The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. Lynne McTaggart
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
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
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 Brain mapping during certain types of healing, such as bioenergy, also shows evidence of brain-wave synchrony.18 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 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
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
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