The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  At times, women produced better results when they weren’t concentrating strictly on the machine, but were doing other things as well, whereas strict concentration seemed important for men’s success.39 This may provide some subatomic evidence that women are better at multitasking than men, while men are better at concentrated focus. It may well be that in microscopic ways men have a more direct impact on their world, while women’s effects are more profound.

  Then something happened which forced Jahn and Dunne to reconsider their hypothesis about the nature of the effects they were observing. In 1992, PEAR had banded together with the University of Giessen and the Freiberg Institute to create the Mind – Machine Consortium. The consortium’s first task was to replicate the original PEAR data, which everyone assumed would proceed as a matter of course. Once the results of all three laboratories were examined, however, they looked, at first glance, a failure – little better than the 50 – 50 odds which occur by chance alone.40

  When writing up the results, Jahn and Dunne noticed some odd distortions in the data. Something interesting had occurred in the secondary variables. In statistical graphs, you can show not only what your average ought to be but also how far the deviations from it ought to spread from your mean. With the Mind – Machine data, the mean was right where it would be with a chance result, but not much else was. The size of the variation was too big, and the shape of the bell curve was disproportionate. Overall, the distribution was far more skewed than it would be if it were just a chance result. Something strange was going on.

  When Jahn and Dunne looked a little closer at the data, the most obvious problem had to do with feedback. Up until that time they’d operated on the assumption that providing immediate feedback – telling the operators how they were doing in influencing the machine – and making an attractive display or a machine that people could really engage with would crucially help to produce good results. This would hook the operator into the process and help them to get in ‘resonance’ with the device. For the mental world to interact with the physical world, they’d thought, the interface – an attractive display – was crucial in breaching that divide.

  However, in the Consortium data, they realized that the operators were doing just as well – or sometimes better – when they had no feedback.

  One of their other studies, called ArtREG, had also failed to get significant overall results.41 They decided to examine that study a bit more closely in light of the Mind – Machine Consortium results. They’d used engaging images on a computer, which randomly switched back and forth – in one case a Navajo sand painting switched with Anubis, the ancient Egyptian judge of the dead. The idea was for their operators to will the machine to show more of one than the other. The PEAR team had assumed once again that an attractive image would act as a carrot – you’d be ‘rewarded’ for your intention by seeing more of the image you preferred.

  Once they’d examined the data of the study in terms of yield by picture, those images which had produced the most successful outcomes all fell into a similar category: the archetypal, the ritualistic or the religiously iconographic. This was the domain of dreams, the unexpressed or unarticulated – images that, by their very design, were intended to engage the unconscious.

  If that were true, the intention was coming from deep in the unconscious mind, and this may have been the cause of the effects. Jahn and Dunne realized what was wrong with their assumptions. Using devices to make the participant function on a conscious level might be acting as a barrier. Instead of increasing conscious awareness among their operators, they should be diminishing it.42

  This realization caused them to refine their ideas about how the effects they’d observed in their labs might occur. Jahn liked to call it his ‘work in progress’. It appeared that the unconscious mind somehow had the capability of communicating with the subtangible physical world – the quantum world of all possibility. This marriage of unformed mind and matter would then assemble itself into something tangible in the manifest world.43

  This model makes perfect sense if it also embraces theories of the Zero Point Field and quantum biology proposed by Pribram, Popp and the others. Both the unconscious mind – a world before thought and conscious intention – and the ‘unconscious’ of matter – the Zero Point Field – exist in a probabilistic state of all possibility. The subconscious mind is a pre-conceptual substrate from which concepts emerge, and the Zero Point Field is a probabilistic substrate of the physical world. It is mind and matter at their most fundamental. In this subtangible dimension, possibly of a common origin, it would make sense that there would be a greater likelihood of quantum interaction.

  At times, Jahn kicked around the most radical idea of all. When you get down far enough into the quantum world, there may be no distinction between the mental and the physical. There may be only the concept. It might just be consciousness attempting to make sense of a blizzard of information. There might not be two intangible worlds. There might be only one – The Field and the ability of matter to organize itself coherently.44

  As Pribram and Hameroff theorized, consciousness results from superradiance, a rippling cascade of subatomic coherence – when individual quantum particles such as photons lose their individuality and begin acting as a single unit, like an army calling every soldier into line. Since every motion of every charged particle of every biological process is mirrored in the Zero Point Field, our coherence extends out in the world. According to the laws of classical physics, particularly the law of entropy, the movement of the inanimate world is always toward chaos and disorder. However, the coherence of consciousness represents the greatest form of order known to nature, and the PEAR studies suggest that this order may help to shape and create order in the world. When we wish for something or intend something, an act which requires a great deal of unity of thought, our own coherence may be, in a sense, infectious.

  On the most profound level, the PEAR studies also suggest that reality is created by each of us only by our attention. At the lowest level of mind and matter, each of us creates the world.

  The effects that Jahn had been able to record were almost imperceptible. It was too early to know why. Either the machinery was still too crude to pick up the effect or he was only picking up a single signal, when the real effect occurs from an ocean of signals – an interaction of all living things in the Zero Point Field. The difference between his own results and the higher ones recorded by Schmidt suggested that this ability was spread across the population, but that it was like artistic ability. Certain individuals were more skillful at harnessing it.

  Jahn had seen that this process had minute effects on probabilistic processes, and that this might explain all the well-known stories about people having positive or negative effects on machines – why, on some bad days, computers, telephones and photocopiers malfunction. It might even explain the problems Benveniste had been having with his robot.

  It seemed that we had an ability to extend our own coherence out into our environment. By a simple act of wishing, we could create order. This represented an almost unimaginable amount of power. On the crudest level, Jahn had proved that, at least on the subatomic level, there was such as thing as mind over matter. But he’d demonstrated something even more fundamental about the powerful nature of human intention. The REG data offered a tiny window into the very essence of human creativity – its capacity to create, to organize, even to heal.45 Jahn had his evidence that human consciousness had the power to order random electronic devices. The question now before him was what else might be possible.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sharing Dreams

  DEEP IN THE RAINFORESTS of the Amazon, the Achuar and the Huaorani Indians are assembled for their daily ritual. Every morning, each member of the tribe awakens before dawn, and once gathered together in that twilight hour, as the world explodes into light, they share their dreams. This is not simply an interesting pastime, an opportunity for storytelling: to the Achuar and the Huaorani,
the dream is owned not by the dreamer alone, but collectively by the group, and the individual dreamer is simply the vessel the dream decided to borrow to have a conversation with the whole tribe. The tribes view the dream as a map for their waking hours. It is a forecaster of what is to come for all of them. In dreams they connect with their ancestors and the rest of the universe. The dream is what is real. It is their waking life that is the falsehood.1

  Further north, a group of scientists also discovered that dreams aren’t owned by the dreamer, asleep in a soundproof chamber behind an electromagnetic shield, electrodes taped to his skull. They are owned by Sol Fieldstein, a City College doctoral student in another room several hundred yards away, who is examining a painting entitled Zapatistas by Carlos Orozco Romero – a panorama of Mexican revolutionaries, followers of Emiliano Zapata, all marching with their shawled women under the dark clouds of an imminent storm. Sol’s instructions are to will this image to the dreamer. A few moments later, the dreamer, Dr William Erwin, a psychoanalyst, is awakened. The dream he was having, he told them, was a crazy thing, almost like a colossal Cecil B. DeMille production. What he kept seeing was this image, under a foreboding sky, of some sort of ancient Mexican civilization.2

  The dreamer is the vessel for a borrowed thought, a collective notion, present in the microscopic vibrations in between the dreamers. The dream state is more authentic for it shows the connection in bold relief. Their waking state of isolation, each in their separate room, is, as the Amazons view it, the impostor.

  One of the questions that arose from the PEAR studies was the nature of ownership of thought. If you could influence machines, it rather begged the question of exactly where your thoughts lie. Where exactly was the human mind? The usual assumption in Western culture is that it is located in our brains. But if this is true, how could thoughts or intentions affect other people? Is it that the thought is ‘out there’, somewhere else? Or is there such a thing as an extended mind, a collective thought? Does what we think or dream influence anyone else?

  These were the kinds of questions that preoccupied William Braud. He’d read of studies like the one with the Mexican painting, which was one of the more dramatic of studies on telepathy conducted by Charles Honorton, a noted consciousness researcher at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. For a behaviorist like Braud, the Honorton study represented a radical new education.

  Braud was soft-spoken and thoughtful, with a gentle, deliberate manner, most of his face encompassed by a generous beard. He’d begun his career as a psychologist of the old school, with a particular interest in the psychology and biochemistry of memory and learning. Nevertheless, there was an errant streak in him, a fascination with what William James, the founder of psychology in America, had termed ‘white crows’. Braud liked anomalies, the things in life that didn’t fit, the assumptions that could be turned askew.

  Just a few years after he’d got his PhD, the 1960s had loosened up the tight hold of Pavlov and Skinner on his imagination. At the time, Braud had been teaching classes in memory, motivation and learning at the University of Houston. Recently, he’d become interested in work showing a remarkable property of the human brain. The early pioneers in biofeedback and relaxation demonstrated that people could influence their own muscular reaction or heart rate, just by directing their attention to parts of it in sequence. Biofeedback even had measurable effects on brain wave activity, blood pressure and electrical activity on the skin.3

  Braud had been toying with his own studies on extrasensory perception. One of his students who practiced hypnosis agreed to participate in a study in which Braud attempted to transmit his thoughts. Some amazing transferences had gone on. His student, who’d been hypnotized and was sitting in a room down the hall from him, unaware of Braud’s doings, seemed to have some empathetic connection with him. Braud had pricked his hand and placed it over a candle flame and his student experienced pain or heat. He’d looked at a picture of a boat and the student remarked about a boat. He opened the door of his lab into the brilliant Texas sunshine and the student mentioned the sun. Braud had been able to carry out his end of the experiment anywhere – the other side of the building or many miles away from his student in the sealed room – and get the same results.4

  In 1971, when he was 29, Braud crossed paths with Edgar Mitchell, who had just returned from his Apollo 14 flight. Mitchell had decided to write a book about the nature of consciousness and at the time he was scouting around for any good research of this kind. Braud and one other academic were the only people in Houston involved in any credible study of the nature of consciousness. It was only natural that he and Mitchell would find each other. They began meeting regularly and comparing notes on research that existed in this area.

  There was plenty of research on telepathy. There’d been the highly successful card experiments of Joseph Rhine, used by Mitchell in outer space. Even more convincing were the studies of the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn in the late 1960s, conducted in its special dream research laboratory. Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner had conducted numerous experiments like the one with the Mexican painting to see if thoughts could be sent and incorporated into dreams. The Maimonides work had been so successful5 that when analyzed by a University of California statistician who was expert in psychic research, the total series had showed an astonishing accuracy rate of 84 per cent. The odds of this happening by chance were a quarter of a million to one.6

  There’d even been some evidence that people can empathetically feel another’s pain. A psychologist named Charles Tart in Berkeley had designed a particularly brutal study, administering electric shocks to himself to see if he could ‘send’ his pain and have it register with a receiver, who was hooked up to machines which would measure heart rate, blood volume and other physiological changes.7 What Tart found was that his receivers were aware of his pain, but not on a conscious level. Any empathy they might have had was registering physiologically through decreased blood volume or faster beating of the heart – but not consciously. When questioned, the participants hadn’t any idea when Tart was getting the shocks.8

  Tart also had shown that when two participants hypnotize each other, they experience intense common hallucinations. They also claimed to have shared an extrasensory communication, where they knew each other’s thoughts and feelings.9

  It got so that Braud’s white crows were beginning to take over, crowding out his academic work. Braud’s own belief system had moved in small deliberate steps from his original ideas, which had embraced the simple cause-and-effect equations of brain chemistry, to more complex ideas about consciousness. His own tentative experiments had been so breath-takingly dramatic that they had convinced him that something far more complex than chemicals was at work in the brain – if any of this was happening in the brain at all.

  As he’d become interested in altered consciousness and the effect of relaxation on physiology, so Braud had been lured away from his behaviorist theories. Mitchell had been receiving some funding from the Mind Science Foundation, an organization devoted to consciousness research. As it happened, the Foundation was planning to move to San Antonio and needed another senior scientist. The job, with all the freedom it offered for experimentation into the nature of consciousness, was exactly what Braud was looking for.

  The world of consciousness research was a small one. One of the other members of the Foundation was Helmut Schmidt, and Braud soon met Schmidt and his REG machines. It was there that he began to wonder how far the influence of the human mind worked. After all, human beings, like REGs, qualify as systems with considerable plasticity and lability – potential for change. These dynamic systems were always in flux and might also be susceptible to psychokinetic influence on some level – quantum or otherwise.

  It was only one small step further for Braud to consider that if people could affect their own bodies through attention, then they just might be able to create the same effect in someone else. And if we could create order in
inanimate objects such as REG machines, perhaps we could also establish order in other living things. What these thoughts were leading up to was a model of consciousness that was not even limited by the body, but was an ethereal presence that trespassed into other bodies and living things and affected them as if they were its own.

  Braud decided to develop a series of experiments to explore just how much influence individual intention might have on other living things. These were difficult studies to design. The problem with most living systems is their sheer dynamism. There are so many variables that it is hard to measure change. Braud decided to begin with simple animals and slowly advance in evolutionary complexity. He needed a simple system with some capability of changing in easily measurable ways. Research of his chanced upon a perfect candidate. He discovered that the small knife fish (Gymnotus carapo) emits a weak electrical signal, which is probably used for navigational purposes. The electrical signal would allow him to quantify its direction precisely. Electrodes fastened to the side of a small tank would pick up the electrical activity of the fish’s emissions and give an influencer immediate feedback on an oscilloscope screen. The question was whether people could change the fish’s swimming orientation.

  Mongolian gerbils were another good candidate because they like to run in activity wheels. This also gave Braud something to measure. He could quantify the velocity of a gerbil on its run and then see if human intention could make it go faster.