The Intention Experiment (site review)

The INTENTION EXPERIMENT is a series of web-based experiments with Lynne McTaggart and leading scientists around the world to test the power of our thoughts to change the physical world.

• The Intention Experiment is a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world. Thousands of volunteers from 30 countries around the world have participated in Intention Experiments thus far.
• Lynne McTaggart, architect of the experiments, is working with leading physicists and psychologists from the University of Arizona, Princeton University, the International Institute of Biophysics, Cambridge University and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. These experiments are being run at McTaggart’s seminars and conferences and on the web, and have produced extraordinary results.
• This is not about sending intentions to make a million dollars. The targets are only philanthropic: healing wounds, helping children with attention deficit or patients with Alzheimer’s, counteracting pollution and global warming. 
• Besides the big Intention Experiments, this website runs informal Intention of the Week for people or situations with illnesses or problems.
• In the pilot experiment, McTaggart asked a group of 16 meditators based in London to direct their thoughts to four remote targets in Dr. Popp’s laboratory in Germany: two types of algae, a plant and a human volunteer. The meditators were asked to attempt to lower certain measurable biodynamic processes. Popp and his team discovered significant changes in all four targets while the intentions were being sent, compared to times the meditators were ‘resting’.

Future Intention Experiments

2. The Germination Intention Experiment.
Can our group intention help barley seeds to germinate early and grow more healthily?

HOW TO PARTICIPATE IN THE EXPERIMENTS

WHAT TO DO ON THE DAY OF THE EXPERIMENTS

1. Come onto the website 15 minutes before the experiment starts.
2. Follow the links, which will take you to the experiment portal
3. Insert the password from the book
4. Answer the questionnaire
5. Power Up

1. Direct your thoughts to send our carefully worded, detailed intention.
2. Join our forum afterward to discuss how you felt during the experiment.

Results of the first three experiments

• Living light

All our early experiments have designed by and carried out at the laboratories of Dr. Fritz Albert Popp at the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany and Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health.
Our first experiments examined the alteration in the tiny light — called biophoton emissions — being emitted from living things.
We chose to look at this tiny current of light, because it is infinitely more subtle than, say, cellular growth rate. Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, and Dr. Schwartz uses highly sensitive CCD cameras, which record and photograph the faint light of outer space.
This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.

• Jade plants, algae and human beings

For our pilot intention experiment, we asked 15 experienced meditators in London to send positive intention to four targets at Popp’s IIB laboratory in Germany: two types of algae, a Jade plant and a human volunteer.
In our experimental design, we aimed for an ‘on off, on off’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Our group sent intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off over several hours. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.
After analyzing the data, Popp’s team found that in the light was profoundly altered.
These results exactly match those Popp’s team had observed during a study of healers, when they’d tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place.

•  The little leaf that glowed

In March and April of this year, we began our large-scale computer experiments, with Dr. Schwartz’s University of Arizona team. Unlike our experiment with Dr. Popp, we decided to have a target plus an identical control. The scientists would not be told which target we’d sent intention to until after they’d analyzed the results.
Our first experiment was carried out at a London Conference on March 11, where 400 of our attendees sent intention to increase the light emissions of a geranium leaf at the University of Arizona. Our intention was to make the leaf ‘glow and glow’.
The results were highly significant, compared to the control — so much so that the difference can be seen on photographs taken by the lab’s special CCD imaging systems.

• Technical glitches

Our biggest challenge so far has been technological. Our intention experiments require that thousands of people stare at the same image of the target on our website at the same time. Ordinarily, this is extremely expensive, requiring many servers linked together to cope with the web traffic.
In our early experiments, we also use a ‘live’ webcam or continually refreshed image of the target. This also requires extra server capacity to enable thousands to see the same image at once.
Our challenge has been to find an affordable computer system sophisticated enough to cope with thousands of people around the world staring at the target image on the same computer page all at the same time.

• Technical glitches

On March 24 we attempted to replicate our first experiment, asking people around the world to send intention via our internet site. Some 10,000 people attempted to participate in the experiment. Our system could not cope with that many participants all trying to access the system at the same moment, and the website crashed. It became clear to us that we needed web experts to cope with this challenge and extra server capacity.

• Team of web experts

We hired a team of web engineers, who carefully designed the experiment to enable the pages to show continually refreshed photographs of the target on the website.
We also rented server space from a company that supplies the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol. For the next experiments, we had nine linked servers, which could have coped with traffic of one million visitors.

• Glowing seeds, too

On April 14, we ran our next web-based experiment. The target this time was stringbean seeds, and again the intention was to make them glow. Nearly 7000 participants from 30 countries around the world participated and the technology worked perfectly,
The bean experiment was showed a strong 'glow effect', but not in terms of statistical significance — largely because of the limitations of our imaging equipment.
According to Dr. Schwartz: “The beans were in the predicted direction, but the results did not reach statistical significance. 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 (this is called power analysis in statistics).”
In other words, we showed a large effect, but we needed more seeds to satisfy the scientific definition of ‘significant’.

• More technical hitches

A repeat of our leaf experiment a week later also experienced technical problems so that only 500 people managed to log on.
According to Dr. Schwartz, ‘The final leaf experiment showed little effect. Less than 1/6th the number of people who participated in the bean experiment participated in the leaf experiment, so the results are inconclusive.’
We began working with Nick Haenen, a web developer in the Netherlands, who is working in technology that gives us access to 500 linked servers— and now at low cost. In addition, a team of computer experts from a variety of Dutch computer companies have offered to donate their time to our project to assist in any other technological issues.
Our technical problems appear to be solved.

1. Intention sent non-locally by a group of at least 400 appears to have a significant effect on distant targets
2. A group of more than 6000 people sending intention from remote sites creates a significant effect, and is as large as 400 people in the same room.
3. For intention to work in a scattered group, we may need to have a critical mass of more than 1000 people.
4. Computer distractions or problems interfere with intention.

Based on:

TheIntentionExperiment.com