None of the scientists involved in the “Love Study” remembered who came up with its name. It might have started as Elisabeth Targ’s private joke, for the study involved couples who were installed in two different rooms and separated by a hallway, three doors, eight walls, and several inches of stainless steel.1
The name was actually meant to be a gracious nod to the study’s arcane benefactor, the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love at Case Western Reserve. As it happened, the study became a posthumous valentine to Targ, who was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor right before the grant money came through. The Love Study would be a fitting tribute to Targ, as the first major scientific demonstration of exactly how intention physically affects its recipient, and the name proved especially apt in describing this process. When you send an intention, every major physiological system in your body is mirrored in the body of the receiver. Intention is the perfect manifestation of love. Two bodies become one.
Targ began her career as a mainstream psychiatrist, but made her name in 1999 with two remarkable studies at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in San Francisco, which tested the possibility of remote healing with end-stage AIDS patients. Targ spent months designing her trial. She and her partner, psychologist and retired hospital administrator Fred Sicher, sought out a homogeneous group of advanced AIDS patients with the same degree of illness, including the same T-cell counts and number of AIDS-defining illnesses. Because they wished to test the effect of distant healing, and not any particular healing modality, they decided to recruit highly experienced, successful healers from diverse backgrounds who might represent an array of approaches.
Targ and Sicher gathered together an eclectic mix of healers from all across America—from orthodox Christians to Native American shamans—and asked them to send healing thoughts to a group of AIDS patients under strict double-blind conditions. All healing was to be done remotely so that nothing, such as the presence of a healer or healing touch, could confound the results. Targ created a strict double-blind format: each healer received sealed packets with information about the patients to be healed, including their names, photos, and T-cell counts. Every other week, the healers were assigned a new patient and asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient an hour a day for six days, with alternate weeks off for rest. In this manner, eventually every patient in the healing group would be sent healing by every healer in turn.
At the end of the first study, although 40 percent of the control population died, all ten of the patients in the treatment group were not only alive but far healthier in every regard.
Targ and Sicher repeated the study, but this time doubled the size of their study population and tightened their protocol even further. They also widened their brief of the outcomes they planned to measure. In the second study, those sent healing were again far healthier on every parameter tested: significantly fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, fewer hospitalizations, fewer visits to the doctor, fewer new illnesses, less severity of disease, and better psychological well-being. The differences were decisive; for instance, the treatment group had six times fewer AIDS-defining illnesses and four times fewer hospitalizations at the end of the study than the controls.2
In Targ’s original studies, the healing had been carried out by highly experienced, successful healers who’d been chosen because they possessed a special gift. After the studies were completed, Targ grew interested in whether an ordinary individual could be similarly trained to use intention effectively.
For the Love Study, Targ found a sympathetic partner in Marilyn Schlitz, vice president of research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The energetic blond had a colorful national reputation because of her meticulously designed parapsychology studies and their spectacular results, which attracted the attention of the senior powers in consciousness research as well as the New York Times. During a long partnership with psychologist William Braud, Schlitz had conducted rigorous research into what became known in the psychic community as DMILS—Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems—the ability of human thought to influence the living world around it.3 Throughout her career in parapsychology, Schlitz had been fascinated by remote influence; she was one of the first to examine the effect of intention in healing, and went on to assemble a vast database of healing research for IONS.
For the Love Study, Schlitz recruited Dean Radin, her IONS senior researcher and one of America’s most renowned parapsychologists. Radin was to design both the study and some of its equipment; with his background in engineering and psychology he would ensure that both the study protocol and its technical detail were rigorous. Targ enlisted Jerome Stone, a nurse and practising Buddhist who had worked with her on the AIDS studies, to design the program and train the patients.
In 2002, after Targ died, Schlitz and the others vowed to carry on with the study and recruited Ellen Levine, one of Targ’s colleagues from the California Pacific Medical Center, to take her place and work with Stone as joint principal investigators.
The Love Study was to follow the basic study design of a perennial favorite among consciousness researchers: the sense of being stared at.4 In those studies, two people are isolated from each other in separate rooms and a video camera is trained on the receiver, who is also hooked up to skin conductance equipment, not unlike a polygraph machine—the type used in lie detection studies to detect an increase in “fight-or-flight,” unconscious autonomic nervous system activity. At random intervals, the “sender” is instructed to stare at the subject on the monitor, while the “receiver” is told to relax and try to think of anything other than the prospect of being stared at. A later comparison analysis determines whether the receiver’s autonomic system registered a reaction during those moments he or she was being stared at to determine whether the mere attention of the sender was unconsciously picked up by the most automatic systems of the receiver’s body.
Schlitz and Braud’s body of evidence on remote staring, conducted over 10 years, showed exactly such an effect. All the studies had been combined into a review that was published in a major psychology journal. The review concluded that the effects had been small but significant.5
The Love Study’s design was also inspired by the major DMILS studies conducted since 1963, which demonstrated that under many types of circumstances, the electrical signaling in the brains of people gets synchronized.6 The frequencies, amplitudes, and phases of the brain waves start operating in tandem. Although the studies followed slightly different designs, all of them asked the same question: can the stimulation of one person be felt in the higher central nervous system of another? Or, as Radin liked to think of it, after a sender gets pinched, does the receiver also feel the “ouch”?7
Two people wired up with a variety of physiological monitoring equipment, such as EEG machines, were isolated from each other in different rooms. One would be stimulated with something—a picture, a light, or a mild electric shock. The researchers would then examine the two EEGs to determine if the receiver’s brain waves mirrored those of the sender when he or she was being stimulated.
The earliest DMILS research had been designed by psychologist and consciousness researcher Charles Tart, who carried out a series of brutal studies to determine whether people could empathetically feel another person’s pain. He administered shocks to himself, while a volunteer, isolated in a different room and hooked up to an array of medical gadgetry, was being monitored to see if his sympathetic nervous system somehow picked up Tart’s reactions. Whenever Tart jolted himself, the receiver registered an unconscious empathetic response in decreased blood volume and increased heart rate—as though he were also getting the shocks.8 Another fascinating early study had been carried out with identical twins. As soon as one twin closed his eyes and his brain electrical rhythms slowed to alpha waves, the other twin’s brain also slowed, even though his eyes were opened wide.9
Harald Walach, a German scientist at the University of Freiburg, tried an approach that was guaranteed to magnify the sender’s effects, in order to maximize the response in the receiver. The sender was shown an alternating black-and-white checkerboard, called a “pattern reversal,” which is known to trigger predictable, high-amplitude electrical brain waves in viewers. At the same instant, the EEG of the distant, shielded receiver recorded identical brain-wave patterns.10
Neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, had used this same protocol a decade before Walach but with a different twist: with light flashes rather than patterns as the stimulus. In this study, the particular patterns of firing in the brain of the sender, evoked by the light, turned out to be mirrored in the brain of the receiver, who was sitting in an electrically shielded room 14.5 meters away. Grinberg-Zylberbaum also discovered that an important condition determined success: the synchrony occurred only among pairs of participants who had met and established a connection by spending 20 minutes with each other in meditative silence.11
In earlier work, Grinberg-Zylberbaum had discovered that brain-wave synchrony occurred not only between two people, but between both hemispheres of the brains of both participants, with one important distinction: the participant with the most cohesive quantum wave patterns sometimes set the tempo and tended to influence the other. The most ordered brain pattern often prevailed.12
In the most recent DMILS study, in 2005, a group of researchers from Bastyr University and the University of Washington gathered 30 couples with strong emotional and psychological connections and also a great deal of experience in meditation. The pairs were split up and placed in rooms 10 meters away from each other, with an EEG amplifier wired up to the occipital (visual) lobe of the brain of each participant. The moment each sender was exposed to a flickering light, he or she attempted to transmit an image or thought about the light to the partner. Of the 60 receivers tested, five of them, or 8 percent, were shown to have significantly higher brain activation during times their partner “sent” visual images.13
The Washington researchers then selected five pairs of the participants who had scored a significant result; wired them up to a functional MRI, which measures minuscule changes in the brain during critical functions; and asked them to repeat the experiment. During the times the thought was “transmitted,” the recipients experienced an increase in blood oxygenation in a portion of the visual cortex of the brain. This increase did not occur when the sending partner was not being visually stimulated.14 The Bastyr researchers replicated their study, this time with volunteers highly experienced in meditation, and got some of the strongest correlations between senders and receivers of all the studies thus far.
The Bastyr study represented a major breakthrough in research on direct mental influence. It demonstrated that the brain-wave response of the sender to the stimulus is mirrored in the receiver, and that the stimulus in the receiver occurs in an identical place in the brain as that of the sender. The receiver’s brain reacts as though he or she is seeing the same image at the same time.
A final extraordinary study examined the effect of powerful emotional involvement on remote influence. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied and compared the EEGs of bonded couples, matched pairs of strangers, and several individuals who had no partner but who nevertheless thought they were being paired off and having their brain waves compared. Everyone who had been paired off, whether he knew his partner or not, displayed increased numbers of brain waves in synchrony. The only participants who did not demonstrate this effect were those who had no partner.15
Radin carried out a variation of this experiment, attaching pairs who had close bonds—couples, friends, and parents and their children. In a significant number of instances, the EEGs of the senders and receivers appeared to synchronize.16
In designing the Love Study, Schlitz and Radin also had been influenced by other research showing that, during acts of remote influence, the recipient’s EEG waves mirror those of the sender. In a number of studies of healing, the EEG waves of the recipient of healing synchronize with those of the healer during moments when healing energy is being “sent.”17 Brain mapping during certain types of healing, such as bioenergy, also shows evidence of brain-wave synchrony.18 In many instances, when one person is sending focused intention to another, their brains appear to become entrained.
Entrainment is a term in physics which means that two oscillating systems fall into synchrony. It was coined in 1665 by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, after he discovered that two of his clocks with pendulums standing in close proximity to each other had begun to swing in unison. He had been toying with the two pendulums and found that even if he started one pendulum swinging at one end, and the other at the opposite end, eventually the two would swing in unison.
Two waves peaking and troughing at the same time are considered “in phase,” or operating in sync. Those peaking at opposite times are “out of phase.” Physicists believe that entrainment results from tiny exchanges of energy between two systems that are out of phase, causing one to slow down and the other to accelerate until the two are in phase. It is also related to resonance, or the ability of any system to absorb more energy than normal at a particular frequency (the number of peaks and troughs in one second). Any vibrating thing, including an electromagnetic wave, has its own preferential frequencies, called “resonant frequencies,” where it finds vibrating the easiest. When it “listens” or receives a vibration from somewhere else, it tunes out all pretenders and only tunes into its own resonant frequency. It is a bit like a mother instantly recognizing her child from among a mass of schoolchildren. Planets have orbital resonances. Our sense of hearing operates through a form of entrainment: different parts of a membrane of the inner ear resonate to different frequencies of sound. Resonance even occurs in the seas, as in the tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy at the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine, near Nova Scotia.
Once they march to the same rhythm, things that are entrained send out a stronger signal than they do individually. This most commonly occurs with musical instruments, which sound amplified when all playing in phase. At the Bay of Fundy, the time required for a single wave to travel from the bay’s mouth to its opposite end and back is exactly matched by the time of each tide. Each wave is amplified by the rhythm of each tide, resulting in some of the highest tides in the world.
Entrainment also occurs when someone sends a strong intention to cause harm, as became evident in the tohate experiments of Mikio Yamamoto of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. Tohate is a kind of mental standoff between two Qigong practitioners, one of whom receives a sensory shock and is eventually made to submit and move back several yards without any physical contact from the other. The central question posed by the technique, in Yamamoto’s mind, was whether the effect of tohate is psychological or physical: does the opponent move back because of psychological intimidation, or is he knocked over by the qi of his opponent?
In the first of Yamamoto’s studies, a Qigong master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room on the fourth floor of a building, while his student was similarly isolated on the first floor. Yamamoto signaled for the master to perform “qi emission” over 80 seconds at random intervals. Each time, he tracked their separate movements—the sending of the qi and the start of the pupil’s recoil. In nearly a third of the 49 such trials—a highly significant result—whenever the master engaged in tohate movements, his opponent in the other room was physically knocked back. In a second set of 57 trials, Yamamoto wired both teacher and pupil to EEG machines. Whenever the master emitted qi, his pupil showed an increase in the number of alpha brain waves in his right frontal lobe, suggesting that this was where the body initially receives the intention “message.”
Yamamoto’s final set of trials examined the EEG-recorded brain waves of both master and student. Whenever the master performed tohate, the beta brain waves of both men demonstrated a greater sense of coherence.19 In an earlier study carried out by the Tokyo group, the brain waves of the receiver and sender became synchronized within one second during tohate. 20
Besides resonance, the DMILS studies offered evidence of another phenomenon during intention: the receiver anticipated the information by registering the “ouch” a few moments before the pinch occurred in the sender. In 1997, in his former laboratory at the University of Nevada, Radin discovered that humans may receive a physical foreboding of an event. He set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed to calm, to arouse, or to upset a participant. His volunteers were wired to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conduction, heart rate, and blood pressure, and they sat in front of a computer that would randomly display color photos of tranquil scenes (landscapes) or scenes designed to shock (autopsies) or to arouse (erotic materials).
Radin discovered that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if they were trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was erotic or disturbing. This offered the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states and that the nervous system doesn’t merely cushion itself against a future blow, but also works out the emotional meaning of it.21
Dr. Rollin McCraty, executive vice president and director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California, was fascinated by the idea of shared physical foreboding of an event, but wondered where exactly in the body this intuitive information might first be felt. He used the original design of Radin’s study with a computerized system of randomly generated arousing photos, but hooked up his participants to a larger complement of medical equipment.
McCraty discovered that these forebodings of good and bad news were felt in both the heart and the brain, whose electromagnetic waves would speed up or slow down just before a disturbing or tranquil picture was shown. Furthermore, all four lobes of the cerebral cortex appeared to take part in this intuitive awareness. Most astonishing of all, the heart appeared to receive this information moments before the brain did. This suggested that the body has certain perceptual apparatus that enables it continually to scan and intuit the future, but that the heart may hold the largest antenna. After the heart receives the information, it communicates this information to the brain.
McCraty’s study had shown certain fascinating differences between the sexes. Both the heart and the brain became entrained with each other earlier and more frequently in women than they did in men. McCraty concluded that this offered scientific evidence of the universal assumption that women are naturally more intuitive than men and more in touch with their heart center.22
McCraty’s conclusion—that the heart is the largest “brain” of the body—has now gained credibility after research findings by Dr. John Andrew Armour at the University of Montreal and the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal. Armour discovered neurotransmitters in the heart that signal and influence aspects of higher thought in the brain.23 McCraty discovered that touch and even mentally focusing on the heart cause brain-wave entrainment between people. When two people touched while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the more “coherent” heart rhythms of the two began to entrain the brain of the other.24
Armed with this new evidence about the heart, Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz decided to explore whether remote mental influence extended to anywhere else in the body. An obvious place to explore was the gut. People speak about intuition as a “gut instinct” or “gut feeling.” Certain researchers have even referred to the gut as a “second brain.”25 Radin wondered if a gut instinct was accompanied by an actual physical effect.
Radin and Schlitz gathered 26 student volunteers, paired them, and this time wired them up to an electrogastrogram (EGG), which measures the electrical behavior of the gut; monitors on the skin usually closely match the frequencies and contractions of the stomach. Although the Freiburg study had shown otherwise, Radin and Schlitz believed that familiarity could only help to magnify the effects of remote influence. In case some sort of physical connection was indeed important, Radin asked all the participants to exchange some meaningful object first.
Radin put one participant from a pair in one room. The other sat in another, darkened room, attached to an electrogastrogram, viewing live video images of the first person. Images periodically flashed on another monitor, accompanied by music designed to arouse particular emotions: positive, negative, angry, calming, or just neutral.
The results revealed another example of entrainment—this time in the gut. The EGG readings of the receiver were significantly higher and correlated with those of the sender when the sender experienced strong emotions, positive or negative. Here was yet more evidence that the emotional state of others is registered in the body of the receiver—in this case, deep in the intestines—and that the home of the gut instinct is indeed the gut itself.26
This latest evidence was further proof that our emotional responses are constantly being picked up and echoed in those closest to us.27 In every one of these studies, the bodies of the pairs had become entrained or “entangled” as Radin called it;28 the recipients were “seeing” or feeling what their partners actually saw or felt, in real time.
As this research intimates, intention might be an attunement of energy. The DMILS research established that, under certain conditions, the heart rate, the arousal of the autonomic nervous system, the brain waves, and the blood flow to the extremities of two different people at a distance all become entrained. Nevertheless, in most of the DMILS studies, the correlated response resulted from a simple stimulation of the sender, which the recipient unconsciously picked up. Except for one instance, no one attempted to influence another person.
Schlitz and Radin now wanted to find out whether they would achieve similar correlations if the sender was actually sending an intention to heal. For the Love Study, Schlitz and her colleagues decided to recruit ordinary individuals and train them in healing techniques. They wondered whether certain conditions were more favorable than others for achieving entrainment. Many healing studies intimated that motivation, interpersonal connection, and a shared belief system were vital to success. Grinberg-Zylberbaum believed that a “transferred potential,” as he termed this form of entrainment, occurred only among those who had undergone some meditative regimen, and then only after some sort of psychic connection between sender and receiver had been established. Nevertheless, in the Freiberg study, many of the pairs had never met each other and had not had a chance to establish a bond. The German researchers had concluded that “connectedness” and mental preparation may play a role, but were not crucial. In Schlitz’s view, motivation was a key component of success. The more urgent the situation, such as would occur with a person suffering from cancer, the more motivated the partner would be in attempting to get him or her well.
Schlitz and her fellow researchers decided to seek out couples with a wife suffering from breast cancer, and began advertising around the San Francisco Bay Area for volunteers. It soon became apparent that they would have to widen their original brief. The breast-cancer population of the Bay Area, which is higher than average in the United States, has been extremely well studied. From the lackluster response to their advertising, it appeared that sufferers were unwilling to take part in yet more research. The scientists decided to open the study to any couple if either partner was suffering from cancer of any variety. Eventually 31 couples volunteered, including healthy couples who were to act as controls.
Jerome Stone wrote a training manual for the couples, after analyzing a number of healers and distilling their common practices.29 The first component of his program involved teaching the sender how to focus and concentrate, as occurs in meditation, to create a high degree of sustained attention. The scientific evidence demonstrates that meditation establishes more coherent brain waves; at least twenty-five studies show that EEG synchronization occurs between the four regions of the brain during meditation.30 Other studies of meditation have shown that it creates more coherent biophoton emissions31 and in general aids healing.
Stone also believed that his senders needed to learn how to generate compassion or empathy for their partners, with a technique based largely on the Tonglen Buddhist idea of “giving and receiving.” This practice would train the partner to develop a true understanding of the suffering of another, to take on the suffering without being burdened by it, and to transform it through the process of sending healing. Developing true empathy would also help to dissolve the boundaries and sense of self between the sender and receiver. Positive, loving thoughts also had positive physiological effects. Rollin McCraty’s research at HeartMath showed that a steady (or, as he called it, “coherent”) variation in heartbeat was more likely with “positive”—loving or altruistic—thoughts and that this “coherence” was quickly picked up by the brain, which soon pulsed in synchrony32 and evidenced improved cognitive performance.33
After Stone instructed the partners in simple techniques of meditation, he also taught them to be compassionate when carrying out intention. The final aspect of Stone’s training involved instilling belief and confidence in both senders and receivers. Stone had discovered evidence in both the healing and the parapsychological literature that belief in the process assists in the success of psychic processes such as ESP, which, like intention, involves “transferring” information across distance.34
Although the training program was originally intended to run for eight weeks, limited funding meant that Stone had to compress his workshop into a single day, to be followed up with homework and practice.
Radin divided the couples into three groups. The first group (the “trained group”) was to undergo Stone’s training, practice compassionate intention daily for three months, and then carry out the test. The second group (called the “wait group”) was to carry out the test first and then have the training. The 18 healthy couples making up the third group (the control group) were to have no training at all, but simply undergo the test.
With all three groups, one member—the member of the couple with the cancer, or one of the designated partners in the control group—was asked to sit in a black reclining chair placed in a one-ton, solid steel, double-walled, electromagnetically shielded enclosure. The tiny Lindgren/ETS chamber was separated from the outside world by two layers of steel and one of solid wood, which blocked out all sound and all electromagnetic energy. Any electrical signals were carried out of the chamber by a fiber-optic cable, to ensure that the room remained, electromagnetically speaking, a solitary confinement.
Each inhabitant was fitted to an array of medical gadgetry to measure brain waves, heartbeat, breathing rate, skin conductance, and peripheral blood flow. A video camera stood discreetly in the corner.
The room was curtained in earth tones and furnished with soft table lighting and an artificial, floor-to-ceiling weeping fig tree. When the room was occupied, ambient music flooded the space. The furnishings and music and even a large color poster of a cascading mountain stream were all intended to distract from the fact that once the 400-pound steel door with an articulated closing mechanism snapped shut, the inhabitant was essentially trapped inside the warmer equivalent of a meatpacking-plant refrigerator.
Some 20 meters away, the other partner was seated in the dark, attached to the same medical equipment as his or her partner, staring at a small blank Sylvania TV screen. Bunched towels blocked out the last vestiges of light. Whenever the image of the partner in the refrigerator room abruptly flashed on the television screen, the other member of the couple was to send a compassionate intention to his or her partner for 10 seconds.
Stone, Radin, and their colleagues planned to examine two different outcomes: whether the training improved the marriage, and also whether there was any correspondence between the physical sensations of sender and receiver. Although they hoped to examine whether the intentions sent also affected the medical prognosis, limited funding made that aspect of the study impossible.
Stone and Levine were given the task of analyzing the social aspects of the study. Initially they discovered that the training made no difference to the quality of the couples’ marriages. The finding was not altogether surprising, considering that anyone prepared to be part of a study involving three months of training was already likely to be extremely committed to the partnership. And Schlitz had aimed to recruit motivated partners when she designed the study. A later, more detailed analysis of the figures showed that the intention training and practice had improved the couples’ marriages, but Radin concluded that these effects were due to their expectation of improved relations.
Then Radin compiled all the physiological data from the three groups and studied the results between partners and group composite averages. Each physiological response offered fascinating information about the effect of intention on the receiver. For instance in the case of measurements of blood to the extremities, in every group, the sender’s skin conductance increased 2 seconds after he had seen the image of his partner, and the receiver recorded a similar arousal a half second after the image had flashed. However, unlike the earlier DMILS studies, where the skin-conduction response in the receiver resembled that of a “startle reflex” and quickly tailed off, in this instance the response persisted 7 seconds after the stimulus. The receiver clearly appeared to be responding to intention—indeed, almost instantaneously. In fact, the receiver’s response occurred at least 1 second faster than it would have been possible for the sender to have consciously formulated an intention. Radin was not sure whether this meant that the receiver had had a premonition of the intention. It might simply have reflected the turgid nature of the skin conductance response; the receiver was probably responding in his or her extremities to information sent by the sender’s central nervous system, which would have reacted to the initial stimulation of the image on the monitor far more quickly than the electrical impulses sent to his or her fingertips. Nevertheless, in Radin’s view, the two skin conductance responses were tracking each other, even if they were slightly out of phase.
A similar situation occurred with the heart rate. The sender’s heart rate increased 5 seconds after the stimulus prompt to send the intention—as was consistent with the physical response that occurs in the body during the process of making some sort of mental effort. But an identical increase took place in the receiver, which would not happen ordinarily if he or she were simply resting in a recliner.
Blood flow followed a similar pattern. Whenever we experience something that stimulates us, the vascular network in our extremities constricts slightly, to maximize blood flow to the core of the body. In the Love Study, this phenomenon occurred in the sender, and was soon imitated in the body of the receiver.
As for respiration, on average, whenever the stimulus image appeared, the sender immediately inhaled sharply and blew out the air 15 seconds later. This respiratory response resembles that of someone about to steady himself for the task at hand. In this case, Radin witnessed a different response in the receiver. During the first 5 seconds, the receiver’s respiration faltered, almost as though he or she had stopped breathing, and then resumed with a large exhale in the final 5 seconds of the intention. It was as though the receiver had been listening with care, holding her breath and straining to hear something, before sighing with relief as soon as the stimulation had passed.
But it was the brain-wave results that proved to be the most interesting. Whenever the receiver’s image flashed on the screen, the senders recorded a little upturn in brain waves, like a “flinch response,” and then a huge spike for about third of a second before they dropped sharply and took about 1 second to come back to baseline. In the sender, this tiny initial upturn represents something called a P300 wave—a well-established phenomenon that records the time that the brain takes to process the switching on of a light. The drop represents the time it takes for internal attention to modulate the stimulus into a response.
In this instance, the receivers had no P300 wave, but their brain waves nevertheless mimicked the virtually vertical plunge of the brain wave that shortly followed in the sender, even though, unlike the sender, the receiver had had no stimulus. The brain of the receiver was reacting just as it does during sleep and dreaming. The receivers had registered an emotional reaction, even though there was no tangible stimulus.
Radin’s results were all the more remarkable because the receivers had not been told how long the stimulus period would be, and neither senders or receivers knew in advance how long the sender would have to wait before his partner’s image flashed on the screen. A computer program randomly selected the time frame, which ranged from 5 to 40 seconds. This meant that any expectation on the part of either member of the couples could not explain the results.
Radin then compared the responses of the groups. All three groups had shown an effect. In every instance, each physiological response of the receivers had tracked those of the senders. However, the most prolonged pattern occurred among the cancer patients whose partners had been trained in compassionate intention. The receivers in the training group not only responded to the stimulus, but also kept responding over 8 of the 10 seconds of the intention. In quantum terms, the couples had become as one.
The Love Study indicates a number of profound suggestions about the nature of intention. Sending a directed thought seems to generate palpable energy; whenever one of Radin’s senders sent a healing intention, many subtle aspects of the receiver’s body became activated, as though he or she had received a minuscule electric shock. It seemed to be a kind of activating awareness, as though the receiver body had felt or heard the healing signal.
There had even been an element of anticipation in the receiver; some of the physiological reactions recorded suggested that the receiver had felt the partner’s healing intention before he had even sent it.
People appear to receive healing deep in their bodies by being retuned to the more coherent energy of the healer’s intention. During healing, it could be that the “orderly” energy of the well person entrains and “reorders” the sick.
In order to have the most powerful effect, a healer or sender needs to become “ordered” on some subatomic level, mentally and emotionally. The Love Study demonstrates that certain conditions and mental states make our intention especially powerful and ourselves more ordered, and that these states can be achieved with training. The success of the basic training program that Radin, Schlitz, and Stone assembled suggests that attention, belief, motivation, and compassion are important for intention to work, but there are probably other conditions that intensify its effects.
I needed, for instance, to find out how we can loosen our psychological boundaries. It was becoming clear to me that when we send intention, in a manner of speaking, we have to “become” the other.35