The Leaf Intention Experiment

Nov
28
2008
by
Lynne McTaggart
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0
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The little leaf that glowed
Psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz, director of the Center for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona, generously volunteered to carry out our first experiment. Dr. Schwartz has a great deal of experience carrying out experiments in energy healing, and is the first scientist to have photographed light (biophoton) emissions from living things through

his super-cooled digital CCD camera system, which not only creates digital photos of biophoton emissions, but analyzes and counts them, one by one.

For our first Intention Experiment, we decided to start with a geranium leaf taken from the flourishing plant in the office of his colleague, Dr. Melinda Connor, using a target and an identical control. Both would be subjected to the same conditions, but only one would be sent intention. Although the participants would know our target, the scientists would not be told until they’d calculated the results.

For our first intention experiment, we started from the ground floor. First we had to establish that the thoughts of a batch of disparate people from around the globe could have an effect — any effect. Only after we’d achieved that could we move on to more ambitious targets.

Such a simple experiment nevertheless required a 50-step protocol to be painstakingly followed by our lab technician, Mark Boccuzzi. Mark would select two geranium leaves identical in terms of size and number of light emissions. In order to achieve statistical significance, we would need more than thirty data points with which to compare to two leaves. Dr. Schwartz decided to puncture each leaf sixteen times. That way, we’d have more than enough data points to compare.

Increasing the light
On March 11, 2007, we decided to carry out a trial run using the attendees of an Intention Experiment conference held by my publishing company in London. Mark Boccuzzi hooked up a webcam, and a live image of each leaf appeared on its own web page, visible only to Lynne and her London audience. After selecting one of the leaves, the audience sent intention for 10 minutes to the target leaf, after which Mark placed both leaves under the CCD camera to be photographed.

The audience was told to attempt to increase the light emissions by using their thoughts to make the leaf ‘glow and glow.’

We then asked a member of the audience to choose the target leaf by flipping a coin then displayed the chosen leaf on a Power Point projector. After engaging the audience in a simple Powering Up exercise, they held an intention to make the leaf glow for 10 minutes.

Mark was told which leaf we’d chosen only after he’d finished his calculations. A week later, Dr. Schwartz revealed that the changes in the light emissions of the leaf given the glowing intention had been so strong that they could readily be seen in the digital images created by the CCD cameras.

Numerically, the increased biophoton effect was highly statistically significant. In fact, he said, all the punctured holes in the chosen leaf were filled with light. All the holes in the control leaf, on the other hand, remained black.

Dr. Schwartz eventually will publish these results in a scientific publication, which prevents me at this writing from publishing photos. Science journals demand that all details of a scientific experiment be published first in a peer-reviewed journal before being circulated publicly.

Glowing seeds
A variation of this experiment was repeated for our internet audience on April 14 — this time using string bean seeds as our target to ‘glow.’

Nearly 7000 people from thirty countries participated in the experiment, This time, after Dr. Schwartz had analyzed the results, the bean seed experiment showed a strong 'glow effect' — the same as the London leaf experiment — but not in terms of statistical significance, largely because of the limitations of the imaging equipment.

“The beans were in the predicted direction, but the results did not reach statistical significance,” Gary wrote me in an email. “However, there were only 12 beans per condition (glow versus control). If it was possible to image twice as many beans, the results would have reached statistical significance (through what is called power analysis in statistics).”

In other words, we showed a large effect, but we needed more seeds just to satisfy the scientific definition of ‘significant.’

A third study carried out in September at a Reconnection Master Conference in Los Angeles produced a similar effect to that of our first Intention Experiment in London.

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Lynne McTaggart

Lynne McTaggart is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books, including the worldwide international bestsellers The Power of Eight, The Field, The Intention Experiment and The Bond, all considered seminal books of the New Science and now translated into some 30 languages.

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