Some 20 million Americans—or one in every 16—and one in 20 British people suffer from some form of thyroid disease. That’s a medical tragedy, no doubt, but the bigger tragedy […]

In June 2018, Google – the portal through which we discover facts, make connections, interpret the world – decided to change its algorithms about which information gains preference on its […]

I was speaking to a colleague recently, who announced that he couldn’t wait for his children to be out of primary school and into the British equivalent of high school.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, has such strange physical manifestations—everything from severe and unexplained physical and mental fatigue to memory loss, nervous system problems […]

In medicine and the wider world of alternative medicine, the fashion now is for healers of every variety to deliver the truth and the whole truth to their patients so […]

After witnessing the debates for Democratic presidential candidate in the US and those for Conservative prime minister in the UK, I’m struck by one glaring omission in any discussion of […]

The other night, my husband Bryan Hubbard and I were watching Donald Trump’s first rally in Orlando, Florida, attended by some 20,000 people. But what was most interesting was not […]

I have a decidedly love-hate relationship with antibiotics. On the one hand, I have to admit that I owe my life to them. In 1942, when my mother was 24, […]

Yesterday, I read a shocking statistic by One Poll of 2000 British adults ages 18-55, commissioned by The School of Health. It was polling their thoughts about climate change, and […]

Much is being made of the idea of fairness in our modern politics, and to many people, notably many Democratic contenders for the presidency and the Labour party in the […]

Is there such a thing as an evolved capitalism? This is a question I’ve been wrestling with ever since the financial crisis of 2008. Back then, after Lehman Brothers collapsed […]

Governments around the world have finally come around to admitting the obvious: air pollution isn’t very good for us. And it’s not just the particulate matter belched out in exhaust […]

I thought it ended with Joe McCarthy and his Red Scare of the early 1950s, one of the more shameful eras in American history, when free speech was truly silenced […]

Surgeons like to play music during surgery to stay alert during the meticulous, tedious work they have to do – often for hours at a stretch. Recently I was amazed […]

‘Our country is broken, our society irreparably polarized.’ Is the word we’re hearing on the street all over America, Britain and much of the European Union, with not many ideas […]

Bad theories die hard, and one of those that seems to have the gift of eternal life is the cholesterol theory of heart disease. It was launched on faulty science, […]

It’s strange to use the words ‘untimely death’ about someone who would have been 90 in December, but among all those talking about the ‘soul’ of Barbara Marx Hubbard and […]

Eugene Wigner, the Hungarian-born American physicist, one of the early pioneers of quantum physics who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution, famously argued that individual people view reality through […]

Democracy clearly is failing in the West. I live in the UK, where today was supposed to be the day that Britain left the EU, as voted on by a […]

What disturbs me most is the sloppy thinking, the near universal presumption that certain facts, which aren’t facts at all, are now inviolate and cannot be questioned.

Dr Mitchell Yass is a man on a mission—to do nothing less than revolutionize orthopedic treatment, particularly when it comes to knee or hip replacements. And for good reason. As […]

As I observe the stalemate between the American Republicans and Democrats over the Mexican wall and parliamentarians of all parties over Brexit, I can’t help thinking that all these great […]

If you’re like me, you watch the nightly news with a sense of dread. Even though I’m a journalist myself, I am dismayed by the increasing tendency of most news […]

During this dark time of uncertainty, when all familiar systems seem to be collapsing around us, I take enormous comfort in one simple fact: the extraordinary regenerative power of small […]

Like many people, I approach the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the US with extreme trepidation, save for one fact: his public stance on vaccination. Among the parade […]

Now that we’ve moved past one of the more tumultuous years in my lifetime, but are about to welcome the most controversial of American administrations, I’ve decided that the ride […]

Learn how to participate in the experiments The Intention Experiment® is a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world. Thousands of […]

Our intention should support all of BP’s efforts to cleanup the oil, with minimum impact on the ecosystem of the seas. Check here for the time in your time zone: […]

Welcome to all Eldon Taylor listeners!sign up to receive your free download on intention. Name: Email: We respect your email privacy You will receive an e-mail with the link to […]

Tell your doctor that you have to search harder to recall the names of distant friends or remember where you last placed your keys, and he’s likely chalk it up […]

I am watching America self-immolate during the presidential election primaries from the vantage point of the UK, where I live. What I most thank Donald Trump for is that he is inadvertently exposing everything that is most odious and unworkable about the US political process and, in doing so, just may force that conversation to change.

Imagine the following happening in America today: a group of women meeting regularly, half of the group pro-life and Trump supporters, and the other half pro-choice and Clinton supporters, each […]

Doctors have finally admitted that while just in case double mastectomies rates have trebled over the past decade, having a healthy breast removed if you have cancer in the other one will not increase your chances of survival. In fact, it’s likely to do more harm than good.

As I witness the great divisions in both Britain and America in the recent referendum and ongoing US election campaign, I’m reminded of Mark Gerzon, who, as a leadership facilitator […]

As the first research director of the National Dental Association (precursor of the American Dental Association) Weston Price, was, first and foremost, a dentist, and so he saw health from the point of view of an open mouth. And what he began to take note of was that indigenous people around the world, who’d always had robust good health and straight, fine teeth, were getting cavities.

Inside the interior of a football-sized laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, Graham Fleming and his colleagues in the biology department have set up the scientific equivalent of […]

If you’ve seen the movie Still Alice, you may come away with two takeaway messages. The first is that Julianne Moore deserved the Oscar she won for her masterful job of portraying a patient slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease.

The second is that Alzheimer’s is entirely a genetically induced disease. If you’ve got it, resign yourself to a bad toss of the dice. Nothing you can do about it other than to wait for the long, forgetful goodbye.

This is a story about a largely unsung hero who changed the face of medicine from a tiny village in the English East Midlands. For us, the story began in […]

About one in three of us can already predict what’s likely to give way first in our bodies: our hearts. Although cancer, stroke and even iatrogenic (medically induced) illness are close runners-up, heart disease is still the number one killer in the West.

This blog is NOT about who should become the next President of the United States. It’s a tale of two campaigns, about the way in which we Americans have elected […]

Gravity is the Waterloo of physics. Attempting to work out the basis for this fundamental property of matter and the universe has bedeviled the greatest geniuses of physics. Even Einstein, who was able to describe gravity extremely well through his theory of relativity, couldn’t actually explain where it came from.

Even better vibrations For all aspects of life, molecules have to speak to each other. If you’re excited, your adrenals pump out more adrenaline, which tells specific receptors to get […]

Konstantin Korotkov, a professor of what is now called the Russian National University of Informational Technology, Mechanics and Optics (formerly St. Petersburg State University), has made his name on an improved version of Kirlian photography, claimed to capture the energy field of a living thing, which mirrored the state of a person’s health.

In March 2007, Don Berry, a US Army veteran from Tullahoma, Tennessee, wrote in to my Intention Experiment website forum, offering to be our first human Intention Experiment.

In 1981, he had been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis and his spine was fused, making it impossible for him to move from side to side. Over the course of the years he had both hips replaced, and he was in constant pain. As he had a wealth of x-rays and other medical test reports, he said, he could produce a full record of his medical history by which to measure any change.

Increasingly, doctors and researchers at the forefront of medicine are finding that most, if not all, of the major degenerative conditions of old age—heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease—have a common cause, and it’s not the inevitable outcome of old age or mechanical problems of ‘wear and tear,’ as commonly proposed, as though the body were a piece of worn-out machinery.

It’s that time of year for making promises to yourself – promises, you know from past experience, that you are overwhelmingly likely to break.

But what if you made your resolutions a firm and public request to the universe? And what if you tried to quantify the results?

Something about the promises we make to each other may carry more weight than the promises we make to ourselves. A statement in the presence of a group is a contract we make with the universe – to do and be better than we presently are. It’s analogous to a sacred promise. There is also the enhanced power of support and connection when we announce an intention to our closest friends, a condition as necessary to the human spirit as oxygen is to the human body.

Dean Radin the celebrated scientist from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, once made an important discovery: that we often 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 wired to physiological monitors that recorded 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 was fascinated to discover that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was erotic or disturbing.

 

Amid all the fear-mongering the press has indulged in of late after the terrorist attacks in Paris and Los Angeles and London, it’s easy to overlook the good news in any calamity: the simple power and goodness of the human spirit.

Take the recent floods in the north of England where I live. Two weeks ago, around Cumbria and the breathtaking Lake District, the heavens suddenly opened and poured down the heaviest rain ever recorded in British history.

Some 13.5 inches of rain fell between 6 pm on Friday December 4 and the same time the following evening, easily breaching the special defences built by the British government after the 2005 floods had created a similar disaster.

More than 5000 Cumbrian homes were flooded and more than a hundred people drowned. The press was full of images of deluge and disaster, homes and farms under water, people scrambling out of top story windows.

The central assumption of all of classical physics is that large material things in the universe are set pieces, a fait accompli of manufacture. How can they possibly be changed?

The renowned quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger has examined just this question in his Institute for Experimental Physics lab at the University of Vienna, which is at the very frontier of some of the most exotic research into the nature of quantum properties.

Zeilinger is particularly interested in superposition, and the implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation – that subatomic particles aren’t real yet, but exist only in a state of potential. Could objects, and not simply the subatomic particles that compose them, he wondered, exist in this hall-of-mirrors state?

My magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You was born from a bad case of Candida. When I was in my early 30s, after an extraordinary patch of bad choices, I underwent a prolonged bout of stress. In every important area of my life, green lights I’d always taken for granted suddenly began turning red.

In quick succession I struggled under an impossible book deadline, married Mr. Wrong, divorced Mr. Wrong, bought the wrong flat, accepted the wrong job, suffered the death of a close friend, and spend a prolonged period of intense isolation in a foreign country.

If I had taken one of those tests in women’s magazines to add up your stress quotient, my sums, which included every last heavy hitter on the major-life-crisis league table—death, marriage, divorce, financial pressure, unfulfilling work, lack of social support—would have rocketed off the chart.

For Americans like me, when I try to ponder on what I’m most thankful this Thanksgiving holiday weekend, what first comes to mind is all the people I try to serve, like you – my readers and subscribers – for a very selfish reason: you are what’s keeping me healthy.

 

Although we consider heart attack, cancer and stroke our biggest killers, the grandfather of all illness is so-called ‘stress’. The term was coined by the little-known Hungarian medical student Hans Selye, who observed that many of his patients, despite having radically different diagnoses, nevertheless manifested virtually identical symptoms. As a group, they simply had the pallor of the unwell.

Selye was the first to define the condition as ‘general adaptation syndrome’, when the body’s hormonal ‘fight-or-flight’ response is unable to cope with the demands placed upon it. Ultimately, he discovered that, when unabated, the condition could lead to high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, allergies, autoimmune disease and the raft of illnesses we now understand to be the standard medical disorders of modern times.

Mitch Krucoff, a cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center, and his nurse practitioner, Suzanne Crater, decided to put prayer to the test with the biggest test of its kind.

Besides prayer, Krucoff wanted to see whether ‘noetic’ therapies, involving some form of remote or mind-body influence, could affect patient outcomes.

He enlisted 150 cardiac patients, recruited from nearby Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and due to have surgery for angioplasty or stents, and divided patient population into five groups.

In addition to standard medical treatment, four of the five were to receive one of the noetic treatments – stress relaxation, healing touch, guided imagery or intercessory prayer. The fifth group would be given no additional intervention besides orthodox medical care. Every patient would undergo continuous monitoring of brain waves, heart rate and blood pressure, to gauge the moment-by-moment effect of these intangible healing influences.

Dr Larry Dossey, author of Be Careful What You Pray For …once noted that negative intention is the very foundation of most healing. Healing from an infectious agent or a rogue cell line such as cancer requires intent to harm.

It works from a desire to kill something: to inhibit bacterial enzymes, alter cell membrane permeability, or interfere with the nutrition given to the cell or the synthesis of DNA. In order for the patient to get better, the offending agent has to die.

Many pioneers of mind–body medicine in the treatment of cancer, such as Dr Bernie Siegel, Dr Carl Simonton, and Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares, have encouraged their patients to use vivid forms of mental imagery – a metaphoric representation of their illness – to enhance their healing.

Simon Singh takes money from Coca-Cola, and says that sugary drinks aren’t unhealthy

Simon Singh’s charity Sense About Science has been making unscientific claims that processed sugars aren’t deadly or feed cancer—but hasn’t revealed that it has been receiving funding from Coca-Cola, according to information published by the London Times.

The drinks giant has been spending millions of dollars on a dis-information campaign that has attempted to shift the focus away from its unhealthy products.

It’s most of the stuff of what we’re made of (we’re 70 per cent water; plants 90 per cent), there’s a hundred times more molecules of water inside us than all the other molecules put together, it covers three quarters of the planet, and life on Earth is impossible without it.

But we’re no closer to understanding exactly how water behaves. In fact, water drives most scientists crazy.

Water is a chemical anarchist, behaving like no other liquid in nature, displaying no less than 72 weird properties – and those are just what we’ve discovered thus far.

It’s is a compound formed from two gases, yet it’s liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. It is the lightest of gases, but far denser as a liquid and lighter as a solid.

If we have an energy field, how long does it live on after we die?

Just this question has been asked – and answered – by Konstantin Korotkov, the noted Russian quantum physicist and professor of what is now called the Russian National University of Informational Technology, Mechanics and Optics, who has created a modern-day version of Kirlian photography.

Kirlian photography

Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, a Russian engineer, discovered that when anything that conducts energy, including human tissue, is placed on a plate made of an insulating material, such as glass, and exposed to high-voltage, high-frequency electricity, the resulting low current creates a halo of coloured light around the object that can be captured on film

Korotkov came up with a means of capturing this mysterious light in real time by creating a mechanism, which he called the Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) technique, which made use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices and a powerful computer.

James O’Dea, former director of the Washington, D. C. office of Amnesty International and now co-director of the Social Healing Project, has spent many years smoothing the way for warring sides to reconcile and forgive. For many years he and Dr. Judith Thompson co-hosted “compassion and social healing” dialogues, in which members of highly divided social and political groups — Republican and loyalist Northern Irish, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Israelis and Palestinians — meet in an attempt to heal shared wounds.

In the dialogues, O’Dea and Thompson move the emphasis away from who is right and who is wrong, and toward who is wounded and how to heal. The aim is to help each party to recognize the other’s pain or shame and, in so doing, to liberate each other from hurt and guilt.

I am fascinated by ideas of what constitutes the good life. In the West our idea of lasting happiness and fulfilment is all about living the dream: the large income, the lovely house, the devoted partner and children, at least two cars in the garage, a couple of holidays a year in the sun. As we’re told in many popular manifestoes about manifestation and the Law of Attraction, what you want, you can get. It’s that easy.

So I started to research what exactly happens to those living the dream, in those terms.

It’s the big question on everyone’s mind: how do you ward off other people’s negative intention — from your interfering co-worker, that grumpy neighbor, even the stranger giving you the evil eye in the supermarket line?

Psychics usually recommend using visualization to create a mental image of protection, such as imagining yourself in a giant bubble. Scientists have tested this idea by putting volunteers into pairs in separate rooms, asking one member of the pair to send an intention to either energize or relax their partners, and having the partner uses images – a shield, a huge concrete wall, a steel fence, a pulsating white light – to act as psychological ‘shield’ to block the senders’ influences. The effect was then measured on the receiver’s autonomic nervous system.

One set of studies showed it worked, and one showed it didn’t.

To my mind, creating a psychic shield around yourself to prevent a barrage of negative influences is likely to require more than an attitude of resistance or a bit of internal imagery.

In fact, it requires the most powerful thought you have.

So many people wrote in to say how hard it is to get their minds around retrocausation – the idea that present thoughts can influence past actions – that I thought I’d share an even more mind-warping experiment.

This was simple experiment carried out by the Oxford University physicist Vlatko Vedral who decided to use Bell’s inequality, the famous test of non-locality – that spooky entanglement between quantum particles. Bell demonstrated that two quantum subatomic particles can remotely influence each other, even over vast distances, which completely ‘violates’ our Newtonian view of separation in space.

Could this same test be used to show that limits governing time can also be violated, they wondered? Brukner enlisted one of his colleagues at the University of Vienna, Caslav Brukner, to design a thought experiment (an experiment essentially just carried out mathematically).

Dear Readers,

I’m in the midst of studying what exactly happens to the participants of my Intention Experiments and Power of Eight® groups for my next book, and it’s led me to the work of Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience.

Davidson is an expert in the communication between the brain and body. Several years ago, his work even came to the attention of the Dalai Lama, who wished to understand more about the biological effects of intensive meditation.

Davidson is fascinated by what goes on in the brains of monks. He and his associate Antoine Lutz have worked with more than 100 monks and Buddhists, studying the effect of meditation on the brain and on brain plasticity. They’re particularly interested in which parts of the brain change depending upon the particular type of meditation and how these changes relate to the object of conscious focus.

One of the most basic assumptions about intention is that it operates according to a generally accepted sense of cause and effect: if A causes B, then A must have happened first. This assumption reflects one of our deepest beliefs, that time is a one-way, forward-moving arrow. What we do today cannot affect what happened yesterday.

However, a sizeable body of the scientific evidence about intention violates these basic assumptions about causation. Research has demonstrated clear instances of time-reversed effects, where effect precedes cause. Indeed, some of the largest effects occur when intention is sent out of strict time sequence.

We are a society gripped by constant pain of one sort or another—and life appears to be getting more painful by the year. In the UK alone, according to government statistics, at least a third of all households—representing some eight million of us—have one or more members suffering from moderate-to-severe persistent pain of some variety. This is two to three times more than the number of such sufferers in the 1970s.

Matters are even worse in the US. According to the American Pain Foundation, more than 26 million Americans ages 20 to 64 experience frequent back pain alone. Almost a third of all adults aged 65 or over report some variety of knee pain, and more than one-sixth report having hip pain or stiffness. Staggeringly, some 25 million cases of pain have to do with migraine, or lower facial pain or jaw pain such as a temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder.

I’m one of those people profoundly saddened by the publication of Go Set a Watchman, not simply because I think everyone will benefit from it but Harper Lee, but also because it defaces an important and enduring hero who has given America hope over the years even during its worst moments.

It saddens me that Lee’s lawyer, her agent and her publishers preferred to put first the prospect of earning millions over literary judgment or their charge’s literary reputation.

In 1992, after rediscovering a network of neurotransmitters in the gut that act in a similar way to ordinary neurons, Dr Michael Gershon, chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, an expert in the new field of neurogastroenterology, christened this phenomenon ‘the second brain’.

He and others have since found that the enteric nervous system, as its technically known, consists of some 30 neurotransmitters and vast sheaths of neurons embedded all along the nine meters of our alimentary canal—100 million of them in all, more than are present in either the spinal cord or peripheral nervous system. In fact, the self-same genes involved in the formation of synapses between neurons in the primary brain are also involved in the formation of synapses in the gut brain.

The terrorist attacks on Tunisia, Kuwait and France have awakened a renewed desire of our leaders to use force to overwhelm the Islamic extremists. I have a small experience of what may be an alternative, based on the Intention Experiment I did for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I carried out this experiment largely because I was tired of seeing the videos of the burning towers replayed, as had been done every year since it happened. With September 11, 2011, looming I was determined to offer up an alternative.

Recently the web portal FEELGUIDE.com ran a story about Roger Nelson and how his work is demonstrating that group consciousness has physical effects on the world during large-scale events.

In case you haven’t heard of his work, Roger, formerly of Princeton University’s PEAR project, is the architect of the Global Consciousness Project, which examines the effect of major world events on a series of random event generator (REG) machines, the modern-day electronic equivalent of a continuous coin-flipper, with a random output that ordinarily produces heads and tails each roughly 50 per cent of the time.

For his project, Dr. Nelson organized a centralized computer program, so that REGs located in 50 places around the globe could pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet.

My father, the bright youngest child of working-class Irish, was more an inventor than a straightforward engineer. At the end of the Second World War, he designed a revolutionary kind of heating system for all the new homes being built for returning vets. In order to fund the start-up, he found two partners willing to invest. They would handle the sales and finance, while he would focus on the designs and shop floor. In a nod to the patriotic mood of the times, the three partners christened their new firm the ‘Federal Boiler Company.’

Dad’s business rapidly took off. He and my mother had moved from Yonkers and the Bronx to the pretty suburban town of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Year after year, they enjoyed the fruits of increasing prosperity: a speedboat, a second car, a second home.

Last month, WDDTY was saddened to learn of the passing of Dr Annemarie Colbin, one of its panel members, a visionary in the natural-food movement and a dear friend.

In 1977, largely in need of income to support her young daughters, Annemarie started the Natural Gourmet Cookery School in the kitchen of her Upper West Side apartment. As the school likes to advertise, she was teaching kale and quinoa before the general public had ever heard of it.

Nearly 40 years later, the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, as it’s now known, which long ago moved to its own premises in Manhattan, became one of the top schools in America for natural cookery. It also became the first and only natural-foods cooking school accredited by the New York State education department to offer a chef’s training programme in the subject, graduating to date more than 2,500 natural gourmet chefs from 45 nations.

We are a society gripped by constant pain of one sort or another – and life appears to be getting more painful by the year.  In the UK alone, according to the UK government, at least a third of all households – representing some eight million of us – have one or more members suffering from moderate-to-severe persistent pain of some variety.  This is two to three times more than the number of sufferers in the 1970s.

Matters are even worse in the US.  According to the American Pain Foundation, more than 26 million Americans aged 20-64 experience frequent back pain alone.  Almost a third of all adults aged 65 or over report some variety of knee pain, and more than one-sixth report having hip pain or stiffness. Staggeringly, some 25 million cases of pain have to do with migraine, or jaw or lower facial pain such as the temporomandibular joint (TMJ).

Thank you all for those lovely statements of support after I wrote that our Intention Experiment website – a website devoted to healing the world’s ills through group prayer – got hacked into and threats on me, my family, my business, even my car were put in its place.

I was fascinated to see that among those offering support that the perpetrators get caught was Maria MacLachlan. Maria and her husband Alan Henness are effectively the Nightingale Collaboration, a tiny organization that was given seed money by Sense About Science in order to spend a prodigious amount of time reporting advertisers and practitioners of alternative medicine to the UK’s The Advertising Standards Authority.

Last Saturday I discovered that my Intention Experiment website – a website that has sought to encourage large groups of people essentially to pray together for solutions to global problems – got hacked into. The home page was replaced by the following:

Lynn McTaggart is a slut so we hacked her site. Really funny walking bitch. You have been warned so many times, and you would not listen. We therefor take things into our own hands. A small fire in your office block might be a good thing too. Please check your fire hazard warnings. We like your little mini car, C4 is such a beautiful thing, similar to your daughter. Plugging both her holes were so good. Wonder if you’re as tight as she is. Hmmmm

The British national election is over, with a big upset of expectations and an outright win for the Conservatives. As polite British elections go, this five-week campaign was one of the most furiously fought of modern times. It often got downright ugly as politicians and laypeople from every political persuasion became starkly polarized, convinced that the other side wanted to bankrupt them, starve them, destroy the National Health System, smash up UK and then Europe, and even leave the country militarily defenseless.

No doubt you have heard that Simon Singh, that stalwart champion of free speech, now wants to ban something else. After three years of a sustained attack on WDDTY in every possible way to get it removed the shelves, he is now threatening legal action against regional health authorities that offer homeopathy on the National Health Service (NHS).

In 1992, Armed police and Federal Drug Administration (FDA) officials burst into the offices of nutritional pioneer Dr. Jonathan Wright in Seattle Washington, guns drawn, and seized more than a hundred thousand dollars of computers, medical records and nutritional supplements. The reason for the raid was mystifying; there had been no patient complaints against him. His crime? Treating patients with vitamins.

Join me in a year-long, life-healing experience and be part of my next book

‘My life – everything about it – my health, relationships, outlook, energy level, happiness, openness, etc. just keep improving; I’ve plainly shifted.’

That’s the typical comment of one of the participants in one of my Intention Experiments. In case you don’t know, besides the science of cutting edge alternative medicine, I’m also fascinated by the science of spirituality. In 2007, I created the world’s largest global laboratory and, with a team of prestigious scientists, conducted the first controlled experiments into the power of mass intention to affect the physical world.

‘I felt like I was part of a power surge (sort of like what I imagine it would be like to be locked in a tractor beam like is described on Star Trek). I was being pulled along on this giant wave of energy while also being part of the cause of the wave – it was very powerful.’

The scene would not look out of place in Breaking Bad. Special Forces in camouflage gear and night vision masks stealthily break into a house and hold up its terrified owner, still in his dressing gown, shining a light in his face as they catch him holding a bottle of what appears to be illegal contraband.

Question: what do you think the UK government would do when faced with a naturally occurring human protein that well could be a successful breakthrough treatment for cancer and save them billions of pounds on largely useless treatments like chemotherapy?

Answer: If you said ‘ban it, as unfit for humans’ you are correct, for that’s exactly what the British government has done with GcMAF, the ‘supermolecule’ being used to treat cancer and many other life-threatening diseases.

Susan Sontag memorably coined the term ‘Illness is metaphor,’ which always had a ring of truth to me. We get the diseases that are a metaphoric representation of some struggle in our lives. But it’s also true that there is such a thing as ‘treatment is metaphor,’ and nowhere more so than with the treatment of cancer.

It’s music to the ears of any couch potato and anyone else fired with New Year resolution to get in shape. It’s also one of my favorite studies about the power of thought. 

A group of scientists at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio wanted to find out basically if there was any difference between going to the gym and just thinking about going to the gym.

The Charlie Hebdo killings have focused the mind on free speech – freedom of expression, to call it by its formal legal name – and also revealed how little we know about what it actually means, as witnessed by the comments on last week’s blog.

Over the last few days all of us in the West have been horrified by the spectacle of Islamic fanatics blowing away 10 of the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, including its editor, Stephane Charbonnier and his police bodyguard. It shocks us precisely because we believe that one of our most fundamental freedoms, the right to free speech, is presently under threat by the most militant of political extremists, and that preserving it is a matter of fighting religious fundamentalists.

Last weekend I read an extraordinary article in the Sunday times about free speech which ran under the headline ‘Silenced: third of Britons feel they are denied free speech’

Something in me in constantly drawn to the idea of the group. When I wrote The Intention Experiment, I was less interested in the power of thought than the power of more than one set of thoughts.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, the only one that celebrates the things in life that really matter: the power of family and connection, the sacred ritual of sharing plentiful food.

Last month I read Eban Alexander’s Proof of Heaven.  If you haven’t read it yet, it’s the story of a neuroscientist who experienced a week-long near death experience while in a death’s door coma after he’d developed bacterial meningitis.  While his relatives watched his lifeless body, he was fully conscious, traveling through different dimensions, ultimately to an extraordinary paradise. 

The first thing I noticed about Bryan was his laugh. I was a fellow editor in the shabby offices of a British publishing company in 1985 and, newly separated at the time from a three-year-old marriage, had very little to smile about.

Does the State reserve the right to have ultimate say over decisions about the medical treatment of children, if its views depart from those of the child’s parents?

I am thrilled to announce that we have won the fight to get What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY) back into Tesco. 

Although the ‘yes to independence movement’ in Scotland may have lost the battle, it has won the war for all of us.  I’m ancestrally Scottish, but for me the outcome of the vote for independence was entirely beside the point.  

The problem with a cover-up is that it just keeps metastasizing. Think of the Richard Nixon White House. To secure a victory in the 1972 US presidential election, the President’s Republican re-election committee started off sanctioning a few standard dirty tricks against the Democratic party,  but by the time of Nixon’s resignation, many of the major figures running America stood accused of involvement in multiple cover-ups of a host of federal offenses, from political sabotage and obstruction of justice, to money-laundering, and perjury.

This week I got an interesting letter from Aaron Sanders, a reader of mine, about some precognitive ‘messages’ about the sad death of Robin Williams.  It all centers around Robin Williams’s encounter with the famous gorilla Koko, who as you no doubt know, understands and uses American sign language.  If you haven’t seen this video on YouTube, have a look at their magical connection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOVS9zotSqM

After removing our magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You for sale, Tesco is learning to its cost about exactly what makes for a good corporate brand.

The attack on What Doctors Don’t Tell You is part of a larger concerted campaign to demolish alternative medicine of every variety.  Small, organized groups, the self-styled guardians of ‘true’ medicine and science, have been systematically harassing many alternative individual practitioners and professional organizations, while Brussels and the UK government, lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry, have been busily putting into place a series of laws that are restricting access to high dose vitamins, herbal supplements and other natural medicine.

Here’s one in the eye for the sceptics.  Earlier this week, a judge in a York court in the UK allowed a dream premonition to be considered as evidence in a court case involving a dispute over lottery winnings.

I was moved to tears one evening after a talk of mine, when one member of the audience approached me to say that when she’d had cancer, she kept a copy of The Field by her bedside, and for some reason, the message within its pages inspired her to keep going and successfully overcome her cancer.  No book review, no matter how glowing, can ever match that kind of reader reaction. 

As you know, we have been the target of a concerted campaign to get the store chains to stop stocking us. The architects of this campaign are the same people who spend a good deal of time attacking and harassing alternative practitioners of every variety.

A concerted letter-writing campaign by a handful of very vociferous self-styled ‘skeptics’ has managed to convince Tesco that customers are complaining about What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and the store chain has just agreed to withdraw the magazine from the shelves.

Sylvia Plath has always fascinated me.  In fact, about 30 years ago, before What Doctors Don’t Tell You and The Field, I nearly did a biography on her and Ted Hughes, not because I considered her a feminist martyr, as she is often portrayed, but because something about the Plath-Hughes myth didn’t quite stack up.  

Our Healing Intention Experiment may not have proved anything scientific, due to the problems in study design I reported on last week (https://lynnemctaggart.com/blog/269-results-of-the-first-healing-intention-experiment), but something major and indisputable happened anyway, and it had to do with the shifts that occurred for most of our audience.

On April 26, 2014, we ran our first Healing Intention Experiment, which randomly chose one of two patients suffering from extreme anxiety.

This time we worked with Dr. Jeffrey Fannin, director of the Center for Cognitive Enhancement.  Dr. Fannin holds a Ph.D in psychology, has been involved in neuroscience for many years and has a good deal of experience in ‘brain mapping’ states of mental disorder such as anxiety, depression or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. 

Since 2007 I have been asking a few seemingly stupid questions:  Can the thoughts you think about things actually change them?  And is the effect even greater if lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time? Is it powerful enough, say, to heal another person – or even the world? 

Eight days and counting

Join the next Healing Intention Experiment May 24, 2014

7 am Hawaiian DST

10 am Pacific

12 pm Central

1 pm Eastern

6 pm UK summer time

7 pm rest of Europe

Tell me how it was for you and join in with the next Healing Intention Experiment on May 24

Hundreds of people from 95 countries are writing in with incredible stories to tell about how participating in the Healing Intention Experiment on April 26 changed their lives in some profound way. Many people with intractable long-term health challenges say their conditions are better or completely resolved.  One of our participants healed her relationship with her husband.  Others have completely changed their outlook. 

Dear Readers,

Last week we ran the historic Healing Intention Experiment, with participants from 94 countries around the globe.  Our target was a  two-times US veteran, who fought in both the Gulf War and Afghanistan, and who has suffered extreme anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder ever since.  Working with Dr. Jeffrey Fannin, an expert in neuroscientist expert in EEG mind mapping of brain waves, we were able to see in real time the effect on our target person’s brain as we send intention to calm him down and end his anxiety.  We also had a ‘control,’ a person with extreme anxiety who wasn’t sent intention but whose brain waves were mapped as well.  Neither party knew who was getting the intention.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the first to identify ‘revised-sequence’ markets which, unlike the ordinary consumer-driven variety, are driven by a corporation, which controls the consumer’s attitudes and values and so creates product demand. Or, to put it more simply, they invent the problem to sell the solution.

Last week, I was reading about a remarkable study carried out by Harvard University, as detailed in Dr. Joe Dispenza’s fascinating new book You are the Placebo.

Lately I’ve been working with a new chiropractor group to help me change the shape of my spine (I’d like a correct a slight curvature, caused in part by the occupational hazard of my profession, with its requirement of long hours at a computer).

If you think there is a limit to the power of thought, consider the case of David Passmore, who was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer around his groin area 30 years ago. His oncologist’s prognosis was grim. David had an advanced cancer that would eventually kill him unless he immediately started a course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the doctor told him.

Lately, with all the comment on these pages about energy medicine, and how one form of energy medicine might be superior to another form, it started me meditating on the nature of healing itself.

This week Bryan and I were witness to a miracle, the miracle of our daughter’s own body potentially healing the unhealable – with the help of a miracle in cutting-edge medicine.

Yesterday was my birthday, and amid the celebrations, that special day offered a unique opportunity to reflect on the past year and to set some intentions for the coming year.

Wherever you were in the world before Christmas, you undoubtedly saw the newspaper headlines claiming ‘experts say ‘vitamin pills are a waste of money’.  Although the ordinary media had a field day with this, including the same London Times journalist who’d a field day bashing WDDTY twice last autumn, their reporting, as usual, lacked any sort of critical assessment of who the experts are and why they may be making these claims.

The end of the year is always a time for reflection about the Big Issues, and this year, after watching the bio-pic on a plane back from Malaysia, then reading the biography, my Big Issue reflection was prompted by Steve Jobs. 

I’ve just returned home from Kuala Lumpur, where I was a speaker at the Leadership Energy Summit Asia organized by a Malaysian organization called the ICLIF Leadership and Governance Centre (http://www.iclif.org).

ICLIF was originally set up by Malaysian central bank governor Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz. After the disastrous banking crisis in Malaysia in 1998 (a crisis akin to our Western financial meltdown of 2008), she wanted to ensure that leaders in finance and corporations be more responsible — and essentially more moral.  

For all the many things we have to be thankful for this over this weekend of Thanksgiving, our greatest gift, in my view, is just being alive to witness and participate in this particular slice of history.

During these past tumultuous weeks, where angry messages have been flying back and forth between two very polarized camps about alternative medicine and WDDTY, one contributor wrote that it was like watching two soccer teams whacking the ball back and forth.

One of the most misused terms being hurled at us as a rebuttal to What Doctors Don’t Tell You is the term ‘science’.

We have been accused of being unscientific, of pedaling unproven and harmful alternatives, as opposed to the real thing, true ‘scientific’ medicine.

There are three points to be made here, adding up to one indisputable truth: there is nothing remotely scientific about conventional medicine.

Even journalists go by the old adage, ‘If at first you don’t succeed. . .’ After being fairly universally condemned for the first attack against What Doctors Don’t Tell You on October 1, the Times chose to run essentially the same article again about us last Saturday, November 2 – this time entitled “Magazine attacked by health experts over cancer ‘cure’ claims.” 

You’ve probably seen the latest issue of New Statesman, where Russell Brand took over as guest editor. The theme he chose was ‘Revolution of Consciousness’, and his high-profile presence has already guaranteed that the issue got noticed and splashed on prime time British TV.

Brand’s argument is that there’s no good reforming what we have or giving the job to the ‘hot, clammy, grasping palms of Cameronn and Osborne’ (the current British prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, respectively).

It’s not a good time to be a drug company employee. Increasingly, those at the top of Establishment medicine are joining the ranks of whistleblowers like us calling for medicine to be decoupled from the pharmaceutical industry.

Simon Singh heads up an ‘educational charity’ Sense About Science (SAS) that has been uncharitably tried to get WDDTY removed from the stores.  He is also co-author of the book, Trick or Treatment, but the only tricks I see in SAS’s campaign against us are dirty ones. Here are the 10 tricks that were employed against us.

On Tuesday October 1, the London Times ran an article about a supposed ‘call to ban’ our journal What Doctors Don’t Tell You over ‘health scares’.  (‘Call to ban journal over health scares,’ p 22).

The article alleged that a group of ‘experts’, including ‘scientists, doctors and patients’ were ‘condemning’ shops for carrying our magazine, which they claimed was ‘dangerous.’

Two days ago we woke up to find ourselves and our magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You the subject of a national scandal. On Tuesday October 1, the Times ran with an article about how there was a ‘call to ban’ our journal What Doctors Don’t Tell You over ‘health scares’.

The Times made a number of accusations in its article published on Tues, October 1, claiming that lots of experts, doctors and patients were seeking to have us banned from the shelves. Here is what they say, and here is what we actually published.

New evidence has emerged about the cooperative nature of genes in every cell that delivers a fatal blow to the ‘Selfish Gene’ theory.

As a people, the Japanese fascinate students of epidemiology because they are such an apparent paradox: they have the lowest rates of heart disease in the world despite the fact that smoking, one of the strongest risk factors, is virtually universal among Japanese men.

I’ve begun to take my message about the Bond to corporations and leadership groups, and what I’m asking for is nothing less than a restructuring of the corporate mission.

We have a few examples of this. Over the generations, as modern society has progressively pulled apart, certain far-sighted individualists have acted as change agents for holism.

I´ve been traveling since mid-July and now on holiday for two weeks, which is why you haven´t heard from me, and two experiences I had during all these travels that really stood out for me had to do with the common theme. commitment, by which I mean commitment to common humanity.

For an entire year I’ve been patiently waiting for the months to pass in the hope that the Washington DC Metropolitan Police would have a little less to do after June and September of last year.

The reason for this audacious hope had to do with two Peace Intention Experiments we carried out last year  via fairly unusual means:  one of the largest radio shows in the US and then via one of the largest web TV news broadcasters.

Lately I’ve been thinking a heretical thought:  What if what you eat and how much you go to the gym have nothing to do with whether you stay healthy?  

Take the Japanese, for instance. As a people, the Japanese fascinate medical scientists because they are such an apparent paradox: they have the lowest rate of heart disease in the world, despite the fact that smoking, one of the strongest risk factors, is virtually universal among Japanese men. 

Recently European scientists finally isolated the reason for the sudden, puzzling disappearance of entire colonies of bees. Although parasitic mites, deadly viruses and bacterial disease have been variously blamed for the phenomenon, study after study fingers the pesticides sprayed on plants and crops, which affect the ability of the bees to navigate and ultimately damages DNA.

There’s a Leonard Cohen track called The Stranger Song, and one of my favorite lines of it goes: ‘Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another.’

Every so often I marvel at the fact that my occupation is itself a spiritual activity because it rests so entirely upon a daily act of faith. Our mortgage, my children’s education and upkeep, our entire lives depend upon on the quiet certainty that if I sit long enough in front of a blank computer screen, at some point it will get filled with sentences that people will pay good money to read.

Something fundamental is shifting in the zeitgeist of the corporate world. Not long ago, I got contacted by a British management consultant who, inspired by a presentation I gave about The Bond, proposed that we work together to bring the Bond into corporations. 

My heart sank when actress Angelina Jolie announced her decision last week to have a double mastectomy as a pre-emptive strike against what doctors told her was a whopping 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer because of the a mutation in her BRCA1 DNA-repairing gene on top of a family history of breast and ovarian cancer.

Last January after sustaining an injury to one knee during a particularly heated hockey match, our 16-year-old daughter Anya, a sports scholar, was handed the diagnosis most dreaded by athletes of any age: complete rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee. The ACL, one of the crisscross ligaments attaching the knee cap to leg bones, is pivotal to any movement of the knee, and a complete tear such as Anya sustained can spell a death sentence for any future sports.

Is anyone else out there staggered by the revelations that emerged from the recent Citizen Committee on Disclosure hearings, but even more staggered by the fact that the conventional press, in the main, are ignoring or belittling what has to be one of the biggest stories of all time?

We have another outbreak of measles over here in the British Isles, this time in Wales, and this time the press is backpedalling furiously to distance itself from its own headlines of a decade ago warning parents that measles-mumps-rubella (MMR ) triple shot may cause autism.

Even Jeremy Paxman, the acerbic, takes-no-prisoners host of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, has silenced any voices of dissent. On two programs, he featured a panel entirely composed of pro-vaccine ‘experts’ and spent most of the time ranting about why we ought to have compulsory vaccination.

This week my family had some joyous news when our eldest daughter Caitlin got engaged to a lovely guy. Amid the celebrations, I paused to reflect on the journey of this extraordinary young woman, who appears to have all her ducks in a row at just 23.

It was not always this way. I watched in fascination as Caitlin transformed from a shy and tentative 16-year-old teenager who had trouble fitting into various schools to a confident young woman, completely in charge of her life and her future.

I’ve observed time and time again as she aimed high – almost too high – but got exactly what she’d hoped for. Against all odds (and predicted grades) she managed to gain entry to one of the top secondary schools and then one of the UK’s top universities.

Last week, as you know, Baroness Margaret Thatcher died, and here in the UK, where I live, there’s been mourning and partying in equal measure.

What there hasn’t been so much of is reflection on why Thatcher was such a bully, even to her closest allies — a trait that ultimately led to her downfall — and also what it might mean to be effective female leader today, just two-plus decades later.

I bring this up because I had the opportunity to attend a launch of Jane Noble Knight’s book The Inspiring Journeys of Women Entrepreneurs, hosted by Gina Lazenby, who invited a group of mostly female entrepreneurs to meet, eat and chat about exactly what feminine leadership looks like in 2013.

My maternal grandmother Stella, who migrated to the US from Italy at the age of 15, had both her babies at home. This was not because she advocated home birth so much as because she had been taught to regard medical progress with a fair degree of suspicion. ‘Don’t go to hospital; they change your baby!’ her own mother had admonished her in broken English.

We live in a time when many systems are falling down, but some of them need a bit of a push to finish the job. I’m thinking here of modern medicine, where we are witnessing the collapse of the current model, but where the old guard fighting as fiercely as possible to keep it propped up.

In Britain we’ve had disclosure after disclosure recently about the shocking state of most of the country’s hospitals: thousands dying from neglect and incompetence; hospital trusts paying private companies to do fast statistical shuffles to cover up the death rates; doctors and nurses admitting they themselves would not go to their own hospitals.

Every day around the world, there’s more evidence that the current medical paradigm isn’t working. The British health minister announced the other day that it’s now growing likely that our antibiotics, the mainstay of modern medicine, will soon be defeated by superbugs, and we may no longer be able to treat infections with drugs.

 The rest of the tools of modern medicine fare no better. The vast majority of ‘drug research’ upon which doctors rely for their treatments has been found to be fraudulent, the ghostwritten product of public relations firms, a necessity in the eyes of Big Pharma because the studies simply do not prove that drugs actually work.

Every so often a local hero comes along who entirely undermines our cynical view of the world as eat-or-be-eaten, and if you haven’t heard this story, it will make your day. 

That hero came in the unlikely form of Billy Ray Harris, who confirmed all the evidence I’ve written about concerning the immense, transformative power of the generous gesture.

Harris, a homeless black man who spends his nights sleeping under a bridge in Kansas City, managed to just get by with the change he was able to beg from passersby in one of the city’s squares.

One day, Sarah Darling dropped some change into his collecting cup, but unbeknownst to her what also dropped in was her diamond engagement ring.

That ring, worth thousands, could have transformed Harris’s fortunes, and after she left, a little devil ‘on his shoulder’ urged him to keep him.

The following day Sarah returned to the square. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said, “but I think I gave you something that’s very precious.”

Mr. Harris, whose grandfather, a reverend, had raised him from the age of 6, didn’t hesitate.  “Was it a ring?”

Professor Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has embarked on a wildly ambitious project:  to demonstrate that a tiny bit of cosmic jiggling proves that the sticks-and-stones universe you see before yourself is a hologram.                      

To test this question, Hogan has employed two giant interferometers at Fermilab, developed by some researchers at MIT. In a classic laser hologram, a laser beam is split. One portion is reflected off an object – and say, an apple – and the other is reflected by several mirrors. They are then reunited and captured on a piece of photographic film. The result on the plate – which represents the interference pattern of these waves – resembles a strange set of concentric circles.

However, when you shine a light beam from the same kind of laser through the film, what you see is a fully realized, three-dimensional virtual image of the apple. (A perfect example is the image of Princess Leia, generated by R2D2 in Episode 4 first movie of the Stars Wars series).

I’m sure you’ve heard of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation, which maintains that everyone on earth is only six friends or acquaintances apart from anyone else, and the Hollywood version, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which challenges you to link anyone in Hollywood in six steps, via his or film roles, to actor Kevin Bacon.

That got me thinking about another game: a list of those greatest influences that most shaped me from my college-student self to the author of science books like The Field.  At 18, I knew I wanted to write books, but I never could have predicted the content. Which 10 books were most responsible for taking me from there to here?

This is no mean task, as my husband and I are avid readers and also magpies: fiction, science, non-fiction of every variety, New Age, even cookbooks line shelves in every room in our house.  And of course not only books but also countless interviews with nearly 100 scientists informed my views. 

Nevertheless, this was roughly the process, the 10 degrees of separation between my interest in general literature (I studied English lit at university) and my current work in pioneer science.

Dear Friends,

Most people completely miss the biggest opportunity they will ever have in their lives for great and lasting change: the times of extreme adversity.

They focus on the immediate carnage — the lost property, the displacement in their lives, the cost in dollars and cents — and not the blessing of the curse – of  being propelled into a completely uncharted territory.

Alphabet City under water

Several days after Hurricane Sandy hit lower Manhattan, leaving most of Avenue C in the East Village under water, Zachary Mack, co-owner of Alphabet City Wine Company, published a blog in Forbes magazine about his experiences of waking up to see his shop under water. No business along his street had been spared.   ‘As someone who saw it in person, the sight was at once surreal and horrifying,’ he wrote four days after the storm.  Yet despite all of this, my spirits have never been so high.’ 

Within minutes of Zachary’s arriving at his wrecked store on the Tuesday, October 30, the day after the Con Ed transformer exploded, a group of three regulars showed up with flashlights and trash bags.  ‘What do you need us to do?  How can we help you?’ they said. 

Dear Friends,

Last year, I got tired to death of talk about 2012. I listened a good deal of powerful oration and prettily turned phrases about evolution, but did not see much hard evidence of anything besides business as usual. So I decided to become a little instigator of change myself by handing people an evolutionary action plan for free.

There would be no catch, no sales pitch, no back-end product hard sell, in fact no business agenda.  I’d help to set up the groups and give them a weekly guide to how to evolve, personally and as a community, and then show them how to bring their message out to the world.

Over time, I’d communicate with the groups via free teleseminars and webinars, and then have them connect with each other via my website.

It is not the end of the world, and we’re all still here, I’m happy to observe.  We averted a fiscal cliff, but we all harbour, even more than we did in 2012, the uneasy sense that we have reached the end of something, closed a chapter on our own history, arrived at a point where there is no turning back. The end of life as we’ve known it. The end of oil. The end of easily acquired stuff.  The end of cheap, flourishing modern capitalism.  The end of every-day-in-every-way our easy-street Western life is getting better.

So if it’s all burning down, if we have to build over scorched ground again, what do we put in its place? What exactly does post-2012 evolution looks like?

 Why do societies fail?

To answer that question, I’ve been reading the work of Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning geography professor and erstwhile anthropologist, who has built his reputation on asking the big questions of specific societies:  why do some of them thrive while others make stupid, even disastrous decisions?  What holds it together and what causes it to collapse?

I’ve been specifically interested in an interview he gave about a course he ran on the collapse of societies. Why had some societies like the Mayans in the Yucatan or the Anasazi in the American Southwest or even the Easter Islanders brought about their own destruction by ceaselessly mining (and finally exhausting) their own resources?

What makes a society not realize that it is eating its own children?