MAKE MY HEART FLUTTER
Most of these 'distant healing' studies have taken place in experimental, rather than
clinical (or medical) contexts; they're more like simulations of healing situations.
Experimenters focus not on illnesses, but rather on specific physiological measures which
can be precisely monitored in 'real-time' -- like brainwaves, body temperature,
heart-rate, blood pressure, etc. Essentially, we look to determine whether the 'patient's'
body -- monitored through one of these physiological measures -- reacts specifically at
the moment the healer is focusing on it and returns to normal when the healer focuses on
something else. The idea is that if we can find solid evidence that healers change some
component of the person's physiology at a distance, then it becomes much more plausible
that they can have beneficial effects on overall health.
In the last section, I spoke about biofeedback and 'psifeedback.' Recall how a common
biofeedback session works: first, using sensitive electrodes attached to the person's
body, we monitor the minute fluctuations in, say, body temperature. The signal from these
electrodes is electronically amplified and 'fed back' to the person who then uses this
real-time feedback to learn, by trial and error, how to voluntarily control these
so-called 'autonomic responses' (e.g., to increase body temperature). At the Mind Science
Foundation [San Antonio, Texas], in the late 1970s, psi researchers William Braud and
Marilyn Schlitz introduced a novel twist to this standard biofeedback procedure: instead
of displaying the ongoing physiological information to the person it came from, they
electronically channeled this information to someone else, located in a distant room. The
idea was to see whether this second person -- the 'healer' -- could use the real-time
physiological information to affect the 'patient's' body. |
