posted March 02, 2011 11:55 AM
The AIDS healing study using various healers including indigenous shaman. The Targ mentioned is not the same as Russel Targ I mentioned before.
pg. 47
Targ began her career as a mainstream psychiatrist, but made her name in 1999 with two remarkable studies at California Pacific Medical Center CPMC) in San Francisco, which tested the possibility of remote healing with end-stage AIDS patients. Targ spent months designing her trail. She and her partner, psychologist retired hospital administrator Fred Sicher, sought out a homogeneous group of advanced AIDS patients with the same degree of illness, including the same T-cell counts and number of AIDS-defining illnesses. Because they wished to test the effect of distant healing, and not any particular healing modality, they decided to recruit highly experienced, successful healers from diverse backgrounds who might represent an array of approaches.
Targ and Sicher gathered together an eclectic mix of healers from all across America--from orthodox Christians to Native American shamans--and asked them to send healing thoughts to a group of AIDS patients under strict double-blind conditions. All healing was to be done remotely so that nothing, such as the presence of a healer or healing touch, could confound the results. Targ created a strict double-blind format: each healer received sealed packets with information about the patients to be healed, including their names, photos, and T-cell counts. Every other week, the healers were assigned a new patient and asked to hold an intention for the health and wellbeing of the patient an hour a day for six days, with alternate weeks off for rest. In this manner, eventually every patient in the healing group would be sent healing by every healer in turn.
At the end of the first study, although 40 percent of the control population died, all ten of the patients in the treatment group were not only alive but far healther in every regard.
Targ and Sicher repeated the study, but this time doubled the size of their study population and tightened their protocol even further. They also widened their brief of the outcomes they planned to measure. In the second study, those sent healing were again far healther on every parameter tested: significantly fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, fewer hospitalizations, fewer visits to the doctor, fewer new illnesses, less severity of disease, and better psychological well-being. The differences were decisive; for instance, the treatment group had six times fewer AIDS defining illnesses and four times fewer hospitalizations at the end of the study than the controls.
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pg. 52
Entrainment is a term in physics which means that two oscillating systems fall into synchrony. It was coined in 1665 by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan huygens, after he discovered that two of his clocks with pendulums standing in close proximity to each other had begun to swing in unison. he had been toying with the two pendulums and found that een if he started one pendulum swinging at one end, and the other at the opposite end, eventually the two would swing in unison.
Two waves peaking and troughing at the same time are considered "in phase," or operating in sync. Thos peaking at the opposite times are "out of phase." Physicist believe that entrainment results from tiny exchanges of energy between two systems that are out of phase, causing one to slow downand the other to accelerate until the two are in phase. It is also related to resonance, or the ability of any system to absorb more energy than normal at a particular frequency the number of peaks and troughs in one second). Any vibrating thing, icluding an electromagnetic wave, has its own preferential frequencies, called "resonant frequencies," where it finds vibrating the easiest. When it "listens" or receives a vibration from somewhere else, it tunes out all pretenders and only tunes into its own resonant frequency. it is a bit like a mother instantly recognizing her child from among a mass of schoolchildren. planets have orbital resonances. our sense of hearing operates through a from of entrainment: different parts of a membrane of the inner ear resonate to different frequencies of sound. Resonance even occurs in the seas, as in the tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy at the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine, near Nova Scotia.
Once they march to the same rhythm, things that are entrained send out a stronger signal than they do individually. This most commonly occurs with muscical instruments, which sound amplified when all playing in phase. At the Bay of Fundy, the time required for a single wave to travel fromt he bay's mouth to its opposite end and back is exactly matched by the time of each tide. Each wave is amplified by the rhythm of each tide, resulting in some of the highest tides in the world.
Entrainment also occurs when someone sends a strong intention to cause harm, as became evident in the tohate experiments of mikio Yamamoto of the National Institue of Radiological Sciences in Ciba and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. Tohate is a kind of mental standoff between two qigong practitioners, one of whome receives a sensory shock and is eventually made to submit and move back several yards without any physical contact fromthe other. The central question posed b the technique, in Yamamoto's mind, was whehter the effect of tohate is psychological or phsical: does the opponent move back because of psychological intimidation, or is he knocked over by the qi of his opponent?
In the first of Yamaoto's studies, a Qigong master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room onthe fourth floor of a building, while his student was similarly isolated onthe first floor. Yamamoto signaled for the master to perform "qi emission" over 80 seconds at random intervals. Each time, he tracked their separate movements--the sending of the qi and th start of the pupil's recoil. In nearly a third of the 49 such trials--a highly significant result--whenever the master engaged in tohate movements, his opponent in the other room was physically knocked back In a second set of 57 trials, Yamamoto wired both teacher and pupi to EEG machines. Wheever the master emitted qi, his pupil showed an increase in the number of alpha brain waes in his right frontal lobe suggesting that this was where the body initially receives the intention "message". (On a personal note, this is were we register anxiety)
Yamamoto's final set of trials examined the EEG-recorded brain waves of both master and student. Whenever the master performed tohate, the beta brain waves of both men demonstrated a greater sense of coherence. In an earlier study carried out by the Tokyo group, the brain waves of the receiver and sender b ecame synchronized within one second during tohate.
Besides resonance, the DMILS (Direct mental interaction with living systems) studies offered evidence of another phenomenon during intention: the receiver anticipated the information by registering the "ouch" a few moments before the pinch occurred in the sender. In 1997, in his former laboratory at the University of Nevada, Radin discovered that humans may receive a physical foreboding of an event. he set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed to calm, to arouse, or to upset a participant. his volunteers were wire to physiological monitors that reocorded changes in skin conduction, heart rate, and blood pressure, and they sat in front of a computer that would randomly display color photos of tranquil scenes (landscapes) or scenes designed to shock (autopsies) or to arouse (erotic materials).
Radin discoverd that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if they were trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an imag that was erotic or disturbing. This offered the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciuosly anticipate and act out our own future emotional states and that the nervous systems doesn't merely cushion itself against a future blow, but also works out the emotional meaning of it.
Dr. Rollin mcCraty, executive vice president and director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California, was fascinated by the idea of shared physical foreboding of an event, but wondered where exactly in the body this intuitive information might first be felt. He used the original design of Radin's study witha computerized system of randomly generated arousing photos, but hooked up his participants to a larger complement of medical equipment.
McCrat discovered that these forebodings of good and bad news were felt in both the heart and the brain, whose electromagnetic waves would speed up or slow down just before a disturbing or tranquil picture was shown. Furthermore, all four lobes of the cerebral cortex appeared to take part in this intuitive awareness. Most astoninshingly of all, the heart appeared to receive this information moments befre the brain did. This suggested that the body has certain perceptual apparatus that enables it continually to scan and intuit the future, but that the heart may hold the largest antenna. After the hear receives the infromation, it communicates this information o the brain.
McCraty's stud had shown certan fascinating differences between the sexes. Both the heart and the brain became entrained with each other earlier and more frequently in women than they did in men. mcCraty concluded that this offered scientific evidence of the universal assumption that women are naturally more intuitive than men and more in touch with their heart cente.
McCraty's conclusion--that hte heart is the largest "brain" of te bod-- has now gained credibility after research findings by Dr. John Anrew Armour at the University of montreal and the Hopital du SacreCoeur in montreal. Armour discovered neurotransmitters inthe heart that signal and influence aspects ofhigher though in the brain. mcCraty discovered that touch and even mentally focusing on the heart cause bainwae entrainment between people. When two people touched while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the more "coherent" heart rhythms of the two began to entrain the brain of the other.
Armed with this new eidence about the heart, Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz decided to explore whether remote mental influence extended to anywhere else in the body. An obvious place to explore was the gut. people speak about intuition as a "gut instinct" or "gut feeling." Certain researchers have even referred to the gut as a "second brain." Radin wondered if a gut instinct was accompanied by an actual physical effect.
Radin and Schlitz gathered 26 student volunteers, paired them, and this time wired them up to an electrogastrogram (EGG_, which measures the electrical behavior of the gut; monitors on the skin usually closely match the frequencies and contractions of the stomach. Although the Freiburge study had shown otherwise, Radin and Schlitz believed that familiarity could only help to magnify the effects of remote influence. In case some sort of physical connection was indeed important, Randin asked all the participants to exchange some meaningful object first.
Radin put on participant from a pair in one room. The other sat in another, darkened room, attached to an electrogastrogram, viewing live video images of the first person. Images periodically flashed on another monitor, accompanied by music designed to arouse particular emotions: positie, negative, angry, calming, or just neutral.
The results revealed another example of entrainment--this time int he gut. The EGG readings of the receiver were significantly higher and correlated with those of the sender when the sender experienced strong emotions, positive or negative. here was yet more evidence that the emotional state of others is registered in the body of the receiver--in this case, deep in the intestines--and that the home of the gut instinct is indeed the gut itself.
On a personal note, there are many studies I have come across done with buddhist monks showing compassion and empathy etc to be correlates of greater neural coherence and stability after being exposed to trauma.
Also, my keyboard has a tendency to not type certain letters.. so my apologies if that's the case!