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So, a basic question is
whether people can psychokinetically influence living
systems at all. Some investigators, such as William
Braud of the Mind Science Foundation, explored subjects’
ability to change the activity or behavior of a ‘target’
animal. For example, Braud conducted a series of
experiments in which the spatial orientation of an
electric fish was the ‘target’ measure of animal
activity. Electric fish naturally emit a current, which
can be detected in specially constructed fish tanks. The
current emitted is strongest when the fish is oriented
perpendicularly to the electrodes in the tank, and
weakest when parallel to them.
The tank with the electric fish was placed in an
electrically shielded box, and the subject and
experimenter were located in a separate room. By
amplifying the detected electrical charge, and
displaying this signal through an oscilloscope, subjects
could receive continuous feedback as to the orientation
of the fish. They would then try, during ‘influence’
periods, to increase the displayed electric charge -
which meant influencing the orientation of the fish -
while in ‘control’ periods, they would do nothing. The
question, of course, was whether higher electrical
activity would occur during the influence vs. the
control periods.
Of the four experiments, three showed significant
increases in electrical activity during influence
periods; the fourth showed a weaker effect, but in the
same direction. The strongest results were obtained with
a psychic; but one of the significant experiments
involoved subjects with no claim to psychic talents.
A number of other experiments, at Braud’s lab and
elsewhere, obtained similar results with other animals.
But let’s look at studies with animals which directly
addressed the question of healing per se. In North
Carolina’s Institute for Parapsychology, researchers
anesthetized a large number of mice which were from the
same litter, comparable in size and of the same sex.
They randomly divided the mice into ‘control’ vs.
‘influence’ groups and asked subjects to focus on the
latter: to try to ‘energize’ them and wake them up as
quickly as possible. The results were statistically
significant, with ‘influence’ mice waking up much more
quickly than controls. Subjects in this experiment were
quite close to the mice, though they couldn’t touch
them. But in a subsequent series, subjects were situated
in a separate room, focusing on the mice through a
one-way mirror; the results were again statistically
significant and positive, despite the increased
distance.
Bernard Grad at McGill university also conducted a
number of experiments with mice. He surgically
introduced small wounds in about 300 mice, and randomly
divided them in three groups. One group of mice was
treated by the Hungarian healer Oskar Estebany; he was
asked to try to accelerate healing of the wounds by
holding the cage in which they were situated between his
hands. A second group of mice was similarly ‘treated’ by
skeptical medical students, while a third group remained
untreated. After a predefined time-period, the wounds of
the mice of all three groups were measured and compared.
The wounded mice treated by Estebany had healed
significantly more quickly than the other two groups. By
contrast, the group ‘treated’ by medical students fared
worse than the untreated group -- not a very reassuring
finding! |
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