Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [154]
16 fMRI technology is far more expensive (about $1,000 per brain scan), and few researchers have access to these machines. Therefore, few studies have gone this route. The results, while mixed, have been suggestive that this is an area ripe for research. See L. J. Standish, “Evidence of Correlated Functional MRI Signals Between Distant Human Subjects,” Alternative Therapies 9 (2003): 122-28. In one pair that was tested—a man and woman who had been colleagues for two years—when the man was sending images to the woman lying in the brain scanner, her brain lit up, or activated in areas 18 and 19 of the visual cortex. This is the region of the brain that is activated when someone directly sees an object.
17 J. Achterberg, “Evidence for Correlation Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Imaging Analysis,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 11 (2005): 965-71 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.).
18 D. Radin, “Compassionate Intention as a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patients: Effects of Distant Intention on the Automatic Nervous System,” Explore 4 (2008): 235-43.
19 I asked Schlitz if she had found pairs other than bonded couples who excelled at these tests. She nodded.
“We see that they are typically people who come from three sets of trainings,” she said. “They are meditators. They’re martial artists. Or they’re classically trained musicians. So you might ask the question, what do those three populations have in common? Well, they have in common both intention and attention training.” A meditator trains his brain to be still and highly focused. An Aikido master learns to focus on the opponent in front of him and movement on the periphery, with “eyes on the back of his head.” The same is true for a classically trained musician, she observed. “Their brains are actually different from a person who hasn’t been trained that way. And one of the things a musician can do, for example, is attend to their own line in the symphony and stay very focused on a particular melody that they’re doing, and at the same time they have the larger capacity to track the whole symphony as it’s performing. So there’s something about that focused attention combined with this more generalized intention.” Having seen how meditation literally molds the brain, I was hardly surprised by this finding. It seemed to add another straw to the mounting pile of evidence that the trained brain has a capacity to glean information and dimensions that the flabby or distracted brain cannot.
20 Specifically, when the “senders” (such as J.D.) saw the image of their loved ones on the screen and began to think about them, certain things happened: for five seconds, their brain waves spiked, as did their heart rate and sweat-gland activity, and their blood flowed away from their fingertips, which happens when people gear up to do a task like focusing their attention. Then, halfway through, the process reversed as they began to relax. That much was predictable. But what gave the researchers pause was the response of the “receivers” (such as Teena) in the soundproof, electromagnetically sealed room. The receivers mimicked their partners’ physiology within a few milliseconds, becoming aroused and then relaxing toward the end of the ten seconds. One curious outcome, Radin said, involved breathing. “At the end of the sending period, the sender typically does a big exhalation, because they’ve been holding their breath for the ten seconds. There’s also a big exhalation for the receiver at the same time, even though they’re not holding their breath.” He laughed. “I didn’t expect that.”
CHAPTER 12. PARADIGM SHIFTS
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