Material Submitted to Psi Research October 1, 2006

Verification Found for Telephone Telepathy

Ask a person about ever having had an experience suggestive of ESP, the most common response is about hearing the phone ring and it being someone the person had just thought about. A related experience is hearing the phone ring and knowing who it is that is calling.

“Telephone telepathy” has now achieved some experimental validation. Rupert Sheldrake, of Trinity College, Cambridge,  and author of Seven Experiments that will Change the World, tested a group of college students on their ability to correctly identify phone calls from their friends before answering the phone.

To conduct his experiment, according to the presentation he gave at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he collected the names and phone numbers of four friends of each student. He randomly chose one of the friends and had that friend call the student. Students were able to guess the identity of the caller forty-five per cent of the time, whereas chance guessing would produce a hit rate of only twenty five per cent. Sheldrake calculated the odds against getting such good results as one billion to one.

Source:

NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.


See also article Scientist probes 'telephone telepathy' in Register

'It's funny you called because I was just...'

By Lester Haines
Published Tuesday 5th September 2006

A UK scientist claims he has evidence of what he calls "telephone telepathy" - the phenomenon by which you think about someone and, lo and behold, the phone rings...
According to Reuters, Rupert Sheldrake reported on Tuesday the results of experiments which "proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even emails".

Sheldrake's guinea pigs gave researchers the names and phone numers of four relatives or friends. One of these was contacted at random and asked to give the subject a bell. Forty-five per cent guessed correctly who was on the other end of the line, Sheldrake told the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science shindig - "well above the 25 per cent you would have expected."

Sheldrake further commented: "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

A similar test involving email yielded the same result, although the researchers' limited pool of testees - 63 for the phone and 50 for the email - coupled to the fact that only nine subjects were filmed across the two tests, prompted "some scepticism".
Sheldrake has vowed to continue his experiments, however, to prove what he believes is the "interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping". Next up for scrutiny is text message telepathy. ®

Bootnote
We're sceptical about this, too. One Reg hack reports he recently had a new phone line installed and after a couple of days the phone rang. To his amazement, it was a friend he'd just been thinking about. However, when the initial shock had worn off, he remembered that he'd just been thinking that the friend in question was the only one he'd actually given the new number to.

Web source: http://www.remoteviewer.nu/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2933

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Drinking Fruit Juice Reduces Alzheimer’s Risk

Drinking at least three glasses of fruit juice a week reduces the chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease by seventy five per cent. According to a new study reported by Britain's Alzheimer's Research Trust, two thousand people were followed for ten years, keeping track of what they consumed. Although those who drink more fruit juice could also engage in other healthy lifestyle behaviors, the researchers believe the positive effect of fruit juice comes from the anti-oxidants they contain.

Source:

Juice reduces Alzheimer's risk: study

AM - Friday, 1 September , 2006  08:24:00

Reporter: Daniel Hoare

TONY EASTLEY: A new study has found that drinking fruit and vegetable juices might be the key to avoiding Alzheimer's disease.

American researchers tracked the habits of almost 2,000 people for up to 10 years and they found that the risk of Alzheimer's was reduced by 76 per cent for those who drank juice more than three times a week.

Alzheimer's researchers say the study reinforces the links between the disease and what goes into our mouths.

Rebecca Wood, from Britain's Alzheimer's Research Trust is speaking here with AM's Daniel Hoare.

REBECCA WOOD: It ties in with work that's been done earlier, for instance on eating a lot of dark berries and a study done a couple of years ago that seemed to show significant reduction in risk from people who ate a lot of dark berry fruit.

And it's great because it's the sort of work charities like to see being done and indeed some of the work that the Alzheimer's Trust does is related to diet because it's a very low cost option of trying to reduce risk.

DANIEL HOARE: How significant is diet in trying to avoid Alzheimer's?

REBECCA WOOD: Well, it's been shown to be more and more of significance and we've looked at quite a few studies recently that are saying things like, you know, obesity in mid-life can increase risk.

So obviously, eating more fruit tends to mean you're having a healthier lifestyle in any case, more fruit juices, you're taking more of the things that are good for you and they tend to tie in with people with better lifestyles anyway. You know, people who think about their diet and people who take more exercise.

So certainly that is a significant part of trying to reduce high risk, and I think there's more and more evidence collecting for that, and obviously there are different ways of looking at it. So for instance our vascular health are things that affect things like heart disease are also affected by having a lot of fruit and a lot of fruit juices, so all of these sorts of things also seem to impact on whether or not we get dementia.

DANIEL HOARE: Is there something specific about fruit and vegetable juices that contribute to lowering Alzheimer's?

REBECCA WOOD: The general wisdom on it, and certainly what's been so far is that anti-oxidants help us to get rid of what are known as free radicals, these things that whiz around our body and which can damage cells.

These fruit and vegetable vitamins then mop those up and stop them doing the damage. They've done a good study here, where they've really looked at it very carefully, the prospective study over 10 years. I think it's a good study.

TONY EASTLEY: Rebecca Wood from Britain's Alzheimer's Research Trust, speaking there with Daniel Hoare.

Web source: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1730564.htm

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The Devil is Misunderstood

The Devil has received a bad rap and is not nearly as evil as people assume. That’s the conclusion of University of California at Los Angles professor Henry Ansgar Kelly, after spending forty years studying the literature on Satan. In his new book, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge Press), he shows that the Bible actually portrays the devil in less negative terms than is generally assumed.

"A strict reading of the Bible shows Satan to be less like Darth Vader and more and more like an overzealous prosecutor," said Kelly in a university press release about his book. According to Kelly’s interpretation, “Satan's basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he's still part of God's administration."

Kelly was ordained as a Jesuit priest before becoming an academic. As a result of his studies, he has concluded that, "If Satan isn't really in opposition to God and he isn't really evil, then that means the fight between good and evil isn't an authentic part of Christianity."

Source:

What the Devil? Prince of Darkness Is Misunderstood, Says UCLA Author of New Satan ‘Biography’

He's not the enemy of God, his name really isn't Lucifer and he isn't even evil. And as far as leading Adam and Eve astray, that was a bad rap stemming from a case of mistaken identity.

"There's little or no evidence in the Bible for most of the characteristics and deeds commonly attributed to Satan," insists a UCLA professor with four decades in what he describes as "the devil business." 

In "Satan: A Biography" (Cambridge Press), Henry Ansgar Kelly puts forth the most comprehensive case ever made for sympathy for the devil, arguing that the Bible actually provides a kinder, gentler version of the infamous antagonist than typically thought. 

"A strict reading of the Bible shows Satan to be less like Darth Vader and more and more like an overzealous prosecutor," said Kelly, a UCLA professor emeritus of English and the former director of the university's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. "He's not so much the proud and angry figure who turns away from God as [he is] a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover. Satan's basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he's still part of God's administration."

The view runs in oppsition to the beliefs held by many Christians and others about key religious concepts like original sin and the nature of good and evil.

"If Satan isn't really in opposition to God and he isn't really evil, then that means the fight between good and evil isn't an authentic part of Christianity," Kelly said. "What I'm saying will be scandalous to some people."

But what would you expect of someone's whose 72nd  birthday fell this year on June 6 (06-06-06) and who felt disappointed when nothing momentous occurred that day? Actually, Kelly is no stranger to bubble-bursting. After digging deep into the history of Valentine's Day, he pronounced 20 years ago that he had not only uncovered the holiday's origins but that it should be celebrated in May, not February.

Still, if Kelly could be considered scandalous, it's not because he doesn't know any better. Kelly started his academic career at a Jesuit seminary and was ordained in four of the seven holy orders on the way to the priesthood, including the order of exorcist.

"It was at that time that I started my campaign to rehabilitate the devil — to deliver him from evil, as it were," Kelly said.

"Satan: A Biography" is the culmination of more than 40 years of research into the devil and religious and cultural traditions that have grown up around him. The book is Kelly's third on the topic. 

When it comes to the Old Testament, Kelly insists that Satan's profile is considerably lower than commonly thought and significantly less menacing. By Kelly's count, Satan only appears three times in the 45 books that make up the pre-Christian scriptures, the best known being in the Book of Job. On each occasion, Satan is still firmly part of what Kelly calls "God's administration," and his activities are done at the behest of "the Big Guy." But his actions aren't evil so much as consistent with the translation of "devil" and "satan," which literally mean "adversary" in Greek and Hebrew, respectively.

"His job is to test people's virtue and to report their failures," Kelly said.

Perhaps most surprising is not the figure Satan cuts, but his notable absences in the Old Testament. In the Bible's first reference to Lucifer, for instance, Satan doesn't appear — even by implication, Kelly points out. "'Lucifer' is Latin for light-bearer," he said, and was the name given to the morning star, or the planet Venus. Originally written in ancient Hebrew, the passage, on face value, refers to the tyrannical Babylonian king who boasts of his conquests but who is "about to be cast to the ground." Kelly insists there's nothing more to the reference than an apt use of metaphor, but the third-century Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria argued in his best known work, "On First Things," that the reference applied to Satan.

"Origen says, 'Lucifer is said to have fallen from Heaven,'" Kelly explained. "'This can't refer to a human being, so it must refer to Satan.' Subsequent church fathers found this reasoning persuasive, and so did everyone who followed them."

Ironically, the only mentions of Lucifer in the New Testament — and there are three of them — refer to Jesus, Kelly said. "Jesus is called 'Lucifer' or 'the morning star' because he represents a new beginning."

Another prominent omission in the Old Testament, Kelly said, can be found in Genesis. "Nobody in the Old Testament — or, for that matter, in the New Testament either — ever identifies the serpent of Eden with Satan," Kelly said. "The serpent is just the smartest animal, and he's motivated by envy after being jilted by Adam for Eve." 

Kelly traces the correlation of Satan and the serpent to not long after the New Testament was completed. In his "Dialogue With Trypho," the second-century Christian martyr Justin of Samaria first argued that Satan appeared as a serpent to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey God, according to Kelly.

"This is what I call 'The New Biography,'" Kelly said. "It starts with Justin Martyr, who implicates Satan in the fall of Adam and Eve. By causing Adam and Eve to fall, Satan caused his own fall. 

"The second step in this new and phony biography comes with Origen, who said, 'No, Satan's first sin was not deceiving Adam and Eve or refusing to go along with God's plan of creating Adam in his own image,'" Kelly said. "'It was to sin out of pride like the morning star, like Lucifer in the passage from Isaiah.' Turning Satan into God's enemy is a two-step process."

Meanwhile, in passages in Luke, Matthew, Corinthians and elsewhere in the New Testament, Satan continues to act as a tester, enforcer and prosecutor but not as God's enemy, Kelly points out.

"Everyone else has said that by the time Satan gets to the New Testament, he is evil, he's an enemy of God, but that's not so," Kelly said. "The whole biblical picture of Satan is that of a bad cop to Yaweh's good cop in the Old Testament, and to Jesus' good cop in the New Testament. Throughout, Satan is someone who works for God."

A scene in the New Testament's Book of Revelation is often cited today as evidence that Satan was the deceiver of Adam and Eve, but the interpretation stems from a fundamental misunderstanding, Kelly argues.  

"'That ancient serpent' refers to the giant sea serpent Leviathan, not the garden snake of Eden," he said. "In Revelation, Leviathan has morphed into a dragon, or large serpent, with the seven heads and 10 horns, which is still further removed from the seductive serpent who deceived Eve."

In addition to linking Satan with the Garden of Eden, the passage from Revelation also has been used to prove that Satan fell early on in the Bible, but Kelly insists that is not accurate.

"Satan's ouster from heaven in Revelation is explained as taking place in the future," Kelly said. "In Revelation 12:10, a voice says that 'the accuser of our brothers is cast out, overcome by the testimony of martyrs.' Since there were no martyrs until Christ died, that has to be in the future."

Similarly, a passage in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus reports having seen "Satan fall like lightning," has been misinterpreted, according to Kelly. "Jesus saw the fall in the past because he had the vision the day before he describes it to the apostles," Kelly said. "But Jesus is referring to a future fall [of Satan] from his position as God's attorney general." 

This is not to say, however, that Kelly contends that Satan is likeable.

"Jesus doesn't like him, and Paul doesn't like him," Kelly explained. "He represents the old guard in the heavenly bureaucracy, and everyone longs for him to be disbarred as the chief accuser of humankind."

Web source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=7261

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It May be Possible to Heal the Past

Research has demonstrated that it is possible to use psychokinesis (“mind over matter”) retroactively. Past studies reported here have demonstrated that after a random number generator had produced a series of ones and zeros on a recording tape, sight unseen and moved directly to a sealed container, a person could later use mental influence to retroactively affect the outcome when the container was opened and observed, either revealing more ones or more zeros (depending upon the influencer’s intention) than expected by chance. This same effect has been demonstrated on living organisms, according to a survey of such research analysed by William Braud,  research director at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, and reported in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.

In all these studies, the target behavior is recorded but not observed until after the mental influencer attempts to use PK to retroactively affect the observed outcomes. Some of the pre-recorded behaviors that were successfully affected retroactively have included the random movements of both gerbils and humans, traffic entering a tunnel, and human galvanic skin response (as in the lie detector test). In one experiment, a healer was able to retroactively reduce the rate at which blood parasites attacked red blood cells. In other experiments, subjects were able to retroactively influence their own galvanic skin response and breathing rate.

The author speculates on how this affect might be applied to retroactive healing. In attempting to theorize about this seeming logically impossible type of result, Braud notes that the retroactive effect is not upon what did happen and was observed in the past. Instead the effect is upon previously unobserved events, which is consistent with quantum theory that states that effects are uncertain until observed. To apply this retroactive effect to healing the past, it would seem to require operating on physiological systems in the person that had not yet been previously observed. It’s most likely application would therefore be in preventative medicine.

Source:

WELLNESS IMPLICATIONS OF RETROACTIVE INFLUENCE: EXPLORING AN OUTRAGEOUS HYPOTHESIS.

William Braud, PhD

Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 2000; 6(1): pp. 37-48.

William Braud is a professor and research director at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif., and codirector of the institute's William James Center for Consciousness Studies.

Virtually all medical and psychological treatments and interventions—conventional as well as complementary and alternative—are assumed to act in present time on present, already well-established conditions. An alternative healing pathway is proposed in which healing intentions—in the form of direct mental interactions with biological systems—may act in a "backward," time-displaced manner to influence probabilities of initial occurrence of earlier "seed moments" in the development of illness or health. Because seed moments are more labile, freely variable, and flexible, as well as unusually sensitive to small influences, time-displaced healing pathways may he especially efficacious. This unusual hypothesis is supported by a review of a substantial database of well-controlled laboratory experiments. Theoretical rationales and potential health applications and implications are presented. (Altern Ther Health Med. 2000;6(1):37-48)

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

Make me a child again, just for tonight.

—Elizabeth Akers Allen, Rock Me to Sleep, Mother

What may he done at any time will he done at no time.

—Old Scottish proverb

What if it were indeed possible to turn time backward in its flight and exert real influences on what is "past"? This logically outrageous possibility has been alluded to several times in previous issues of this journal. Dossey¹ and O'Laoire² considered the feasibility of time-displaced or backward-acting influences in the context of prayer, and Schlitz and Braud³ broached this possibility in their review of studies of direct mental influence upon biological systems.

Dossey⁴ has explicitly raised the possibility of "time-displaced health" and "time-displaced illness," and has provided clinical examples that may be consistent with the action of consciousness outside of concurrent time. The idea that mental intentions in the present could have direct, observable influences on the past may at first seem like science fiction. Upon closer examination, however, it can be discovered that there exist surprisingly strong theoretical rationales for—and a substantial body of empirical findings consistent with—this unusual idea. In this article I will review the thinking and evidence bearing on this outrageous hypothesis and discuss the implications of the evidence for physical and psychological health and well-being.

EVIDENCE FOR CONCURRENT DIRECT MENTAL INFLUENCE ('REAL-TIME PSYCHOKINESIS')

There exists a substantial experimental database for con-current direct mental influences, or what might be called "real-time psychokinesis (PK)" (mind-over-matter) effects. Careful laboratory research, conducted since the 1930s, has yielded evidence consistent with the conclusion that, under certain conditions, people are able to influence sensitive, labile physical systems by intending, willing, imagining, visualizing, or "wishing for" desired outcomes. These outcomes occur when the human influencers are at a distance from the target systems and the targets are effectively shielded from all conventional informational and energetic influences.

The inanimate target systems for these studies typically include random mechanical systems (such as bouncing dice or other small objects) or electronic random event generators (REGs) that operate on the basis of radioactive decay or thermal noise in semiconductor components. Exhaustive meta-analyses of inanimate PK studies have yielded impressive results. Radin and Ferrari⁵ systematically analyzed 148 studies of direct mental influence of dice, conducted between 1935 and 1987, and concluded that real direct mental influence (PK) effects existed in this database of nearly 2.6 million trials. They also presented and successfully addressed the various criticisms that had been marshaled against such experiments. Radin and Nelson⁶ reported a similar extensive meta-analysis of 597 studies of direct mental influence of electronic REGs that had been conducted between 1959 and 1987. Here, too, they found strong and consistent evidence for real PK effects on these inanimate target systems. Subsequent meta-analyses of still more REG data yielded similar, positive findings.^7-11

In addition to inanimate targets, animate target systems have been used extensively and successfully in direct mental influence experiments. Well-designed studies demonstrating distant mental influence of living systems were carried out as early as the 1920s and 1930s by experimental physiologists working in Russia. In a series of careful experiments, investigators were able to observe direct mental influences on motor acts, visual images and sensations, sleeping and waking, and physiological reactions (changes in breathing and electrodermal activity [EDA]) in people stationed at remote locations and shielded from all conventional interactions. These Russian research teams included many investigators who are now well known for their work in more conventional areas of physiology, conditioning and learning, and higher nervous activity—investigators such as Vladimir Bekhterev, K. I. Platonov, A. G. Ivanov-Smotensky, and Leonid Vasiliev. This early work has been summarized by Vasiliev¹² and by Braud.^{13, 14}

During this same period, similar studies were carried out in other countries. There were French experiments on inducing hypnosis at a distance (conducted by such notable investigators as Pierre Joire, Joseph Gibert, Pierre Janet, and Charles Richet) and Dutch experiments on remote influence of motor actions (by H. Brugmans at Groningen, in the northeastern Netherlands).^12-14

Since then, hundreds of experimental studies of distant mental influences on biological systems have been conducted; many of these have been designed as experimental models or analogs for the study of distant or mental healing. Reviews of these studies have been provided by Braud,^13-15 Braud and Schlitz,^{16, 17} Braud and colleagues,¹⁸ Solfvin,¹⁹ Benor,²⁰ and Targ.²¹ Remote mental influence studies designed to explore the efficacy of prayer as well as healing intentions have been reviewed by Braud²² and Dossey.⁴ In the November 1997 issue of Alternative Therapies, Schlitz and Braud²³ presented a meta-analysis of studies demonstrating direct mental influences of the intention and attention of one person on the ongoing physiological (electrodermal) activity of another person, monitored-at a distance and shielded from conventional sensorimotor influences.

The conclusion reached in these reviews and meta-analyses of concurrent direct mental interactions with biological target systems is that, in certain circumstances, the appropriate deployment of attention and intention is associated with directional shifts in objectively measured activities in distant and shielded biological systems. These anomalous influences occur under conditions that preclude chance coincidence and mediation by conventional physical processes. The biological target systems that have been influenced successfully in these studies have varied widely and have included bacteria, yeast colonies, motile algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, wood lice, ants, chicks, mice, rats, gerbils, cats, and dogs, as well as cellular preparations (e.g., blood cells, neurons, cancer cells) and enzyme activity. In human "target persons," eye movements, gross motor movements, FDA, plethysmographic activity, respiration, and brain rhythms have been influenced successfully.^4,12-23 The "psychokinetic" effects observed in these studies typically are small, yet they are reliable and consistent and may be produced not only by those selected for special talents, but also by unselected research participants who try their hands (or, better yet, their minds) at such feats for the very first time. Taken together, these studies provide a sound empirical foundation for considerations of the "mechanisms," implications, and possible practical applications of what has been called mental or spiritual healing.

THE POSSIBILITY OF TIME-DISPLACED DIRECT MENTAL INFLUENCES

In the studies described in the previous section, objective changes in target system activities were measured while the influence attempts were occurring (i.e., "real time" or concurrent PK influences were being studied). In 1971, a novel twist was introduced into such studies by theoretical physicist Helmut Schmidt. Inspired by the apparently nonlocal and acausal nature of PK effects, and informed by the measurement problem, observer effects, and other paradoxical phenomena within quantum theory, Schmidt conducted preliminary studies to determine whether PK effects could be found using prerecorded targets (i.e., whether direct mental influences might occur in a time-displaced or "backward-acting" manner).

To study possible retro-PK, Schmidt^{24(pp268-269)} devised an ingenious experimental design:

Consider the following experiment: A random number generator [operating on the basis of the truly random, unpredictable, and conventionally uninfluenceable, physical process of radioactive decay] is activated to produce a string of N binary numbers. These numbers are automatically recorded on magnetic tape, paper punch tape, or some other reliable recording medium. Nobody is present during this generation and recording, and nobody looks at the data until at some later time the recorded sequence of "heads" and "tails" is played back [for the very first time] to a subject in a PK test situation. During the slow playback each recorded head or tail makes a red or green lamp light up while the subject tries mentally to enforce an increased lighting rate of the red lamp.

One might think that in this situation the subject could not succeed because the decision as to how many heads and tails will appear has already been made before the test session. But one can also present arguments that PK might still operate, and that, furthermore, such PK tests with time displacement could give some interesting new insights into the physics and psychology of psi [psychic or paranormal phenomenal.

Schmidt actually began carrying out such experiments in 1971 and published a formal report of his findings in 1976. He found that time-displaced PK influences of prerecorded but previously unobserved target events were indeed possible, and that the likelihood or strength of such influences did not differ appreciably from that of real-time or concurrent influences.²⁴

In France, Pierre Janin²⁵ had conducted his own exploratory experiments on "psychokinesis into the past" in 1974, publishing a report of his findings in 1975. Janin found evidence for significant time-displaced PK influences on 2 types of random systems: a radioactivity-based electronic REG and a mechanical system involving randomly occurring right and left movements of steel marbles. He also conducted experiments on concurrent PK on the same 2 target systems and found no significant difference between concurrent and time-displaced PK. In Janin's experiments, the initial random events had been translated into treble and bass sounds on magnetic tape. These sounds were played back, for the first time, to research participants who attempted to influence the events that the sounds represented and that had initially occurred a day or so earlier.

In the Schmidt and Janin studies as well as subsequent retro-PK studies, the interval between the initial occurrence of the influenced events and the time of the later "intentional effort" was 1 or more days. The "instructed aim sequence" of which events were to be influenced in which ways was determined after the events, but before the "effort." This sequence was unknown to the experimenter at the time the initial events were recorded and was based on an intervening quasi-random outcome (such as weather information or the nature of a particular digit in a complex algorithmic calculation). The existence of a PK effect was determined by comparing segments of the prerecorded record that were "wished for" in particular ways (directions) with other segments that were "wished for" in other ways or not at all (control segments), and also by comparing obtained event frequencies with theoretically expected frequencies (based on mean chance expectations). Both empirical and theoretical baselines were therefore used for evaluating the departures that could be attributed to direct mental influence. Appropriate randomness trials and tests were used to ensure that the random processes indeed behaved randomly when they were not being subjected to direct mental influence.

Prior to this published empirical work on retroactive PK, the possibility of time-displaced PK influences had been mentioned or alluded to in theoretical papers published in 1973 by Janin,²⁶ in 1975 by Evan Harris Walker,²⁷ and in 1975 in a mathematical theory developed by Schmidt himself.²⁸

FORMAL TIME-DISPLACED DIRECT MENTAL INFLUENCE EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED UNDER INDEPENDENT SUPERVISION

Time-displaced PK tests provide an interesting methodological feature: because an objective record of the to-be-influenced physical events already exists, before the time of the later PK influence efforts, such a record can be given to an independent supervisor for safekeeping and for later checking to ensure that mistakes or deliberate fraud on the part of the experimenter have not taken place. This special feature can allow positive results to be channeled directly to a skeptic or critic of this kind of research. Indeed, if the protocols are properly followed, a retro-PK experiment with a successful outcome is perhaps the most methodologically "safe" and potentially convincing evidence for paranormal or psychic functioning. Schmidt has conducted 5 formal, supervised experiments of this kind. These studies, which are summarized in Table 1, provide strong evidence for the existence of a time-displaced PK effect on prerecorded inanimate events.

ADDITIONAL TIME-DISPLACED PHENOMENA

In addition to the formal time-displaced PK studies just described, there are other phenomena—found both in everyday life and in the laboratory—that suggest a kind of action working backward into the past. In a sense, all actions that are performed in the service of future goals exemplify the idea of a future event or outcome in some way influencing present actions. The influence of the present by the future is, of course, formally identical to the influence of the past by the present. Once—in Aristotelian thinking, for example—there was a place in Philosophy for final causes or teleological action. With natural science's increasing emphasis on efficient causes—and its great success in explicating such causes—ideas of final cause, teleology, intention, and purpose were increasingly banished. Today, when we speak of future events or goals "causing" our present actions, we either use the term figuratively or smuggle the future goal into the present (where it may have legitimate efficacy) via our present anticipations, apprehensions, or expectations about the future events. It is currently politically correct to attribute causality only to such presently acting expectations, rather than to future goal events themselves.

It is more difficult to account for accurate premonitions or precognitive experiences in present-time-only terms. Many apparent premonitions can be explained away as coincidences, subtle rational inferences, or distortions of perception or memory. There remain, however, convincing anecdotal accounts of extremely detailed and accurate "foretellings" that cannot be dismissed so readily. Moreover, meta-analyses of carefully conducted precognition laboratory experiments have yielded strong evidence for the reality of precognitive effects. For example, Honorton and Ferrari³⁴ analyzed the results of 309 forced-choice precognition experiments conducted between 1935 and 1987. These experiments involved approximately 2 million trials, during which participants were asked to guess which of several alternative outcomes would be randomly selected to occur at some future time, ranging from milliseconds to a year. Their meta-analysis revealed strong evidence for accurate and reliable pre-cognitive effects in this database.

Successful precognition usually is understood as someone's "mind" somehow reaching out into the future, accessing future information, and bringing this information back into the present. Even on this view, half of the explanatory process already involves something akin to backward action. It is possible, however, to reverse our usual thinking about precognition and conceptualize it as a future event somehow reaching back in time to influence a present mind. If the future-action-influencing-present-mental-activity schema of precognition is reversed to involve a future-mental-activity-influencing-present-action schema, we have a model that exactly duplicates the arrangements and outcomes found in the successful retro-PK studies described above. The entire body of existing evidence for precognition (paranormal knowledge of the future) could therefore easily be recast as evidence for backward-acting influences.

Additional laboratory findings are suggestive of processes involving influences acting backward in time. Klintrnan^{35, 36} has reported experiments in which people's reaction times in identifying color patches were faster when a name that matched that color was presented quickly afterward compared to when a name that mismatched that color was quickly presented after-ward. This effect—a kind of "time-reversed interference"—occurs under conditions in which the matching or mismatching color name is randomly determined and the nature of the future name is unknown—in a conventional sense—to the person when the reaction time to the color patch is measured.

Similarly, Radin^{37, 39} and Bierman and Radin³⁸ found that people evidence differential autonomic nervous system reactions (heart rate, EDA, and plethysmographically monitored finger blood volume) to emotional versus non-emotional slides 5 seconds before the slides are randomly selected and exposed. The differential autonomic reaction (a kind of anticipatory orientation reaction) occurred during a time when the emotional or non-emotional nature of the upcoming slide was still unknown—in a conventional sense—to the participant. This effect has been termed a "pre-sentiment (pre-feeling)" effect, and it is taken to reflect precognition operating at an unconscious, bodily level. It could just as well be interpreted as an objective event (the presentation of an emotional or non-emotional slide picture itself or the person's future-reaction to the slide picture) acting backward in time to influence a person's physiological activity.

TIME-DISPLACED STUDIES OF DIRECT MENTAL INFLUENCE OF LIVING SYSTEMS

With the above considerations and findings as a preface, we come now to the heart of this paper: the direct mental influence of "past" biological activities by intentions active in the "present" is it possible to influence prerecorded but previously unobserved biological activities through a time-displaced, retroactive PK process? Inspired by Schmidt's early PK experiments with inanimate, prerecorded targets, in 1978 colleagues and I conducted a preliminary study of possible time-displaced PK using an animate, prerecorded target.¹⁸ The target activity chosen was prerecorded EDA. Ten participants contributed fluctuating EDA tracings while sitting quietly in a room. These EDA tracings were transduced and stored on magnetic tape, but remained unobserved until they were later presented (decoded and displayed as polygraph pen tracings), for the first time, to a selected research participant who attempted to influence segments of the records in prescribed directions. The intentional "efforts" took place 1 to 7 days after the initial EDA had been emitted and recorded. For each tracing, a quasi-random sequence of 10 influence (i.e., attempt to mentally activate) and 10 non-influence control periods was determined just before each later "intentional effort" session. The influence and control epochs were each 30 seconds in duration.

The overall results for these 10 prerecorded EDA PK sessions did not differ significantly from chance. However, some interesting secondary evidence that influences may have been occurring on a session-by-session basis (based on possible correspondences of session outcomes with observations of the influencer's changing motivations from session to session) was noted and described in the original report. The results for this study¹⁸ are given as "experiment 1" in Table 2.

Since that initial exploration of a possible time-displaced direct mental (PK) influence on prerecorded activity of an animate target system, 18 similar studies have been conducted. A statistical summary of the results of all 19 of these conceptually similar studies is presented in Table 2.

In 1979, Gruber⁴⁰ reported 6 experiments. In the 20 sessions of experiments 2 and 3 (10 with the investigator himself serving as influencer and 10 including 10 unselected research participants each contributing 1 session), the prerecorded, animate target activity consisted of locomotor activities of small mammals (gerbils running in activity wheels). The prerecorded living system activity in the 20 sessions of experiments 4 and 5 was a different form of mammalian locomotor activity (gerbils crossing a photobeam in a large cage). The prerecorded activity in the 20 sessions of experiments 6 and 7 was the photobeam-monitored locomotor behaviors of people who had been instructed to walk randomly in a dark room while listening to pink noise (which is white noise, or sounds of random frequencies and intensities, to which "red" sounds of lower frequency or pitch have been added to make the sound more pleasant). In each experiment, the activity of the living target system was converted into recorded click sounds that were stored in an unobserved form until they were played, for the first time, to influencers. The "influence efforts" occurred 1 to 6 days after the target activities initially occurred.

In 1980, Gruber⁴¹ reported 6 additional experiments. In the 30 sessions of experiments 8, 9, and 10 (10 sessions with a special, selected participant and 20 sessions with 20 unselected participants, i.e., those without special talents), the prerecorded activity was the photobeam-monitored behavior of people entering a supermarket in Vienna. In the 30 sessions of experiments 11, 12, and 13, the prerecorded activity was provided by the photobeam-monitored frequency of cars passing through a small and short tunnel in the center of Vienna during rush hour. Again, target activities were converted to click sounds and played, for the first time, to the influencers 1 to 2½ months after the activity initially occurred.

In 1990, Snel and van der Sijde⁴² reported results of a study in which a paranormal heater attempted, through distant and retroactive mental influence, to prevent the spread and multiplication of blood parasites (rodent malaria organisms, Bahesia rodhani) in red blood cells of athymic rats. The "healer" did not receive feedback regarding the dependent measure (the mean, absolute counts of infected red blood cells, microscopically monitored), but simply worked with photographs of the caged rats. It was not determined which animals were the "target" rats and which were the "uninfluenced controls" until after blood cell measures were completed (the condition assignment was randomized by someone not otherwise involved in the study). Measurements were taken 14, 28, and 42 days after the animals were inoculated with the parasites. Measurements on these 3 days are presented, respectively, as experiments 14, 15, and 16 of Table 2.

In 1993, Braud conducted 15 sessions in which participants attempted to mentally influence their own prerecorded spontaneously fluctuating EDA (W.G.B., unpublished data, 1993). Experimental procedures and measurement techniques were similar to techniques described by Schlitz and Braud³ in 1997, with the important difference that this time the intentional influences were "distant" in time rather than space. The EDA had been converted from analog to digital form, stored as a file on a computer disk and presented (35 to 40 minutes after the EDA had initially been generated and recorded) for the first time as a tracing on a computer monitor screen.

The person who had contributed the EDA tracing approximately one half-hour earlier now watched the tracing and used it as feedback while attempting to mentally influence his or her own prerecorded autonomic activity. Three types of 30-second measurement epochs were randomly interspersed, during which the influencer attempted to either increase (activate), decrease (calm), or not influence (rest) his or her own prerecorded EDA activity. Analyses were performed to determine whether the amounts of EDA during respective periods of the earlier, pre-recorded record corresponded to the influencer's later intentional aims for the various segments of the record. Results of comparisons of time-displaced activation versus calming periods are presented as experiment 17 in Table 2. Although the P value slightly exceeded the arbitrary .05 level, the difference was in the expected direction and yielded a substantial effect size.

In 1997, Schmidt⁴³ published the results of 10 experimental sessions (experiment 18 in Table 2) in which he attempted—successfully—to influence the durations of his own prerecorded breathing intervals, using recording, measurement, and time-displaced influence procedures similar to those described above. Schmidt also interspersed sessions in which he successfully influenced prerecorded electronic random events. Schmidt's influences on prerecorded animate activity (breathing rate) were somewhat stronger than were his influences on prerecorded inanimate activity (REG data), but not significantly so.

In this study and other time-displacement studies reviewed in this article, what is observed is a strong correlation between the occurrence of certain events in a (past) data stream and the occurrence of (future) intentions. Because there is no obvious connection between the prerecorded events and the random process that determines the sequence of later intentional aims (the intervention), and because changes in prerecorded events do not take place in the absence of the later intentional (intervention) aims (as confirmed through direct comparisons with non-influence, control periods), a claim for a form of "causation" or "influence" of the events by the intentions (beyond mere correlation) seems justified.

In 1998, Radin et al⁴⁴ reported an experiment in which EDA and other autonomic measures were successfully influenced by influencers who were distant from the target activities in space (6000 miles) and time (2 months). The to-be-influenced autonomic activity records were produced in Las Vegas, Nev, and were stored and remained unobserved until they were influenced 2 months later by healers located in Brazil. The EDA results for 21 sessions are given as experiment 19 in Table 2.

Table 2 summarizes the results of 233 experimental sessions in which participants attempted to influence a variety of living systems in a time-displaced, retroactive fashion. This table includes all animate, time-displaced studies that have been conducted to date of which the author is aware. To facilitate summary and comparisons, the differing test statistics of the various studies have all been converted to a common metric (P,  z, and r scores) for the purposes of this table. The results of 10 of the 19 studies were independently significant (i.e., they yielded z scores with associated P values <.05); only 1 significant study outcome would be expected on the basis of chance alone. Using a method recommended by Rosenthal⁴⁵ for combining results of several studies, a Stouffer z score may be calculated by summing the individual z scores and dividing this sum by the square root of the number of contributing z scores (in this case, 19). The resulting Stouffer z score for the combined set of 19 studies of time-displaced direct intentional influence of living systems is 4.98, which has a highly significant associated P value of .00000032.

The effect sizes shown in Table 2 are r values, calculated according to the formula r=z / N. These effect sizes varied from -0.15 to +1.00, with a mean r of .32. All of these statistical results compare favorably with results typically found in behavioral and biomedical research projects. Interestingly, the results are extremely similar to those of Schiltz and Braud's meta-analysis of 11 "real time" (concurrent) intentional influences on EDA.³ Additional compelling evidence pointing to the robustness of these findings is that—with the single exception of experiment 1—all of the coefficients (r's) are in the hypothesized direction.

THE 'SIZE' OF THESE EFFECTS

Throughout this article, statistical significance levels and effect sizes have been used to indicate the presence of direct mental influences. Historically, the arbitrary P<.05 criterion has been used as an indication of the reality of an effect. Many of the obtained P values in the reviewed studies reach and sometimes greatly exceed this probability criterion. More recently, however, there has been a growing movement within the behavioral and biomedical research communities to deemphasize P values (which are rarity indicators) and emphasize effect sizes (which more closely reflect the actual sizes of changes or outcomes and "correct" for differences in sample size). Typically, effect sizes in the ranges of 0.0 to 0.3, 0.3 to 0.6, and 0.6 to 1.0 are taken to represent "small," "medium," and "large" effects, respectively. On average, the effect sizes obtained in the reviewed mental influence studies are at the border between small and medium. However, they compare favorably with what is typically observed in more conventional behavioral and biomedical studies and in some cases the obtained effect sizes are quite large (Table 2). The average effect size observed in these time-displaced mental influence studies (0.32) is 10 times as great as those obtained in some representative medical study outcomes that have been heralded as medical breakthroughs (effect sizes of 0.04 and 0.03, obtained in 2 well-known studies^46,47 of the effectiveness of propranolol and aspirin, respectively, in reducing heart attacks).

To facilitate the appreciation of effect sizes, Rosenthal (a recognized research methods and meta-analysis expert) has offered a special binomial effect size display that allows us to represent a common effect size measure (r) in terms of the corresponding proportion of, for example, people in some sample whose health, well-being, or survival rate might be improved by an intervention or treatment with that particular effect size.⁴⁵

According to this binomial effect size display conversion, an effect size (r) of 0.03 would be the equivalent of 3 additional persons surviving in a sample of 100 persons. An effect size (r) of 0.30 (observed in the present studies) would be the equivalent of 30 additional participants surviving in a sample of 100. In life-or-death situations, especially, the outcomes associated with these effect sizes are far from trivial.

Another method for estimating the strength of these effects is to calculate the actual percentage of events or activities that change in association with the direct mental interventions. In various reported aggregations of these percent influence scores, the average influence has ranged from a fraction of a percent to a few percent (in cases of random generator influence) to 4% or 8% (in certain electrodermal influence studies) to 80%, 90%, and even 100% changes in individual sessions. In special experiments, remote, direct mental influence effects on EDA did not differ appreciably from the size of deliberate, self-regulation effects on these same activities.^16,48 Again, expressed in these percent change terms these effects are far from negligible.

REPLICATION CONSIDERATIONS

Many of the trials, sessions, and studies in these and other areas of mental influence research do not show an effect. Such replication failures are not unexpected in areas that are being freshly explored and in which the effects and measures are relatively subtle. I offer 2 speculations regarding replication failures. The first is that the emergence of these mental influence effects may depend on the simultaneous presence of a complex and interactive set of physical, physiological, psychological, and even social and cultural factors. If all requisite ingredients of such a complex recipe are not present, or present in insufficient degrees, the effect may not occur. The nonlocal or field-like nature of these phenomena suggests that critical variables may reside not only in the immediate influencers, influencers, and target systems, but may also be present in other people or situations that are spatially and temporally removed from the test situation but meaningfully connected with the experiment.

Until we learn more about the limits and boundary conditions of these effects, such "remote" contributors will remain difficult to isolate and control. It is crucial to begin identifying the critical independent, contextual variables that might facilitate or impede these effects. Two of the most crucial variables may be the potential for free variability in the target system and the fullness of the intentions of the influencers (the presence of a strong need being one guarantee of strong intentions). Experimenter effects themselves no doubt contribute to the variability in study outcome. The challenge of investigating experimenter effects has been recognized and systematically explored in these areas much more than it has in other research areas.⁴⁹ Additional important variables have been identified and discussed elsewhere.⁵⁰

The second reason for replication failures in these areas is that, because of the extraordinary nature of the knowledge claims, many more replications are attempted in these areas than in more conventional areas of research. Even well-accepted findings do not always replicate. It would be interesting to see what would happen if conventional interventions were tested as often as anomalous claims are tested.

A final replication consideration is the "file drawer" issue: could the results of published, positive reports be canceled out by negative findings that are never published and languish in researchers' file drawers? It is highly unlikely that a huge file drawer of unreported, negative findings could cancel out the reported positive findings, for the following reasons:

1.      Given the scarcity of funding for this kind of research and the small numbers of researchers who are active in these areas, it is unlikely that a large number of such studies are even conducted.

2.      Unlike in other research areas, the journals devoted to studies of these types have explicit policies of publishing negative as well as positive research reports.

3.      The actual extent of file drawer contributions has been formally and carefully evaluated in the relevant meta-analyses, and the analysts have concluded that the file drawer is not a major threat to the meta-analytic conclusions.

4.      The overall significance levels are sufficiently rare as to exclude cancellation even by very large numbers of unreported negative or neutral findings.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

The results of the 19 experiments reviewed here suggest that it is possible for people to exert direct mental influences "into the past" to influence the preoccurring and prerecorded activities of biological systems. In these studies, the past events that were influenced in this time-displaced fashion were labile events, characterized by free variability. In addition, the records of the events were stored but never observed during the interval between their initial occurrence and the later influence attempts.

It is crucial to point out that, in the view of Schmidt and others who have conducted these studies, the present intentions, wishes, or PK influences do not change the past. Once an event has occurred, it remains so; it does not "un-occur" or change from its initial form. It appears, instead, that the intentions, wishes, or PK "efforts" influence what happens (or happened) in the first place. To clarify this interpretation even further, the time-displaced direct mental intervention could be said to "change" what would have happened, but does not change what did happen. If, for example, the past events consisted of holes punched in a paper tape record, the intervention does not remove holes that were already there. Instead, the intervention influenced whether certain holes were punched in the first place—if they were punched, they remain punched; if they were not punched, they remain unpunched. In this illustration, what would have happened may be inferred on the basis of a theoretical, statistical expectation (i.e., it would correspond to mean chance expectancy) or may be actually calculated on the basis of empirical contrast conditions (data segments) in which events are counted or measured in the absence of the intervention. Additional evidence that the prerecorded events "Stay put"—once registered—has been provided by examining multiple records, created in various formats. All of the records correspond.

The present or future intentions seem to act on the initial probabilities of occurrence of the events and help determine which events initially come into being (i.e., which of several potential events are actualized). Psychokinesis—whether in the form of distant mental influence or time-displaced mental influence—seems to bias the probabilities of initial occurrence of random or freely variable events such that a desired, intended, or goal-serving outcome increases in likelihood. The process appears to act most efficiently on the seed moments or originations of events. Such stages would seem to be more labile, flexible, sensitive, or susceptible to influences of all kinds, including these direct mental influences.

If the findings uncovered in these laboratory experiments are indicative of general principles, these principles might be applied practically in the service of physical health and psychological well-being. Future intentions may have real influences on present seed moments or origination stages of healthful or harmful bodily events or symptoms in the present, and present intentions may have real influences on past seed moments or origination stages of healthful or harmful bodily events or symptoms in the past. Such effects would be most likely to occur in cases of seed moments that are characterized by randomness or free variability.

Consider a simple system consisting of 2 neurons and their intervening synapse. The processes at the synapse may exist in a delicate state, probabilistically balanced near a sensitive thresh-old that could make the difference between the firing or not firing of an adjacent neuron. Such processes could be ideal "targets" for successful direct mental influences, similar to those described in this article. Indeed, Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles has proposed that synapses may be characterized by probabilistic, random, quantum processes and may be in delicately poised conditions that might make them susceptible to mental influence.⁵¹ Eccles suggested that such influences may be common-place within an individual's central nervous system, providing a mechanism of action that allows ordinary volitional actions. In this view, volitional actions become instances of endogenous PK in which one's mental intentions may act on the matter of his or her labile synaptic processes to instigate the first of a series of physico-chemical-neuronal activities that eventuate—many "linkages" later—in some observable action or movement. In addition to the probabilistic synaptic activity suggested by Eccles, other substrates that might support quantum randomness effects have been proposed by others. These substrates include the presynaptic vesicular grid,⁵² ion channels,^53,54 calcium ions,⁵⁵ and cytoskeletal microtubules.⁵⁶ In principle, if intention may act directly on a neural (or any anatomical or physiological) substrate in this fashion in "real time," such actions could also take place in a time-displaced fashion.

In addition, if a biological substrate possessing the requisite randomness or free variability can be susceptible to the organism's own intentions, perhaps it is susceptible to the intentions of other organisms as well. Intentional consequences may not be locally confined, but may occur nonlocally (in time and space). All of these suggestions are consistent with the theories and findings of modern PK research—some key features of which have been mentioned in this article. If these nonlocal intentions are aligned with aims or goals of health and wholeness, perhaps active intentions could be directed in the present or even into the past to promote biological and psychological seed moments favorable to physical and psychological health and well-being.

Consider another simple system—a small group of cancerous or precancerous cells at a certain location within the body and a natural killer (NK) cell that is roaming near those cells in a random or freely variable course. It is conceivable that there exists a point at which a random "choice" or "decision" occurs, and the NK cells could move, with 50-50 probability, either toward or away from those cancerous cells (seed moments of disease). In principle, PK or intentional influences could bias the probabilities of action of the NK cell sufficiently to promote movement toward and subsequent destruction of the small group of cancerous or precancerous cells, thereby terminating a seed moment that otherwise might have eventuated in illness or even death (several "linkages" down the line—through probability-pyramiding or snowballing effects).

When a patient appears in our office with a particular malady, we tend to think that the curing or beating of this condition involves using our armamentarium of conventional and unconventional treatments and interventions to slowly and progressively correct that malady in the present. We believe we should use our tools to chop away and gradually destroy an undesired condition that is already well established—working on what now exists, a system with great momentum and inertia. In addition to such real-time therapeutic influences, the findings reviewed in this article suggest an alternative healing pathway. Along with such real-time effects that are often taken for granted, it is possible that our healing intentions may be acting "backward in time" to influence the initial seed moments of the development of the malady that confronts us today. Such an alternative healing pathway or process might be a more effective and efficient one—an "easier" one, because it would be influencing a system at a more labile, flexible, sensitive, and susceptible stage in its development and progression. If such a process could act early and thoroughly enough, it might actually prevent the development of harmful physical or psychological processes. This would constitute an instance of true preventive medicine. Time-displaced healing modalities might actually have important advantages over real-time healing modalities.

If the implications just mentioned could be explored in additional, carefully designed studies, it would be possible to learn more about the ranges and limits of time-displaced, direct mental influences. As more is learned about these effects and the factors or conditions that foster or impede them, possible practical applications of these principles in health-related areas could be planned and studied.

POSSIBLE ROLES OF INTERMEDIATE PREOBSERVATION AND DIAGNOSTIC OBSERVATIONS

In the time-displaced studies described above, the to-be-influenced events and record of these events are maintained in an unobserved state until the intentional influence attempts are made. There are provocative findings suggesting that preobservations of the data or records during the interval between event generation and influence attempt may influence the fate of the initial events (i.e., their susceptibility to later direct mental influence). Schmidt has found that if certain to-be-influenced events are strongly observed (with an intense and meaningful density of attention) during the intervening period, those events may no longer be susceptible to later direct mental influence. It is as though prior observation itself establishes or concretizes the reality of the observed events, "locking them in" and making them no longer susceptible to subsequent mental influence.

Such intermediate preobservation effects have been observed in the case of human, canine, and goldfish "preobservers." It should be pointed out that relatively few experiments of this kind have been performed, and their results are not always consistent.^57,58 However, the outcomes in which time-displaced PK effects may be "blocked" by prior observations are consistent with certain interpretations of the role of human and other observations or measurements in the "collapse of the state vector" in quantum systems, and there have even been empirical tests of such preobservation effects by physicists who have been uninvolved in parapsychological investigations, such as R. Smith (unpublished data, 1968) and Hall and colleagues.⁵⁹ If it could indeed be shown that conscious preobservation can block subsequent PK success, this finding could pave the way for an exciting series of studies in which the nature of the preobservation is systematically varied and its influence on PK effects is observed. Preobservations of prerecorded events by humans at various stages of their development and in various states of consciousness could be studied. Indeed, a true comparative psychology of consciousness could be developed in which organisms of various species could serve as preobservers and their outcomes could be noted. The blocking of a time-displaced PK effect could serve as a measurement method for exploring, rather directly, the phylogeny (evolutionary history) and ontogeny (individual development) of consciousness.

The influence of preobservation raises the health-related issue of the possible role of diagnostic observations in these effects. In the time-displaced studies reviewed, care was taken to ensure that the to-be-influenced events had not been consciously observed before the influence attempts were made. The very first observation of these events was in the form of a motivated intention. In fact, one rationale for choosing EDA as a target activity in our studies was that changes in the electrical activity of the sweat glands—which underlie EDA changes—are governed by the autonomic nervous system, the functioning of which we are ordinarily "unaware." A research program could be developed around studies of the nature and degree of "conscious awareness" of the to-be-influenced activities on the part of the organisms originally generating such activities. The issues that could be explored are closely related to the preobservation issues mentioned in the previous paragraphs.

If health-serving time-displaced mental influences can only occur with respect to previously unobserved activities, this might limit their application to physical or psychological conditions that have not yet been observed or noted by patients, clients, or healthcare professionals. A previously diagnosed condition would have been preobserved and therefore be less susceptible to later direct mental influence. The ambiguous empirical findings with respect to preobservation are not yet sufficiently clear to permit useful predictions about the role of diagnostic preobservations. It is likely, however, that the nature of the diagnostic observation could be crucial in determining its effects. Strong, clear, unambiguous diagnostic tests or measurements that are viewed by multiple observers might yield outcomes quite different from ambiguous diagnostic measures witnessed under conditions of minimal density, intensity of attention, awareness, or by only a single diagnostician.

Consider the following hypothetical case: A patient receives a pessimistic diagnosis of metastatic cancer with poor prognosis based on a radiologist's interpretation of computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan results for the liver and intestinal areas. The diagnosis consists of observations of vague spots on a CAT scan record. Subsequently, the patient engages in an intense healing program that includes self-healing components as well as the assistance of others. Strong healing intentions (of self and others) are directed toward the patient. Later, a higher-resolution CAT scan reveals a different picture of the "spots" and the initial diagnosis is now questioned. Nearly 7 years later, the patient is alive, well, and happy. Three possible interpretations of this case might be made. First, the initial diagnosis was incorrect and the patient never was ill. Second, there was indeed the beginning of a severe illness that was halted in its tracks and reversed by later psychological and life-change interventions acting conventionally in "real time." Third, there may have been a time-displaced influence of the later healing intentions on the seed moments of an illness, with the illness either not progressing or not occurring in the first place. The ambiguous nature of the first diagnostic preobservation may have allowed subsequent time-displaced mental influences to be effective. A case virtually identical to this hypothetical example actually occurred and has been reported.⁶⁰

Usually we think of medical diagnoses as beneficial procedures that inform us about the presence of a harmful condition that is really there, allowing us to take appropriate measures to reduce or eliminate the harmful physical condition. The above considerations, however, suggest that a medical diagnosis itself could falsely indicate or even actually produce (through focused intentionality) a condition of illness that was not present prior to the diagnosis. Diagnoses may be both therapeutic and iatrogenically harmful. The issues raised by the nature and timing of a "diagnosis" are numerous, complex, and deep, and their adequate consideration would take us beyond the scope of this paper.

AN APPARENT PARADOX AND ITS POSSIBLE RESOLUTION

Paradox is simply the way nonduality looks to the mental level.

—Harman and DeQuincey^61(p45)

We cannot end our discussion of possible health-serving, time-displaced intentional influences without mentioning what may be (to some) a troubling logical difficulty. If retroactive intentional effects do not change the past, but influence what came to be in the first place, how would one handle a case in which a patient presented with a malady that already had developed and was too obviously strongly present in this moment? If a future, intentional mental intervention were to be effective in such a case, would it not have to "undo" something that already had happened, and would this not lead to logical. contradictions and paradoxical considerations?

There are several ways of dealing with such difficulties. One is to posit that it is indeed possible to change the past and not merely influence initial probabilities of occurrence. Another suggestion is that the presenting condition is complex, and that some of its synergetic, harmful components may not yet have occurred in sufficiently full form or may still be susceptible to concurrent or time-displaced mental influences. A third possibility is indicated in the Figure. The nature of a symptom complex that presents itself to a physician at time T₃ may in fact be com-mon to a family of curves (world-lines or life-lines) that describe various potential time courses of the progression of an illness.

In the Figure, curve A represents a poor prognosis in which health declines progressively, eventually resulting in the death of the patient. Curve B indicates a less severe illness time course. Curve C indicates a gradual, incomplete recovery. Curve D depicts a relatively rapid and complete recovery.

Note that the presenting condition at time T₃ could be on any of the 4 curves and, based only on information available at time T₃, one cannot know which curve actually may be in effect. It is possible that healing intentions generated at time T₃ might retroactively influence which of a family of possible curves is actualized at time T₂—the common seed moment for several possible progression/outcome curves.

Therefore, without violating the principle that time-displaced intentions might act only to influence but never to change the past, it is still possible to account for illness recovery curves C and D, because one of these entire curves may have been selected, through the biasing agency of time-displaced intentionality, from the equiprobable curves with potential origins at time T₂. Note, also, that curve D may represent an outcome that typically is termed "spontaneous remission" by the medical community. A thorough report of several hundred instances of "spontaneous remission" from metastatic cancer is available.⁶² Is it possible that at least some of these spontaneous remissions are the result of time-displaced healing intentions on the part of patients, their loved ones, or health professionals?

It should be pointed out that the time-displaced possibili-ties presented in this section and elsewhere in the article do not preclude more conventional, "real-time" influences that could be active at time T₃ or any other time. In fact, every moment in the development of healthful or harmful condi-tions can be conceived as a "seed moment" for future progressions of those conditions. As such, every moment of the development or progression of a health condition may be susceptible to both concurrent conventional and complementary and alternative influences as well as possible time-displaced influences of the types proposed in this article. The latter are suggested as adjunctive and not necessarily exclusive influ-ence pathways or possibilities.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

The following areas remain to be discussed: (1) issues and research findings involving the most effective mental influence strategies; (2) whether "trial by trial" feedback to the influencers is necessary for these effects to occur (it is not); (3) possible alterna-tive paranormal interpretations of these obtained findings (there are several, but all involve "violations" of our usual understanding of what is possible in time); (4) theoretical understandings of what might underlie these obtained effects; (5) the relevance of these findings to an intriguing suggestion made by Schopenhauer about the complex and seemingly deliberately orchestrated interrelation-ships of our world-lines and lives in space and time⁶³ and the anthropic cosmological principle⁶⁴; and, perhaps most interestingty, (6) the import of these findings for our apprehension of the nature of time itself. These issues must await a later presentation.

Acknowledgment

All of the preceding conceptualization, analysis, and writing was done at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif. The already published experiment 1 (Table 2) has been performed at the Mind Science Foundation, San Antonio, Tex, and the empirical work supporting experiment 17 (Table 2) was performed at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, Calif.

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18. Braud W, Davis G, Wood R. Experiments with Matthew Manning. J Soc Psychical Res. 1979;50(782):199-223.

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22. Braud WG. Empirical explorations of prayer, distant healing, and remote mental influence. J Religion Psychical Res. 1994;17(2):62-73.

23. Schlitz M, Braud W. Distant intentionality and healing: assessing the evidence. Altern Ther Health Med. 1997;3(6):62-73.

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25. Janin P. Psychocinèse clans le passé? Une expérience exploratoire. Rev Metapsychique. 1975;1(21-22):71-96.

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27. Walker EH. Foundations of parapsychical and parapsychological phenomena. In: Oteri L, ed. Quantum Physics and Parapsychology. New York, NY: Parapsychology Foundation; 1975:1-53.

28. Schmidt H. Toward a mathematical theory of psi. J Am Soc Psychical Res. 1975;69(4):301-319.

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31. Schmidt H, Morris RL, Hardin CL. Channeling Evidencefir a Psychokinetic Effect to Independent Observers: An Attempted Replication: Mind Science Foundation Research Report. San Antonio, Tex: Mind Science Foundation; 1990.

32. Schmidt H, Braud W. New PK tests with an independent observer. J Parapsychology. 1993;57:227-240.

33. Schmidt II, Stapp H. PK with prerecorded random events and the effects of preobservation. J. Parapsychology. 1993;57:331-349.

34. Honorton C, Ferrari DC. Future telling: a rneta-analysis offorced-choice precognition experiments, 1935-1987. J Parapsychology. 1989;53:281-308.

35. Klintman H. Is there a paranormal (precognitive) influence in certain types of perceptual sequences? Part 1. Eur J Parapsychology. 1983;5:19-49.

36- Klintman H. Is there a paranormal (precognitive) influence in certain types of perceptual sequences? Part 2. Eur J Parapsychology. 1984;5:125-140.

37. Radin DI. Unconscious perception of future emotion: an experiment in presentiment. J Sci Exploration. 1997;11(2):163-180.

38. Bierman DJ, Radin DI. Anomalous anticipatory response on randomized future con-ditions. Percept Mot Skills. 1997;84:689-690.

39. Radin DI. Further investigation of unconscious differential anticipatory responses to future emotions. Proceedings of Presented Papers: The 41st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Parapsychological Association; 1998:162-183.

40. Gruber ER. Conformance behavior involving animal and human subjects. Eur J Parapsychology. 1979;3(l):36-50.

41. Gruber ER. PK effects on pre-recorded group behavior of living systems. Eur J Parapsychology. 1980;3(2):167-175.

42. Snel FWJJ, van der Sijde PC. The effect of retro-active distance healing on Babesia rodhani (rodent malaria) in rats. Eur J Parapsychology. 1990;8:123-130.

43. Schmidt H. Random generators and living systems as targets in retro-PK experi-ments. J Am Soc Psychical Res. 1997;91(1):1-13.

44. Radin DI, Machado ER, Zangari W. Effects of distant healing intention through time and space: two exploratory studies. Proceedings ofPrexented Papers: The 41st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Parapsychological Association; 1998:143-161.

45. Rosenthal R. Meta-analytical Procedures for Social Research. Beverly Hills, Calif.. Sage; 1984.

46. Kolata G. Drug found to help heart attack survivors. Science. 1981;214:774-775.

47. Steering Committee of Physicians' Health Study Research Group. Preliminary report: findings from the aspirin component ofthe ongoing Physicians' Health Study. N Engl J Med. 1988;318:262-264.

48. Braud W, Schlitz M. Psychokinetic influence on electrodermal activity. J Parapsychology. 1983;47:95-119.

49. Sheldrake R. Experimenter effects in scientific research: how widely are they neglected? J Sci Exploration. 1998;12(l):73-78.

50. Braud WC. Implications and applications of laboratory psi findings. Eur J Parapsychology. 1990;8:57-65.

51. Eccles JC. The human person in its two-way relationship to the brain. In: Morris JO, Roll WG, Morris RL, eds. Research in Parapsychology 1976. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press; 1977:251-262.

52. Beck F, Eccles JC. Quantum aspects of brain activity and the role of consciousness. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1992;89:11357-11361.

53. Bass L. A quantum-mechanical mind-body interaction. Found Physics. 1975;5:159-172.

54. Donald ML Quantum theory and the brain. Proc R Soc Lond. 1991;427A:43-93.

55. Stapp HP. Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Vertag; 1993.

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61. Harman WW, DeQuincey C. The Scientific Exploration of Consciousness: Toward an Adequate Epistemology. Sausalito, Calif: Institute of Noetic Sciences; 1994.

62. O'Regan B, Hirshberg C. Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography. Sausalito, Calif: Institute of Noetic Sciences; 1993.

63. Schopenhauer A. Transcendent speculation on the apparent deliberateness in the fate of the individual. In: Payne EFK, trans. Pererga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays. Oxford, England: Clarendon; 1974:201-223. [Originally published 1851.]

64. Barrow JD, Tipler FJ. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 1986.

Weblink: http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Braud_Retro.html

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DNA May Contain Ancestors’ Memories

It may be possible that within our DNA is coded memories from our ancestors’ experiences. Writing in American Chronicle, science journalist Steve Hammons bases his speculation on what we already know about DNA. Evidence exists that DNA is modified by experience. Our instincts seem to be inherited via DNA. Experiences that have powerful implications for survival are likely candidates for being encoded in DNA and passed along. Research with subjects taking LSD in isolation tanks, which was the basis for the movie Altered States, have produced evidence suggestive of ancestral memories mediated by DNA. Genetic memory may be an alternative explanation for certain experiences suggestive of reincarnation.

Source:

Deep DNA memory theories: Can we remember our ancestors� lives?

Steve Hammons

July 19, 2006

Research into the nature of DNA has revealed that this material within each cell of our bodies has important implications for who each one of us is, on many levels.

In addition to determining our physical characteristics, our vulnerabilities to certain diseases, and maybe even our personality, is it possible that the DNA helix holds some of the important memories of our ancestors?

Theories that suggest that we can tap into the deep nature of DNA to uncover ancient memories are not new. In the 1960s, some psychological researchers claimed that there may be keys that unlock our DNA, revealing experiences of generations of our relatives who lived long before our present time.

In the 1988 movie ALTERED STATES starring William Hurt, the main character, a research scientist (Hurt) dives deep into his consciousness and genetic roots. In the film, he not only relives ancient experiences of his ancestors, he actually changes on the biological level.

This film was reportedly based on the real-life research of prominent psychologists and medical researchers of the 1960s and �70s who used isolation tanks and pharmacological triggers to access deep DNA memories and experiences, which they claimed were real.

These ideas are similar in a way to the concepts of past lives and reincarnation. However, this DNA-related line of thinking focuses on the previous lives within us that are based on genetic memories, encoded on the DNA helix within us.

BLUEPRINT, MEMORY BANK, INNER SPACE

The DNA within all living things is the blueprint for what each organism becomes, subject to the environmental influences that can also have significant effects.

For humans, recent discoveries about DNA are rapidly changing our views about the importance of this material. DNA may affect us much more significantly than we imagined. And, it may hold keys to further discoveries.

It has long been known that our physical appearance is determined by the combination of DNA from our mother and father. Now, researchers are confirming that certain diseases and disorders have direct links to our DNA. Our health may be programmed to some degree by our genetic history.

Our IQ and aptitudes, musical skills, athletic ability, even our psychological and emotional traits may be significantly affected by the DNA within us.

It has been demonstrated that experiences necessary for survival of a species are learned and that this knowledge is passed on to subsequent generations. In some cases this is mostly likely at least partially through DNA and the unconscious �instinct� that results. Even tiny and simple organisms learn crucial survival skills and pass these on.

For humans, with our relatively complex brain, feelings and memories, what other kinds of experiences might be saved in our DNA over the many thousands of years when our ancestors were born, lived and died? And, can they be accessed by us here and now?

OUR ANCESTORS WITHIN US

Because learning about situations that are necessary for survival of a species are probably saved as a kind of unconscious genetic memory, those fundamental human experiences could be deep down in our DNA somewhere.

Let�s say you have always had a significant fear of bears since you were a child. Even Smokey the Bear and other friendly Hollywood bears could not convince you to regard bears with anything but anxiety and fearful feelings.

Maybe it is possible that deep, deep within your DNA memory banks, your great-great-great-great-grandmother or great-great-great-great-grandfather had a very bad experience with a bear two hundred years ago. Maybe they saw someone be killed by a bear. Maybe they had to climb a tree to save themselves from being eaten by a bear.

Would a life-changing experience like this, resulting in knowledge very useful for survival, possibly be encoded in the DNA and passed on to future generations and you?

If there were a way to go deep down into your mind and consciousness, and into your genetic history, maybe through some kind of altered state like a dream or through some kind of trigger, could you recall and experience that event?

Could you relive and re-experience in some way great-great-great-great grandma�s or grandpa�s harrowing and hair-raising close encounter with a hungry bear two hundred years ago?

What about some similar �peak experience� or life-changing event of an ancient relative five hundred years ago? What about five thousand years ago? After all, we know that at least some part of that history is inside all of us, right in the DNA in every cell of our body, right now.

WHAT WE KNOW AND DON�T KNOW

Scientific researchers are gradually uncovering the secrets of our DNA. They have identified the functions of and relationships between some of this material. Many genes remain a mystery and their purpose is unknown.

Sometimes, these mystery genes are called �junk DNA.� According to some researchers, this may be an inaccurate label. Because the purpose and nature of this DNA material is not understood, it certainly does not mean it is useless junk.

As is often the case in scientific discovery, the more we know, the more we realize how little we know. Each question answered can raise many new questions.

For some, our human overconfidence and even arrogance can sometimes trick us into believing that we know all of the answers.

However, in the field of genetics research, there seems to be so much that is not known, that for an open-minded person, these kinds of theories about deep DNA memories cannot be ruled-out.

To conduct our own personal research and to find out for ourselves, maybe all we need to do is listen to our inner DNA.

Listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. Their lives, joys and fears are within us. In that way, they are with us always.

Weblink:

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=11660

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Book on Alien Encounters Contains Memory Cues

Whitley Streiber, author of the non-fiction book, Communion, has since studied and written extensively on the phenomenon of human encounters with extra-terrestrial beings. His work has led him to believe that many people have had such encounters but have submerged their memories because of their frightening nature. In his new book, Grays, Streiber has adopted a “fiction-based-on-fact” approach to writing about one class of encounters. On his website www.UnknownCountry.com, he says that as he wrote this book he inserted certain passages that are designed to awaken submerged memories among readers who have had this type of encounter.

New novel 'The Grays' uses fact-based fiction to tell amazing truths

Steve Hammons

August 16, 2006

A new book by well-known author Whitley Strieber promises to shed light on reports that our planet and individual people are being contacted in various ways by highly-advanced civilizations from other star systems and even other dimensions.

Strieber’s novel THE GRAYS is due in bookstores August 22.

The book, which Strieber calls fact-based fiction, reflects his exploration of the visitation to Earth by mysterious beings and their contact with and abduction of humans.

It is not new territory for him – he has dealt with these elements in his personal life and in many books on these subjects.

The deep and complex missions of these visitors and their complicated relationships with humans are topics Strieber addresses in his new book.

He delves into the secret activities of our government and military in their attempts to cope with and coordinate these developments.

Characters in the book include high-ranking U.S. military officers and a military “empath” who communicates with an alien in U.S. custody. The conflicts and choices facing military and government insiders and factions dealing with these issues are also examined.

Some characters are seemingly average people who find themselves in the midst of strange and vast plans involving these visitors and our government.

A triad of aliens called “the Three Thieves” and their secret work in a small Kentucky town are also part of the story.

Readers join Strieber’s characters in discovering surprising and even shocking aspects of secrets stretching back through our history – and equally important indications for our future.

TRUTH THROUGH FICTION

In his July 27 journal entry on the Web site UnknownCountry.com, a site run by Strieber and his wife Anne, he describes fascinating aspects of the processes that went into writing THE GRAYS.

Strieber had addressed the issues of his own alleged contact with apparently extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional beings in his non-fiction book COMMUNION and several subsequent non-fiction works.

However, Strieber reports in his online journal that he concluded the fact-based fiction approach he took in his previous novel MAJESTIC provided the best way to communicate his understanding of these kinds of highly unusual phenomena.

MAJESTIC examined the circumstances and events surrounding the alleged “Roswell Incident,” the reported 1947 recovery of a crashed spacecraft or UFO and crew in New Mexico by U.S. Army Air Corps personnel stationed at the nearby air base.

That novel traced the reactions to this event of the post-World War II Truman administration, our military and elements of the U.S. intelligence community. The book also explored some of the other developments and discoveries that resulted.

Interestingly, for his new book, Strieber states that fiction allows him to “communicate subtle, hidden things.” He says he intends that THE GRAYS will help readers understand the overall phenomena and their own experiences.

HIDDEN MESSAGES, DEEP SECRETS

“I've learned a lot about the way the contact experience works, and how it works in the human mind, including how and why we hide it from ourselves,” Strieber writes in his journal.

“So when people who have had experiences and don't remember it read these chapters, their memories will be triggered by the associations that I have embedded in them. I know quite certainly that this will work, and that it will happen.”

“And it fits one of the central objectives of the mission I have undertaken in my life, which is to help people come into contact with memories from their own lives that are so strange that their minds have buried them,” Strieber says.

He claims that his new novel may evoke memories from those who have seen but “forgotten” unusual incidents. “This will work for close encounter witnesses, too,” he writes.

“The book is designed to reconstruct associations that have been broken by fear and by the action of the visitors. While reading and living the emotional journey of the characters, it is my hope that you will discover hidden parts of your own journey that have the same flavor.”

DIFFERENT VISITORS AMONG US

Strieber states that his first real-life contact was with the short, large-headed and large-eyed beings commonly known as “the Grays.”

He also claims that he has had contact with another group, also frequently reported, usually referred to as “the Blonds” or sometimes “the Nordics,” a handsome human-appearing race.

Strieber and others have reported that these two groups have different motives, agendas and methods of operation regarding their interest in Earth and the human race.

When having contact with a member of the Blond group, Strieber says, “He described his reasons for distrusting and disliking the Grays in the most vivid terms possible.”

“He also said that we must not make the mistake of trying to fight them, or we'd end up in the state his people are in, locked in an eternal war that they can neither win nor end.”

In his journal entry, Strieber writes about the role of human and “alien” DNA, which has frequently been referenced in literature about alleged abductions of humans and biological procedures conducted on them.

He says his book “will cast the whole DNA-theft thing in a completely different light as well.” According to Strieber, “The grays do take DNA, and for a lot of reasons, one of which involves making bodies that are exactly like the bodies of those from whom it has been taken.”

OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

If Strieber’s new novel is as thought-provoking and insightful as COMMUNION, MAJESTIC and his other books on these subjects, readers are sure to gain valuable information and intelligence about possible scenarios involving extraterrestrial visitation.

According to many credible sources, these topics are not just matters for “UFO nuts,” but rather an urgent and important challenge for all of us.

These subjects may be something we must become educated about, rising above and exploring beneath the cover stories and often necessary information blackouts our government officials have utilized over past decades to maintain the security of very complex situations and intelligence.

THE GRAYS looks to be another valuable addition to the vast array of non-fiction and fiction books and films on these topics.

Strieber’s efforts and those of many others continue to share previously secret information with us, transforming classified reports into what is called open source intelligence or OSINT – that is, information available to all of us.

Through the OSINT that is being actively released and revealed at this point in time, Americans and the people of our planet can become more prepared for the challenges that face us now and in the future.

Weblink : http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=12538

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Scientist publishes 'escape route' from global warming

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 31 July 2006

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has drawn up an emergency plan to save the world from global warming, by altering the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere. Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed.

In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an "escape route" is needed if global warming begins to run out of control.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research.

A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an overall cooling effect.

Such "geo-engineering" of the climate has been suggested before, but Professor Crutzen goes much further by drawing up a detailed model of how it can be done, the timescales involved, and the costs.

In his forthcoming scientific paper, Professor Crutzen emphasises that the best way of averting global climate disaster is for countries to cut back significantly on their emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide produced by burning oil, gas and coal. But in the absence of such measures, and with the average global temperature expected to rise more than 3C this century, there may soon come a time when more extreme measures have to be considered, he said.

"If sizeable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not happen and temperatures rise rapidly, then climatic engineering, as presented here, is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects," Professor Crutzen said.

"Such a modification could also be stopped on short notice, if undesirable and unforeseen side-effects become apparent, which would allow the atmosphere to return to its prior state within a few years," he said.

Such an idea is so controversial that some scientists opposed its publication in the peer-reviewed scientific press, fearing that it may encourage the view that it is easier to treat the symptoms rather than the causes of climate change.

Professor Crutzen, however, argues that the "grossly disappointing" international political response to the necessity of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions means that it should no longer be considered taboo to think about geo-engineering of the climate.

"Importantly, its possibility should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating," he said. "The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced. Currently, this looks like a pious wish."

His plan is modelled partly on the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, when thousands of tons of sulphur were ejected into the atmosphere causing global temperatures to fall.

Pinatubo generated sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere which cooled the Earth by 0.5C on average in the following year. The sulphate particles did this by acting like tiny mirrors, preventing a portion of incoming sunlight from reaching the ground.

Professor Crutzen calculated that a relatively small amount of sulphur could cause similar cooling if it was released at high enough altitudes into the stratosphere, rather than at the lower altitude of the troposphere. Weather balloons or even artillery shells could be used to carry the sulphur.

"Although climate cooling by sulphate aerosols also occurs in the troposphere, the great advantage of placing reflective particles in the stratosphere is their long residence time of about one to two years, compared to a week in the troposphere," Professor Crutzen said.

"It may be possible to manufacture a special gas that is only processed photochemically in the stratosphere to yield sulphate," he said. Such a compound should be non-toxic, insoluble in water, non-reactive, and have a relatively short half-life of about 10 years.

It would cost between $25bn and $50bn - or about $25 or $50 per head in the developed world - to launch sufficient sulphate to last for up to two years.

But this high cost should be measured against the much bigger costs of environmental disasters, such as coastal flooding, caused by global warming, he said.

Side-effects could be an increase in the destruction of the ozone layer and whitening of the sky, although the particles would make sunsets and sunrises more spectacular, he said.

Other 'geo-engineering' ideas

* Reflecting mirrors:

Earth's natural reflectance or "albedo" reflects about 30 per cent of sunlight back into space. Increasing the albedo could be done by building giant unfolding mirrors in space, laying reflecting film in the deserts, or floating white plastic islands in the ocean to mimic reflective effect of sea ice.

* Swallowing up CO2:

Marine plankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which the microbes need for photosynthesis. The growth of plankton is limited by the relatively small amounts of iron in the sea. Scientists have conducted experiments on boosting plankton by throwing iron filings into the sea.

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has drawn up an emergency plan to save the world from global warming, by altering the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere. Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed.

In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an "escape route" is needed if global warming begins to run out of control.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research.

A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an overall cooling effect.

Such "geo-engineering" of the climate has been suggested before, but Professor Crutzen goes much further by drawing up a detailed model of how it can be done, the timescales involved, and the costs.

In his forthcoming scientific paper, Professor Crutzen emphasises that the best way of averting global climate disaster is for countries to cut back significantly on their emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide produced by burning oil, gas and coal. But in the absence of such measures, and with the average global temperature expected to rise more than 3C this century, there may soon come a time when more extreme measures have to be considered, he said.

"If sizeable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not happen and temperatures rise rapidly, then climatic engineering, as presented here, is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects," Professor Crutzen said.

"Such a modification could also be stopped on short notice, if undesirable and unforeseen side-effects become apparent, which would allow the atmosphere to return to its prior state within a few years," he said.

Such an idea is so controversial that some scientists opposed its publication in the peer-reviewed scientific press, fearing that it may encourage the view that it is easier to treat the symptoms rather than the causes of climate change.

Professor Crutzen, however, argues that the "grossly disappointing" international political response to the necessity of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions means that it should no longer be considered taboo to think about geo-engineering of the climate.

"Importantly, its possibility should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating," he said. "The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced. Currently, this looks like a pious wish."

His plan is modelled partly on the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, when thousands of tons of sulphur were ejected into the atmosphere causing global temperatures to fall.

Pinatubo generated sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere which cooled the Earth by 0.5C on average in the following year. The sulphate particles did this by acting like tiny mirrors, preventing a portion of incoming sunlight from reaching the ground.

Professor Crutzen calculated that a relatively small amount of sulphur could cause similar cooling if it was released at high enough altitudes into the stratosphere, rather than at the lower altitude of the troposphere. Weather balloons or even artillery shells could be used to carry the sulphur.

"Although climate cooling by sulphate aerosols also occurs in the troposphere, the great advantage of placing reflective particles in the stratosphere is their long residence time of about one to two years, compared to a week in the troposphere," Professor Crutzen said.

"It may be possible to manufacture a special gas that is only processed photochemically in the stratosphere to yield sulphate," he said. Such a compound should be non-toxic, insoluble in water, non-reactive, and have a relatively short half-life of about 10 years.

It would cost between $25bn and $50bn - or about $25 or $50 per head in the developed world - to launch sufficient sulphate to last for up to two years.

But this high cost should be measured against the much bigger costs of environmental disasters, such as coastal flooding, caused by global warming, he said.

Side-effects could be an increase in the destruction of the ozone layer and whitening of the sky, although the particles would make sunsets and sunrises more spectacular, he said.

Other 'geo-engineering' ideas

* Reflecting mirrors:

Earth's natural reflectance or "albedo" reflects about 30 per cent of sunlight back into space. Increasing the albedo could be done by building giant unfolding mirrors in space, laying reflecting film in the deserts, or floating white plastic islands in the ocean to mimic reflective effect of sea ice.

* Swallowing up CO2:

Marine plankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which the microbes need for photosynthesis. The growth of plankton is limited by the relatively small amounts of iron in the sea. Scientists have conducted experiments on boosting plankton by throwing iron filings into the sea.

Weblink:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1205975.ece

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Drinking Tea Supports Health

Tea drinkers have less chance of developing certain diseases, including cancer and coronary heart disease, than non-drinkers. According to a study conducted at Kings College, London, and reported in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a review of the past fifteen years’ worth of epidemiological studies that contained data on tea consumption showed that those who drank at least three cups of tea a day showed significantly reduced risk of various health impediments.

The researchers noted that the effect is created by the flavonoids, the polyphenol antioxidants, that tea contains. There were no observed health hazards observed with up to eight cups of tea daily. The researchers commented that drinking tea might be more healthy than drinking water, especially if tea motivates people more than water does to drink several cups a day.

Sources:

Eat To Live: Tea more healthy than water

By JULIA WATSON
UPI Senior Editor

LE BUGUE, France, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Thrilling news! Tea is as good for you as water!

Personally speaking, I couldn't be more delighted. The instruction to drink eight glasses of water a day has never seemed either appealing or practical.

That amount of water makes it uncomfortable to emulate the habits of the camel when away from home for more than an hour and to sleep through the night without interruption.

It is even less captivating when you consider that dedicated water enthusiasts will only consume it from bottles. Think about the landfills stuffed with discarded plastic.

And why would you opt to pay for bottled water when you are already obliged to write a check for the stuff that's pumped through your faucet?

Which may, indeed, be the same stuff that is filling some of those pricey bottles. Remember when, in 2004, the Coca-Cola Company had to confess that the UK version of Dasani came from the London public water mains?

But in fact the same charge could be leveled at most supermarket own-label bottled water. Or any bottled water with "purified" on the label. It will have been filtered again or treated to ultraviolet light or perhaps have been carbonated or had minerals added. But nonetheless, it's water you already own a part of.

Besides, no one ever expects medicine to taste good -- and eight glasses of water daily for health is surely medicine. Anyway, there are jug filters on the market that promise to remove whatever elements from local water supplies offend ...

Enough of that. On to the celebration.

Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is not only as good for you as drinking floods of water, it may even be better!

The secret is its flavonoids. These are polyphenol antioxidants that help prevent cell damage. They can provide protection against heart disease and some cancers. Three to four cuppas a day (so much more manageable than eight glasses of water) can also strengthen the bones, protect against tooth plaque and potentially against tooth decay.

Really? Well, at the very least, tea is made with water, which contains fluoride, which is good for the teeth.

All this excellent news was discovered by a group of researchers at Kings College London.

British public health nutritionist Dr Carrie Ruxton, who worked on the study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, told the BBC, "Drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so it's got two things going for it."

To those of you who protest that tea is dehydrating, she says it's an urban myth.

"Studies on caffeine have found very high doses dehydrate and everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages dehydrate. But even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is quite hard to make, you would still have a net gain of fluid."

Tea drinking (the classic beverage brewed from leaves, not the chilled bottled drink diluted with fruit juices is what is understood here) is most popular among the over-40s, Dr Ruxton asserted. "In older people, tea sometimes made up about 70 percent of fluid intake so it is a really important contributor."

If you're going to make tea properly, you really should use loose leaves and a teapot. The water must be boiled just to the point where tiny bubbles begin to crinkle around the edges of the kettle. The longer you boil the water, the more oxygen you lose, which flattens flavor. The teapot should have been filled with very hot water to maintain the temperature. Empty this out, and for Indian tea, dump into it one heaped teaspoon of tea leaves for each person plus one for the pot.

For the more delicate Chinese tea, omit the teaspoon for the pot. (In fact, to make Chinese tea correctly requires a far more sophisticated and delicate procedure.) Fill the pot and allow the tea to stand and infuse for several minutes before pouring. Then drink to your good health.

http://www.upi.com/ConsumerHealthDaily/view.php?StoryID=20060825-070355-2514r

Original article:

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition advance online publication 19 July 2006; doi: 10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602489

Black tea – helpful or harmful? A review of the evidence

Guarantor: CHS Ruxton.

Contributors: EJG carried out the literature search; all authors wrote the paper.

E J Gardner¹, C H S Ruxton² and A R Leeds³

1. ¹39 Cornwall Ave, London, UK
2. ²Nutrition Communications, Front Lebanon, Cupar, UK
3. ³King's College London, Department of Nutrition & Dietetics, London, UK

Correspondence: Dr CHS Ruxton, Nutrition Communications, 6 Front Lebanon, Cupar KY15 4EA, UK. E-mail: carrie@nutrition-communications.com

Received 26 August 2005; Revised 8 May 2006; Accepted 12 June 2006; Published online 19 July 2006.

 Objective:

To consider whether consumption of black tea has a positive or negative impact on health.

Design:

Databases were searched for relevant epidemiological and clinical studies published between 1990 and 2004.

Results:

Clear evidence was found for coronary heart disease (CHD), where an intake of 3 cups per day related to risk reduction. The mechanism could involve the antioxidant action of tea polyphenols. While experimental models have suggested that flavonoids attenuated cancer risk, epidemiological studies failed to demonstrate a clear effect for tea, although there is moderate evidence for a slightly positive or no effect of black tea consumption on colorectal cancer. Studies on cancer were limited by sample sizes and insufficient control of confounders. There is moderate evidence suggestive of a positive effect of black tea consumption on bone mineral density although studies were few. There is little evidence to support the effect of tea on dental plaque inhibition but evidence to support the contribution of tea to fluoride intakes and thus theoretical protection against caries. There was no credible evidence that black tea (in amounts typically consumed) was harmful. Normal hydration was consistent with tea consumption when the caffeine content was <250 mg per cup. A moderate caffeine intake from tea appeared to improve mental performance, although sample sizes were small. There was no evidence that iron status could be harmed by tea drinking unless populations were already at risk from anaemia.

Conclusions:

There was sufficient evidence to show risk reduction for CHD at intakes of 3 cups per day and for improved antioxidant status at intakes of one to six cups per day. A maximum intake of eight cups per day would minimise any risk relating to excess caffeine consumption. Black tea generally had a positive effect on health.

Sponsorship:

The Tea Council. The authors confirm that the sponsors played no role in the writing of this review.

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/1602489a.html

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Western Values Hurting Japanese Mental Health

As Japan adopts Western values, there seems to be a decline in mental health. According to surveys in Japan, a majority of workers report “high anxiety,” and sixty five per cent of companies report that mental health problems among workers has increased significantly. The Japanese Mental Health Institute notes that the population is shrinking and blames the declining birth rate upon job stress, increased depression and rising suicide rates.

The main stressors involve abandoning the practices that created job security. As Japan adopts Western policies, including merit-based pay and promotion, workers have to compete with each other, an uncomfortable practice given their tradition of working in teams.

A spokesman for the Institute remarked, “People tend to be individualized under the new working patterns. When people worked in teams they were happier.”

Source:

Western values 'are causing mental illness'

From Leo Lewis in Tokyo

THE rapid spread of Western business practices in Japan has caused widespread mental illness and is responsible for a deepening demographic crisis, government officials say.

Statistics indicate that 60 per cent of workers suffer from “high anxiety” and that 65 per cent of companies report soaring levels of mental illness.

Meanwhile, the size of the Japanese population is shrinking, and for the first time the Government has acknowledged that the falling birth rate is linked to job-related factors. Directors of the Japanese Mental Health Institute blame the same factors for rising levels of depression among workers and the country’s suicide rate, which remains the highest among rich nations.

Merit-based pay and promotion are of particular concern because they are at odds with the traditional system, built on seniority, that has reigned supreme in corporate Japan. In the harsh new atmosphere of cut-throat rivalry between workers, the Institute for Population and Social Security argues, young people do not feel financially stable enough to start families.

The trend is put down to Japanese companies’ attempts to globalise by adopting working practices more closely in line with US and British models. Larger numbers of temporary staff, a greater willingness to sack people and greater pay disparities are the downside.

A spokesman for the Mental Health Institute said that the emphasis on individual performance was driving Japanese workers — particularly those in their thirties — to mental turmoil. “People tend to be individualised under the new working patterns,” he said. “When people worked in teams they were happier.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25689-2305849,00.html

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Denmark is the Happiest Country

In a worldwide study of 178 countries not involved with internal military conflicts, Denmark ranked number one in happiness. The United States was number twenty three. At the bottom was Burundi in Africa.

The survey was conducted at the University of Leicester in central England, using data from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The data focused on expressed satisfaction with one’s life and environment.

Numbers two through five were Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas. Britain was in 41st place, Germany 35th and France 62^nd, while China was 82nd, Japan 90th, and India 125th.

Source:

Denmark is happiest place in the world, report says

Researcher produces first 'world map' of happiness

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- If you're looking for happiness, move to Denmark.

It's the happiest country in the world while Burundi in Africa is the most unhappy, according to a new report by a British scientist released on Friday.

Adrian White, an analytical social psychologist at the University of Leicester in central England, based his study on data from 178 countries and 100 global studies from the likes of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

"We're looking much more at whether you are satisfied with your life in general," White told Reuters. "Whether you are satisfied with your situation and environment."

The main factors that affected happiness were health provision, wealth and education, according to White who said his research had produced the "first world map of happiness."

Following behind Denmark came Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas.

At the bottom came the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Burundi. The United States came in at 23rd, Britain was in 41st place, Germany 35th and France 62nd.

Countries involved in conflicts, such as Iraq, were not included.

"Smaller countries tend to be a little happier because there is a stronger sense of collectivism and then you also have the aesthetic qualities of a country," White said.

"We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th, and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being."

He admitted collecting data based on well-being was not an exact science, but said the measures used were very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes.

Regular studies by academics across the globe using the same tests would allow researchers to better understand what factors affected happiness and White said he hoped every country in the future would carry out biannual checks.

Weblink:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/07/27/happy.world.reut/index.html

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Loneliness Kills the Sedentary Elderly

One in five Americans are lonely, according to a study conducted by the University of Chicago. Loneliness involves feelings of being unhappy, stressed out, friendless and hostile. The main difference between lonely and non-lonely people is that the lonely perceive stressful events as threatening and tend to respond passively by withdrawing, whereas non-lonely people respond to stressful events as a challenge.

Loneliness among those over fifty years of age is accompanied by greater incidence of alcoholism, depression, weak immune system responses to illness, impaired sleep and suicide. The physiological effect of loneliness is greatest on blood pressure, with an average of thirty points higher among the lonely. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, the number two killer in the United States.

Walking, however, reduces blood pressure by an equal amount, according to the study, such that it is the best defense against the health hazards of loneliness.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060331_loneliness.html

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Magnetic Stimulation Disrupts Migraines

Magnetic stimulation of the head, with a device which looks something like a hand-held hair dryer, is able to interrupt the development of migraines, according to a report presented at the American Headache Society's annual meeting. Migraine attacks begin by nerve cell hyper-excitability, followed by fatigue and malfunction of the nerve cells. These phases seem to correlate with the aura that many migraine sufferers experience at the onset of the migraine.

The device sends electricity through a coil that creates a magnetic field. This field stimulates brain cell activity and disrupts the migraine process.  Participants in the study were supplied with either a working model of the device, or a placebo model. They were instructed to give themselves a couple of pulses of magnetic energy to the back of their head at the first sign of a migraine. Twice as many people using working models than people using placebo models reported that they could eliminate their headaches with the device. The ability of the device to eliminate light and sound sensitivity was even greater.

Source:

 

Weblink:

http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/06/22/hscout533395.html

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Experts are Made, not Born

The study of chess players, from rank amateurs to grand masters, has produced many insights into intelligence, native ability and acquired skill. What distinguishes a master from a wannabe is not intelligence or innate ability, according to an article in Scientific American that summarized decades of research into this subject, but hard work. Chess champions show no greater intelligence or memory capacity than lesser players. Masters, however, have accrued experience and have focused on organizing this experience so that they can quickly perceive and recognize complex patterns.

Research studies investigating several areas of expertise besides chess has shown that “Effortful practice” and motivation is more important than innate ability. Research has shown that it is focused and intense intention to study and learn in a methodical manner, rather than simply putting in the time practicing, that makes the difference. This result echoes a principle from the Cayce readings that it is more constructive to engage oneself fully in the contemplation of an affirmation than merely to recite it by rote.

Source:

The Expert Mind

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

By Philip E. Ross

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.

The Drosophila of Cognitive Science
The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.

Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.

Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.

The measurement of chess skill has been taken further than similar attempts with any other game, sport or competitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player's recent results over older ones and discount successes according to the strength of one's opponents. The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player's skill over the course of his or her career.

Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their model--and not billiards, say, or bridge--is the game's reputation as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, "the touchstone of the intellect." The feats of chess masters have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.

The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow forgotten the precise position of a pawn. He can find it, as it were, by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening--a well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited number of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of his earlier moves--say, by reasoning: "I could not capture his bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been standing in the way...." He does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections.

Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and planning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world's leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game. He found that although experts--the class just below master--did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones--just as Capablanca had claimed.

Recent research has shown that de Groot's findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.

De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.

Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed, such a memory for the subject matter of a particular field is a standard test for the existence of expertise.

The conclusion that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study of an initially weak chess player, identified only by the initials D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one of Canada's leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, professor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that despite the increase in the player's strength, he analyzed chess positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying instead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and associated strategies.

Chunking Theory
In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised--that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board--rather than reached as the result of master play. The correlation between game-playing strength and the accuracy of the players' recall was much weak-er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.

Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.

Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to strain the working memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.

Take the sentence "Mary had a little lamb." The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.

In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words.

Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: "The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory." Such manipulation involves changing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may be likened to reciting "Mary had a little lamb" backward. It can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quickly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly high quality.

Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put information into long-term memory and take it out again in ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson's most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995 study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few seconds. The researchers explained these findings by recourse to a structure they called long-term working memory, an almost oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term memory the one thing that had always been defined as incompatible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in 2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide support for the theory by showing that expert chess players activate long-term memory much more than novices do.

Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of "the isolated queen's-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian Defense," and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as the same position "minus the dark-squared bishops." To resort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memorizing a riff on "Mary had a little lamb" by substituting rhyming equivalents at certain slots, such as "Larry" for "Mary," "pool" for "school" and so on. Anyone who knows the original template should be able to fix the altered one in memory in a trice.

A Proliferation of Prodigies
The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.

According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage. Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster title at age 15, in 1958; today's record-holder, Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging. High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convincing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help him compare the errors committed in all the games in two international tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993. The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grandmaster level--"and that was on a good day and with a following wind." The very best old-time masters were considerably stronger but still well below the level of today's leaders.

Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither computers nor game databases. They had to work things out for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they fall below today's masters in technique, they tower above them in creative power. The same comparison can be made between Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.

At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.

Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. László Polgár, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters--the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgár, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.

The Polgár experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.

Furthermore, success builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation. A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.

Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest "natural" chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child q uickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945

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Magic Mushrooms Provide Spiritual Experience

Forty years after the suspension of research on psychedelic drugs, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore has recently completed what has been called a landmark study on “magic mushrooms” or psilocybin. In this study, funded partly by federal funds and published in the journal Psychopharmacology, thirty six volunteers spent three sessions in the laboratory. One session involved the psychedelic, while two involved Ritalin as a blind, comparison control. During a session the participant lay on a couch for approximately six hours, wearing eye shades and listening on headphones to classical music.

Two thirds of the participants had mystical experiences, while one third had frightening experiences. The participants were on average forty six years old, and all had at least some previous experience with spiritual practices, but none with hallucinogenics.

Those who had mystical experiences reported “a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love.” Researchers commented that this research will help investigate what happens in the brain during intense spiritual experiences. It will also provide someday a treatment for the terminally ill who are fearing death.

Because so many people had negative experiences with the psychedelic, even though they were in a controlled, supportive and affirmative environment, the researchers warned, “do not try this at home!”