by Lynne McTaggart

Ed Note: This is a follow-up and expansion of an article on the initial findings of the first-ever, long-distance double-blind group intention experiment in history which occurred March 10-11, 2007. Participants included 400 attendees of the first Intention Experiment Conference in London and consciousness researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson.For background: theglobalintelligencer.com/mar2007/life-health [1]

LONDON, UK - Now that we’ve carried out a number of our Intention Experiments, it’s safe to say that nothing we’ve learned was what we imagined we’d find, but everything we did find offered another extraordinary piece of the puzzle about the power of intention. Many of our new answers beg many more questions, the answers to which may be yielded up in future experiments.

We have run five experiments thus far, one with German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp and his colleague Dutch psychologist Eduard Van Wijk at the International Institute of Biophysics, and four with psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz and his team at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness Research.

All experiments concerned examining the alteration in the tiny light — called biophoton emissions — being emitted from living things. We chose to look at this tiny current of light because it is infinitely more subtle than, say, cellular growth rate. The tiniest change in the organism can be controlled for. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, which can register an intensity of visible light of about 10–17 watts per square centimetre, analogous to the light coming from a candle several kilometres away. Schwartz used a highly sensitive CCD cameras, which record and photograph the faint light of outer space.

This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.

For our first intention experiment we gathered a group of experienced meditators in London, and had them send positive intention to four targets at Popp’s IIB laboratory in Neuss, Germany. This included two very simple organisms: the algae Acetabularia acetabulum, a strange freak of nature, consisting of a single cell and dinoflagellates, a type of primitive fluorescent ‘animal’, the light emissions of which is extraordinarily responsive to change. With such primitive organisms, Popp explained, it would be possible to demonstrate, with a fair degree of certainty, that any effect, for better or worse, was entirely the result of our remote influence. As both Popp and Schwartz have cautioned many times, if we were going to attempt to do intention experiments, we need to begin on the ground floor – and dinoflagellates were certainly that.

Eventually Popp acquiesced to including the use of several other subjects: a jade plant, and a human subject whom Eduard felt he could enlist. Each would constitute a separate experiment, and then we would have several results to compare.

In our experimental design, we aimed for an ‘on off, on off’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Popp suggested that we have our group send intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off, so that we would be ‘running’ intention a few times every hour. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.

As change of any sort is easier to see with something ill that you try to make well, we decided to stress some of our subjects in some way. The most obvious way to stress a life form is to place it in a hostile medium. Van Wijk decided to pour some vinegar into the medium of the dinoflagellates. We could stress the jade plant by sticking a needle through one of its fleshy leaves. Eduard ultimately decided to stress our human subject with three cups of coffee. We decided to leave the Acetabularia alone, to test whether our intentions could also affect a healthy organism.

The experiment ran at night, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eduard would turn on the equipment, and I selected three half-hour windows within that time frame to carry out our group intentions unbeknownst to either our scientists or Annemarie, our human target a laser biologist and meditator of long standing. The 16 meditators and I met on March 28, 2006 at 5:30 pm and sent intentions to all four targets from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at every hour on the hour to 10 minutes past and from 20 past until the half hour.

When analysing the data, once they’d received our meditation schedule, van Wijk studied not only the intensity of light but also its deviation from symmetry: normal emissions from a living thing, when plotted on a graph as a bell curve, are perfectly symmetrical. He also looked at any deviations in the kurtosis, or the customary ‘peakedness’, of the distribution. High kurtosis means a bell curve that is high around the middle, or mean. Again, when emissions are plotted on a graph, the normal peak distribution is 0 – the highs and lows cancel each other out.

After examining our 12 block periods – the six times we sent intention and the six periods of rest – he found no change in light intensity. But he did find large changes in the skewness, showing a lack of the customary symmetry (from 1.124 to 0.922) and kurtosis (from 2.403 to 1.581) of the emissions. Something in the light was profoundly altered.

The most interesting aspect of these results is that they exactly match those van Wijk had observed during a study of healers, when he had tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place.

In the study, when he had placed some algae with a photon counter in the presence of a healer and his patients and measured the photons of the algae during 36 healings, he had been surprised to discover that the photon count distributions of the algae had ‘remarkable’ alterations during the healing rituals. Large shifts in the cyclical components of the emissions had occurred. His tiny study had suggested that healing caused a shift in the light emissions of everything in its path. Now he had discovered the same effect when simple intention was sent by ordinary people from 300 miles away.

As for the two algae and the jade plant, in all three instances, our subjects registered a significant decrease in biophotons during the meditation sessions, compared with the control periods. The dinoflagellates had been killed by the vinegar, in the end; nevertheless, Popp said, their response (a lowering of emissions by nearly 140,000) was significantly different from the normal emissions of a dying organism. Among the survivors, the Acetabularia, the healthy subject, had evidenced a larger effect than the jade plant, perhaps because it was not overcoming a stress (544 emissions lower than normal), whereas with the jade plant (which had 65.5 emissions lower than normal), the stress (the pin) remained in the leaf during the experiment.

During meditation, Popp wrote in his report, ‘there is a clear preference of dropping down reactions rather than going up’, which tracked the times of our intentions. With the Acetabularia, we had had an overall decrease over the norm of 573 emissions, and an increase of only 29.

Our little meditation effort had created a major healing effect, a significant decrease in living light. Not only that, but the effect from all that distance was similar to the effect by an experienced healer when healing in the same room. The intention of our group had created the same light as a healer’s.

Of leaves and stringbeans

Then in March and April of this year, we began our large-scale computer experiments, in conjunction with Dr. Schwartz’s team at the University of Arizona. In all four instances, we worked with Mark Boccozzi, a scientist working with Dr Gary Schwartz at the university’s. In all instances, we used a target (in three instances a leaf and in one instance seeds from stringbeans) plus an identical control.
 
Our first experiment was carried out at our London Conference on March 11, where 400 of our attendees sent intention to increase the light emissions of a geranium leaf at the University of Arizona. Our intention was to make the leaf ‘glow and glow’. The results were highly significant, compared to the control — so much so that the difference can be seen on photographs taken by the lab’s special CCD imaging systems.

Our second intention experiment was carried out on March 24 and was identical in design, except that we asked people around the world to send intention via our internet site. Our estimate was that 10,000 people attempted to participate in the experiment. Our system could not cope with that many participants all trying to access the system at the same moment, and the website crashed.

The results from the experiment show a bit of movement in the predicted direction, but with so many people confused and unable to access the experiment, the results were inconclusive.

It was becoming clear to me that the biggest challenge with these experiences was not demonstrating the power of intention, but in creating a computer system sophisticated enough to allow thousands of people around the world to stare at the same computer page at the same time.

The third experiment was set for April 14. For this experiment I was taking no chances. I hired a team of web engineers called Visionwt, run by experienced web designer Tony Wood. The team met with us over many days and carefully designed the experiment so that Mark at the University of Arizona would be able to continually send refreshed photographs of the target to Tony, who would place it on the website.

We had hypothesized it was important to have a ‘live’ connection with the leaf or plant, and so we designed the event to have the continually refreshing photo. Nevertheless, that renewing photo represented the primary technical challenge of the experiment —the reason we required so much server power.

In the end, we rented server space from a company that supplies the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol. For April 14 and 21, we had on hand nine servers, which could have coped with traffic of one million visitors. We were not taking any chances.

This time, we asked participants, again through our website, to send intention to seeds of stringbeans (to make them glow). In the end, we had upwards of 7000 participants from 30 countries around the world. The technology worked perfectly, although at the start of the experiment, the servers were almost full.  

The bean experiment showed a strong 'glow effect', but not in terms of statistical significance — largely because of the limitations of our imaging equipment. According to Dr. Schwartz, “The beans were in the predicted direction, but the results did not reach statistical significance. However, there were only 12 beans per condition (glow versus control). If it was possible to image twice as many beans, the results would have reached statistical significance (this is called power analysis in statistics).”
 
In other words, we showed a large effect, but we needed more seeds to satisfy the scientific definition of ‘significant’.
 
We then ran a fourth experiment one week later, on April 21. This time, we returned to the leaf, with ‘glow’ instructions—again to test the technology and server power. This time, it appeared that we had 7000 or more people trying to log on, but only 500 who managed to participate - again, it appeared because of technical problems which prevented many people from logging-on. According to Dr. Schwartz, ‘The final leaf experiment showed little effect. Less than 1/6th the number of people who participated in the bean experiment participated in the leaf experiment, so the results are inconclusive.’
 
Conclusions

Here's what we can conclude, as highly tantalizing preliminary possibilities, which will be tested as hypotheses in depth later:
 
1. Intention sent nonlocally by a group occupying the same room — large or small — appears to have a significant effect on distant targets.
 
2.  A group of more than 6000 people sending intention from remote sites around the world may create an effect as large as 400 people in the same room — with targets allowing for power analysis.
 
3.  For intention to work in a scattered group (as in our on-line intention experiments), we may need to have a critical mass of more than 1000 people.
 
Nevertheless, there were several ‘confounding’ factors, as they say in science. The lack of an effect for the April 21 study may have been due either to the small numbers participating or technical problems. We'll have to test the critical mass hypothesis in future.
 
4.  Computer distractions or problems interfere with intention. In the first March 24 experiment and the last one — April 21 — the technical hitches could have interfered with the intense focus required. People may need an image of the target to send intention. Just 'thinking' about a possible leaf may not have an effect (as many did in the first experiment in March).
 
5.  The strongest effect may be through a coherent group effect, where the group is present in the same room.
 
What this means — which we didn’t expect — is that intention may have a 'dose effect'; for intention to work when people are scattered around the globe, it may need a critical mass. The Transcendental Meditation organization has long held a similar view. The Maharishi’s Mahesh Yogi has proposed that meditation has a threshold effect. HE says if 1 per cent of the population of a particular area practises TM, or the square root of 1 per cent of the population practises TM-Sidhi, a more advanced type of meditation, conflict of any variety – rates of murders, crime, drug abuse, even traffic accidents – goes down.

We may have also demonstrated that group intention has an ‘enhanced’ effect when carried out locally — group intention may work best when intenders occupy the same physical space.

We will test these hypotheses in further intention experiment — and we have many exciting ones planned.
 
We will move on from beans and leaves and are planning to work with America’s leading parapsychologist, Dean Radin from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to set up a simple human study, which we’ll carry out in several months – probably September. We’re also planning water experiments with Russian physicist Konstantin Korotkov. Dr. Schwartz will be working on ‘germination’ studies, where we try to influence the growth of plants.  
 
We’ll carry out the experiments just once a quarter, and vary targets, to eliminate any ‘intention fatigue’. We’re also planning to contact a subset of our most enthusiastic intention participants (say, 500 of them) and let them do individual studies with the scientists. We’re going to eliminate the source of our web problems — a 'live' image of the leaf/seeds. In future, we will simply use a straight photo, and that should avoid both problems and need for large server power.  

Science is an amazing process of unexpected discovery and happy accident. When you conduct a scientific study, you stumble along in the dark, not even sure what you are looking for. And then, when you come across your answer, it often takes your breath away. It may not be not the answer you were hoping for and certainly not the one that you expected.

Each new intention experiment adds a new element to our scientific story. Now we’ll plan to test whether there is indeed a ‘dose’ effect, whether specific instructions (like ‘grow’ or ‘heal’) also work, and whether intention works best when a group of people are contained in the same space.

Frontier science is the art of inquiring about the impossible, but the most important part of scientific investigation is just the simple willingness to ask outlandish questions. That’s what I hope to keep doing in our experiments.

Lynne McTaggart is a journalist, the award-winning author of the bestselling book The Field and publisher of several alternative health and spirituality newsletters, including the international newsletter What Doctors Don't Tell You. For more information: www.livingthefield.com [2] & www.theintentionexperiment.com [3]