Regional
(2008-02-25)
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BRUSH, CO
(KUNC) -
The Science of Woo Woo
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by Marc Ringel, M.D.
KUNC February 25, 2008
Surprisingly, the spiritual tone of KUNC pieces I've done about healing has provoked some of the biggest negative reactions from listeners. Outraged critics, self-anointed representatives of pure science, criticize me aggressively from a viewpoint that wholly denies the possibility of healing occurring any way but via the material world described by modern physics as we currently know it. This piece, which describes a mind-blowing study, will certainly, once again, get the goats of my scientific detractors.
The authors recruited eleven healers who claimed to establish some sort of connection between themselves and patients that could promote healing at a distance. Each healer paired herself with one person to be the recipient of her mind outreach efforts, someone with whom she already felt a special bond.
The receivers were placed in a machine called a functional MRI, a device that teams a huge magnet with a powerful computer to generate a detailed picture of brain activity. ( MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging.) The recipients were told to relax as much as possible, in itself quite a feat with their heads stuck into a loud multi-ton machine that generates a magnetic field about half a billion times stronger than the earth's.
The healing partners were nearby, in the MRI control room, physically and visually isolated from the test subjects. They were instructed to project healing intentions in twelve random two-minute segments. Neither subjects nor experimenters knew the on-off sequence prior to each session.
The functional MRI ran continuously during the 24 minutes that the subject was in the scanner. A sophisticated set of computer programs that analyzed the data uncovered highly significant differences in the brain activity of subjects between when their partners were concentrating on reaching them and when they were not. The areas that lit up during the intention-to-contact intervals were the same as those that have been related in other studies to decision-making, information processing and, most interestingly, to response to painkillers, both opiates and placebos.
The chances of finding such anatomical differences on the MRIs between 24 intention-to-contact and non-intention-to-contact intervals among 10 pairs (one pair was disqualified because of irregularities in the MRI), for a total of 240 trials, are about 10,000 to 1.
There are no known biological processes that could account for these results. The healers came from a variety of traditions, so there is not even a singular non-biological woo-woo explanation either. The one thing that the healers did have in common was that none of them claimed to actually heal, but only to serve as a conduit of some spiritual source of healing.
I do believe in healing. The report I've described may lend some scientific credibility to my belief.
One view of what makes science science is that it is falsifiable, meaning that every one of its claims is open to examination and discredit. So, for you skeptics, here's the reference: Achterberg, et. al. Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Functions of Recipients in The Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, volume 11, number 6. Please study it, then, if you feel you've found important flaws, send me an email about it, care of KUNC. I welcome the dialog. After all, I'm a scientist too.
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