The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. Lynne McTaggart

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      At one point, Schwartz asked one of the students to stand with his left hand over Einstein’s head, with his right arm extended towards Schwartz, who was sitting in a chair three feet away. Schwartz moved his arm up and down. To the amazement of the other students, Schwartz’s movement was picked up by the amplifier. The signal had passed through Schwartz’s body and travelled through the student. Schwartz was still generating the signal, but this time, the student had become the antenna, receiving the signal and transmitting it to the amplifier, which acted as another antenna.

      Schwartz realized he had hit upon the most important point of all his research. Simple movement generated electrical charge, but, more important, it created a relationship. Every movement we make appears to be felt by the people around us. The implications were staggering. What if he were admonishing a student? What might be the physical effect on the student of wagging his finger while shouting ‘Don’t do that’? The student might feel as if he were getting shot with a wave of energy. Some people might even have more powerful positive or negative charges than others. In Elmer Green’s copper wall experiment, all sorts of equipment malfunctioned in the presence of Roslyn Bruyere, a famous healer.

      Schwartz was onto something fundamental about the actual energy that human beings emit. Could the energy of thought have the same effect as the energy of movement outside the thinker’s own body? Did thoughts also create a relationship with the people around us? Every intention towards someone else might have its own physical counterpart, which would be registered by its recipient as a physical effect.

      Like Schwartz, I suspected the energy generated by thoughts did not behave in the same way as the energy generated by movement. After all, the signal from movement decreased over distance, much like ordinary electricity. With healing, distance appeared to be irrelevant. The energy of intention, if indeed there were any, would have to be more fundamental than that of ordinary electromagnetism – and lie somewhere, perhaps, in the realm of quantum physics. How could I test the energetic effects of intention? Healers, who appeared to be sending more energy than normal through their healing, offered an obvious place to start.

Elmer Green demonstrated in his research that an enormous surge of electrostatic energy occurred during healing. When a person is simply standing still, his or her breathing and beating heart will produce electrostatic energy of 10–15 millivolts on the EEG amplifiers; during activities requiring focused attention, such as meditation, the energy will surge up to 3 volts. During healing, however, Green’s healers produced voltage surges up to 190 volts; one produced 15 such pulses, which were 100,000 times higher than normal, with smaller pulses of 1–5 volts appearing on each of the four copper walls. On investigating the source of this energy, Green discovered that the pulses were coming from the healer’s abdomen, called dan tien and considered the central engine of internal energy in the body in Chinese martial arts.5

      Stanford University physicist William Tiller constructed an ingenious device to measure the energy produced by healers. The equipment discharged a steady stream of gas and recorded the exact number of electrons pulsing out with the discharge. Any increase in voltage would be captured by the pulse counter.

In his experiment, Tiller asked ordinary volunteers to place their hands about six inches from his device and hold a mental intention to increase the count rate. In the majority of more than 1000 such experiments, Tiller discovered that, during the intention, the number of recorded pulses would increase by 50,000 and remain there for 5 minutes. These increases would occur even if a participant was not close to the machine, so long as he or she held an intention. Tiller concluded that directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over remote distance.6

I found two other studies measuring the actual electrical frequencies emitted by people using intention. One study measured healing energy and the other examined energy generated by a Chinese Qigong master during times that he was emitting external Qi, the Chinese term for energy or the life force.7 In both instances, the measurements were identical: frequency levels of 2–30 hertz were being emitted by the healers.

This energy also seemed to change the molecular nature of matter. I discovered a body of scientific evidence examining chemical changes caused by intention. Bernard Grad, an associate professor of biology at McGill University in Montreal, had examined the effect of healing energy on water that was to be used to irrigate plants. After a group of healers had sent healing to samples of water, Grad chemically analysed the water by infrared spectroscopy. He discovered that the water treated by the healers had undergone a fundamental change in the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen in its molecular makeup. The hydrogen bonding between the molecules had lessened in a similar manner to that which occurs in water exposed to magnets.8 A number of other scientists confirmed Grad’s findings; Russian research discovered that the hydrogen–oxygen bonds in water molecules undergo distortions in the crystalline microstructure during healing.9

These kinds of changes can occur simply through the act of intention. In one study, experienced meditators sent an intention to affect the molecular structure of water samples they were holding throughout the meditation. When the water was later examined by infrared spectrophotometry, many of its essential qualities, particularly its absorbance – the amount of light absorbed by the water at a particular wavelength – had been significantly altered.10 When someone holds a focused thought, he may be altering the very molecular structure of the object of his intention.

In his research, Gary Schwartz wondered whether intention only manifested as electrostatic energy. Perhaps magnetic energy also played a role. Magnetic fields naturally had more power, more ‘push–pull’ energy. Magnetism seemed the more powerful and universal energy; the earth itself is profoundly influenced by its own faint pulse of geomagnetic energy. Schwartz remembered a study carried out by William Tiller, in which psychics had been placed inside a variety of devices that block different forms of energy. They had performed better than usual in a Faraday cage, which filters out only electrical energy, but they performed worse when placed in a magnetically shielded room.11

      From these early studies, Schwartz gleaned two important implications: healing may generate an initial surge of electricity, but the real transfer mechanism may be magnetic. Indeed, psychic phenomena and psychokinesis could be differentially influenced, simply through different types of shielding. Electrical signals might interfere, while magnetic signals enhance the process.

      To test this latest idea, Schwartz was approached by a colleague of his, Melinda Connor, a post-doctoral fellow in her mid-forties with an interest in healing. The first hurdle was finding an accurate means of picking up magnetic signals. Measuring tiny low-frequency magnetic fields is tricky, requiring the use of expensive and highly sensitive equipment called a SQUID, or superconducting quantum interference device. A SQUID, which can cost up to four million dollars, ordinarily occupies a specially constructed room that has been magnetically shielded in order to eliminate ambient radiating noise.

      The best Schwartz and Connor could come up with on their limited budget was a poor man’s SQUID – a small handheld, battery-operated three-axis digital gaussmeter originally designed to measure electromagnetic pollution by picking up extra-low-frequency (ELF) magnetic fields. The gaussmeter was sensitive enough to pick up one-thousandth of a gauss, a very faint pulse of a magnetic field. In Schwartz’s mind, this level of sensitivity was more than adequate to do the job.

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