Ingrid Pettersson’s husband died in late 2013 only four weeks after being diagnosed with a rare cancer. Although his oncologist had been confident that his cancer was treatable, he was deeply affected by the pessimistic attitude of his home-health nurses and their gloomy prognosis, particularly their repeated pronouncements that he’d never resume normal activity like driving again. Ingrid stood by watching helplessly as her husband seemed just to give up.
As a result of his rapid decline and death, Ingrid had to close his thriving business and move out of their new apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden. Within months she was beset with financial difficulties. For most of the early part of that year she was overwhelmed by shock, grief, and depression at her dramatic loss and her suddenly changed circumstances.
Four years before her husband died, she had joined one of my workshops and experienced a profound transformation in a Power of Eight group. Her whole appearance changed: her skin was shining, she’d felt much younger and energized than she used to be, and was healthier than ever. “I felt so good and I attracted more of what I wanted in life and even my relationship improved,” she said. Her friends and even her doctor remarked upon this major difference in her health and appearance, a change that continued on for about a half year, but as she returned to “old habits” all the good changes slowly “dropped away.”
Several months after her husband’s death, she remembered that experience and decided to join in with a large-scale experiment of ours targeting a person with posttraumatic stress disorder. After participating, her debilitating grief vanished. “Since your last experiment, it is all gone,” she wrote. “I could not believe it. It is just amazing.” For the first time in months Ingrid had a good night’s sleep and woke up energized and felt happier than she had in a long time. “The negativities and even my grief after my husband died did not seem to affect me as much as it had done during the last months.” And best of all, she said, “I got back the flow in my life.” After the experiment she decided to start a new career organizing workshops in energy healing in Gothenburg and Stockholm.
Ingrid gave me another important clue about the rebound effects of the global Intention Experiments. Her epiphany had occurred during the first global Intention Experiment that targeted a single human being in early 2014. Up to that point, I’d allowed only smaller groups—Power of Eight groups or Intentions of the Week—to target people. I’d avoided any formal large-scale experiments on human subjects mainly because I was unsure whether a group of intenders numbering in the many thousands would have a positive or negative result, particularly after the increased violence that had occurred during the Sri Lankan Experiment. After the Intentions of the Week had some success, the Peace Experiments turned out to have positive results, and many of the global experiments suggested that size of group made no difference to the outcome, I decided to press ahead with our first big experiment on a human being. This was going to require the most careful baby step of all, and an opportunity to test it out had fallen into my lap in October 2013, when I was invited to deliver a few lectures in Hawaii.
Along Bishop Street, amid the modern glass and steel high-rises of downtown Honolulu, stands a bit of architectural whimsy, the Dillingham Transportation Building, a particularly fine example of Italian Renaissance Revival and a monument to Hawaii’s most famous double act, Benjamin Franklin Dillingham and his son “Uncle” Walter, both of whom recognized that the key to transforming this sleepy little clutch of islands into a modern cash cow was sugarcane and a means of moving it from one side of the islands to the other. The father built the railroads, and the son, through his own construction company and a number of political favors, drained the wetlands, extended a number of ports, and finished the job of commercializing the islands. Two floors above the ground-floor arcade and stone quoins of the Dillingham building’s exterior and the gilded Art Deco lobby in a small corner suite resides the office of another father-and-son team with an equally immodest goal: to change the face of modern medicine, using state-of-the-art video technology.
Like the Dillinghams, the Drouins are transplants, French Canadians from Quebec, Dr. Paul Drouin, a medical doctor who practiced for twenty-five years by integrating the best of conventional and alternative medicine. The censure of some peers, his growing frustration about the closemindedness of the profession with its total unwillingness to entertain the worth of any kind of alternative medicine, and the implications of new discoveries about quantum effects in biology led him to a big idea: to create a university that would give doctors and health professionals an opportunity to learn about the new science and alternative theories of treatment and to incorporate this knowledge into their careers.
Dr. Drouin’s vision began to take shape after he joined forces with his then twenty-five-year-old son Alexi, who holds a degree in film and television, and who had his own big idea: to make the university entirely virtual. He would film leading authors, academics, and practitioners lecturing about quantum physics or their work in modalities of alternative medicine in front of a green screen and embed these courses on iPads, which would be automatically offered to every student. Thanks to Alexi’s perfectionism and technical virtuosity, the green screen transformed into a modern television news desk, and the lectures were professionally presented, complete with PowerPoint slides.
By then the duo had moved to Honolulu, where the process of getting accredited held less red tape, and christened their fledgling institution the Quantum University for Integrative Medicine. To date, the university has enrolled nine thousand students, many of whom have gone on to complete their PhDs. “I’m the form, he’s the content,” says Alexi, pointing to Dr. Paul, as the students know him, an irrepressible sixty-five-year-old with a thick French accent and a jack-o’-lantern grin, who regularly features on many courses as the well-loved face of Quantum U.
Students and teachers have a single opportunity every year to connect in person with each other at the university’s annual conference, and it was there, in October 2013, where I was invited to speak that I met the Drouins and began to kick around the possibility of doing an Intention Experiment with them on their web platform. One night during dinner with the Drouins and the other conference speakers, Dr. Jeffrey Fannin, director of the Center for Cognitive Enhancement (now known as Thought Genius) generously offered both to donate his time for the entire project and to find some willing volunteers to participate in the experiment. Dr. Fannin holds a PhD in psychology, with a particular interest in neuroscience, and has a good deal of experience in studying and, through EEGs, mapping the brain waves of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. As Quantum University has its own television station, the Drouins could broadcast the event on web TV, Alexi assuring me that they had more than adequate bandwidth for the thousands we expected to sign up. Ever the technical innovator, he also had a plan to increase what my British neighbors refer to as the bread-and-circuses aspect of the event: he was fairly sure that he could show the effects on our subject’s brains happening in real time.
In the next few months while we were planning how to achieve such a complex technical feat, two patients of Dr. Fannin suffering from anxiety offered to allow themselves essentially to be experimented upon using what is, by any regard, a most unusual therapy: the power of strangers’ thoughts. One would act as the target; the other, the control, but both would be blinded to who had been chosen as the subject. During the months prior to the experiment, Alexi helped to publicize the event by sending out numerous Facebook announcements, and by the time we were ready to go, we had more than seven thousand people signed up.
Alexi had set himself up for his greatest technical challenge to date. On April 24, the day of the event, his cameras would show alternating split screens between Jeffrey, who’d be connected via Skype; me on another Skype screen; Dr. Paul, who would be moderating from the studio; and both patients, who’d be attached to EEG machines. Although he wouldn’t feature much in the broadcast, an EEG was also attached to Mario, our “intender” sitting in another room, who would participate with our audience in sending intention to the chosen target so that we could compare his brain waves during intention with those of our target.
Human brain waves come in different speeds, from the very slowest, which are delta and theta (5–8 Hz or cycles per second), associated with deep meditation and sleep, to alpha brain waves (of 8–13 Hz), which also occur during light dreaming or meditation, to beta waves (around 13–30 Hz), for everyday cognitive tasks, and gamma (above 30 Hz), a state of extreme focus. Jeffrey’s work entails translating the results of EEG readings into a tomography, or qEEG, showing different frequencies of a person’s brain waves and comparing them to “normal” brain waves, and his equipment can display in real time the percentage of certain brain waves present in a person at any moment. For our broadcast, Alexi had also rigged up an additional screen to be trained on both EEG machines, showing the percentage of different brain waves currently activated, which were depicted as flashing bands of different colors, stretching and receding horizontally.
On the day of the event, thanks to Alexi’s skill, all the screens meshed together beautifully. Our choice of the target, chosen from a top hat, turned out to be Todd Voss, a veteran of two wars, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraqi war, who’d been diagnosed with PTSD after coming home. He suffered a deep depression and was hypervigilant. Whenever he went into a room, he found it necessary to sit with his back to the wall, always scanning and looking for threats. He also had trouble sleeping. The Veteran Association’s response to his condition was to prescribe a load of medications, but Todd knew the drugs would just put a “Band-Aid” on his experience, and he was eager for any nondrug solution to his problem. Our intention was to attempt to calm down Todd by at least 25 percent and also to focus on increasing the alpha waves of his brain (the brain waves associated with greater calm and peace).
With brain mapping, a person’s entire brain frequency activity is depicted as a “map” of thirty little “heads” in different colors, each representing certain frequencies of brain waves. Green depicts wave frequencies that correspond most to “normal”; and a rainbow of other colors are used to show how much a person’s brain waves deviate from normal (red, for instance, shows several deviations more than normal; blue, several deviations lower than normal).
Jeffrey had carried out brain maps on both Todd and Kathy, our control person, before the experiment and would be doing so again during the experiment, after the experiment, and then a few weeks later, in mid-May.
We had asked our audience to concentrate on increasing the number of Todd’s alpha waves, which were depicted as bands of turquoise, by having them stretch out and become more prominent; during the experiment, courtesy of the split screen, we were fascinated to watch the effects of our collective intention in real time as the bands of turquoise began to stretch.
Brain mapping done before the experiment had revealed certain areas of Todd’s brain with a frequency “signature” characteristic of PTSD, but various brain maps made during the Intention Experiment determined that Todd’s alpha waves had increased to three standard deviations above normal after our intention. Most exciting of all, the area of the brain most representative of PTSD was almost completely normal during the experiment.
Other analysis demonstrated that coherence within the brain—the ability of the brain waves to work better together and stay working together—also had improved. After Dr. Fannin worked out what is called an independent t-test to determine the statistical significance of the experiment, he discovered less than a 1 percent probability that these results occurred through chance.
The same effects were not evident in the brain maps of either Kathy or Mario, our intender, both of whom experienced virtually no change in alpha brain waves. This appeared to rule out the possibility that the changed outcome might be the result of the placebo effect, particularly as neither Kathy nor Todd knew whom we’d chosen until after the event.
The results were initially very encouraging, but there were a few problems with the study design we had to acknowledge. One difficulty with an experiment of this type, which uses a highly novel medical intervention, is finding willing volunteers and also carrying out such an experiment at reasonable cost.
For potential targets, Jeffrey was limited to those among his own patient base who were willing to undergo such an experiment, most of whom had already begun treatment with him. Todd Voss had previously undergone two kinds of brain training, one with Dr. Fannin, and part of this training involves teaching techniques to lower stress by increasing a person’s own alpha brain waves. However, when Todd’s symptoms returned, Dr. Fannin regarded him as a deserving candidate for our experiment.
A week after the event, Todd described himself as very much improved—well enough to plan some extensive travel. He no longer felt the need for any more clinical sessions for his PTSD, and within the next year, would go on to get married and have a child. His clinical experience and recent brain maps were compelling, but because Todd was previously taught techniques that purport to achieve the exact effect that we were attempting to achieve by intention, it was impossible for us to declare categorically that any changes in his brain were due to our thoughts alone, rather than his own brain training.
While it was gratifying to me that Todd was feeling so much better, an even more compelling part of the story emerged when I checked in with our participants several weeks later. This time, nearly one-fifth reported some sort of pronounced physical improvement.
“My carpal tunnel injury improved, and I felt very relaxed. Even slept better.”
“I suffered with my knee for almost three years. After this experiment all the pain I used to have was gone, completely.”
“A previously chronic condition in my back and knees is feeling better.”
“Last ten days I have regular digestion (I had constipation for almost twenty years).”
“I had relief in my hip as if I had taken some pain relief.”
“The pain in the knee is completely gone.”
“Painful hip issue appears to be healing.”
“I believe my body is ‘recalibrating’ in some way.”
“I used to have colon problems, not anymore. :)”
“Continuing improvement to skin condition.”
“No longer experiencing sciatic pain.”
“I sleep better, and anxiety and panic attacks have disappeared.”
“Having suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for the last few years, . . . I am seeing subtle, but regular, signs of improvement. I am having less pain and anxiety.”
“I feel like I am finally ready to deal with my own PTSD on a physical level.”
The results were even more amazing in the weeks that followed. Nearly half of our respondents were healing their relationships: clients, ex-husbands, siblings, neighbors, parents. This time the emphasis was not simply on more peace in relationships, but on healing old wounds. Sandra reconnected with her mother, whom she ordinarily only spoke to by phone a handful of times a year. “We had a conversation as we have never had in my life.”
Two participants reconnected with their sisters, forgave past hurts, and were able to see each other “with new eyes.” “I’m getting along with my older sister and that never happens. It’s like her heart is softening or opening,” said one. Another participant healed a relationship with a coworker. Marie healed her connection with her husband. “My husband looks at me like I met him yesterday and it feels so good!”
“My life—everything about it—my health, relationships, outlook, energy level, happiness, openness, etc.—just keep improving,” wrote Sophie. “I’ve plainly shifted.”
I thought of Ingrid Pettersson’s grief, and it finally dawned on me what might be happening: the rebound effect on participants mirrored the intention itself. If they prayed for peace, their lives became more peaceful. If they tried to heal someone else, they experienced a healing in their own lives. Focusing on healing someone else brings on a mirrored healing.