The Field (23 page)

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.

Braud wanted to test the effects of intention on human cells, ideally those of the immune system, for if an outside agent could influence the immune system, the prospects for healing were immense. But this represented a challenge far too great for his laboratory. The immune system was an entity with so much complexity that in any study of human intention, it would be almost impossible to quantify what had changed and who was responsible for the changing.

A far better candidate was the red blood cell. When red blood cells are placed in a solution with the same saline (salt) levels as blood plasma, their membranes remain intact and will survive for a long time. Add too much or too little salt to the solution and the membranes of the blood cells weaken and finally burst, causing the hemoglobin of the cell to spill out into the solution, a process called ‘hemolysis’. Controlling the rate is often a matter of varying the amount of salt in the solution. Since the solution becomes more transparent as hemolysis carries on, you can also quantify the rate of this process by measuring the amount of light transmitted through the solution with a gadget called a spectrophotometer. Here was another system which was easy to measure. Braud decided to enlist some volunteers, place them in a distant room and determine whether, by simple wishing, they could ‘protect’ these cells from bursting by slowing their rate of hemolysis once a fatal amount of salt had been added into the test tube.

All these studies met with success.
¹⁰
Braud’s volunteers had been able to change the direction of fish, speed up gerbils and protect human red blood cells to a significant extent. Braud was ready to move on to human beings, but he needed some method of isolating physical effects. A perfect device for this, as any police detective knows, is one that measures electrodermal activity (EDA). With lie detector tests, the machine picks up any increase in the electrical conductivity of the skin, which is caused by increased activity of the sweat glands, which in turn are governed by the sympathetic nervous system. As doctors can measure electrical activity of the heart and brain with ECG (electrocardiogram) and (EEG) electroencephalogram) machines, respectively, so too can the lie detector record increased electrodermal activity. Higher EDA readings show that the sympathetic nervous system, which governs emotional states, is in overdrive. This would indicate stress, emotion or mood swings – any sort of heightened arousal – which is more likely if someone is lying. These are often referred to as ‘fight or flight’ responses, which rise and become more pronounced when we face something dangerous or upsetting: our hearts race, our pupils dilate, our skin tends to sweat more and blood drains from our extremities to go to the sites in the body where it is most needed. Taking these readings can give you a measure of unconscious response, when the sympathetic nervous system is stressed before the person being tested is even consciously aware of it. By the same token, low levels of EDA would be indicative of little stress and a state of calm – the natural state of truth telling.

Braud launched his human experimentation with what would become one of his signature studies: the effect of being stared at. Researchers into the nature of consciousness are particularly fond of the phenomenon because it is a relatively easy extrasensory experiment with which to judge success. With transmitted thoughts, there are many variables to consider when determining whether the receiver’s response matches the sender’s thoughts. With staring, the receiver either feels it or doesn’t. It is the closest you can get to reducing subjective feelings to the simple binary multiple choice of a REG machine.

In Braud’s hands, staring and being stared at became state of the art, a stalker’s paradise. Participants would be placed in a room and be attached to silver chloride palmar electrodes, a skin resistance amplifier and a computer. The only other equipment in the room was a Hitachi color Camcorder VM-2250, which was to be the implement of spying. This small video camera would be attached to a 19-inch Sony Trinitron in another room, two hallways and four doors away. This would allow the starer to view the subject peacefully without the possibility of any form of sensory cueing.

Pure chance, as arrived at by artful mathematical calculation – a computer’s random algorithm – governed the starer’s script. Whenever the script dictated, the starer would stare intently at the subject on the monitor and attempt to gain his or her attention. Meanwhile, in the other room, the staree, relaxed in a reclining chair, had been told to think about anything other than wondering when he or she was being stared at.

Braud carried out this experiment sixteen times. In most cases, those being stared at showed significantly greater electrodermal activity during the staring sessions than would be expected by chance (59 per cent against the expected 50 per cent) – even though they were not consciously aware of it. With his second group of participants, Braud decided to try something different. In this case, he had them meet each other before-hand. He asked them to carry out a series of exercises that involved staring into each other’s eyes and looking intently at each other when they talked. The idea was to reduce any discomfort over being stared at and also to get them to know each other. When this group underwent the trial, they got opposite results from the earlier tests. They were at their calmest precisely when they were being stared at. Like the Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition where prisoners begin to love their jailers, the starers had begun to love being stared at. In a manner of speaking, they’d become addicted to it. They were more relaxed when being stared at, even at a distance, and they missed it when no one was looking at them.
¹¹

From these latest studies, Braud grew even more convinced that people had some means of communicating and responding to remote attention, even when they weren’t aware of it.
¹²
Like those people given Charles Tart’s electric shocks, the person being stared at was not conscious of any of this. Awareness occurred only deep in a subliminal level.

Much of this research inspired an important consideration – the degree to which necessity dictated the size of the effect. It was obvious now to Braud that random systems or those with a high potential for influence could be affected by human intention. But was the effect any larger if the system
needed
changing? If it was possible to calm someone down, would the effect be more exaggerated in someone who needed calming down – someone, say, with loads of nervous energy? In other words, did
need
allow someone greater access to effects from The Field? Were the more organized of us – biologically speaking – better at accessing this information and drawing it to the attention of others?

In 1983, Braud tested out this theory with a series of studies in collaboration with an anthropologist called Marilyn Schlitz, another consciousness researcher who’d worked with Helmut Schmidt. Braud and Schlitz selected a group of highly nervous people, as evidenced by high sympathetic nervous system activity, and another calmer group. Using a similar protocol to the staring studies, Braud and Schlitz by turns tried to calm down members of both groups. Success or failure would be measured again by a polygraph tracing of a person’s electrodermal activity.

The volunteers were also asked to participate in another experiment, in which they’d attempt to calm themselves down with standard relaxation methods.

When they finished the study, Schlitz and Braud noticed a huge disparity between results of the two groups.
¹³
As they suspected, the effect was far larger in the group needing the calming down. In fact, it was the greatest effect achieved in any of Braud’s studies. The calm group, on the other hand, had registered almost no change; their effect only differed slightly from chance.

Strangest of all, the size of the effect on the agitated group by those trying to calm them down was only slightly less than the effect that people had on themselves when using relaxation techniques. In statistical terms, it meant that other people could have almost the same mind – body effect on you that you could have on yourself. Letting someone else express a good intention for you was almost as good as using biofeedback on yourself.

Braud tried a similar study showing that you could also help someone else focus his or her attention by remote influence. Once again, the effects were largest among those whose attention seemed to wander the most.
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A meta-analysis is a scientific method of assessing whether an observed effect is real and significant by pooling the data from a large body of often disparate individual studies. In effect, it combines single studies, which may sometimes be discounted as too small to be definitive, into one giant experiment. Although there are problems comparing studies of different shapes and sizes, it may give you some idea about whether the effect you are studying is big or small. Schlitz and Braud had conducted a metaanalysis on all of the studies they could find investigating the effect of intention on other living things. Research conducted all over the world had shown that human intention could affect bacteria and yeast, plants, ants, chicks, mice and rats, cats and dogs, human cellular preparations and enzyme activity. Studies on humans had shown that one set of people could successfully affect the eye or gross motor movements, breathing and even the brain rhythms of another set. The effects were small, but they occurred consistently and had been achieved by ordinary people who had been recruited to try out this ability for the very first time.

Overall, according to Schlitz and Braud’s meta-analysis, the studies had a success rate of 37 per cent against the expected result of 5 per cent by chance.
¹⁵
The EDA studies alone had a success rate of 47 per cent compared with the 5 per cent success rate expected by chance.
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These results gave Braud several important clues about the nature of remote influence. It was apparent that ordinary humans had the ability to influence other living things on many levels: muscle activity, motor activity, cellular changes, nervous system activity. One other strange possibility was suggested by all these studies: the influence increased depending on how much it mattered to the influencer, or how much he or she could relate to the object of influence. The smallest effects were found in the fish studies; these increased in experiments dealing with cuddly gerbils; they increased yet again with human cells; and they were at their greatest when people were attempting to influence another person. But the greatest effect of all occurred when the people to be influenced really needed it. Those who required something – calming down, focusing attention – seemed more receptive to influence than others. And strangest of all, your influence on others was only marginally less than your influence on yourself.

Braud had even seen cases of telepathy during the influence sessions. At the beginning of one session, one influencer happened to remark that the electrodermal tracings of the subject were so regimented that they reminded him of a German techno-pop musical band called Kraftwerk. When Braud returned to the recipient’s room at the end of the session, the first thing she said was that early in the session, for some odd reason, she kept thinking of the pop group Kraftwerk. In Braud’s work this kind of association was becoming the norm, rather than the exception.
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Every scientist engaged in consciousness research was thinking the same thought. Why was it that some people were more able to influence, and some conditions more conducive to influence, than others? It was like a secret labyrinth that certain people could maneuver around more easily than others. Jahn and Dunne had found that archetypal or mythical images triggering the unconscious produced the strongest psychokinetic effects. The highly successful Maimonides research on telepathy had been conducted when the participants were asleep and dreaming. Even when only dabbling, Braud showed great success during hypnosis. In Tart’s studies, and in his own remote staring studies, the communication had occurred subconsciously, without the recipient being aware of it.

Braud had looked hard for the common thread in all these experiments. He’d noticed several characteristics which tended to more readily guarantee success: some sort of relaxation technique (through meditation, biofeedback or another method); reduced sensory input or physical activity; dreams or other internal states and feelings; and a reliance on right-brain functioning.

Braud and others found what had been termed the ‘sheep/goat’ effect – these effects work better if you believe they will and less than average if you believe they won’t. In each case, like a REG machine, you are affecting the result – even if (as a goat) your effect is negative.

Another important characteristic appeared to be an altered view of the world. People were more likely to succeed if, instead of believing in a distinction between themselves and the world, and seeing individual people and things as isolated and divisible, they viewed everything as a connected continuum of interrelations – and also if they understood that there were other ways to communicate than through the usual channels.
¹⁸

It seemed that when the left brain was quieted and the right brain predominated, ordinary people could gain access to this information. Braud had read the
Vedas
, India’s bible of the ancient Hindus, which described
siddhis
, or psychic events, that would occur during profound meditative states. In the highest state, the meditator experiences feelings of a type of omniscient knowing – a sense of seeing everywhere at once. The subject enters a state of unity with the single object being focused upon. He or she also experiences the ability to achieve gross psychokinetic effects such as levitation and moving objects at a distance.
¹⁹
In nearly every instance, the recipient had eliminated the sensory bombardment of the everyday and tapped into a deep well of alert receptivity.