Chapter 11

Praying for Yesterday

On the eve of the millennium, Leonard Leibovici, an Israeli professor of internal medicine in Israel and expert on hospital-acquired infections, conducted a study of healing prayer’s effect on nearly 4,000 adults who had developed sepsis while in the hospital. He set up a strict protocol, using a random number generator to randomize the participants into two groups, only one of which would be prayed for, and throughout the study maintained impeccable blinding; neither the patients nor the hospital staff knew who was getting treated—or indeed even knew that a study was being carried out. The names of all those in the treatment group were then handed to an individual, who said a short prayer for the well-being and full recovery of the treated group as a whole. Leibovici was interested in comparing three outcomes between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups: the number of deaths in the hospital; the overall length of stay in the hospital; and the duration of fever. When calculating the results, he was careful to employ several statistical measurements to examine the significance of any differences. As it happened, the group that had been prayed for suffered fewer deaths than the controls (28.1 versus 30.2 percent), although the difference was not statistically significant. What was scientifically significant, however, was the major difference between the prayed-for group and the controls related to the severity of illness and the time it took to heal. Those being prayed for had a far shorter duration of fever and hospital stay and, in general, got better faster than the controls.

The subject of Leibovici’s research—the healing effects of prayer—of course was hardly new. But his study offered one novel twist. The patients had been in the hospital between 1990 and 1996. The praying was carried out in 2000—between four and ten years later.

The study was meant to be a spoof. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) had published it in the Christmas 2001 issue,¹ which is generally reserved for light-hearted commentary, next to a reindeer-shaped cluster of rogue cells. But Leibovici was not joking. He was trying to make a serious point in the most graphic way he could. Leibovici had a particular affinity for mathematics and statistics, and used them repeatedly in his reviews and meta-analyses when evaluating particular procedures. He had even come to believe that diseases and the success of treatment could be predicted through mathematical models.²

But the scientific method, in his view, was being defiled by its careless application to alternative medicine. Two years before, also in the Christmas issue of the BMJ, he had published an article claiming that alternative medicine masquerading as scientific medicine was like a cuckoo chick in a reed warbler’s nest.³ The begging noises of the interloper chick are indistinguishable from those of its warbler counterparts; indeed, as it grows, the cries of the cuckoo are so loud that they match the noise of eight little warblers. The warbler parents ignore any clues that they have an impostor in their midst and continue to nourish the cuckoo chick—to the detriment, even death, of their own offspring. Leibovici was convinced that alternative medicine could not accommodate the demands of scientific rigor—and that we had no business wasting precious time and resources on the cuckoo in the nest.

But with this article, it seemed that Leibovici was the one wasting his time and breath. Most of his colleagues had missed the point so thoroughly that his only recourse was to show them. Two years later, almost to the day, his prayer study appeared in the BMJ.

He had intended that the study would illustrate that you simply cannot use the scientific method to explain subjective things like prayer. The problem was that every one had taken the study at face value. Dozens of skeptics derided the study. As one correspondent wrote, if it were possible to violate the arrow of time in this way, it would allow one to go back in time and prevent the Holocaust from happening by murdering Hitler.⁴

In support of Leibovici, many scientists interested in psychical research claimed that the study offered proof that prayer was effective at any point in time: Larry Dossey, who has also written extensively on “non-local” consciousness and healing,⁵ commented that, in a stroke, Leibovici had turned “conventional notions of time, space, prayer, consciousness and causality” on their heads.⁶ Many others commented that Leibovici had been undone by the very meticulousness of his study design. Leibovici’s study had used only one supplicant to carry out the prayers and had sent the same prayer at the same time for each patient in the treatment group, so many of those in the alternative medicine camp did not believe the study suffered from some of the same problems in design as the other prayer research. To all the correspondents Leibovici retorted in the BMJ letters section:

The purpose of the article was to ask the following question: Would you believe in a study that looks methodologically correct but tests something that is completely out of people’s frame (or model) of the physical world, for example, retroactive intervention or badly distilled water for asthma? ⁷

It was wrong, he was saying, because it had to be wrong. It was statistics tied up in a knot and gone berserk. So that his motive would be clear, he added:

The article has nothing to do with religion. I believe that prayer is a real comfort and help to a believer. I do not believe it should be tested in controlled trials.

Instead, the true purpose was:

To deny from the beginning that empirical methods can be applied to questions that are completely outside the scientific model of the physical world. Or in a more formal way, if the pre-trial probability is infinitesimally low, the results of the trial will not really change it, and the trial should not be performed.

Although he had intended to use science to prove the absurdity of alternative medicine, he had actually ended up proving to many people that we can pray today to affect something that occurred yesterday. Leibovici appeared to deeply regret his study and refused to discuss it further.⁸ Despite all his efforts throughout his career to apply reason and logic to medicine, this was the study that he would be most remembered for—a study that demonstrated, in effect, that we can go back and change the past.

 

One of the most basic assumptions about intention is that it operates according to a generally accepted sense of cause and effect: the cause must always precede the effect. If A causes B, then A must have happened first. This assumption reflects one of our deepest beliefs, that time is a one-way, forward-moving progression. This assumption is reinforced every moment of our ordinary lives. First we order our coffee, then the waitress delivers it to our table. First we order a book from Amazon, then it arrives in the mail. Indeed, the most tangible evidence of time’s arrow is the physical evidence of our own aging; first we are born, then we grow old and die. Similarly, we believe that the consequence of our intentions can occur only in the future. What we do today cannot affect what happened yesterday.

However, a sizable body of the scientific evidence about intention violates these basic assumptions about causation. Research has demonstrated clear instances of time-reversed effects, where effect precedes cause. Leibovici’s study was unique among prayer research in that it was conducted “backward in time”—the healing intention was meant to affect events that had already occurred. But to many frontier scientists, this experiment in “retroprayer” simply represented a true-to-life instance of the time-displacement effects regularly seen in the laboratory. Indeed, some of the largest effects occur when intention is sent out of strict time sequence.

Studies like Leibovici’s offer up the most challenging idea of all: that thoughts can affect other things no matter when the thought is made and, in fact, may work better when they are not subject to a conventional time sequence of causation.

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at PEAR discovered this phenomenon when they investigated time displacement in their REG trials. In some 87,000 of these experiments, volunteers were asked to attempt to mentally influence the “heads” and “tails” random output of REGs in a specific direction anywhere from three days to two weeks after the machines had run. As a whole, the “time-displaced” experiments achieved even greater effects than the standard experiments.⁹ Jahn and Dunne had deemed these differences nonsignificant, only because the number of trials carried out in this manner was tiny compared with the rest of their monumental body of evidence. Nevertheless, the very idea that intention could work equally well “backward,” “forward,” or in sequence made Jahn realize that all our conventional notions of time needed to be discarded.¹⁰ The fact that effects were even larger during the time-displaced studies suggested that thoughts have even greater power when their transmission transcends ordinary time and space.

Retrocausation has been explored in great detail by Dutch physicist Dick Bierman and his colleague Joop Houtkooper of the University of Amsterdam¹¹ and later Helmut Schmidt, an eccentric physicist at Lockheed Martin who created an elegant variation on time-displaced REG remote influence to determine whether someone’s intention could change a machine’s output after it had been run. He rewired his REG to connect it to an audio device so that it would randomly set off a click that would be audiotaped and heard through a set of headphones by either the left or the right ear. He then turned on the machine and tape-recorded the output, ensuring that no one, even himself, was listening. After making copies of this master tape (again, with no one listening), he locked the master tape away, to eliminate the possibility of fraud, and gave medical students the copies a day later. The volunteers were asked to listen to the tape and send an intention to have more clicks in their left ear. Schmidt also created control tapes by running the audio device but not asking anyone to attempt to influence the left-right clicks. As expected, the right and left clicks of the controls were distributed more or less evenly.

Once the participants had finished their attempts to influence the tapes, Schmidt had his computer analyze both the student tapes and the master tapes that had been hidden away to see if there was any deviation from the typical random pattern. In more than 20,000 trials carried out between 1971 and 1975, Schmidt discovered a significant result: on both the copies and the masters, 55 percent had more left-ear than right-ear clicks. And both sets of tapes matched perfectly.

Schmidt believed he understood the mechanism for his improbable results. It wasn’t that his participants had changed a tape after it had been created; their influence had reached “back in time” and influenced the machine’s output at the moment that it was first recorded.¹² They had changed the output of the machine in the same way they might have if they had been present at the time it was being recorded. They did not change the past from what it was; they influenced the past when it was unfolding as the present so that it became what it was.

Schmidt continually refined the design of his “retro-PK” studies over 20 years, eventually involving martial arts students, who are trained in mind control. In one study, he used a radioactive-decay counter to generate a visual display of random numbers. The students sat in front of this visual display, and attempted mentally to influence the numbers in a particular statistical distribution. Once again, he achieved a highly significant result, with odds of 1,000 to 1 against its being a chance occurrence. Somehow, the intention of the students had reached “back in time” to affect what occurred in the first place.¹³

Time-displaced intention has also been successfully applied to living things. German parapsychologist Elmar Gruber, of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg, carried out a series of ingenious experiments examining whether the movement of animals and humans can be influenced after the fact. His first series of tests concerned gerbils running in activity wheels and moving about within a large cage. A special counter kept track of the number of revolutions in the activity wheel. A beam of light in the cage also had a recording device to note whenever the gerbil made contact with it. Similarly, he asked a group of human volunteers to walk around an area across which he had placed a photobeam, which was also attached to a recorder to note every instance when the volunteers ran into it.

Gruber then converted each revolution of the wheel or contact with the photobeam into a clicking sound. Tapes were made of the clicks, which were copied and stored, again to eliminate fraud. Between one and six days later, volunteers were asked to listen to the tapes and attempt to mentally influence the gerbils to run faster than normal, or the people to run into the beam more often than usual. Success would be measured by a greater number of clicks than usual. Gruber carried out each type of trial 20 times, and in each instance compared the volunteers’ tapes with tapes made during sessions when the animals and humans were not subjected to the remote influence. Four of the six batches of trials achieved significant results, and in three of these, the effect size was larger than 0.44.

An effect size is a statistical figure used in scientific research to demonstrate the size of change or outcome. It is arrived at by a number of factors, usually by comparing two groups, one of which has made the change. An effect size under 0.3 is considered small, a size between 0.3 and 0.6 is medium, and anything above 0.6 is considered large. Aspirin, considered one of the most successful heart attack preventives of modern times, has an effect size of just 0.032, more than 10 times smaller than Gruber’s overall effect size. In the case of the activity-wheel gerbil trial, the effect size was a huge 0.7.¹⁴ If his results had concerned a drug, Gruber would have discovered one of the greatest lifesavers of all time.

Gruber carried out six more intriguing experiments. In one study he recorded the number of times that people in a Viennese supermarket crossed a photobeam, and then recorded the number of times a photobeam was crossed by cars passing through various tunnels in Vienna during the rush hour. These again were converted into clicks, and the tapes made of the clicks were stored for one to two months before being played to volunteers, who were asked to influence the speed of the people on foot or in the cars. This time, he decided to include among his group of influencers some people with psychic ability. He also created similar tapes as controls, which were not exposed to remote intention. Once again, when compared with sessions that were not subjected to influence, the results were highly significant; all but one of the automobile–tunnel studies had a significant effect size; in two of the studies, the effect sizes (0.52 and 0.74) were enormous.¹⁵

Is it possible to retroactively prevent a disease, after it has infected its host and spread? The Chiron Foundation in the Netherlands designed an intriguing study to test this seemingly impossible proposition. A large group of rats was randomly divided in two groups, and one group was given a parasitic infection of the blood. The experiment was blinded so that the experimenters themselves did not know which animals were infected and which were controls until after the study was completed. A healer given photographs of the rats after they had been infected with the disease was asked to attempt to prevent the spread of the parasites. Measurements of the blood cells were taken at several intervals after the animals had been infected. The study was carried out three times, each time involving a large number of rats. Two trials achieved a medium (0.47) effect size.¹⁶

Psychologist William Braud then asked one of the most provocative questions of all: is it possible to “edit” one’s own emotional response to an event? To test this, he designed a batch of studies to test time-displaced influence on nervous activity. He recorded several tracings of the electrodermal activity (EDA) of volunteers, using standard lie-detection equipment—a reasonable gauge of whether a person is calm or agitated. Braud then asked the participants to examine one of their own tracings and to attempt to influence it, by sending an intention either to calm down or to activate their own sympathetic nervous system at that earlier point in time. The other tracings of the participants, which were not exposed to mental influence, were to act as controls. Later, when he compared the tracings with the controls, he discovered that those tracings that were exposed to the volunteers’ own retroinfluence were calmer than the controls. Overall, these studies achieved a small, significant effect size (0.37), offering some of the first evidence that human beings might be able to rewrite their own emotional history.¹⁷ Helmut Schmidt successfully employed a similar study design to change his own prerecorded breathing rate, demonstrating that it is possible to retroactively change your own physical state as well.¹⁸

Dean Radin set up an EDA test similar to Braud’s, but added remote distance to a test of retroactive influence. Two months after running the tests, Radin sent copies of the electrodermal readouts to healers in Brazil and asked them to attempt to quiet the readings. After 21 such studies Radin achieved a 0.47 effect size, similar to Braud’s.¹⁹

Radin also tested the possibility that, under certain conditions, a future event can influence an earlier nervous-system response. He made ingenious use of a strange psychological phenomenon called the “Stroop effect,” named after its discoverer, psychologist John Ridley Stroop,²⁰ originator of a landmark test in cognitive psychology. The Stroop test uses a list of the names of colors (e.g., green) printed in different colored inks. Stroop found that when people are asked to read out the name of the color as quickly as possible, they take much longer if the name of the color does not match the color of the ink (e.g., if the word green is printed in red ink) than they do if the name and the color of the ink match (e.g., if the word green is printed in green ink).

Psychologists believe that this phenomenon has to do with the difference in the time it takes the brain to process an image (the color itself), compared with the time it takes to process a word (the color name).

Swedish psychologist Holger Klintman devised a variation on the Stroop test. Volunteers were asked first to identify the color of a rectangle as quickly as they could, then asked whether a color name matched the color patch they had just been shown. A large variation occurred in the time it took his volunteers to identify the color of the rectangle. Klintman discovered that the identification of the rectangle color was faster when it matched the color name shown subsequently.²¹ The time it took for people to identify the color of the rectangle seemed to depend on the second task of determining whether the word matched the rectangle color. Klintman called his effect “time-reversed interference.” In other words, the later effect influenced the brain’s reaction to the first stimulus.

Radin created a modern version of Klintman’s study. His participants sat in front of a computer screen and identified the colors of rectangles that flashed upon the screen as quickly as possibly by typing in their first letter. The image on the screen would then be replaced by the name of a color, and the volunteer would then have to type either y (yes) to indicate that the name of the color matched the color of the rectangle or n (no) to indicate a mismatch. Radin varied the second part of the design, so that after the participant had identified the color of the rectangle, he or she would also have to type in the first letter of the actual color of the letters of the color’s name. For instance, if the word green flashed up but was colored blue, he or she would have to type in b.

In four studies of more than 5,000 trials, all four showed a retrocausal effect. A significant correlation was observed in two of the studies, with a third marginally significant.²² Somehow, the time it took to carry out the second task was affecting the time it took to carry out the first one. Radin concluded that his studies offered evidence of a time displacement in the nervous system. The implications are enormous. Our thoughts about something can affect our past reaction times.

One scientifically accepted way to examine the overall power of an effect is to pool the results of all the studies together into what is called a “meta-analysis.” Analyzed in this manner, nineteen of the retroinfluence studies yielded an extraordinary collective result.²³ William Braud calculated that the overall effect size was 0.32. Although that is considered a small effect on its own, it represents ten times the effect size for most prescription drugs, such as the beta-blocker propanolol, that are recognized as extremely effective.

A different type of analysis of all the best studies of time displacement was carried out in 1996 by Dick Bierman, an experimental physicist at the University of Amsterdam. In statistics, the best way to judge an effect is to work out how much it deviates from the mean, or average. One method popular with statisticians is to work out the chi-square distribution, which entails plotting the square of each individual score. Any deviation from chance, whether positive or negative, will show up as a large positive deviation in bold relief. Bierman detected an enormous variance in individual studies, but collectively they produced results whose occurrence by chance alone was represented by odds of an extraordinary one to 630 billion.²⁴

One interpretation of the laboratory evidence of retroinfluence suggests the unthinkable: intention is capable of reaching back down the time line to influence past events, or emotional or physical responses, at the point when they originally occurred. The central problems of going “back to the future” and manipulating our own past are the logical knots the mind gets tied up in when considering them. As British philosopher Max Black argued in 1956, if A causes B, but occurs after B, B often precludes A. Therefore, A cannot cause B.

This conundrum was overlooked in the movie The Terminator. If the Schwarzenegger cyborg goes back in time and kills Sarah Connor so that she cannot give birth to future rebel John Connor, there would be no future revolution between man and machine. The Terminator no longer has any need to come back in time or, indeed, any purpose for being created.

British philosopher David Wiggins constructed a similar scenario to illustrate the logical problems inherent in the idea of a time machine. Suppose a young man is the grandson of the cruel leader of a fascist movement. He decides to travel back in time to kill his grandfather, to prevent him from taking control. But if he does so, the young man’s mother may not be born and he of course would cease to exist.

Nevertheless, physicists no longer consider retrocausation inconsistent with the laws of the universe. More than one hundred articles in the scientific literature propose ways in which laws of physics can account for time displacement.²⁵ Several scientists have proposed that scalar waves, secondary waves in the Zero Point Field, enable people to engineer changes in space-time. These secondary fields, caused by the motion of subatomic particles interacting with the Zero Point Field, are ripples in space-time—waves that can travel faster than the speed of light. Scalar Field waves possess astonishing power: a single unit of energy produced by a laser in such a state would represent a larger output than all the world’s power plants combined.²⁶

Certain technologies, such as quantum optics, have made use of laser pulses to squeeze the Zero Point Field to such a degree that it creates negative energy.²⁷ It is well accepted in physics that this negative energy, or exotic matter, is able to bend space-time. Many theoreticians believe that negative energy would allow us to travel through wormholes, travel at warp speed, build time machines, and even help human beings to levitate.

When electrons are packed densely together, the density of the spray of virtual particles that are constantly created in the Zero Point Field is increased. These spray densities are organized into electromagnetic waves that flow in two directions, and so may be going “back and forward” in time.²⁸

Physicist Evan Harris Walker first proposed that retroinfluence can be explained by quantum physics if we just take account of the observer effect.²⁹ Walker and later Henry Stapp, an elementary particle physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, who acted as an independent monitor of Helmut Schmidt’s final martial arts study, believed that a small tweak in quantum theory, making use of “nonlinear quantum theory,” could explain all cases of retroinfluence. In a linear system such as current quantum mechanics, the behavior of a system can be easily described: 2 + 2 = 4. The system’s behavior is the sum of its parts. In a nonlinear system, 2 + 2 may equal 5 or even 8. The system’s behavior is more than a sum of its parts—but how much more we can’t often predict.

In Walker and Stapp’s view, turning quantum theory into a nonlinear system would enable them to include one other element in the equation: the human mind. In Schmidt’s martial arts study, the numbers on the visual display remained in their “potential” state of all possible sets of numbers until they had been observed by the students. At that point, the mental intent of the students and the numbers on the display interacted in a quantum way. According to Stapp, the physical universe exists as a set of “tendencies” with “statistical links” between mental events. Even though the tape of the numbers has been generated, they divide into a number of channels of all possible outcomes. When a person looks at the numbers, his brain state will also divide into the same number of channels. His intent will select out a particular channel, and through the numbers “collapse” the channels into a single state.³⁰ Human will—our intention—creates the reality, no matter when.

The other possibility is that all information in the universe is available to us at every moment, and time exists as one giant smeared-out present. Braud has speculated that forebodings of the future might be an act of backward time displacement—a future event somehow reaching back in time to influence a present mind. If you simply reverse presentiment and call it backward influence, so that all future mental activity influences the present, you maintain the same model and results as the retrocausation studies. All precognition might be evidence of backward-acting influence;³¹ all future decisions may always influence the past.

There is also the possibility that at the most fundamental layer of our existence there is no such thing as sequential time. Pure energy as it exists at the quantum level does not have time or space, but exists as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We, in a sense, are time and space. When we bring energy to conscious awareness through the act of perception, we create separate objects that exist in space through a measured continuum. By creating time and space, we create our own separateness and indeed our own time.

According to Bierman, what appears to be retrocausation is simply evidence that the present is contingent upon future potential conditions or outcomes, and that nonlocality occurs through time as well as space. In a sense, our future actions, choices and possibilities all help to create our present as it unfolds. According to this view, we are constantly being influenced in our present actions and decisions by our future selves.

This explanation was bolstered through a simple thought experiment carried out by Vlatko Vedral and one of his colleagues at the University of Vienna—Caslav Brukner, a Serb who had managed to leave Yugoslavia during the civil war and, like Vedral, spent time at Zeilinger’s Viennese lab.

When Brukner joined Vedral in London during a yearlong fellowship at Imperial College, he began thinking about quantum computation, and the fact that it is billions of times faster than classical computing. Once a quantum computer is finally perfected it will enable one to scan every last corner of the Internet in half an hour.³² Could this enormous advantage in speed have some basis in Bell’s Inequality, the famous test of nonlocality? Bell demonstrated that the remote influence maintained between two quantum subatomic particles, even over vast distances, “violates” our Newtonian view of separation in space.

Could this same test be used to show when temporal constraints—the limits governing time—are also violated? Brukner enlisted Vedral to design a thought experiment with him. Their experiment rested on a given in science about time: in the evolution of a particle, a measurement taken at a certain point will be utterly independent of a measurement taken later or earlier. In this instance, the “inequality” of Bell’s would refer to the difference between the two measurements when taken at different times.

For their experiment, they no longer needed two particles, and so could utterly eliminate the “Bob” particle and concentrate on the photon, “Alice.” The task now was to make theoretical calculations of Alice’s polarization at two points of time. If quantum waves behave like a wriggling jump rope being shaken at one end, the direction in which the rope is pointed is called polarization. To work out their time sequences mathematically, Brukner and Vedral made use of what is called “Hilbert,” or abstract, space.

First they calculated Alice’s polarization, then they measured it moments later. When they had finished their calculations of Alice’s current position, they went back and measured her earlier polarization again. They discovered that between two points of time, Bell’s Inequality indeed had been violated; they got a different measurement of the first polarization the second time around. The very act of measuring Alice at a later time influenced and indeed changed how it was polarized earlier.

The implications of their astonishing discovery were not lost on the scientific community. New Scientist included their discoveries in a dramatic cover story: “Quantum Entanglement: How the Future Can Influence the Past,” and concluded:

Quantum mechanics seems to be bending the laws of cause and effect…. entanglement in time puts space and time on an equal footing in quantum theory…. Brukner’s result suggests that we might be missing something important in our understanding of how the world works.³³

For me, Brukner’s thought experiment held a significance far greater than a simple theoretical one. It showed that instantaneous cause and effect occurs not only through space but also back and possibly forward through time. It offered the first mathematical proof that the actions of every moment influenced and changed those of our past. It may well be that every action we take, every thought we have in the present, alters our entire history.

Even more significant, his experiment demonstrated the central role of the observer in creating, and indeed changing, reality. Observing had played an integral part in changing the state of the photon’s polarization. The very act of measuring an entity at one point of time changed its earlier state. This may mean that every observation of ours changes some earlier state of the physical universe. A deliberate thought to change something in our present could also influence our past. The very act of intention, of making a change in the present, may also affect everything that has led to that moment.

This sort of backward influence resembles the nonlocal correlations found in the quantum world, as if the connections were always there in some underlying arrangement.³⁴ It may be that our future already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present. This makes sense, since subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until observed or thought about. If consciousness operates at the quantum frequency level, it would naturally reside outside space and time, and we would theoretically have access to information—“past” and “future.” If humans are able to influence quantum events, they are also able to affect events or moments other than the present.

Radin discovered more evidence that our psychokinetic influence is operating “backward” in an ingenious study examining the possible underlying mechanism of intention on the random bits of an REG machine. Radin first ran five REG studies involving thousands of trials, then analyzed the experiments through a process called a “Markov chain,” which allowed a mathematical analysis of how the REG machine’s output changed over time. For this process, he made use of three different models of intention: first, as a forward-time causal influence (the mind “pushes” the REG in one direction throughout the influence); second, as a precognitive influence (the mind intuits the precise moment to hit the REG in its random fluctuations to produce the intended result by “looking into the future” and passively “bringing back” this information into the present); and third, as a true retrocausal influence (the mind first sets the future outcome and applies all the chain of events that will produce it “backward” in time).

Radin’s analysis of the data had one inescapable conclusion: this was not a process running forward, in an attempt to hit a particular target, so much as an “information” flow that had traveled back in time.³⁵

But just how much of the past could we change in the sticks-and-stones world of real life? William Braud had pondered this issue at length. He once observed that those moments in the past most open to change might be “seed” moments when nature has not made up its mind—perhaps the earliest stages of events before they blossomed and grew into something static and unchangeable.³⁶ These moments were analogous to a sapling that could still be bent and trained before its trunk was too stiff and branches too large; the brain of a child, which was far more open to influence and learning than an adult’s; or even a virus, which is far easier to overcome in its infancy.³⁷ Random events, decisions with equally likely choices, or illness—all probabilistic moments disposed to early influence where human intention could slightly shift the outcome in a certain direction—might be the events in our lives most open to retroinfluence. Braud referred to them as “open,” or labile, systems—those most open to change.

These systems include many of the workings of living things, which are random processes, much like the quantum systems of random-event generators. Any one of a number of the biological processes in living things requires a cascade of processes, which would be sensitive to the kind of subtle effects on REG machinery observed, say, in the PEAR research.³⁸

In Braud’s earlier work, he had discovered that remote influence had its greatest effect when there was a strong need for it.³⁹ The necessity of a particular outcome might be the one quality that moves mountains backward in time.

A clue to the extent of our reach was revealed in Schmidt’s discovery of an observer effect in his audio REG experiments that is much like the effect in quantum experiments: it was most important that the person attempting to influence his tapes be the very first listener. If anyone else heard the tape first and listened with focused attention, it was less susceptible to influence later. A few studies even suggest that observation by any sentient being—human or animal—blocks future attempts at time-displaced influence.

Bierman tested this by rigging up a radioactive source to trigger beeps that were delayed for one second and then observed by a final observer. In about half of the events, another preobserver was given feedback of this quantum event before the final observer witnessed it.

In those instances, the preobserver’s observation resulted in collapse of superposition state of the quantum event while, in the other half of cases, the final observer “produced” the collapse.⁴⁰

If consciousness is the crucial ingredient for “collapse” to occur, humans—and their ability to “reduce” reality to limited states—are completely responsible for the idea that time is an arrow in one direction. If our future choice of a particular state is what affects its present “collapse,” the reality may be that our future and present are constantly meeting up with each other.

This accords with what is understood about the observer effect in quantum theory—that the first observation of a quantum entity “de-coheres,” or collapses its pure state of potential into a single state.⁴¹ This rather suggests that, if no one had ever seen Hitler, we might have been able to send an intention to prevent the Holocaust.

Although our understanding of the mechanism is still primitive, the experimental evidence of time reversal is fairly robust. This research portrays life as one giant, smeared-out here and now, and much of it—past, present, and future—as open to our influence at any moment.

But that hints at the most unsettling idea of all. Once constructed, a thought is lit forever.