During the thirty-minute experiment, one partner would send ten-second bursts of focused loving “intentions” to the other at random times. The computer would measure each partner’s nervous system. The intriguing question was this: When the “sender” transmitted his packets of love, would the “receiver” physically respond with a jump in her brain-wave activity, with a racing heart, or with sweaty palms?
“You have a long-term couple; they will both have a lot of physical proximity to each other,” Radin explained. “They will be ‘entangled’ both emotionally and psychologically and maybe physically. And if they are physically entangled, you should be able to separate them, poke one, and see the other one flinch. And in essence that’s what these experiments are looking at. They’re looking at space separation under conditions where we don’t know of any classical form of connection that would cause one to get poked and the other one to flinch.”
That poses a revolutionary question right there, but then the “Love Study” added a twist. It made intuitive sense that couples who were “highly motivated” to connect would in fact perform better at affecting each other’s vital signs. What sorts of couples, Schlitz and Radin asked themselves, are highly motivated to connect? One answer: sick ones. Of the three dozen couples in their study, twenty-two couples included one partner who had been diagnosed with cancer. Thus both partners should be “highly motivated” to see that their prayers or intentions had a physical impact on the ill partner.
I asked Radin if I might observe entanglement in action. He agreed, and on a gorgeous morning in March 2007, I caught a glimpse of Einstein’s spooky action at a distance in the pulsating force of Teena and J. D. Miller’s love.
Teena Miller breezed toward me, a study in pink: pink camisole and a pink silk blouse draping over her floral skirt. Her large straw hat shaded translucent skin and kept her red hair in place. It seemed a strangely feminine outfit for the Institute’s rugged compound on the mountain, yet I could sense that Teena defined her own atmosphere. She did nothing halfway. A passionate liberal, she served as an executive board member of California’s Democratic Committee. She joined rallies with little provocation and had accumulated an odd set of titles—indeed, she was a certified whiskey taster and, for some reason we did not explore, an honorary member of the International Order of Camel Jockeys. At fifty-seven,Teena had defeated cancer not once but twice.
A half-step behind trailed her husband, J. D. Miller, cupping her elbow in his hand, less to guide her, it seemed, than to simply touch her. At sixty-four, J.D. was trim in his khaki pants and royal-blue shirt, his easy smile framed by a white beard and mustache. J.D. was a CPA and financial planner, a Republican, a beta to Teena’s alpha. Teena and J.D. had married nine years earlier, and to say they were “bonded” was an understatement. Teenagers, more like, taking every chance to embrace each other so intimately that I would avert my eyes. (“Excuse us,” Teena said as she kissed J.D. on the cheek during one of these close encounters. “She calls it ‘vitamins,’ ” J.D. explained.)
J.D. said he fell for Teena twenty years before he dared ask her out. In the interim,Teena married and gave birth to two girls, divorced, and raised the girls on her own. But J.D. never married. He was waiting, and when he bumped into Teena a decade ago, it took him all of two dates to make his intentions known.
Three years before I met the Millers, their relationship had come under scientific scrutiny in the “Love Study.” The Millers qualified not only because of their palpable chemistry, but also because of a tumor in Teena’s breast the size of her fist. She endured six months of chemotherapy, eleven operations, and six weeks of daily radiation before her doctor declared the cancer removed. Teena was in the middle of treatment when she saw a flier announcing a research project about “loving intentions.” She picked up the phone and called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, eager to have another arrow in her quiver against cancer.
That is how Teena and J. D. Miller found themselves squirreled away in the mountains of northern California, wired to computers that would measure their vital signs and, like a Geiger counter, the seismic activity of their love. And it is how I found myself following the Millers, Schlitz, and Radin down a stone path through the woods to their laboratory nestled in the trees.
Radin led J.D. to a soundproof room, and sat him before a computer screen. Over the next half-hour, Teena’s face would appear on the screen at random intervals, and remain there for ten seconds. During those times, J.D. would send his wife compassionate thoughts. The rest of the time he would think of anything but his wife.
As Radin gave J.D. some last-minute instructions, Schlitz was ushering Teena into the soundproof, electromagnetically shielded room. No noise, no signals of any sort, could enter or leave. Teena settled into the deep armchair and sighed contentedly, absorbing her environment: a plastic ficus tree, soft lighting, pale curtains, and a camera aimed at her face which would allow her husband to see her from the other room. Schlitz leaned down to affix electrodes to Teena’s hand.
“So, this is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is measuring your skin conductance activity,” Schlitz explained to Teena. Because they had dismantled much of the equipment after the Love Study was finished, they were measuring only two of the five bodily functions during this replication.
“Basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system. And as you can see, your image is being projected by this little camera into the next room. So your husband will be able to watch you at random times during the session.You won’t know when, so don’t try to guess, because it’s all random.”
“Right,” Teena said, leaning back against the headrest and closing her eyes as Schlitz closed the hermetically sealed door with a soft thud.
A minute later, the experiment began. After a few seconds, Teena’s face appeared on J.D.’s monitor. We knew he was seeing Teena on the monitor and sending her loving intentions for those ten seconds; we gazed at the computer screen recording Teena’s blood flow and skin conductance (that is, the perspiration on her hand). Those ragged or undulating lines would indicate whether Teena was perhaps unconsciously “responding” to J.D.’s thoughts projected from the other room.
“Notice how there’s a change in blood flow?” Radin asked me excitedly, pointing at sine waves on the computer monitor. “A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you hear somebody whispering in your ear and there’s nobody around, you have this sense of What? What was that? That’s more or less what we’re seeing in her physiology.”
Thirty minutes passed, during which time J.D. sent thirty-six random packets of “loving intention” to his wife. The experiment ended. Radin slipped off to run through a quick computer analysis of the data. Schlitz walked to the sealed room and opened the door. I followed on her heels, intent on interviewing Teena and J.D. separately, before they could exchange their stories. I was curious to know whether their thoughts as well as their physiology matched in any way.
“What did you experience?” I asked Teena.
“Happiness. It went between my granddaughter and my husband. What goes through my mind is kissing my husband right near his ear, where the whiskers are. I love that spot. And that kept popping into my head, constantly.”
“Were there any body sensations associated with it?” Schlitz asked.
“How do you explain bliss? How do you explain that in words, other than holding my granddaughter, or being hugged by my husband? It’s just the best feeling.”
I cornered J.D.
“What were you thinking about when you were sending your thoughts?” I asked.
“Some of the stuff I’m not going to share with you.” He laughed, looking slyly at his wife across the room.“But others . . . well, she has a picture with her today that shows her with her granddaughter, and there’s just a bond between them. It makes her feel so good, so I was thinking of those things.”
Initially, I found it impressive that they had fo
cused on the same two things—each other and Teena’s granddaughter. But I quickly checked myself. Of course their thoughts overlapped: you would hardly expect them to be pondering presidential politics during a “love” study. In my head I heard the sonorous voice of Richard Sloan, the skeptic at Columbia Medical Center, scolding me:“Anecdotes, while interesting, are merely anecdotes. They are not evidence.”
Equally intriguing was the story Teena told me while we waited for the results. I asked her if she thought that these connections that Radin and others had measured might simply be statistical flukes or chance happenings.
“It can’t be,” she insisted. “It’s energy. I have always believed that, because I’ve been linked to certain people.”
She paused. “For example, one day I knew something wasn’t right with my daughter. She was nineteen, and I picked up the phone and I called a number. I don’t know where the number came from. And this young voice on the other end of the phone picked it up, and I said, ‘Hello.’ And I immediately started talking. I said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I believe my daughter is walking toward you at this very moment.’And he got very quiet.
“And he said, ‘Describe her.’
“And I said, ‘She’s about five-two, she’s very attractive, she’s nineteen, she’s got long dark hair . . .’
“ ‘What’s her name?’
“ ‘Alison,’ I said. Then I heard him calling, ‘Alison!’ ”
Teena laughed. “She was in the parking lot at a gas station, her car had broken down, and that was the closest place she could get to. And when Alison heard him calling her name, she stopped, because she didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her.
“And the young man said, ‘Your mother’s on the phone. She wants to talk to you.’ ”
Teena smiled. “And that’s what I mean when I say I’m linked with people.”
Later, I phoned Alison to ask for her version of events. She recalled that in the fall of 1994 or spring of 1995, when she was a freshman at the University of Nevada in Reno, she was driving home from school to her mother’s home near San Francisco. Her car began to break down near Sacramento. She managed to pull into a service station, and as she was talking to the mechanic, the phone rang. She heard him say,“Yeah, your daughter’s right here,” and he handed her the phone.
“Is your mother really intuitive?” I asked.
“Yes, but not like that. It was crazy.”
Alison does not remember calling her mother from the service station or a pay phone beforehand—but she may have. She does not believe she gave her mother the telephone number at the gas station—but it is a possibility. I have eliminated one other possibility: the technology that would have allowed Teena to return the call automatically, without knowing the number—*69 or caller ID—was not available in California in 1995. As with so many other stories I encountered in my research, this one is not airtight: a skeptic will dismiss it and a believer will feel a shiver of recognition.
I turned to Marilyn Schlitz at IONS, who had been listening to the story and nodding.
“How can this be explained?” I asked. “Is this common?”
“Well, to have such a clear example, where you have a number which is seven digits, is pretty improbable, to say the least. Certainly the experience is widely reported, and we do see a lot of evidence for this kind of thing within the laboratory as well.”
Of course, no matter how many strange stories you present, how this happens—whether it points to a quantum phenomenon or an old wives’ tale—remains a matter of fiery debate.
Where Science and Spirituality Kiss
Moments later, Dean Radin marched back with a computer analysis of the results. He leaned over Teena, showing her a graph with lines that looked like a series of molehills. On a sheet of paper were the emotions that Teena had felt, translated into the language of physiology: squiggly lines that measured blood flow and skin resistance (perspiration). The lines showed that within two seconds of the time that J.D. began sending his “intentions” toward her, she became “aroused” (that is, increased perspiration) and then she would relax (or flush) when he switched off his intentions.
This one test does not offer definitive evidence that one person’s thoughts affect another person’s body. But the Love Study suggests there may be a concrete, measurable, physical connection between bonded couples.19 When Radin and Schlitz analyzed the results of all thirty-six couples in their study, they found that when one person “sent” his compassionate intention to his partner, the partner’s physiology mirrored his within two seconds.20
The correlations were not perfect, but they were powerful. And they did not happen by chance. The odds of getting the results they did by mere chance were 11,000 to 1 for all the bonded couples. And when you looked at the “highly motivated” couples—the ones who were facing cancer, who had something at stake—the odds against chance jumped to 135,000 to 1.
Now, let me be clear. I am not arguing that studies like this one explain reality. These findings could turn out to be a statistical fluke—although there have been some fifty other studies like this one that yielded similar results. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, or twenty-five, scientists find wholly materialistic explanations for phenomena such as gut feelings or intuition. But I present the alternative studies here because they offer an explanation—something not pulled out of a magician’s hat but based in quantum physics and tested under rigorous conditions.
“What we’re experiencing here suggests that consciousness or mind or intention is causal—not only in our own bodies, but causal in the external world,” Schlitz said.
When you pray for your child, or root for the Dodgers, or curse at your colleague under your breath, that has a measurable effect, she said. “We can’t yet explain it, but this provides a revolutionary break in thinking about how we’re connected, and how we’re separated. I think we are smack dab in the middle of a paradigm shift.”
As she spoke, a wild thought occurred to me. Perhaps quantum physics offers an explanation for prayer and healing. Maybe Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is at work, in which prayers move from one person to another through Dean Radin’s Jell-O-like reality, that closely woven fabric of reality in which all things are ultimately entangled. For some, that stuff is God, who does not so much intervene in our lives as provide the medium through which prayers move.
I was curious about how Teena explained the results.
“It’s just the real strong power of energy between people who care for each other.”
Finally, I thought. The missing element. My “God I.O,” the scientist’s God, that intelligence that weaves the universe together, unifies everything in a web of consciousness, the God that resides non-locally, outside of time and space—that God had left me a bit cold. It was flesh and bones without life.What was absent was the pneuma, the breath of love. Even though scientists on the frontiers of science rarely mention that line on God’s résumé, everyone else who believes there is something more than this puts “love” first on the list.
It occurs to me that experiments like the Love Study are both very small and very large. We are talking about tiny variations in a person’s sweat glands; it doesn’t get much more incremental than that. And yet, perhaps Teena’s fluctuating skin resistance swings the door open to a cosmic idea—that she is somehow connected across time and space to her husband and children, and if she is connected to them, then why not to every particle and person in the universe? That is what quantum entanglement—this Jell-O-like reality—is claiming. The implications are as vast as the heavens.
And while the terminology of “entanglement” and “non-local mind” may be twenty-first-century, the idea dates back to antiquity.
“This is the place where science and spirituality are converging,” Schlitz observed. “You look at the great teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, a lot of the shamanic traditions, even in the Christian traditions, and you see this sense of unity an
d wholeness. And now what we’re finding is that there is a justification for that sort of philosophical position from an empirical base, from a scientific base.”
While this definition of God does little to fill my soul or feed my emotions—I gain little comfort from imagining myself in the arms of non-local mind, for example—it does go some way toward nourishing my intellect. As I was wrestling with my own concept of God, one that could survive the science I was absorbing, I suffered a small crisis that allowed me to put some of these ideas to a test.
The U.S. Postal Service and the Fabric of Reality
On January 30, 2007, a tiny error set off a chain reaction that threatened nearly a year of research. All year long, a young colleague of mine had been generously transcribing my interviews from various reporting trips, for a pittance. I could not have finished the book without her. Over Christmas, she had taken some minidisks (three-inch-by-three-inch square digital disks) to her family’s home in New England and accidentally left them there. This particular set of minidisks included interviews from four trips (New Mexico, Canada, Florida, and Pennsylvania), which were essential for five different chapters—nearly half the book.
Her mother put the minidisks in a manila envelope and dropped them into a mailbox. On February 2, the envelope arrived in Washington with a large gash in it, minus the minidisks.When I learned this, the earth lurched to a halt, silence roared in my ears, and I was paralyzed by the implications like a mouse before a rattlesnake.
If you live on the East Coast and noticed a decline in your mail delivery service in the first half of February 2007, you can direct your ire at me. During that time, I enlisted the help of every U.S. Postal Service customer-relations officer between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. By seven o’clock each morning I had methodically called the managers of mail distribution centers up and down the coast. I e-mailed them digital pictures of the minidisks. I called individual post offices, and enjoyed several conversations with the investigative arm of the U.S. Postal Service. By the end of the third day, the Postal Service officer who was in charge of my case remarked, “Ms. Hagerty, we have thirty people working to find your minidisks.” I did not mention to her the dozen or so other federal employees I had called on my own.
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