Fingerprints of God (35 page)

Mainstream scientists rightly question these studies. They ask whether the statistical analysis was done properly, whether the findings have been replicated or are just a fluke, whether the researchers had a stake in a particular outcome (a flaw not limited to these off-Broadway scientists, by the way, but is endemic in scientific studies). These are legitimate questions, even though the studies I reviewed were rigorously conducted and published in peer-reviewed journals.

I include them here because materialist scientists have not
explained
things that people experience routinely—such as gut feelings, premo nitions, and certainly not the power of prayer—except to dismiss them as coincidence. Had they presented compelling theories for these everyday phenomena, I would not bother exploring alternative explanations. Since they haven’t, we are going to take a brief walk on the wild side—through the parapsychology ghetto, a neighborhood that most scientists drive around. But like Harlem, parapsychology is enjoying something of a renaissance.

Dean Radin and his colleagues’ most recent experiment mirrors the one that Alain Aspect conducted with particles of light. In that experiment, the French researcher connected two particles and then separated them, only to find that they continued to behave as if they were still connected. Radin and his colleague Marilyn Schlitz, who directs research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, tested the phenomenon on a larger scale: instead of bonded photons, they studied bonded people.

Radin and Schlitz selected thirty-six couples who were willing to see if their emotional bonds translated into physical ones.
¹⁸
During the experiment, each partner in a couple was placed in a separate room in which they could not talk to, see, or communicate with the other in any way; in fact, one partner was sealed in a soundproof, electromagnetically shielded room. Each person was also wired to allow a computer to record various physiological measurements: heart rate, respiration, brain-wave activity (EEGs), skin conductance (sweat glands), and peripheral blood flow. These are measures of a person’s unconscious nervous system, which one does not control.

During the thirty-minute experiment, one partner would send ten-second bursts of focused loving “intentions” to the other at random times. The computer would measure each partner’s nervous system. The intriguing question was this: When the “sender” transmitted his packets of love, would the “receiver” physically respond with a jump in her brain-wave activity, with a racing heart, or with sweaty palms?

“You have a long-term couple; they will both have a lot of physical proximity to each other,” Radin explained. “They will be ‘entangled’ both emotionally and psychologically and maybe physically. And if they
are
physically entangled, you should be able to separate them, poke one, and see the other one flinch. And in essence that’s what these experiments are looking at. They’re looking at space separation under conditions where we don’t know of any classical form of connection that would cause one to get poked and the other one to flinch.”

That poses a revolutionary question right there, but then the “Love Study” added a twist. It made intuitive sense that couples who were “highly motivated” to connect would in fact perform better at affecting each other’s vital signs. What sorts of couples, Schlitz and Radin asked themselves, are highly motivated to connect? One answer: sick ones. Of the three dozen couples in their study, twenty-two couples included one partner who had been diagnosed with cancer. Thus both partners should be “highly motivated” to see that their prayers or intentions had a physical impact on the ill partner.

I asked Radin if I might observe entanglement in action. He agreed, and on a gorgeous morning in March 2007, I caught a glimpse of Einstein’s spooky action at a distance in the pulsating force of Teena and J. D. Miller’s love.

Teena Miller breezed toward me, a study in pink: pink camisole and a pink silk blouse draping over her floral skirt. Her large straw hat shaded translucent skin and kept her red hair in place. It seemed a strangely feminine outfit for the Institute’s rugged compound on the mountain, yet I could sense that Teena defined her own atmosphere. She did nothing halfway. A passionate liberal, she served as an executive board member of California’s Democratic Committee. She joined rallies with little provocation and had accumulated an odd set of titles—indeed, she was a certified whiskey taster and, for some reason we did not explore, an honorary member of the International Order of Camel Jockeys. At fifty-seven,Teena had defeated cancer not once but twice.

A half-step behind trailed her husband, J. D. Miller, cupping her elbow in his hand, less to guide her, it seemed, than to simply touch her. At sixty-four, J.D. was trim in his khaki pants and royal-blue shirt, his easy smile framed by a white beard and mustache. J.D. was a CPA and financial planner, a Republican, a beta to Teena’s alpha. Teena and J.D. had married nine years earlier, and to say they were “bonded” was an understatement. Teenagers, more like, taking every chance to embrace each other so intimately that I would avert my eyes. (“Excuse us,” Teena said as she kissed J.D. on the cheek during one of these close encounters. “She calls it ‘vitamins,’ ” J.D. explained.)

J.D. said he fell for Teena twenty years before he dared ask her out. In the interim,Teena married and gave birth to two girls, divorced, and raised the girls on her own. But J.D. never married. He was waiting, and when he bumped into Teena a decade ago, it took him all of two dates to make his intentions known.

Three years before I met the Millers, their relationship had come under scientific scrutiny in the “Love Study.” The Millers qualified not only because of their palpable chemistry, but also because of a tumor in Teena’s breast the size of her fist. She endured six months of chemotherapy, eleven operations, and six weeks of daily radiation before her doctor declared the cancer removed. Teena was in the middle of treatment when she saw a flier announcing a research project about “loving intentions.” She picked up the phone and called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, eager to have another arrow in her quiver against cancer.

That is how Teena and J. D. Miller found themselves squirreled away in the mountains of northern California, wired to computers that would measure their vital signs and, like a Geiger counter, the seismic activity of their love. And it is how I found myself following the Millers, Schlitz, and Radin down a stone path through the woods to their laboratory nestled in the trees.

Radin led J.D. to a soundproof room, and sat him before a computer screen. Over the next half-hour, Teena’s face would appear on the screen at random intervals, and remain there for ten seconds. During those times, J.D. would send his wife compassionate thoughts. The rest of the time he would think of anything but his wife.

As Radin gave J.D. some last-minute instructions, Schlitz was ushering Teena into the soundproof, electromagnetically shielded room. No noise, no signals of any sort, could enter or leave. Teena settled into the deep armchair and sighed contentedly, absorbing her environment: a plastic ficus tree, soft lighting, pale curtains, and a camera aimed at her face which would allow her husband to see her from the other room. Schlitz leaned down to affix electrodes to Teena’s hand.

“So, this is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is measuring your skin conductance activity,” Schlitz explained to Teena. Because they had dismantled much of the equipment after the Love Study was finished, they were measuring only two of the five bodily functions during this replication.

“Basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system. And as you can see, your image is being projected by this little camera into the next room. So your husband will be able to watch you at random times during the session.You won’t know when, so don’t try to guess, because it’s all random.”

“Right,” Teena said, leaning back against the headrest and closing her eyes as Schlitz closed the hermetically sealed door with a soft thud.

A minute later, the experiment began. After a few seconds, Teena’s face appeared on J.D.’s monitor. We knew he was seeing Teena on the monitor and sending her loving intentions for those ten seconds; we gazed at the computer screen recording Teena’s blood flow and skin conductance (that is, the perspiration on her hand). Those ragged or undulating lines would indicate whether Teena was perhaps unconsciously “responding” to J.D.’s thoughts projected from the other room.

“Notice how there’s a change in blood flow?” Radin asked me excitedly, pointing at sine waves on the computer monitor. “A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you hear somebody whispering in your ear and there’s nobody around, you have this sense of
What? What was that?
That’s more or less what we’re seeing in her physiology.”

Thirty minutes passed, during which time J.D. sent thirty-six random packets of “loving intention” to his wife. The experiment ended. Radin slipped off to run through a quick computer analysis of the data. Schlitz walked to the sealed room and opened the door. I followed on her heels, intent on interviewing Teena and J.D. separately, before they could exchange their stories. I was curious to know whether their thoughts as well as their physiology matched in any way.

“What did you experience?” I asked Teena.

“Happiness. It went between my granddaughter and my husband. What goes through my mind is kissing my husband right near his ear, where the whiskers are. I love that spot. And that kept popping into my head, constantly.”

“Were there any body sensations associated with it?” Schlitz asked.

“How do you explain bliss? How do you explain that in words, other than holding my granddaughter, or being hugged by my husband? It’s just the best feeling.”

I cornered J.D.

“What were you thinking about when you were sending your thoughts?” I asked.

“Some of the stuff I’m not going to share with you.” He laughed, looking slyly at his wife across the room.“But others . . . well, she has a picture with her today that shows her with her granddaughter, and there’s just a bond between them. It makes her feel so good, so I was thinking of those things.”

Initially, I found it impressive that they had focused on the same two things—each other and Teena’s granddaughter. But I quickly checked myself.
Of course
their thoughts overlapped: you would hardly expect them to be pondering presidential politics during a “love” study. In my head I heard the sonorous voice of Richard Sloan, the skeptic at Columbia Medical Center, scolding me:“Anecdotes, while interesting, are merely anecdotes. They are not evidence.”

Equally intriguing was the story Teena told me while we waited for the results. I asked her if she thought that these connections that Radin and others had measured might simply be statistical flukes or chance happenings.

“It can’t be,” she insisted. “It’s energy. I have always believed that, because I’ve been linked to certain people.”

She paused. “For example, one day I knew something wasn’t right with my daughter. She was nineteen, and I picked up the phone and I called a number. I don’t know where the number came from. And this young voice on the other end of the phone picked it up, and I said, ‘Hello.’ And I immediately started talking. I said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I believe my daughter is walking toward you at this very moment.’And he got very quiet.

“And he said, ‘Describe her.’

“And I said, ‘She’s about five-two, she’s very attractive, she’s nineteen, she’s got long dark hair . . .’

“ ‘What’s her name?’

“ ‘Alison,’ I said. Then I heard him calling, ‘Alison!’ ”

Teena laughed. “She was in the parking lot at a gas station, her car had broken down, and that was the closest place she could get to. And when Alison heard him calling her name, she stopped, because she didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her.

“And the young man said, ‘Your mother’s on the phone. She wants to talk to you.’ ”

Teena smiled. “And that’s what I mean when I say I’m linked with people.”

Later, I phoned Alison to ask for her version of events. She recalled that in the fall of 1994 or spring of 1995, when she was a freshman at the University of Nevada in Reno, she was driving home from school to her mother’s home near San Francisco. Her car began to break down near Sacramento. She managed to pull into a service station, and as she was talking to the mechanic, the phone rang. She heard him say,“Yeah, your daughter’s right here,” and he handed her the phone.

“Is your mother really intuitive?” I asked.

“Yes, but not like
that.
It was crazy.”

Alison does not remember calling her mother from the service station or a pay phone beforehand—but she may have. She does not believe she gave her mother the telephone number at the gas station—but it is a possibility. I have eliminated one other possibility: the technology that would have allowed Teena to return the call automatically, without knowing the number—*69 or caller ID—was not available in California in 1995. As with so many other stories I encountered in my research, this one is not airtight: a skeptic will dismiss it and a believer will feel a shiver of recognition.

I turned to Marilyn Schlitz at IONS, who had been listening to the story and nodding.

“How can this be explained?” I asked. “Is this common?”

“Well, to have such a clear example, where you have a number which is seven digits, is pretty improbable, to say the least. Certainly the experience is widely reported, and we do see a lot of evidence for this kind of thing within the laboratory as well.”

Of course, no matter how many strange stories you present, how this happens—whether it points to a quantum phenomenon or an old wives’ tale—remains a matter of fiery debate.

Moments later, Dean Radin marched back with a computer analysis of the results. He leaned over Teena, showing her a graph with lines that looked like a series of molehills. On a sheet of paper were the emotions that Teena had felt, translated into the language of physiology: squiggly lines that measured blood flow and skin resistance (perspiration). The lines showed that within two seconds of the time that J.D. began sending his “intentions” toward her, she became “aroused” (that is, increased perspiration) and then she would relax (or flush) when he switched off his intentions.