Dean Radin (1) , Jerome Stone (2) , Ellen Levine (3), Shahram Eskandarnejad (3), Marilyn Schlitz (1,3), Leila Kozak (4,5), Dorothy Mandel (5) & Gail Hayssen (1)
(1) Institute of Noetic Sciences
Petaluma, CA, USA
(2) Touchstone Services
Portland, ME, USA
(3) California Pacific Medical Center
San Francisco, CA, USA
(4) Bastyr University
Seattle, CA, USA
(5) Saybrook Graduate School
San Francisco, CA, USA
This study investigated the effects of intention on the autonomic nervous system of a human "sender" and distant "receiver" of those intentions, and explored the roles that motivation and training have in modulating these effects. Skin conductance level was measured in each member of a couple, both of whom were asked to feel the presence of the other. While the receiving person relaxed in a shielded room under double-blind conditions, the sending person in another room directed intention towards the receiver during 10-second epochs. These sending epochs were alternated with no-sending inter-epoch periods ranging randomly between 5 and 40 seconds. Thirty-six couples participated in 38 test sessions; in 22 couples one of the pair was a cancer patient. In 12 of those couples, the healthy person was trained to direct intention towards the patient and asked to practice that intention daily for three months prior to the experiment (trained group). In the other 10 couples, the pair was tested before the partner was trained (wait group). Fourteen healthy couples received no training (control group). Ensemble means of the skin conductance measures were determined during the intention epochs and normalized using nonparametric bootstrap procedures. Overall, receivers' skin conductance levels increased during the sending epochs, achieving a peak deviation at the end of the average epoch (z = 3.9, p = 0.00009, two-tailed). Planned differences in skin conductance among the three groups were not significant, but peak deviations were largest in the trained group, followed by the wait and control groups, respectively. This study confirms previous studies indicating that directing intention towards a distant person is correlated with a rise in that person's autonomic nervous system, and it suggests that motivation to heal and to be healed, and training on how to direct distant intention, may modulate this relationship.