A good reporter is a disrupter of the social order, her weaponry the meticulous recording of observable phenomena. You start with what is known and build on it, one fact at a time, like a scientist or a detective. Scientists can also be harbingers of inconvenient truths, as the best scientist, I’m told, likes to be proved wrong.
Both reporters and scientists begin by making certain assumptions. You construct your hypothesis, you design a way to test it, and then you sit back to see where you land. Sometimes you discover that you’ve been following the wrong directions and you have arrived on uncharted territory. And if you are a true explorer, you’re delighted to be there because it’s often when your hypothesis is wrong that you learn something radically new about the way the world works.
But how do you prove something that defies every law that you’ve been taught? What if your entire premise is outside the bounds of what is known or observable? What if you were trying to locate the mathematical equation for a miracle?
When I began our first global Intention Experiments in March 2007, fifteen months before that first workshop, we were also flying completely blind. We had no maps to draw on or precedent to follow; virtually no one had ventured into my area of inquiry—group intention. A solid body of scientific research had shown that human thoughts could change physical reality, with all manner of targets, from electrical equipment to other human beings. Dean emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering Robert Jahn and his colleague, psychologist Brenda Dunne, who ran the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, for instance, had spent thirty years painstakingly amassing some of the most convincing evidence about the power of directed thoughts to affect electronic machinery. Among many ingenious random event generators, or REG machines, as they came to call them, they had built special computer programs that randomly alternated the appearance of two images, say, of cowboys and Indians, each 50 percent of the time. Jahn and Dunne would place participants in front of computer screens and ask them to try to influence the machine to produce more Indians, then more cowboys. 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 one or another specified direction, and their results were replicated independently by sixty-eight investigators.
The late William Braud, a psychologist and the research director of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and, later, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, had conducted a large body of research showing that thoughts can affect the movement of animals and have powerful effects on the autonomic nervous system (fight-or-flight mechanisms) and states of stress of human beings.
During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the late Dr. Elisabeth Targ devised an ingenious, highly controlled pair of studies, in which some forty remote healers across the United States were shown to improve the health and survival of terminal AIDS patients, just by sending healing thoughts, even though the healers had never met or been in contact with their patients.
Many formal and informal mass meditation groups had also reported positive results in lowering violence. The Transcendental Meditation organization, founded by the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had carried out a number of studies of large groups of meditators, offering some provocative evidence that if 1 percent of the population is practicing ordinary TM meditation and the square root of 1 percent of the population is practicing TM-Sidhi, a more advanced type of meditation, violence of any sort, from murders to traffic accidents, decreases.
But almost no experiments had been conducted on the effect of lots of people sending the same thought to the same target at the same time.
Without precedent to draw upon in terms of group experiments, we were left with many imponderables. What was the best wording for an intention? Should we be specific in our intention statement or put out a general request that the target be affected in some way and let the universe decide exactly how? Should the intention senders all be in the same room together, or could each of them be in their individual homes, in front of their computer screens? If we carried out the experiment over the internet, as we’d planned to do, did our senders have to have some “live” connection with the target, like a live feed from the laboratory? Did distance matter, and would the power of intention wane the farther you were from their target? What’s the optimum time to hold the thought for it to work? Will any old time do, or does the universe have to be in the mood? And was there an optimal number of participants necessary to produce a measurable effect? Like the TM studies, did we need a similar critical mass of people to have an effect?
We were going to have to test those questions, one painstaking step at a time.
Possibly the biggest question of all was who, among credible scientists, was willing to put his reputation on the line to do this work with me for free. Luckily, a number of scientists, like me, have a low-grade spirituality that infuses their lives and influences the research they want to do, and I soon discovered a willing volunteer for the earliest experiments in Dr. Gary Schwartz, a psychologist and director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona. Gary has impeccable credentials: Phi Beta Kappa honors and a degree from Cornell University, a PhD from Harvard, assistant professorship at Harvard, tenured professorship at Yale, and directorship of the Yale Psychophysiology Center and Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic. Despite this impressive pedigree, by 1988, Gary felt restricted by the fusty world of East Coast academia and left it for the open spaces and open-mindedness of the University of Arizona, where, as a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery, he could teach with the additional freedom to pursue essentially any research he wanted. This freedom was amplified in 2002, when Gary received a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine to create a Center for Frontier Medicine and Biofield Science. Gary had already carried out a wealth of experiments in energy medicine and had a full lab at his disposal, now the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, entirely devoted to research into the nature of healing.
A stocky, ebullient man then in his early sixties with an air of constant urgency, Gary is a bustling hive of enthusiasms, which he has managed to work into his university curriculum as subjects worthy of graduate and undergraduate study.
By the time I first made contact with him, Gary’s enthusiasms had veered toward the very outer boundaries of the human mind. Long before he agreed to get involved in my work he’d carried out a wealth of studies examining energy forms of healing and the nature of consciousness, including the Afterlife Experiments, a series of controlled studies, carefully designed to eliminate cheating and fraud, to test whether mediums in fact could communicate with the dead. His batch of mediums turned out to have an accuracy rate of 83 percent, producing more than eighty pieces of information about deceased relatives, from names and personal oddities to details about the nature of their deaths. Gary is generally up for almost anything, so long as it can be scientifically quantified. He was one scientist who would not be fazed by the idea of lots of people trying to fix a world problem by the power of positive thinking.
Nevertheless, like most scientists, he had an instinctive regard for caution, and he insisted that we proceed one baby step at a time in our global Intention Experiments. In science, you start at the absolute beginning with the most basic question you can ask. We’d start with “vegetable” and work our way through “mineral” and “animal” with experimental models that would be very simple initially and grow in complexity over time. First we’d use plants as targets, then perhaps water, and finally human beings.
I was crestfallen at having to start with plants. When I launched the Intention Experiment in 2007, I had big plans. I wanted to save people from burning buildings. I’d imagined big collective intentions to cure cancer, then repair the ozone layer, before moving on to ending violence in hot spots around the world.
To all these big ideas of mine, Gary would continuously quote from the opening scene of the movie Contact, where Ted Arroway is counseling his impulsive young daughter Ellie, who is on their ham radio and trying to get someone out there to tune in, secretly hoping that that particular someone will be from outer space.
“Small moves, Ellie,” Gary said to me repeatedly, echoing Arroway. “Small moves.” As he kept reminding me, we were working with an experimental design that had never been attempted before. First we had to establish that the thoughts of a group of people could have an effect—any effect. Only after we’d been able to demonstrate that could we even consider larger and more extravagant targets. We had to take it one faltering baby step at a time.
Although I appreciated his desire for rigor, any decisions continued to be a tug-of-war between my blue-sky imaginings and Gary’s scientific caution. Okay, let’s see if we can lower global warming, I’d say to Gary during one of our periodic brainstorming sessions over the phone.
How about we start with a leaf, he’d reply. And when we’re done, we’ll move on to seeds.
As Gary ultimately convinced me, targeting one of the simpler biological systems like a leaf or seeds helps to limit the endless variables present in a living thing, the myriad chemical and electrical processes occurring simultaneously every moment. Only by starting off with the simpler types of biological systems could we demonstrate that any changes were caused by the power of intention and not a vast array of other possibilities. And plants were clean, safe subjects. Using a plant or indeed anything nonhuman as our subject meant we wouldn’t have to put our proposed study through a university internal review board, set up to make sure that human studies are carried out ethically, which could easily hold up the experiment for months.
The kind of scientific experiments we could carry out would normally be limited by the measuring equipment we could get our hands on. Fortunately, Gary’s lab, housed in an unassuming one-story modern pink stucco block at the university, was a sprawling Aladdin’s cave of sophisticated equipment capable of registering the tiniest flicker of change in a living organism. Gary had been highly influenced by the work of the late German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, who, while investigating a cure for cancer, discovered that all living things, from algae to human beings, emit a tiny current of light. Popp gave his discovery the ponderous title of “biophoton emissions” and spent the rest of his life attempting to convince the scientific establishment that this dribble of faint light represented a living organism’s primary means of communicating within itself and also the outside world. He grew to believe that this light was nothing less than the body’s central conductor, responsible for coordinating millions of molecular reactions inside the body and its central means of orienting itself to its environment via a two-way communication system. By the time of his death in 2014, the German government and more than fifty scientists around the world had come to agree with him.
Popp had built and developed several photomultipliers to record this faint light, and Gary wanted to take this one stage further by using equipment to actually photograph it. He’d already managed to talk a professor of radiology into giving him access to a $100,000 digital charged-coupled device (CCD) camera system ordinarily used in astronomy and capable of photographing the faintest light from distant galaxies after realizing such a device would enable him to create digital photos of the subtle light emissions from living things and to count them, one pixel at a time. Even before we began working together, he had used forty thousand dollars of his grant money to purchase his own, cheaper version, a piece of equipment that would enable us to start from the ground floor. Measuring whether the power of thoughts has any effect in changing this tiny current of light would be far more subtle than, say, examining our effect on growth rate, and equipment this sensitive would enable us to capture every single hairbreadth of difference in the change of light emissions from any living thing, Gary assured me.
When scientists start out on a new experiment, the usual first step is to stand on the shoulders of the people who have ventured into the territory before, which is why they like to repeat what has already been demonstrated in previous experiments before investigating something new. For our trial run, we aimed to replicate the pilot study we’d carried out with Fritz Popp, which I wrote about in The Intention Experiment. In that experiment, sixteen experienced meditators and I had assembled in London and sent healing intention to four targets in Popp’s lab in Neuss, Germany—two kinds of algae, a jade plant, and a woman—all of whom had been stressed in some way. Measurements of all the targets showed we’d had a strong effect in changing the tiny light emissions during the times we’d sent healing intention.
For that first Intention Experiment, however, we didn’t have what most true scientific experiments insist on: a set of matched controls—similar subjects that, unlike the targets, are not the object of any changing agent. Our “control” had been just the half-hour periods when we were resting and not “running” intention, and also the fact that we’d not told the scientists when we were doing what. This time Gary and I would have two near-identical targets subjected to the same conditions; we would randomly pick one of them to send intention to and use the other as our control. Once again the studies would be “blinded”; the scientists would be kept “blind” about which target we’d chosen until after they’d calculated the results, so that no unconscious bias would influence the results in any way.
After kicking around a number of possibilities for the first major Intention Experiment, we eventually decided on a geranium leaf, picked off a thriving geranium plant in Gary’s Arizona lab, as our first target. We enlisted the attendees of a conference run by my company on March 11, 2007, and asked them to send intention to lower the “glow” of one of the two geranium leaves we’d randomly selected, which would be constantly photographed by a webcam shown to our audience via a gigantic screen.
A major reason for Gary’s initial caution in the choice of our first target had to do with the way you have to prove something scientifically. To show that something works according to standard scientific protocol, you need to demonstrate statistical significance, a mathematical demonstration that your results weren’t arrived at accidentally but as a consequence of whatever it is you are testing, and to do that, you need a certain critical mass of the item you are studying. Science agrees that significance is anything less than “p<.05,” which indicates less than a one in twenty chance that your results aren’t arrived at by chance.
For our results to achieve true statistical significance, we needed more than thirty points of comparison between the two leaves, or what scientists call “data points.” Managing that in even a rudimentary experiment like ours would nevertheless require a painstaking fifty-step protocol followed by Gary’s young lab technician, Mark Boccuzzi. Mark would select two geranium leaves identical in size and number of light emissions and then puncture each leaf sixteen times in a 1.6 inch by 1.6 inch grid, a process that would take several hours of preparation. The plan was for Mark to place both leaves under his digital cameras, send the images to Peter, our first Intention Experiment webmaster, and then stand by, waiting for the signal that our group intention was finished, at which point he would use the CCD camera to photograph each leaf.
Originally, we planned to have our participants attempt to lower the light emissions, as we had in the Popp experiment. But the healthy light of a living organism defies common sense; the lower the level of light in the main, the healthier the organism. As March 11 approached, I began to think that our participants would naturally feel prompted to increase it. Right before the experiment, Gary and I decided to reverse the instruction in order to increase the leaf’s light emissions. I wasn’t thrilled about this experimental protocol. When you deliberately increase something’s light, you are actually stressing it. So essentially our entire experiment was to be an exercise in injuring a living thing, even if it was just one leaf about to drop off a plant.
On the day of the conference we flipped a coin to decide our target; the other leaf would act as our control.
Gary and I had also decided that participants should focus their minds on the intention for ten minutes, an arbitrary time frame that we had chosen because we felt that any longer would be hard for them to sustain. An hour before the experiment was to begin, I’d started to worry that asking the audience to focus their thoughts for that amount of time might prove difficult without some sort of mind anchor. I asked my husband, Bryan, to consult with Mel Carlile, who ran the Mind-Body-Spirit bookshop for our conference, if he might be able to recommend meditation music for us to play during the experiment. “Here, try the first track, ‘Choku Rei,’ ” said Mel, handing Bryan a CD of Jonathan Goldman’s album Reiki Chants.
Right before we began, Gary got on the phone to wish the audience good luck. “Remember,” he added, “you are making scientific history.”
A giant image of our leaf appeared on the screen. I instructed the audience in the “Powering Up” techniques that I’d created and published in The Intention Experiment. “Make the little leaf glow and glow,” I said. “Imagine it glowing in your mind’s eye.”
The intenders kept holding their intention while the hypnotic meditative music played in the background for ten minutes. Later I was astonished to discover that Choku Rei essentially means strengthening the power, flow, and focus of healing energy—something akin to “Powering Up.” Maybe there are no accidents.
At the time, though, I felt ridiculous standing there on that stage. In my investigative reporter days, I had been fastidious about the standard journalistic practice of gathering at least two independent sources of evidence as the minimum requirement before I would regard something as fact. It was such a hard-and-fast rule with me that one evening in 1979, during the writing of my first book, The Baby Brokers, an exposé of the private adoption market, I had stayed up that entire night, poring over what I had about a fellow who’d set up a string of adoption agencies in different states and countries. His practices seemed highly dubious, and he’d even made a veiled threat during one phone interview, but I was weighed down by the knowledge that one slipup could unfairly ruin this person’s life, even if, to all appearances, that person was somebody trafficking in human beings. I don’t have it, I finally decided at 6 a.m. about one accusation I’d been preparing to make: I can’t confirm this as a fact. Although my gut forcefully argued otherwise, I softened the story.
And now, here I was, all these years later leading my audience in a prayer to a leaf. Everything about this was violating my own two-sources rule. In fact, it was violating every last bit of the pertinacious, fact-gathering side of me.
After the ten-minute-intention period was completed, Mark placed both leaves in the biophoton imaging system and photographed them for two hours. The conference ended, everyone went back to their respective countries, and we waited to hear what had occurred on the other side of the world in a small laboratory in Arizona.
“You won’t believe it,” Gary said giddily on the phone to me several days later, after I’d revealed which leaf had been the target. “The leaf sent intention was glowing so much compared with the other leaf that it seems like the other leaf had a ‘neglect effect.’ ”
The changes from the “glow” intention had been so pronounced that they were visible in the digital images created by the CCD camera. Numerically, the increased biophoton effect was also highly statistically significant. In fact, said Gary, all the punctured holes in the chosen leaf had been filled with light, compared with the holes in the control leaf, which were discernibly less bright.
A week later, he copied me in on an email to Mark: “WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE HOW PRETTY THE DATA ARE . . . images, graphs, and tables . . .” For our official press release about the event, his tone was more measured: “For a first experiment of this kind,” he wrote, “the results could not be more encouraging.”
Buoyed by this overwhelming result, we made plans for our first big online event to run on March 24. One of the cornerstones of our early hypotheses was that the experiment would only work if the audience had some sort of real-time connection with the target, and to achieve this we’d decided to have two live web-camera images of our target and our controls continuously running. At the last minute, Peter, our webmaster, cautioned us not to use webcam images, as we had in our conference experiment, because they might cause the website to freeze if we had thousands of online participants coming onto our website, as appeared likely as the date of the experiment approached. “Inherently webcasts always fail or at the least are very unpredictable,” he wrote.
Mark had set up the next best possibility: two digital cameras, which would feed our website with a continually refreshed image of both leaves every fifteen seconds. Instead of live video of the leaves, we’d be showing live pictures of them to save server power.
My youngest daughter, then age ten, flipped a coin to choose leaf one or two. We’d upgraded to a huge server with extra RAM and turned off all our other websites to maximize our power. And then we waited once again, expecting to carry on making scientific history.
Instead, like thousands of others, I spent the next hour in total frustration, repeatedly trying to enter my website but unable to get past the first page. Peter’s misgivings had proved correct. So many people—an estimated ten thousand—had tried to gain access to the site simultaneously that our website had crashed.
The only thing to do was to announce what had happened and promise our participants that we’d try again as soon as we could, while privately vowing not to promote these experiments so widely in the future so that the size of our audience could again overwhelm our server. Demonstrating the power of intention seemed to be the easy bit. The difficult part was setting up an online technical configuration that would allow thousands of people to see the same live target at the same time.
To avoid another cyber traffic jam we enlisted a new web team and rented a gigantic server from a company that supplied the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol, with nine linked servers to handle the load. Our new webmaster, Tony Wood, from Vision with Technology, and his team, who’d handled the web needs for big companies like the Financial Times, were confident that they could construct something to keep the website from freezing. This time around we’d shut down the home page during the actual experiment, create an HTML page only visible to registered participants of the experiment, and move the actual experiment away from our main Intention Experiment site. But just to be on the safe side, Tony wanted to have a trial run a week before the real event.
On April 21, the day of the trial run, all but a handful of the more than seven thousand people who’d signed up for the experiment got into the site and were able to participate in our “glow” experiment. This time our object was string bean seeds. Again our study worked. As with our March experiment with the audience, we got a positive effect, although not a significant one in scientific terms. This was probably due to the limitations of the CCD camera, which enabled us to photograph only twelve seeds; a minimum requirement for statistical significance is to have at least twenty data points to compare. Although the first experiment concerned only two leaves, Mark had punctured them thirty times each to have more than enough data points, as he would be comparing light emissions coming from each puncture site. This time, with twelve seeds, we had only twelve data points for examining our light emissions. As Gary wrote me about the latest experiment, “If it was possible to image twice as many seeds, the results would have reached statistical significance.”
But when we ran what we were billing as the “actual” experiment the week later on April 28, again with geranium leaves, only five hundred people managed to get through, and the results were inconclusive. In August we decided to go back to basics and repeat our first leaf experiment at a conference in Los Angeles, which replicated our initial results.
Despite this shaky start, we’d answered the biggest question of all: Was any of it actually going to work? Although we’d had two inconclusive results when potential participants couldn’t get onto our web portal, for those times that the bulk of participants did manage to gain access to an image of the target, we’d had three positive results: the March 11 experiment with my London conference audience; the April 14 seed experiment over the internet; and the repeat of our first leaf experiment at the Los Angeles conference. And we’d had strong effects in all three.
You begin by making certain assumptions, you construct your hypothesis, and you hope that a map appears. More experiments had worked than not worked, but beyond that, we didn’t have much else to go on. Had the failures been due only to technical hitches? Or in the case of the April 21 experiment, because of low attendance? Although the website hadn’t held up during that aborted March 24 internet experiment, a number of people who couldn’t get on the site nevertheless had sent intention to a mental image of a geranium leaf, and Gary’s sensitive CCD camera and equipment had picked up some sort of an effect, with a strong trend in the same direction as the conference data.
What did that mean? Was it pure coincidence? Was the lack of significance because the audience had not seen an image of the target, or because of the technical hitches, or was it the fact that the participants were scattered around the globe instead of in the same room, as they had been during our March 11 experiment in London? Did group intention work better when carried out by a focused group in the same physical space, as we’d had at the March conference? Or was it that you had to actually “see” the target in order to affect it?
Was the April 28 experiment unsuccessful because we didn’t have a large enough critical mass of participants, or because of technical problems? Or could it have been, as Gary postulated, “a boredom effect”—my audience had grown tired of participating in essentially the same experiment?
At this point, we did not know the answer to any of these questions. In science, if you find something untoward, you take comfort in the idea that you can test it again, and if it replicates, you can locate the agent of change, and reestablish order, certainty, and a predictable arc of cause and effect.
There was only one thing we’d grown sure of: we’d have to abandon the idea of a live connection with our targets. I simply couldn’t afford to rent giant server capacity every time we wanted to run an experiment. The scientists had always generously donated their time, but when I’d first come up with the Intention Experiment, I hadn’t counted on all the technical costs. To keep the April 21 experiment holding up, it had cost us about nine thousand dollars for a half hour in server power alone, and the creation of special web pages many thousands more—far too much for me or my company to donate on a regular basis. We had to find another way to carry out these experiments and to come up with a study design that was readily replicable so that our results would have some scientific validity.
Basically I had to find the impossible: an enormous amount of server power, a way in which to carry out the experiments cheaply, and a platform that was going to hold up under the pressure of thousands of simultaneous visitors.
But it turned out that the live images didn’t matter at all. When a batch of small groups began spontaneously forming on my internet site and having their own effects on individual members, I realized that all of us, from our separate computer screens, had already made the connection.