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

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       CHAPTER FOUR

       Hearts that Beat as One

      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 tumour just 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 rota: each healer received sealed packets with information about the patients to be healed, including their name, photo 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 per cent of the control population died, all 10 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 had 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, the vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The energetic blonde had a colourful 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 pristine. Targ enlisted Jerome Stone, a nurse and practising Buddhist who had worked with her on the AIDS studies, to design the intention programme 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 CPMC, 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 favourite 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.СКАЧАТЬ