by Lynne McTaggart
Ed Note: This is a follow-up and expansion of an article on the initial findings of the first-ever, long-distance double-blind group intention experiment in history which occurred March 10-11, 2007. Participants included 400 attendees of the first Intention Experiment Conference in London and consciousness researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson.For background: theglobalintelligencer.com/mar2007/life-health
LONDON, UK - Now that we’ve carried out a number of our Intention Experiments, it’s safe to say that nothing we’ve learned was what we imagined we’d find, but everything we did find offered another extraordinary piece of the puzzle about the power of intention. Many of our new answers beg many more questions, the answers to which may be yielded up in future experiments.
We have run five experiments thus far, one with German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp and his colleague Dutch psychologist Eduard Van Wijk at the International Institute of Biophysics, and four with psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness Research.
All experiments concerned examining the alteration in the tiny light — called biophoton emissions — being emitted from living things. We chose to look at this tiny current of light because it is infinitely more subtle than, say, cellular growth rate. The tiniest change in the organism can be controlled for. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, which can register an intensity of visible light of about 10–17 watts per square centimetre, analogous to the light coming from a candle several kilometres away. Schwartz used a highly sensitive CCD cameras, which record and photograph the faint light of outer space.
This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.
For our first intention experiment we gathered a group of experienced meditators in London, and had them send positive intention to four targets at Popp’s IIB laboratory in Neuss, Germany. This included two very simple organisms: the algae Acetabularia acetabulum, a strange freak of nature, consisting of a single cell and dinoflagellates, a type of primitive fluorescent ‘animal’, the light emissions of which is extraordinarily responsive to change. With such primitive organisms, Popp explained, it would be possible to demonstrate, with a fair degree of certainty, that any effect, for better or worse, was entirely the result of our remote influence. As both Popp and Schwartz have cautioned many times, if we were going to attempt to do intention experiments, we need to begin on the ground floor – and dinoflagellates were certainly that.
Eventually Popp acquiesced to including the use of several other subjects: a jade plant, and a human subject whom Eduard felt he could enlist. Each would constitute a separate experiment, and then we would have several results to compare.
In our experimental design, we aimed for an ‘on off, on off’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Popp suggested that we have our group send intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off, so that we would be ‘running’ intention a few times every hour. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.
As change of any sort is easier to see with something ill that you try to make well, we decided to stress some of our subjects in some way. The most obvious way to stress a life form is to place it in a hostile medium. Van Wijk decided to pour some vinegar into the medium of the dinoflagellates. We could stress the jade plant by sticking a needle through one of its fleshy leaves. Eduard ultimately decided to stress our human subject with three cups of coffee. We decided to leave the Acetabularia alone, to test whether our intentions could also affect a healthy organism.
The experiment ran at night, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eduard would turn on the equipment, and I selected three half-hour windows within that time frame to carry out our group intentions unbeknownst to either our scientists or Annemarie, our human target a laser biologist and meditator of long standing. The 16 meditators and I met on March 28, 2006 at 5:30 pm and sent intentions to all four targets from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at every hour on the hour to 10 minutes past and from 20 past until the half hour.
When analysing the data, once they’d received our meditation schedule, van Wijk studied not only the intensity of light but also its deviation from symmetry: normal emissions from a living thing, when plotted on a graph as a bell curve, are perfectly symmetrical. He also looked at any deviations in the kurtosis, or the customary ‘peakedness’, of the distribution. High kurtosis means a bell curve that is high around the middle, or mean. Again, when emissions are plotted on a graph, the normal peak distribution is 0 – the highs and lows cancel each other out.
After examining our 12 block periods – the six times we sent intention and the six periods of rest – he found no change in light intensity. But he did find large changes in the skewness, showing a lack of the customary symmetry (from 1.124 to 0.922) and kurtosis (from 2.403 to 1.581) of the emissions. Something in the light was profoundly altered.
The most interesting aspect of these results is that they exactly match those van Wijk had observed during a study of healers, when he had tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place.
In the study, when he had placed some algae with a photon counter in the presence of a healer and his patients and measured the photons of the algae during 36 healings, he had been surprised to discover that the photon count distributions of the algae had ‘remarkable’ alterations during the healing rituals. Large shifts in the cyclical components of the emissions had occurred. His tiny study had suggested that healing caused a shift in the light emissions of everything in its path. Now he had discovered the same effect when simple intention was sent by ordinary people from 300 miles away.
As for the two algae and the jade plant, in all three instances, our subjects registered a significant decrease in biophotons during the meditation sessions, compared with the control periods. The dinoflagellates had been killed by the vinegar, in the end; nevertheless, Popp said, their response (a lowering of emissions by nearly 140,000) was significantly different from the normal emissions of a dying organism. Among the survivors, the Acetabularia, the healthy subject, had evidenced a larger effect than the jade plant, perhaps because it was not overcoming a stress (544 emissions lower than normal), whereas with the jade plant (which had 65.5 emissions lower than normal), the stress (the pin) remained in the leaf during the experiment.
During meditation, Popp wrote in his report, ‘there is a clear preference of dropping down reactions rather than going up’, which tracked the times of our intentions. With the Acetabularia, we had had an overall decrease over the norm of 573 emissions, and an increase of only 29.
Our little meditation effort had created a major healing effect, a significant decrease in living light. Not only that, but the effect from all that distance was similar to the effect by an experienced healer when healing in the same room. The intention of our group had created the same light as a healer’s.
