian press discovered bioelectrography, as it came to be called, and hailed him as a great inventor. Kirlian photography suddenly became respectable, particularly in space research, and was championed by many Western scientists. Publication of Kirlian’s first study in 1964 further attracted the scientific community.25 (#ulink_8d6e1c25-9253-51f8-8b4e-4ecc7c4c553b)
Lying for months in his bed, Korotkov realized that if he was going to discover more about how to capture this mysterious light Kirlian claimed was so vital to health, he was going to have to give up his day job. He knew that the involvement of a well-established quantum physicist such as himself would lend the technique scientific legitimacy and his technical ability might also help advance the technology. Perhaps he could even devise a means of depicting the light in real time.
After he got back up on his feet, Korotkov spent months developing a mechanism, which he called the Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) technique, that made use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices and a powerful computer. Ordinarily, a living thing will dribble out the faintest pulse of photons, perceptible only to the most sensitive equipment in conditions of utter pitch black. As Korotkov realized, a better way to capture this light was to stir up photons by ‘evoking’, or stimulating them into an excited state so that they would shine millions of times more intensely than normal.
His equipment blended several techniques: photography, measurements of light intensity and computerized pattern recognition. Korotkov’s camera would take pictures of the field around each of the 10 fingers, one finger at a time. A computer program would then extrapolate from this a real-time image of the ‘biofield’ surrounding the organism and deduce from it the state of the organism’s health.
Korotkov went on to write five books on the human bioenergy field.26 (#ulink_d305a904-7a0b-58b2-ad19-2cfdc3e752c2) In time, he managed to convince the Russian Ministry of Health of the importance of his invention to medical technology, diagnosis and treatment. His equipment was initially employed to predict certain clinical situations, such as the progress of recovery of people after surgery.27 (#ulink_0f9d3e83-8b23-58f0-99bd-fa248588d4fe) It soon became widely used in Russia as a diagnostic tool for many illnesses, including cancer and stress,28 (#ulink_0d6b30a8-7140-565d-a42c-1ba8e69fe010) and was even used to assess athletic potential – to predict the psychophysical reserves in athletes training for the Olympics and the likelihood of victory or exhaustion from overtraining.29 (#ulink_00377c01-28d3-510f-95f5-88058e7354d3) Eventually, some 3000 doctors, practitioners and researchers worldwide came to use the technology. The National Institutes of Health got interested and funded work on the ‘biofield’, which employed Korotkov’s equipment.30 (#ulink_f2ddee8b-9dab-575a-a172-f454ee8131ed)
While officially exploring these practical applications, Korotkov privately carried on with his own studies of what had really captured his imagination: the connection between biofields and consciousness.31 (#ulink_56898306-dff1-581d-a14a-d182ea9adca3) He took GDV readings of healers and a Qigong master while they were sending energy, and discovered remarkable changes in their corona discharges. Korotkov then explored the effects of a person’s thoughts on the people surrounding him. He asked a number of couples to ‘send’ a variety of thoughts to their partners, while they were standing within close range. Every strong emotion – whether love, hate or anger – produced an extraordinary effect on the light discharge of the recipient.32 (#ulink_deead3dd-2523-5153-aeb4-c0076357338f)
Some 40 years after Backster first employed his crude polygraph mechanism to register the effect of thoughts, Korotkov verified those early discoveries with state-of-the-art equipment. He hooked up a potted plant to his GDV machine and asked his researchers to think of different emotions – anger, sadness, joy – and then positive and negative intentions towards the plant. Whenever a participant mentally threatened the plant, its energy field diminished. The opposite occurred if people approached the plant with water or feelings of love.
Largely because he lacked scientific credentials, Backster was never recognized for his contributions. He had stumbled across the first evidence that living things engage in a constant two-way flow of information with their environment, enabling them to register even the nuances of human thought. The more advanced scientific knowledge of physicists Fritz Popp and Konstantin Korotkov was needed to uncover the actual mechanism of that communication. Their research into the nature of quantum light emissions from living organisms suddenly made sense of Backster’s findings. If thoughts are another stream of photons, it is perfectly plausible that a plant could pick up the signals and be affected by them.
The work of Backster, Popp and Korotkov suggested something profound about the effect of intention. Every last thought appeared to augment or diminish something else’s light.
Notes - Chapter 3: The Two-Way Street
1 (#ulink_f2ceeeda-509d-5f2d-b205-281e4f942d6d). For all history of Cleve Backster’s discoveries and experiments, interview with Backster, October 2004 and his Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells, Anza, Calif.: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003.
2 (#ulink_3661862b-46aa-5aba-9734-e50d34142896). As Obi-Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker, after Alderan has been blown up by the Empire in Star Wars part IV: A New Hope: ‘I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.’
3 (#ulink_6349f023-dd0f-5a39-b87f-316aad9a5870). Presentation given at the Tenth Annual Parapsychology Association meeting in New York City, September 7, 1967. Also published as C. Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception in plant life’, International Journal of Parapsychology, 1968; 10 (4): 329–48.
4 (#ulink_6349f023-dd0f-5a39-b87f-316aad9a5870). P. Dubrov and V. N. Pushkin, Parapsychology and Contemporary Science, New York and London: Consultants Bureau, 1982.
5 (#ulink_6349f023-dd0f-5a39-b87f-316aad9a5870). P. Tompkins and C. Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
6 (#ulink_6349f023-dd0f-5a39-b87f-316aad9a5870). ‘Boysenberry to Prune, Boysenberry to Prune: Do you read me? Lie detector expert Cleve Backster reported in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he had detected electrical impulses between two containers of yogurt at opposite ends of his laboratory. Backster claims the bacteria in the containers were communicating.’ Esquire, January 1976.
7 (#ulink_04495f6d-2190-5108-b8dc-4e010f292cfe). Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception’, op. cit.
8 (#ulink_3106f4af-8f8a-5129-a432-1319d022fc2b). Backster, Primary Perceptions, op. cit.: 112–13.
9 (#ulink_962599c8-3446-59bf-9ffc-2be8fbabcde9). Backster, Primary Perceptions. See also Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, London: Three Rivers Press, 2000.
10 (#ulink_f14f6118-9ac7-5de2-86e9-8f2f09da1193). This and other personal details of events resulted from interviews with Ingo Swann, New York, July 2005.
11 (#ulink_fe823055-6fd0-5e79-80e3-e30a9e339be0). See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39 for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
12 (#ulink_fe823055-6fd0-5e79-80e3-e30a9e339be0). All details of these experiments resulted from an interview between the author and Fritz-Albert Popp, January 2006.
13 (#ulink_fe823055-6fd0-5e79-80e3-e30a9e339be0). R. M. Galle et al., ‘Biophoton emission from Daphnia magna: A possible factor in the self-regulation of swarming’, Experientia, 1991; 47: 457–60; R. M. Galle, ‘Untersuchungen zum dichte und zeitabhängigen Verhalten der ultraschwachen Photonenemission von pathogenetischen Weibchen des Wasserflohs Daphnia magna.’ Dissertation. Universität Saarbrücken, Fachbereich Zoologie, 1993.
14 (#ulink_876ba80f-cd51-5eaa-b081-96e2c234611a). F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Nonsubstantial biocommunication in terms of Dicke’s Theory’, in M. W. Ho, F.-A. Popp and U. Warnke (eds.), Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1994: 293–317; J. J. Chang et al., ‘Research on cell communication of P. elegans by means of photon emission’, Chinese Science Bulletin, 1995; 40: 76–9.
15 (#ulink_876ba80f-cd51-5eaa-b081-96e2c234611a). J. J. Chang et al., ‘Communication between Dinoflagellates by means of photon emission’, in L. V. Beloussov and F.-A. Popp (eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Non-equilibrium and Coherent Systems in Biophysics, Biology and Biotechnology, Sep. 28–Oct. 2 1994, Moscow: Bioinform Services Co., 1995: 318–30.
16 (#ulink_2104220b-31f0-5fda-9030-64f66b45be6a). Interview with Popp, Neuss, Germany, March 1, 2006.
17 (#ulink_2104220b-31f0-5fda-9030-64f66b45be6a). F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Mechanism of interaction between electromagnetic fields and living organisms’, Science in China (Series C), 2000; 43 (5): 507–18.
18 (#ulink_2104220b-31f0-5fda-9030-64f66b45be6a). Ibid.
19 (#ulink_2104220b-31f0-5fda-9030-64f66b45be6a). L. Beloussov and N. N. Louchinskaia, ‘Biophoton emission from developing eggs and embryos: Nonlinearity, wholistic properties and indications of energy transfer’, in J. J. Chang et al. (eds.), Biophotons, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998: 121–40.
20 (#ulink_7acc5146-cf10-508f-95b5-49ce86e7020e). K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tell us about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–50.
21 (#ulink_f7a48fe3-ea92-5504-abe2-502d923588e4). A. V. Tschulakow et al., ‘A new approach to the memory of water’, Homeopathy, 2005; 94: 241–7.
22 (#ulink_affed60e-f9c9-51d2-b9bb-b722e3f303c2). E. P. A. Van Wijk and R. Van Wijk, ‘The development ofa bio-sensor for the state of consciousness in a human intentional healing ritual’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (ISLIS), 2002; 20 (2): 694–702.
23 (#ulink_3c17338f-64d8-5bce-9d36-1e2d165be56f). M. Connor, ‘Baseline testing of energy practitioners: Biophoton imaging results.’ Paper presented at the North American Research in Integrative Medicine conference, Edmonton, Canada, May 2006.
24 (#ulink_43c8b189-9281-54df-b0ff-dbe3005d39c2). Personal details about K. Korotkov the result of multiple interviews with the author, November–March 2005–2006.
25 (#ulink_80de4ced-1c99-5cc8-8f20-9f2755f6f3c6). S. D. Kirlian and V. K. Kirlian, ‘Photography and visual observation by means of high frequency currents’, J. Sci. Appl. Photogr., 1964; 6: 397–403.
26 (#ulink_be248f33-979e-5559-bbc6-eeae18345d8f). Korotkov’s most important work on the subject was K. Korotkov, Human Energy Field: Study with GDV Bioelectrography, New Jersey: Backbone Publishing Co., 2002; K. Korotkov, Aura and Consciousness – New Stage of Scientific Understanding, St Petersburg: St Petersburg Division of the Russian Ministry of Culture, State Publishing Unit ‘Kultura’, 1999.
27 (#ulink_be248f33-979e-5559-bbc6-eeae18345d8f). K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms in living systems: The basis of life processes’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (1): 49–57.
28 (#ulink_be248f33-979e-5559-bbc6-eeae18345d8f). L. W. Konikiewicz and L. C. Griff, Bioelectrography – A new method for detecting cancer and body physiology, Harrisburg, Va.: Leonard Associates Press, 1982; G. Rein, ‘Corona discharge photography of human breast tumour biopsies’, Acupuncture & Electrotherapeutics Research, 1985; 10: 305–8; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Stress diagnosis and monitoring with new computerized “Crown-TV” device’, Journal of Pathophysiology, 1998; 5: 227.
29 (#ulink_be248f33-979e-5559-bbc6-eeae18345d8f). P. Bundzen et al., ‘New technology of the athletes’ psycho-physical readiness evaluation based on the gas-discharge visualisation method in comparison with battery of tests’, ‘SIS-99’ Proceedings, International Congress St Petersburg, 1999: 19–22; P. V. Bundzen, et al., ‘Psychophysiological correlates of athletic success in athletes training for the Olympics’, Human Physiology, 2005; 31 (3): 316–23; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms’, op. cit.
30 (#ulink_be248f33-979e-5559-bbc6-eeae18345d8f). Clair A. Francomano and Wayne B. Jonas, in Ronald A. Chez (ed.), Proceedings: Measuring the Human Energy Field: State of the Science. The Gerontology Research Center, National Institute of Aging, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, Maryland, April 17–18, 2002.
31 (#ulink_9cb02364-448c-5789-b7cb-88b9a79bfbad). S. Kolmakow et al., ‘Gas discharge visualization technique and spectrophotometry in detection of field effects’, Mechanisms of Adaptive Behavior, Abstracts of International Symposium, St Petersburg, 1999: 79.
32 (#ulink_9cb02364-448c-5789-b7cb-88b9a79bfbad). Interview with K. Korotkov, March 2006.
CHAPTER FOUR (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
Hearts that Beat as One (#u236ffb7a-627f-551d-9cad-bdd789027bf5)
NONE OF THE SCIENTISTS INVOLVED IN ‘The Love Study’ remembered who came up with its name. It might have started as Elisabeth Targ’s private joke, for the study involved couples who were installed in two different rooms and separated by a hallway, three doors, eight walls and several inches of stainless steel.1 (#litres_trial_promo)
The name was actually meant to be a gracious nod to the study’s arcane benefactor, the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love at Case Western Reserve. As it happened, the study became a posthumous valentine to Targ, who was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour just before the grant money came through. The Love Study would be a fitting tribute to Targ, as the first major scientific demonstration of exactly how intention physically affects its recipient, and the name proved especially apt in describing this process. When you send an intention, every major physiological system in your body is mirrored in the body of the receiver. Intention is the perfect manifestation of love. Two bodies become one.
Targ began her career as a mainstream psychiatrist, but made her name in 1999 with two remarkable studies at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in San Francisco, which tested the possibility of remote healing with end-stage AIDS patients. Targ spent months designing her trial. She and her partner, psychologist and retired hospital administrator Fred Sicher, sought out a homogeneous group of advanced AIDS patients with the same degree of illness, including the same T-cell counts and number of AIDS-defining illnesses. Because they wished to test the effect of distant healing, and not any particular healing modality, they decided to recruit highly experienced, successful healers from diverse backgrounds who might represent an array of approaches.
Targ and Sicher gathered together an eclectic mix of healers from all across America – from orthodox Christians to Native American shamans – and asked them to send healing thoughts to a group of AIDS patients under strict double-blind conditions. All healing was to be done remotely so that nothing, such as the presence of a healer or healing touch, could confound the results. Targ created a strict double-blind rota: each healer received sealed packets with information about the patients to be healed, including their name, photo and T-cell counts. Every other week, the healers were assigned a new patient and asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient an hour a day for six days, with alternate weeks off for rest. In this manner, eventually every patient in the healing group would be sent healing by every healer in turn.
At the end of the first study, although 40 per cent of the control population died, all 10 of the patients in the treatment group were not only alive but far healthier in every regard.
Targ and Sicher repeated the study, but this time, doubled the size of their study population and tightened their protocol even further. They also widened their brief of the outcomes they planned to measure. In the second study, those sent healing were again far healthier on every parameter tested: significantly fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, fewer hospitalizations, fewer visits to the doctor, fewer new illnesses, less severity of disease and better psychological well-being. The differences were decisive; for instance, the treatment group had six times fewer AIDS-defining illnesses and four times fewer hospitalizations at the end of the study than the controls.2 (#ulink_64aed3af-b767-550b-b48d-c49aee4a5e34)
In Targ’s original studies, the healing had been carried out by highly experienced, successful healers who had been chosen because they possessed a special gift. After the studies were completed, Targ grew interested in whether an ordinary individual could be similarly trained to use intention effectively.
For the Love Study, Targ found a sympathetic partner in Marilyn Schlitz, the vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The energetic blonde had a colourful national reputation because of her meticulously designed parapsychology studies and their spectacular results, which attracted the attention of the senior powers in consciousness research as well as the New York Times. During a long partnership with psychologist William Braud, Schlitz had conducted rigorous research into what became known in the psychic community as ‘DMILS’ – direct mental interaction with living systems – the ability of human thought to influence the living world around it.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Throughout her career in parapsychology, Schlitz had been fascinated by remote influence; she was one of the first to examine the effect of intention in healing, and went on to assemble a vast database of healing research for IONS.
For the Love Study, Schlitz recruited Dean Radin, her IONS senior researcher and one of America’s most renowned parapsychologists. Radin was to design both the study and some of its equipment; with his background in engineering and psychology he would ensure that both the study protocol and its technical detail were pristine. Targ enlisted Jerome Stone, a nurse and practising Buddhist who had worked with her on the AIDS studies, to design the intention programme and train the patients.
In 2002, after Targ died, Schlitz and the others vowed to carry on with the study and recruited Ellen Levine, one of Targ’s colleagues from CPMC, to take her place and work with Stone as joint principal investigators.
The Love Study was to follow the basic study design of a perennial favourite among consciousness researchers: the sense of being stared at.4 (#litres_trial_promo) In those studies, two people are isolated from each other in separate rooms and a video camera is trained on the receiver, who is also hooked up to skin conductance equipment, not unlike a polygraph machine – the type used in lie detection studies to detect an increase in ‘fight-or-flight’, unconscious autonomic nervous system activity. At random intervals, the ‘sender’ is instructed to stare at the subject on the monitor, while the ‘receiver’ is told to relax and try to think of anything other than the prospect of being stared at. A later comparison analysis determines whether the receiver’s autonomic system registered a reaction during those moments he or she was being stared at to determine whether the mere attention of the sender was unconsciously picked up by the most automatic systems of the receiver’s body.
Schlitz and Braud’s body of evidence on remote staring, conducted over 10 years, showed exactly such an effect. All the studies had been combined into a review that was published in a major psychology journal. The review concluded that the effects had been small but significant.5 (#litres_trial_promo)
The Love Study’s design was also inspired by the major DMILS studies conducted since 1963, which demonstrated that, under many types of circumstances, the electrical signalling in the brains of people gets synchronized.6 (#litres_trial_promo) The frequencies, amplitudes and phases of the brain waves start operating in tandem. Although the studies followed slightly different designs, all of them asked the same question: can the stimulation of one person be felt in the higher central nervous system of another? Or, as Radin liked to think of it, after a sender gets pinched, does the receiver also feel the ‘ouch’?7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two people wired up with a variety of physiological monitoring equipment, such as EEG machines, were isolated from each other in different rooms. One would be stimulated with something – a picture, a light or a mild electric shock. The researchers would then examine the two EEGs to determine if the receiver’s brain waves mirrored those of the sender when he or she was being stimulated.
The earliest DMILS research had been designed by psychologist and consciousness researcher Charles Tart, who carried out a series of brutal studies to determine whether people could empathetically feel another person’s pain. He administered shocks to himself, while a volunteer, isolated in a different room and hooked up to an array of medical gadgetry, was being monitored to see if his sympathetic nervous system somehow picked up Tart’s reactions. Whenever Tart jolted himself, the receiver registered an unconscious empathetic response in decreased blood volume and increased heart rate – as though he were also getting the shocks.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Another fascinating early study had been carried out with identical twins. As soon as one twin closed his eyes and his brain electrical rhythms slowed to alpha waves, the other twin’s brain also slowed, even though his eyes were wide open.9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Harald Walach, a German scientist at the University of Freiburg, tried an approach that was guaranteed to magnify the sender’s effects, in order to maximize the response in the receiver. The sender was shown an alternating black-and-white checkerboard, called a ‘pattern reversal’, which is known to trigger predictable, high-amplitude electrical brain waves in viewers. At the same instant, the EEG of the distant, shielded receiver recorded identical brain-wave patterns.10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, had used this same protocol a decade before Walach but with a different twist: with light flashes rather than patterns as the stimulus. In this study, the particular patterns of firing in the brain of the sender, evoked by the light, turned out to be mirrored in the brain of the receiver, who was sitting in an electrically shielded room 14.5 metres away. Grinberg-Zylberbaum also discovered that an important condition determined success: the synchrony only occurred among pairs of participants who had met and established a connection by spending 20 minutes with each other in meditative silence.11 (#litres_trial_promo)
In earlier work, Grinberg-Zylberbaum had discovered that brainwave synchrony occurred not only between two people, but between both hemispheres of the brains of both participants, with one important distinction: the participant with the most cohesive quantum wave patterns sometimes set the tempo and tended to influence the other. The most ordered brain pattern often prevailed.12 (#litres_trial_promo)
In the most recent DMILS study, in 2005, a group of researchers from Bastyr University and the University of Washington gathered 30 couples with strong emotional and psychological connections and also a great deal of experience in meditation. The pairs were split up and placed in rooms 10 metres away from each other, with an EEG amplifier wired up to the occipital (visual) lobe of the brain of each participant. The moment each sender was exposed to a flickering light, he attempted to transmit an image or thought about the light to the partner. Of the 60 receivers tested, 5 of them, or 8 per cent, were shown to have significantly higher brain activation during times their partner ‘sent’ their visual images.13 (#litres_trial_promo)
The Washington researchers then selected five pairs of the participants who had scored a significant result, wired them up to a functional MRI, which measures minuscule changes in the brain during critical functions, and asked them to repeat the experiment. During the times the thought was ‘transmitted’, the recipients experienced an increase in blood oxygenation in a portion of the visual cortex of the brain. This increase did not occur when the sending partner was not being visually stimulated.14 (#litres_trial_promo) The Bastyr researchers replicated their study, this time with volunteers highly experienced in meditation, and got some of the strongest correlations between senders and receivers of all the studies thus far.
The Bastyr study represented a major breakthrough in research on direct mental influence. It demonstrated that the brain-wave response of the sender to the stimulus is mirrored in the receiver, and that the stimulus in the receiver occurs in an identical place in the brain as that of the sender. The receiver’s brain reacts as though he or she is seeing the same image at the same time.
A final extraordinary study examined the effect of powerful emotional involvement on remote influence. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied and compared the EEGs of bonded couples, matched pairs of strangers, and several individuals with no partner but who nevertheless thought they were being paired off and having their brain waves compared. Everyone who had been paired off, whether he knew his partner or not, displayed increased numbers of brain waves in synchrony. The only participants who did not demonstrate this effect were those who had no partner.15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Radin carried out a variation of this experiment, attaching pairs who had close bonds – couples, friends, parents and their children. In a significant number of instances, the EEGs of the senders and receivers appeared to synchronize.16 (#litres_trial_promo)
In designing the Love Study, Schlitz and Radin also had been influenced by other research showing that, during acts of remote influence, the recipient’s EEG waves mirror those of the sender. In a number of studies of healing, the EEG waves of the patient synchronize with those of the healer during moments when healing energy is being ‘sent’.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Brain mapping during certain types of healing, such as bioenergy, also shows evidence of brain-wave synchrony.18 (#litres_trial_promo) In many instances, when one person is sending focused intention to another, their brains appear to become entrained.
Entrainment is a term in physics which means that two oscillating systems fall into synchrony. It was coined in 1665 by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, after discovering that two of his clocks with pendulums standing in close approximation to each other had begun to swing in unison. He had been toying with the two pendulums and found that even if he started one pendulum swinging at one end, and the other at the opposite end, eventually the two would swing in unison.
Two waves peaking and troughing at the same time, are considered ‘in phase’, or operating in synch. Those peaking at opposite times are ‘out of phase’. Physicists believe that entrainment results from tiny exchanges of energy between two systems that are out of phase, causing one to slow down and the other to accelerate until the two are in phase. It is also related to resonance, or the ability of any system to absorb more energy than normal at a particular frequency (the number of peaks and troughs in one second). Any vibrating thing, including an electromagnetic wave, has its own preferential frequencies, called ‘resonant frequencies’, where it finds vibrating the easiest. When it ‘listens’ or receives a vibration from somewhere else, it tunes out all pretenders and only tunes into its own resonant frequency. It is a bit like a mother instantly recognizing her child from among a mass of school children. Planets have orbital resonances. Our sense of hearing operates through a form of entrainment: different parts of a membrane of the inner ear resonate to different frequencies of sound. Resonance even occurs in the seas, such as in the tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy in the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine, near Nova Scotia.
Once they march to the same rhythm, things that are entrained send out a stronger signal than they do individually. This most commonly occurs with musical instruments, which sound amplified when all playing in phase. At the Bay of Fundy, the time required for a single wave to travel from the bay’s mouth to its opposite end and back is exactly matched by the time of each tide. Each wave is amplified by the rhythm of each tide, resulting in some of the highest tides in the world.
Entrainment also occurs when someone sends a strong intention to cause harm, which became evident in the tohate experiments of Mikio Yamamoto of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. Tohate is a kind of mental stand-off between two Qigong practitioners, one of whom receives a sensory shock and is eventually made to submit and move back several yards without any physical contact from the other. The central question posed by the technique, in Yamamoto’s mind, was whether the effect of tohate is psychological or physical: does the opponent move back because of psychological intimidation, or is he knocked over by the qi of his opponent?
In the first of Yamamoto’s studies, a Qigong master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room on the fourth floor of a building, while his student was similarly isolated on the first floor. Yamamoto signalled for the master to perform ‘qi emission’ over 80 seconds at random intervals. Each time, he tracked their separate movements – the sending of the qi and the start of the pupil’s recoil. In nearly a third of the 49 such trials – a highly significant result – whenever the master engaged in tohate movements, his opponent in the other room was physically knocked back. In a second set of 57 trials, Yamamoto wired both teacher and pupil to EEG machines. Whenever the master emitted qi, his pupil showed an increase in the number of alpha brain waves in his right frontal lobe, suggesting that this was where the body initially receives the intention ‘message’.
Yamamoto’s final set of trials examined the EEG-recorded brain waves of both master and student. Whenever the master performed tohate, the beta brain waves of both men demonstrated a greater sense of coherence.19 (#litres_trial_promo) In an earlier study carried out by the Tokyo group, the brain waves of the receiver and sender became synchronized within one second during tohate.20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Besides resonance, the DMILS studies offered evidence of another phenomenon during intention: the receiver anticipated the information by registering the ‘ouch’ a few moments before the pinch occurred in the sender. In 1997, in his former laboratory at the University of Nevada, Radin discovered that humans may receive a physical foreboding of an event. He set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed to calm, to arouse, or to upset a participant. His volunteers were wired to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conduction, heart rate and blood pressure, and they sat in front of a computer that would randomly display colour photos of tranquil scenes (landscapes), or scenes designed to shock (autopsies) or to arouse (erotic materials).
Radin discovered that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was erotic or disturbing. This offered the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states and that the nervous system does not merely cushion itself against a future blow, but also works out the emotional meaning of it.21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Dr Rollin McCraty, executive vice-president and director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California was fascinated by the idea of shared physical foreboding of an event, but wondered where exactly in the body this intuitive information might first be felt. He used the original design of Radin’s study with a computerized system of randomly generated arousing photos, but hooked up his participants to a greater complement of medical equipment.
McCraty discovered that these forebodings of good and bad news were felt in both the heart and brain, whose electromagnetic waves would speed up or slow down just before a disturbing or tranquil picture was shown. Furthermore, all four lobes of the cerebral cortex appeared to take part in this intuitive awareness. Most astonishing of all, the heart appeared to receive this information moments before the brain did. This suggested that the body has certain perceptual apparatus that enables it continually to scan and intuit the future, but that the heart may hold the largest antenna. After the heart receives the information, it communicates this information to the brain.
McCraty’s study had shown certain fascinating differences between the sexes. Both the heart and brain became entrained with each other earlier and more frequently in women than they did in men. McCraty concluded that this offered scientific evidence of the universal assumption that women are naturally more intuitive than men and more in touch with their heart centre.22 (#litres_trial_promo)
McCraty’s conclusion – that the heart is the largest ‘brain’ of the body – has now gained credibility after research findings by Dr John Andrew Armour at the University of Montreal and the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal. Armour discovered neurotransmitters in the heart that signal and influence aspects of higher thought in the brain.23 (#litres_trial_promo) McCraty discovered that touch and even mentally focusing on the heart cause brain-wave entrainment between people. When two people touched while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the more ‘coherent’ heart rhythms of the two began to entrain the brain of the other.24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Armed with this new evidence about the heart, Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz decided to explore whether remote mental influence extended to anywhere else in the body. An obvious place to explore was the gut. People speak about intuition as a ‘gut instinct’ or ‘gut feeling’. Certain researchers have even referred to the gut as a ‘second brain’.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Radin wondered if a gut instinct was accompanied by an actual physical effect.
Radin and Schlitz gathered 26 student volunteers, paired them, and this time wired them up to an electrogastrogram (EGG), which measures the electrical behaviour of the gut; monitors on the skin usually closely match the frequencies and contractions of the stomach. Although the Freiburg study had shown otherwise, Radin and Schlitz believed that familiarity could only help to magnify the effects of remote influence. In case some sort of physical connection was indeed important, Radin asked all the participants to exchange some meaningful object first.
Radin put one participant from a pair in one room. The other sat in another, darkened room, attached to an electrogastrogram, viewing live video images of the first person. Images periodically flashed on another monitor, accompanied by music designed to arouse particular emotions: positive, negative, angry, calming or just neutral.
The results revealed another example of entrainment – this time in the gut. The EGG readings of the receiver were significantly higher and correlated with those of the sender when the sender experienced strong emotions, positive or negative. Here was yet more evidence that the emotional state of others is registered in the body of the receiver – in this case, deep in the intestines – and that the home of the gut instinct is indeed the gut itself.26 (#litres_trial_promo)
This latest evidence was further proof that our emotional responses are constantly being picked up and echoed in those closest to us.27 (#litres_trial_promo) In every one of these studies, the bodies of the pairs had become entrained or ‘entangled’ as Radin called it;28 (#litres_trial_promo) the recipients were ‘seeing’ or feeling what their partners actually saw or felt, in real time.
As this research intimates, intention might be an attunement of energy. The DMILS research established that, under certain conditions, the heart rate, the arousal of the autonomic nervous system, the brain waves and the blood flow to the extremities of different people all become entrained, even when they are situated at a distance. Nevertheless, in most of the DMILS studies, the correlated response resulted from a simple stimulation of the sender, which the recipient unconsciously picked up. Except for one instance, no one attempted to influence another person.
Schlitz and Radin now wanted to find out whether they would achieve similar correlations if the sender were actually sending an intention to heal. For the Love Study, Schlitz and her colleagues decided to recruit ordinary individuals and train them in healing techniques. They wondered whether certain conditions were more favourable than others for achieving entrainment. Many healing studies intimated that motivation, interpersonal connection and a shared belief system were vital to success. Grinberg-Zylberbaum believed that a ‘transferred potential’, as he termed this form of entrainment, occurred only among those who had undergone some meditative regime and then only after some sort of psychic connection between sender and receiver had been established. Nevertheless, in the Freiberg study, many of the pairs had never met each other and had not had a chance to establish a bond. The German researchers had concluded that ‘connectedness’ and mental preparation may play a role, but were not crucial. In Schlitz’s view, motivation was a key component of success. The more urgent the situation, such as would occur with a partner suffering from cancer, the more motivated his or her partner would be in attempting to get him or her well.
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