"But it's also wrong to say," he hastens to add, "that just because there's something parapsychological out there, everything we know must crumble. The basis of science is so well founded, so built up layer upon layer, that this stuff is no more than a little crack at the edges of some very old, very solid monuments."
Others think, however, that the cracks could widen into a serious structural flaw. Consider Spiegel's Stanford study, where women with advanced breast disease who attended a psychological support group lived twice as long as those who didn't attend. Suppose an anticancer drug were undergoing trials, and the experimental group, unbeknownst to the experimenters, contained a disproportionate number of patients who were also in group therapy. Longer survival rates might not have to do entirely with the efficacy of the pharmaceutical, but with the patients' state of mind. Thus, even carefully designed experiments could be hopelessly, invisibly skewed.
This would be what Larry Dossey calls a "local" effect of consciousness, the stuff of PNI: a person's attitudes, emotions, and thoughts can have effects on their bodies. But Dossey and the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions go yet further, pointing to evidence suggestive of "non-local" effects: that the body may be "influenced by events occurring at a distance from the patient and outside his or her awareness."
If this is true, it could topple the tallest spire on the cathedral of science—the double-blind experiment. Science works by accounting for—and controlling—every variable and influence that could conceivably affect an experimental outcome. What if there are factors that must be taken into account that have heretofore been ruled out as theoretically impossible? For all we know, Dossey says, outcomes could be influenced "by people outside the experimental arena, like well-wishing friends or praying kinfolk. When we look back on our present era, I think we're going to be astonished how naive we were, that we actually believed we could isolate people in such a way that the influence of consciousness could be annulled."
Under his prodding, the NIH's Panel on Mind/Body Interventions has sandwiched into its report a daring call for a Task Force on the Nature of Consciousness, to comprise representatives from every discipline: psychologists, neurophysiologists, artificial intelligence experts, physicists, physicians, and philosophers. Similarly, the professionally variegated Causality Project has already been meeting for years, aiming for nothing less than a new paradigm of science. Other enclaves—with exotic names like the Bay Area Consciousness Group, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR), and Temple University's Center for Frontier Sciences—are already pins in the sketchy map of a brave new world.
A project is even underway to create an internationally affiliated group of first-class "Consciousness Research Laboratories" that would exchange data and provide replication of each other's work. All the baroque-sounding formulations that have sparked centuries of philosophical wrangling—Descartes' "radical dualism," Leibniz's "psychophysical parallelism," Spencer's "mindstuff theory"—may soon move from the Victorian armchair to the cyclotron, the petri dish, the electron-tunneling microscope.
But what species of researcher is going to risk grants, tenure, and professional repute by venturing out into the night with a high-tech jelly-jar to try to capture a flitting, hypothetical psychic quark? Typical of a new breed of what might be called experiential experimentalists, biophysicist Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., director of Temple University's Center for Frontier Sciences, has logged time on a Zen meditation cushion and also taught for three years at an institute run by Catholic mystic Father Matthew Fox. Rubik, a well-regarded hard scientist, recently attended a White House meeting on health care in her capacity as advisor to the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, where she heads a panel on electromagnetic interventions." The panel will examine everything from electrical therapies used to accelerate bone healing to a "neurobiochemical stimulator" (which, she says, "has created profound changes in animals' brain chemistry and moods"). Her passion, she says, is "how energy fields maybe including a nonlocal field of consciousness itself—interact with life."
Like a number of her Causality Project colleagues, Rubik feels her various spiritual sojourns have given her an inside track on the mind-brain puzzle. Her accounting makes it sound as if Descartes, last seen at his recent, merciful public interment, may yet shake off the clods of soil to meander among the scientific living. "I agree Cartesianism is dreadful," she muses "but there is something immaterial about who we are. Maybe we'll need to go back to Eastern mystical concepts like an 'etheric' or 'astral' energy domain."
Clearly, these ideas—particularly as they emerge from the belly of what looks suspiciously like a new-age Trojan Horse wheeled in sometime around the dawn of Aquarius—will irritate some sensibilities. "Media Blitz for Mind/Body Malarkey" blared a recent headline in a scientific-muckraking newsletter called Probe. The article took aim at what it held to be the moonier aspects of Moyers' TV series, which it called "seductively anti-medical, anti-scientific, and anti-rational." Its claim that "a campaign has been launched to radically change and spiritualize America's science-based medicine" received wide press coverage.
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