Consciousness Interactions with Remote Biological Systems: Anomalous Intentionality Effects
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
This is the big one — a 13-year summary asking whether the mind can directly affect living things at a distance. Across 37 experiments, influencers mentally targeted a wild variety of biological systems from separate rooms: skin conductance, blood pressure, muscle tremors, fish swimming direction, gerbil activity, and red blood cell breakdown. Twenty-one of 37 experiments were individually significant — 57% versus 5% expected by luck — and the combined odds against chance were in the trillions. They introduced the "lability hypothesis," suggesting systems that naturally fluctuate are easier to influence mentally. Framed as a laboratory model for mental healing, this became a foundational reference in the field.
Abstract
This paper describes a 13 year long, and still continuing, series of laboratory experiments that demonsrrare that persons are able to exert direct mental inHuences upon a variety of biological systems that are simated at a distance from rhe inHuencer and shielded from all conventional informational and energetic influences. The spontaneously Hucruating activity of the target system is monirored objectively during randomly interspersed inHuence and noninfluence (control) periods while, in a distant room, a person arrempts to inHuence the system's activity in a prespecified manner using mental processes of intentionality, focused attention, and imagery of desired outcomes. The expetimental design rules out subtle cues, recording errors, expecrancy and suggestion ("placebo") effects, artifactual reactions to external stimuli, confounding internal rhYThms, and coincidental or chance correspondences. Distantly influenced systems include: another person's electrodermal activiry, blood pressure, and muscular activiry; the spatial orientation of fish; the locomotor activity of small mammals; and the rate of hemolysis of human red blood cells. The experiments are viewed as laboratory analogs of mental healing.
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📋 Cite this paper
Braud, William G, Schlitz, Marilyn J (1991). Consciousness Interactions with Remote Biological Systems: Anomalous Intentionality Effects. Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine.
@article{braud_schlitz_1991_consciousness_interactions,
title = {Consciousness Interactions with Remote Biological Systems: Anomalous Intentionality Effects},
author = {Braud, William G and Schlitz, Marilyn J},
year = {1991},
journal = {Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine},
}