When I consider all the anger among our increasingly polarized society and all the hand-wringing going on about what to do about it, I’m reminded of a remarkable piece of research nicknamed ‘The Love Study.’

The Love Study was the brainchild of the late psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Targ, plus noted consciousness researchers Drs Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
The design of the study was inspired by a batch of research conducted since 1963, which demonstrated that, under many types of circumstances, the electrical signaling in the brains of people gets synchronized. The frequencies, amplitudes and phases of the brain waves start operating in tandem.
Although the studies followed slightly different designs, all of them asked the same question: can the stimulation of one person be felt in the higher central nervous system of another? Or, as Radin liked to think of it, after a sender gets pinched, does the receiver also feel the ‘ouch’?
Two people wired up with a variety of physiological monitoring equipment, such as EEG machines, would be isolated from each other in different rooms. One would be stimulated with something – a picture, a light or a mild electric shock.
The researchers would then examine the two EEGs to determine if the receiver’s brain waves mirrored those of the sender when he or she was being stimulated.
In using this protocol, neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, discovered that brain-wave synchrony occurred not only between two people, but between both hemispheres of the brains of both participants, with one important distinction: the participant with the most cohesive quantum wave patterns sometimes set the tempo and tended to influence the other.
The most ordered brain pattern often prevailed.
A mirror pattern
In designing the Love Study, Schlitz and Radin also had been influenced by other research showing that, during acts of remote influence, the recipient’s EEG waves mirror those of the sender. In a number of studies of healing, the EEG waves of the patient synchronize with those of the healer during moments when healing energy is being ‘sent’.
Brain mapping during certain types of healing, such as bioenergy, also shows evidence of brain-wave synchrony. In many instances, when one person is sending focused intention to another, their brains appear to become entrained.
Any vibrating thing, including 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 school children.
Schlitz and Radin now wanted to find out whether they would achieve similar correlations if the sender were actually sending an intention to heal.
For the Love Study, Schlitz and her colleagues decided to recruit ordinary individuals and train them in healing techniques.
Schlitz and her fellow researchers decided to seek out couples with a partner suffering from cancer. Eventually 31 couples volunteered, including healthy couples who were to act as controls, and the couples were divided into study and control groups.
In every case, the member of the couple with the cancer (or one of the designated partners in a control group) was asked to sit in a black reclining chair placed in a one-ton, solid steel, double-walled, electromagnetically shielded enclosure.
The tiny chamber was separated from the outside world by two layers of steel and one of solid wood, which blocked out all sound and all electromagnetic energy. Any electrical signals were carried out of the chamber by a fibre-optic cable, to ensure that the room remained, electromagnetically speaking, a solitary confinement.
Each inhabitant was fitted to an array of medical gadgetry to measure brain waves, heartbeat, breathing rate, skin conductance and peripheral blood flow. A video camera stood discretely in the corner.
Some 20 metres away, the other partner was seated in the dark, attached to the same medical equipment as his or her partner, staring at a small blank TV screen.
Whenever the image of the partner in the refrigerator room abruptly flashed on the television screen, the other member of the couple was to send a compassionate intention to his or her partner for 10 seconds.
Two bodies become one
When Radin examined both the study groups and two sets of controls, he found that in every instance, each physiological response of the receivers had tracked those of the senders. However, the most prolonged pattern occurred among the cancer patients whose partners had been trained in intention techniques. The receivers in the training group not only responded to the stimulus, but also kept responding over 8 of the 10 seconds of the intention.
In quantum terms, the couples had become as one.
People appear to receive healing deep in their bodies by being retuned to the more coherent energy of the healer’s intention. During healing, it could be that the ‘orderly’ energy of the well person entrains and ‘re-orders’ the sick.
What’s become clear to me is that when we send intention, in a manner of speaking, we have to ‘become’ the other.
In the case of dealing with people who disagree or argue with us, a little calm and loving intention for the other can create another kind of miracle – getting you both on the same positive wavelength.