14
Studies have been conducted also at Bastyr University in Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, the universities of Nevada and Hertfordshire, and University Hospital of Freiburg. See S. Schmidt, “Distant Intentionality and the Feeling of Being Stared At: Two Meta-analyses,”
British Journal of Psychology
95 (2004): 235-47.
15
Of the more than fifty studies, three of interest to me were: L. J. Standish et al., “Electroencephalographic Evidence of Correlated Event-Related Signals Between the Brains of Spatially and Sensory Isolated Subjects,”
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
10 (2004): 307-14 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). In five of the sixty subjects tested, the receiver’s brain showed significantly higher brain activity when the sender was projecting an image. The chances that this would happen randomly to this number of people are more than 3,000 to 1. However, when researchers tried to replicate the results with the five successful subjects, only one showed a statistically significant “response.”
D. Radin, “Event Related EEG Correlations Between Isolated Human Subjects,”
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
10 (2004): 315-23 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). For three of the thirteen pairs of adult friends or relatives, the receiver’s brain-wave activity jumped when the partner was sending positive intentions. On average, the receiver’s EEG peaked 64 milliseconds after the sender’s, then sloped downward, as did the sender’s.
D. Radin and M. Schlitz, “Gut Feelings, Intuition, and Emotions: An Exploratory Study,”
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
11 (2005): 85-91 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). In this case, involving twenty-six pairs of adults, one person sat in a shielded room, while another tried to evoke positive, negative, calming, or neutral responses. There seemed to be a “response” in the EEG of the receiver when the sender sent positive or negative emotions. The odds against these being chance findings were 167 to 1 and 1,100 to 1, respectively.
16
fMRI technology is far more expensive (about $1,000 per brain scan), and few researchers have access to these machines. Therefore, few studies have gone this route. The results, while mixed, have been suggestive that this is an area ripe for research. See L. J. Standish, “Evidence of Correlated Functional MRI Signals Between Distant Human Subjects,”
Alternative Therapies
9 (2003): 122-28. In one pair that was tested—a man and woman who had been colleagues for two years—when the man was sending images to the woman lying in the brain scanner, her brain lit up, or activated in areas 18 and 19 of the visual cortex. This is the region of the brain that is activated when someone directly sees an object.
17
J. Achterberg, “Evidence for Correlation Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Imaging Analysis,”
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
11 (2005): 965-71 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.).
18
D. Radin, “Compassionate Intention as a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patients: Effects of Distant Intention on the Automatic Nervous System,”
Explore
4 (2008): 235-43.
19
I asked Schlitz if she had found pairs other than bonded couples who excelled at these tests. She nodded.
“We see that they are typically people who come from three sets of trainings,” she said. “They are meditators. They’re martial artists. Or they’re classically trained musicians. So you might ask the question, what do those three populations have in common? Well, they have in common both intention and attention training.” A meditator trains his brain to be still and highly focused. An Aikido master learns to focus on the opponent in front of him and movement on the periphery, with “eyes on the back of his head.” The same is true for a classically trained musician, she observed. “Their brains are actually different from a person who hasn’t been trained that way. And one of the things a musician can do, for example, is attend to their own line in the symphony and stay very focused on a particular melody that they’re doing, and at the same time they have the larger capacity to track the whole symphony as it’s performing. So there’s something about that focused attention combined with this more generalized intention.” Having seen how meditation literally molds the brain, I was hardly surprised by this finding. It seemed to add another straw to the mounting pile of evidence that the trained brain has a capacity to glean information and dimensions that the flabby or distracted brain cannot.
20
Specifically, when the “senders” (such as J.D.) saw the image of their loved ones on the screen and began to think about them, certain things happened: for five seconds, their brain waves spiked, as did their heart rate and sweat-gland activity, and their blood flowed away from their fingertips, which happens when people gear up to do a task like focusing their attention. Then, halfway through, the process reversed as they began to relax. That much was predictable. But what gave the researchers pause was the response of the “receivers” (such as Teena) in the soundproof, electromagnetically sealed room. The receivers mimicked their partners’ physiology within a few milliseconds, becoming aroused and then relaxing toward the end of the ten seconds. One curious outcome, Radin said, involved breathing. “At the end of the sending period, the sender typically does a big exhalation, because they’ve been holding their breath for the ten seconds. There’s also a big exhalation for the receiver at the same time, even though they’re not holding their breath.” He laughed. “I didn’t expect that.”
CHAPTER 12. PARADIGM SHIFTS
1
My colleagues hailed from
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
,
USA Today
,
Newsday
, ABC News, the BBC, and
New Scientist
magazine. Another journalist made his living authoring popular science books. This was the sharpest and most magical group of people I have known, their intellect rivaled only by their capacity to laugh and to drink.
2
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(New York: Bantam, 2006).
3
Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 3rd edition; originally published 1962).
4
This quotation has repeatedly, and wrongly, been attributed to Kuhn. In fact, the words are those of a science writer reviewing Kuhn’s book: Nicholas Wade, “Thomas S. Kuhn: Revolutionary Theorist of Science,”
Science
197, no. 4299 (1997): 144.
7
Darren Staloff, “James’s Pragmatism,” a lecture in the series “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition,” produced by the Teaching Company.
8
William James,
Pragmatism
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1916), p. 107 (italics mine).
9
Mary Baker Eddy,
Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures
(Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1875), p. 587.
Index
Accelerator machines, pilots in
Achterberg, Jeanne
AIDS
prayer and
spirituality and
Albuquerque Journal
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
Alcoholism
recovery from
spiritual experience and
Alicia (recovered alcoholic)
Americans
belief in God
and prayer
Amygdala
electrical stimulation
temporal lobe epilepsy and
Angular gyrus, malfunction
“Anthropic Principle,”
Antidepressant drugs
Anxious ego dissolution
Apostle,The
(movie)
Arnott, John
Aspect, Alain
Astin, John
Astonishing Hypotheses
,
The
(Crick)
Atheism, and transcendence
Attitude, and disease outcome
Auditory spiritual experiences
Augustine, Saint
Autoscopic seizures
Ayahuasca
Ayala,Terrence
Baby boomers, and evangelical churches
Baine, Michael
Barkley, Gregory
Barrow, John
Beard, A.W.
Beauregard, Mario
Bedard, Gilles
Behaviorism
Belief in God
Benson, Herbert
Bible
Blackmore, Susan6
Blanke, Olaf
Blind Faith
(Sloan)
Blindness, and spiritual sight
Body, and mind
Bonds, emotional
Borg, Jacqueline
Bowyer, Susan
Bradley, Mary Ann
Brain
changes in
chemicals of
and consciousness
dying
electrical activity
epilepsy and
and mind
science and
and mystical experience
and near-death experiences 6
and out-of-body experiences8
plasticity of
as radio receiver
remolding of
spiritual
spiritual center
and spiritual experience
Persinger’s view
study of
training of
transformation of
Brain scans
of Buddhist monks
of Carmelite nuns
for glossolalia
for near-death experiences
Brain-wave activity
manipulation of
Brave New World
(Huxley)
Breast cancer, emotions and
Breath
Bright,Vicky
Britton,Willoughby
Broken hand, healing of
Brokenness
AA and
Bucke, Richard
Buddhist monks
brain scans
brain waves
parietal lobes
thalamus
Burnham, Sophy
Bush babies, injured, prayer and
Byrd, R. C.
Cancer patients
emotions and
psychedelic drugs and
Carmelite nuns
brain scans
Catherine of Genoa, Saint
Catherine de’ Ricci, Saint
Caudate nucleus
Celeste, Sister (Franciscan nun)
Center for Positive Connections
Centering prayer
brain-imaging studies
glossolalia and
Change, spiritual experience and
Charismatic Christians
Chemically induced experience
Chemist, God as
Chemistry, of spiritual experience
Children, mystical
Christ.
See
Jesus
Christian Science
and God
and healing
loss of faith in
and lost objects
and spiritual senses
Christian Science Monitor, The
Christianity, exclusivity of
Churches, evangelical
Clinical populations
Cloninger, Robert
self-transcendence test
Cole-Turner, Ron
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Collective unconscious, Jung and
Collins, Francis
Comings, David
Communication with God
Compassion meditation training
Conceptualizing, temporal lobes and
Consciousness
altered states
brain and
causal
after death
forms of, James’s view
new level of
non-local
psychedelic drugs and
science and
Contemplative brains
Conversions, n3
epileptic seizures and
James and
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Cortisol
Cosmic consciousness, Bucke and
Couples, bonded
Courtemanche, Jerome
Cousins, Norman
Craftsman, God as
Creativity, brain activity and
Crick, Francis
Culture
and religious choice
and spirituality
Dalai Lama
D’Aquili, Eugene
Darwin, Charles
Davidson, Richard
Dawkins, Richard
Death, fear of, psychedelic drugs and
Delta brain waves
Depression, and physical health
Devinsky, Orrin
Dewhurst, Kenneth
Dirac, Paul
Disease, Christian Science and
Distant healing, science and
Dittrich, Adolf
Divided self, religious conversion and
Divine intelligence, science and
DNA and spirituality, study on
Doors of Perception
,
The
(Huxley)
Dopamine
regulatory gene
Dossey, Barbie
Dossey, Larry
Recovering the Soul
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
DPT (hallucinogen)
Durkheim, Émile, and mystics
Duvall, Robert
Dying patients
Dyson, Freeman
Ears, healing of, in Christian Science
Eaton, Don
Ecstasy (drug)
Ecstatic Journey
,
The
(Burnham)
Eddy, Mary Baker
definition of God
Einstein, Albert
and God
Electrical reactions in brain
Electrician, God as
Emotional bonds20
Emotional release
Emotions
brain-wave activity and