Another of Braud's studies posed the question of whether people could affect the rate of decay of human blood cells in test tubes by thought alone. Red cells drawn from volunteers were placed in a solution with low salt content, which normally would cause them to rupture. The volunteers were told to try to mentally "protect" their own distant blood cells from harm. Astonishingly, measurements made with a computer-linked spectrophotometer revealed that nearly a third of the participants had succeeded, seemingly, in mentally slowing their blood cells' destruction. The odds here, gleaned from 64 separate sessions, were nearly 200,000 to one.
Overall, Braud has performed more than 500 such experiments, all aimed at detecting the nonlocal influence of consciousness—pure thought—on biological processes as diverse as the spatial orientation of fish, the locomotor activity of small rodents, and the brain rhythms of people. Consciousness, he has concluded, produces verifiable biological effects in distant human 'targets' as well as in bacteria, neurons, cancer cells, enzymes, fungi, mobile algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, insects, chicks, gerbils, cats, and dogs. In human subjects, these "telesomatic" effects occurred even when the target was unaware of the effort. "I very much doubt that mobile algae," Dossey deadpans, "are susceptible to suggestion or the placebo effect."
It is doubtful that the majority of Dossey's colleagues will be susceptible to his suggestion: that the mind-body revolution is leading inexorably toward a consciousness revolution—one so profound that some long-cherished scientific truisms may have to be subsumed within a much larger, much stranger framework. The heretical theses being nailed to the church door are unsettling: that mental forces can violate the laws of physical causality; that the mind's influence on the body goes beyond the biochemical links between brain and immune system posited by PNI; that there are things that mind can do that a physical brain could not. What Dossey is talking about in a fairly unvarnished way is the science—or as some would have it, the nonscience or nonsense—of parapsychology, a bastard-turned-prodigal child that may be on the verge of claiming its share of the patrimony.
It's not as if it was ever entirely scratched out of the family portrait. William James, the father of American psychology, spent 25 years examining psychic phenomena, spiritism, and religious experiences, producing a radical empiricism that respectfully made room for altered states. Freud admitted that when it came to such oddities as visions of the future, "attempts at giving a psychological explanation have been inadequate to cover the material collected, however decidedly the sympathies of those of a scientific cast of mind may incline against accepting such beliefs."
Jung, whose early work was influenced by F.W.H. Meyers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, conceived of the brain as simply a "transformer station": "In the deeper layers of the psyche which we call the unconscious, there are things that cast doubt on the indispensable categories of our conscious world, namely, time and space. The existence of telepathy is still denied only by positive ignoramuses."
But, we might ask ... so what? Say the human mind can work some inexplicable mojo on algae: It doesn't mean you can sit in a chaise lounge and mentally skim the pool clear of pond scum. But proponents say the implications are sweeping: They pertain to no less than the mind-brain connection, the mysteries of healing, and the underpinnings of Western science itself.
In a single stroke, Dossey's panel has resurrected a bete noir, a bugaboo, a haint that experimental reductionism has kept from haunting the premises for centuries: "the ghost in the machine" (as Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle derisively called the notion of nonphysical selfhood)—a spook that, instead of vaporously passing through walls, could eventually bash in the front door of The House That Science Built.
The question devolves on this: How does attitude influence the brain, and thence the body, in the first place? In which vestibule of our gray matter, on what wetware coat hook, does the mind hang its hat? If, as Braud's experiments suggest, the mind isn't quite "inside" the brain, can it take jaunts around the perimeter? And what is that perimeter? What are the limits—and prerogatives—of consciousness?
This is far from the first time the question has come up. Every major religion claims to own and operate the sole franchise. Every world-class philosophy has mud-wrestled with it. Any surgeon who ever unscrewed the lid of the skull, peeled back the dura mater, and stared into the container of vanilla pudding said to include all the ingredients of a human being has had at least one preposterous moment of awe—and utter doubt.
Pioneering neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize for his work on the synapse, once commented that the hair-trigger sensitivity of the brain's intercellular connections suggests "a machine designed to be operated by a ghost." Eccles proposed that the way that consciousness affected the brain might be via psychokinesis (literally "soul-motion"), or the direct influence of thought upon matter. The mind might be like a concert virtuoso tickling the ivories of the brain, performing "cognitive caresses" of the cortical neurons. Fellow brain-mapper Wilder Penfield called it "the ultimate of ultimate problems." He came to believe that "the dualist hypothesis (the mind is separate from the brain) seems the more reasonable of explanations."
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