Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [119]
During the thirty-minute experiment, one partner would send ten-second bursts of focused loving “intentions” to the other at random times. The computer would measure each partner’s nervous system. The intriguing question was this: When the “sender” transmitted his packets of love, would the “receiver” physically respond with a jump in her brain-wave activity, with a racing heart, or with sweaty palms?
“You have a long-term couple; they will both have a lot of physical proximity to each other,” Radin explained. “They will be ‘entangled’ both emotionally and psychologically and maybe physically. And if they are physically entangled, you should be able to separate them, poke one, and see the other one flinch. And in essence that’s what these experiments are looking at. They’re looking at space separation under conditions where we don’t know of any classical form of connection that would cause one to get poked and the other one to flinch.”
That poses a revolutionary question right there, but then the “Love Study” added a twist. It made intuitive sense that couples who were “highly motivated” to connect would in fact perform better at affecting each other’s vital signs. What sorts of couples, Schlitz and Radin asked themselves, are highly motivated to connect? One answer: sick ones. Of the three dozen couples in their study, twenty-two couples included one partner who had been diagnosed with cancer. Thus both partners should be “highly motivated” to see that their prayers or intentions had a physical impact on the ill partner.
I asked Radin if I might observe entanglement in action. He agreed, and on a gorgeous morning in March 2007, I caught a glimpse of Einstein’s spooky action at a distance in the pulsating force of Teena and J. D. Miller’s love.
Teena Miller breezed toward me, a study in pink: pink camisole and a pink silk blouse draping over her floral skirt. Her large straw hat shaded translucent skin and kept her red hair in place. It seemed a strangely feminine outfit for the Institute’s rugged compound on the mountain, yet I could sense that Teena defined her own atmosphere. She did nothing halfway. A passionate liberal, she served as an executive board member of California’s Democratic Committee. She joined rallies with little provocation and had accumulated an odd set of titles—indeed, she was a certified whiskey taster and, for some reason we did not explore, an honorary member of the International Order of Camel Jockeys. At fifty-seven,Teena had defeated cancer not once but twice.
A half-step behind trailed her husband, J. D. Miller, cupping her elbow in his hand, less to guide her, it seemed, than to simply touch her. At sixty-four, J.D. was trim in his khaki pants and royal-blue shirt, his easy smile framed by a white beard and mustache. J.D. was a CPA and financial planner, a Republican, a beta to Teena’s alpha. Teena and J.D. had married nine years earlier, and to say they were “bonded” was an understatement. Teenagers, more like, taking every chance to embrace each other so intimately that I would avert my eyes. (“Excuse us,” Teena said as she kissed J.D. on the cheek during one of these close encounters. “She calls it ‘vitamins,’ ” J.D. explained.)
J.D. said he fell for Teena twenty years before he dared ask her out. In the interim,Teena married and gave birth to two girls, divorced, and raised the girls on her own. But J.D. never married. He was waiting, and when he bumped into Teena a decade ago, it took him all of two dates to make his intentions known.
Three years before I met the Millers, their relationship had come