In 1994, psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz from the University of Arizona sat in on a lecture by physicist Elmer Green, one of the pioneers of biofeedback. Green, like Schwartz, had grown interested in the energy being transmitted by the mind. To examine this more closely, he had decided to study remote healers and to determine whether they sent out more electrical energy than usual while in the process of healing.

Green reported in his lecture that he had built a room whose four walls and ceiling were entirely made of copper and were attached to microvolt electroencephalogram (EEG) amplifiers – the kind used to measure the electrical activity in the brain. Ordinarily, an EEG amplifier is attached to a cap with imbedded electrodes, each of which records separate electrical discharges from different places in the brain. The cap is placed on a person’s head, and the electrical activity picked up is displayed on the amplifier. EEG amplifiers are extraordinarily sensitive, capable of picking up the most minute of effects – even one-millionth of a volt of electricity.
In remote healing, Green suspected that the signal produced was electrical and emanated from the healer’s hands. The copper wall acted like a giant antenna, magnifying the ability to detect the electricity from the healers and enabling Green to capture it from five directions.
He discovered that, whenever a healer sent healing, the EEG amplifier often recorded it as a huge surge of electrostatic charge, the same kind of the buildup and discharge of electrons that occurs after you shuffle your feet along a new carpet and then touch a metal doorknob.
In the early days of the copper wall experiment, Green had been faced with an enormous problem. Whenever a healer so much as wriggled a finger, patterns got recorded on an EEG amplifier. Green had had to work out a means of separating out the true effects of healing from this electrostatic noise. The only way to do so, as he saw it, was to have his healers remain perfectly still while they were sending out healing energy.
It made perfect sense that we transmitted energy. A great deal of evidence had already proved that all living tissue has an electric charge. Placing this charge in three-dimensional space caused an electromagnetic field that travelled at the speed of light. The mechanisms for the transmission of energy were clear, but what was unclear was the degree to which we sent out electromagnetic fields just by simple movements and whether our energy was being picked up by other living things.
Some people might even have more powerful positive or negative charges than others. In Elmer Green’s copper wall experiment, all sorts of equipment malfunctioned in the presence of Roslyn Bruyere, a famous healer.
Schwartz was onto something fundamental about the actual energy that human beings emit. Do thoughts also create a relationship with the people around us? Every intention towards someone else might have its own physical counterpart, which would be registered by its recipient as a physical effect.
Elmer Green demonstrated in his research that an enormous surge of electrostatic energy occurred during healing. When a person is simply standing still, his or her breathing and beating heart will produce electrostatic energy of 10–15 millivolts on the EEG amplifier; during activities requiring focused attention, such as meditation, the energy will surge up to 3 volts. During healing, however, Green’s healers produced voltage surges up to 190 volts; one produced fifteen such pulses, which were 100,000 times that of normal, with smaller pulses of 1–5 volts appearing on each of the four copper walls. On investigating the source of this energy, Green discovered that the pulses were coming from the healer’s abdomen, called dan tien and considered the central engine of internal energy in the body in Chinese martial arts.
Stanford University physicist William Tiller constructed an ingenious device to measure the energy produced by healers. The equipment discharged a steady stream of gas and recorded the exact number of electrons pulsing out with the discharge. Any increase in voltage would be captured by the pulse counter.
In his experiment, Tiller asked ordinary volunteers to place their hands about six inches from his device and hold a mental intention to increase the count rate. In the majority of more than 1000 such experiments, Tiller discovered that, during the intention, the number of recorded pulses would increase by 50,000 and remain there for 5 minutes. These increases would occur even if a participant was not close to the machine, so long as he or she held an intention. Tiller concluded that directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over remote distance.
Two other studies measuring the actual electrical frequencies emitted by people using intention. One study measured healing energy and the other examined energy generated by a Chinese Qigong master during times that he was emitting external Qi, the Chinese term for energy or the life force. In both instances, the measurements were identical: frequency levels of 2 –30 hertz were being emitted by the healers.
This energy also seemed to change the molecular nature of matter. I discovered a body of scientific evidence examining chemical changes caused by intention. Bernard Grad, an associate professor of biology at McGill University in Montreal, had examined the effect of healing energy on water that was to be used to irrigate plants.
After a group of healers had sent healing to samples of water, Grad chemically analysed the water by infrared spectroscopy. He discovered that the water treated by the healers had undergone a fundamental change in the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen in its molecular makeup. The hydrogen bonding between the molecules had lessened in a similar manner to that which occurs in water exposed to magnets. A number of other scientists confirmed Grad’s findings; Russian research discovered that the hydrogen–oxygen bonds in water molecules undergo distortions in the crystalline microstructure during healing.
These kinds of changes can occur simply through the act of intention. In one study, experienced meditators sent an intention to affect the molecular structure of water samples they were holding throughout the meditation. When the water was later examined by infrared spectrophotometry, many of its essential qualities, particularly its absorbance —the amount of light absorbed by the water at a particular wavelength had been significantly altered. When someone holds a focused thought, he may be altering the very molecular structure of the object of his intention.