Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [118]
Dean Radin and other scientists around the world are running tests to determine whether this kind of connection is coincidence or a measurable phenomenon, whether we are disconnected billiard balls or dynamic beings living in an entangled tapestry that some would call God’s universe. This amounts to declaring civil war on normal science, since most scientists insist that one person’s thoughts or consciousness cannot extend beyond the brain, and certainly not far enough to affect another person’s vital signs.
Yet a small avalanche of experiments suggests that we may in fact be connected in this way. Researchers at universities around the world—from Stanford to the University of Edinburgh—have conducted more than fifty studies to test the hypothesis, and found a “small but significant effect” of one person’s thinking upon another person’s body.14 Some studies using EEGs showed that when the “sender’s” brain-wave activity changed, the “receiver’s” brain-wave activity followed within milliseconds.15 Other researchers employed brain-scanning technology and found that when the sender tried to relay an image to the receiver, parts of the receiver’s brain that handle visual images were activated.16
In one intriguing experiment, Jeanne Achterberg, a psychology professor at Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, and her colleagues gathered eleven shaman healers on the Big Island of Hawaii.17 At random two-minute intervals, each healer prayed for a close friend as the friend lay in a brain scanner. When Achterberg analyzed the brain scans, she was astonished at the results. During the intervals when the healers were sending their prayers and intentions, the partners’ brains “lit up” in the areas that are usually activated when someone does something or says something in response to a stimulus—possibly, she theorized, the healer’s thoughts. The odds that chance alone accounted for the partners’ brains lighting up in this way were 7,874 to one.
Mainstream scientists rightly question these studies. They ask whether the statistical analysis was done properly, whether the findings have been replicated or are just a fluke, whether the researchers had a stake in a particular outcome (a flaw not limited to these off-Broadway scientists, by the way, but is endemic in scientific studies). These are legitimate questions, even though the studies I reviewed were rigorously conducted and published in peer-reviewed journals.
I include them here because materialist scientists have not explained things that people experience routinely—such as gut feelings, premo nitions, and certainly not the power of prayer—except to dismiss them as coincidence. Had they presented compelling theories for these everyday phenomena, I would not bother exploring alternative explanations. Since they haven’t, we are going to take a brief walk on the wild side—through the parapsychology ghetto, a neighborhood that most scientists drive around. But like Harlem, parapsychology is enjoying something of a renaissance.
The Bonds of Love
Dean Radin and his colleagues’ most recent experiment mirrors the one that Alain Aspect conducted with particles of light. In that experiment, the French researcher connected two particles and then separated them, only to find that they continued to behave as if they were still connected. Radin and his colleague Marilyn Schlitz, who directs research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, tested the phenomenon on a larger scale: instead of bonded photons, they studied bonded people.
Radin and Schlitz selected thirty-six couples who were willing to see if their emotional bonds translated into physical ones.18 During the experiment, each partner in a couple