I’ve just heard back from psychologist Dr. Gary Schwartz, director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Healing, and his chief lab technician Mark Boccuzzi, both at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. They have just finished analyzing the results of our historic January 30 Water into Wine Experiment, which I want to share with you.
Like all science, even the simplest experiments take a good deal of planning and many steps to carry them out. Here’s how we did it, and here’s what happened.
Preparation
Five days before the Saturday experiment, Mark filled up two 300 ml beakers (labeled “Beaker #1” and “Beaker #2”) with simple Tucson tap water.
Two days before the experiment, I wrote “Beaker #1” and “Beaker #2” on two pieces of paper, folded them, juggled them about, and chose one at random. Usually my youngest daughter performs this crucial part of the experiment for me, but this time, she was at school so I stepped in.
The target turned out to be Beaker #2, below:
Here’s the actual recording setup with the sensors, holders, Vernier PC interface, and computer.
I immediately emailed the photo of the beaker to my web team at CopperStrings, located in India, who were preparing our experiment pages. Each Intention Experiment gets assembled using the expertise of people from three continents, which just goes to show what an international effort this is.
As with all our experiments, both Mark and Dr. Schwartz were deliberately ‘blinded’ — they did not know which beaker was selected as the target for distant global intention until after the experiment was finished and they’d performed their calculations.
The twenty-minute experiment
On January 30, the Intention Experiment was carried out for 20 minutes in total: a five-minute period to ‘Power Up’ (following the special program I developed to focus the mind and heart); a five- minute ‘Instruction’ period to read about water pH, why we were doing this intention and how the experiment would work; and then the 10- minute period of the actual experiment, where the image of Beaker 2 was revealed to our participants, who were told to hold a specific intention to lower the pH of the water by at least 1 pH measure.
As with all our recent experiments, our Copperstrings web team control all the pages, so that they flip over automatically during the experiment. As usual, one of the team was on hand for two hours before the experiment started to well afterward, and we had virtually no reports of problems in participating.
We also asked our participants to focus on an image of pH scale and to imagine the water’s pH moving toward the acidic (or red) side of the scale. During the intention, the participants were instructed to imagine the water tasting more like wine and to do so with all their five senses.
Meanwhile, Mark, back in Tucson, then took recordings of pH and temperature twice every second for five minutes before our experiment started, during all the time of our Power Up period, Instruction period, and Intention period, and for five minutes after the experiment. In total, his equipment monitored pH and temperature in the two beakers for a half hour.
Beside this ACTIVE Experiment (where we were actually sending intention), the following week, the Tucson scientists set up an identical DUMMY Experiment. In this experiment, they designated Beaker #2 as the ‘intention’ beaker, and ran the entire experiment for the exact same length of time, but this time there were no participants, no procedure on the web and no intention sent to either beaker.
Having a DUMMY Experiment provides scientists with more information, in order to control for any variables.
Our results
Here’s the simple raw data of pH and temperature of the two beakers, recorded by the sensors and then displayed by the Logger Pro software, for first the ACTIVE and then the DUMMY Experiments.
ACTIVE EXPERIMENT (our actual Water into Wine Experiment) (Fig.1)
DUMMY EXPERIMENT (Fig.2)
The upper graph in the ACTIVE Experiment chart represents the pH data for the two beakers and the lower graph represents the temperature data, plotted for that half hour period before, during and after the experiment.
The red line in the first graph represents the pH reading for Beaker #2 (our target), and the blue line its temperature. The green line is the pH and orange squiggle the temperature reading of Beaker #1 — the control.
In the DUMMY Experiment, the scientists imitated the real experiment exactly, by designating Beaker #2 the ‘target’ and Beaker #1 the ‘control’.
The same colors apply to pH and temperature for the two beakers in this DUMMY Experiment.
Note that as soon as Mark inserted the pH sensors, the pH rose rapidly and then began to stabilize.
You’ll also note Beaker #2 was always slightly cooler than Beaker #1 (in both Experiments), which may have had something to do with the placement of the beakers relative to the computer monitor.
During both experiments, the temperature in both beakers decreased as time went on. Nevertheless, it began to recover in the DUMMY Experiment more than in the ACTIVE Experiment.
Studying the results more closely
In order to carefully analyze our results, Mark and Dr. Schwartz then thin-sliced the time frame further, so that even the subtlest of changes would show up more clearly. Here are the graphs for pH for the ACTIVE and DUMMY Experiments, shown below.
In this expanded scale, it is now easy to see that the pH of our target Beaker #2 (the red line) is consistently lower than that of Beaker #1 (the green line) for both sessions, again possibly because of the position of the two beakers relative to the computer monitor.
ACTIVE Session pH (Fig. 3)
DUMMY Session pH (Fig. 4)
Nevertheless, a close examination of the 10-minute Intention period reveals a slight decrease in pH for the Target Beaker #2 (red) compared to the Control Beaker #1 (green). Interestingly, the five-minute Instruction period (directly preceding the 10-minute Intention period), and the five-minute Post-intention period both show pH increasing for the Target Beaker compared with the Control Beaker.
These patterns are less prominent in the DUMMY Experiment’s results for pH, which stayed relatively steady through the entire Experiment (fig. 4).
Temperature changes
The next two sets of graphs show the data for temperature — again examined in closer detail for a clearer snapshot of any subtle changes.
ACTIVE Experiment Temperature (Fig. 5)
DUMMY Experiment Temperature (Fig. 6)
Close examination of these two sets of graphs again reveals a subtle but meaningful trend, says Dr. Schwartz. In our actual ACTIVE Experiment (Fig. 5), the temperature of the Targeted Beaker #2 (shown in blue) decreases between the first half and the second half of the ten- minute Intention Period. The Control Beaker #1’s temperature (shown in orange) stayed relatively steady.
In other words, our decrease in pH during the exact time we sent intention was paralleled by a small but measurable decrease in temperature (compared to the matched control).
Furthermore, as you can see in the graph, the decreased temperature is maintained in the five-minute Post-intention period.
The difference between Targeted and Non-Targeted beakers is clearer in the ACTIVE Experiment (Fig. 5), when compared to the DUMMY Experiment (Fig.6). In the Dummy Experiment, the the Targeted and Non-Targeted beakers show a consistent and parallel path throughout the experiment, including a decrease over the ten-minute “intention” period – even though, of course, no intention was actually sent for that experiment.
Furthermore, during the five-minute Post-intention period, the temperature in both beakers moved in the opposite direction to that of our Target Beaker. The temperature rose in both beakers in the DUMMY Experiment, whereas the temperature fell with the Target of our ACTUAL Experiment.
What does this all mean?
It means, quite simply, that we had a small, positive result — a measurable lowering of both pH and temperature in our TARGET beaker, compared to the control of the ACTIVE Experiment and the two beakers in the DUMMY Experiment.
“The trends observed in this exploratory experiment are consistent with our prediction that global distant intention to lower the pH of tap water could have a measurable effect on decreasing the pH of water in a controlled, blinded experiment,” Dr. Schwartz concluded.
Furthermore, the effects were observed exactly during the 10-minute window of our Intention. “Moreover, adds Dr. Schwartz, “these effects were paralleled in the temperature of tap water, and were observed in both the Intention and POST periods,” he adds.
Although the effects were small (a part of a pH and a degree of temperature) it’s well to remember that subtle changes in pH or temperature can improve or disturb a live body of water – or indeed an entire ecosystem damaged by modern pollution. We do well to realize that just a change of a half pH in our bodies would cause life-threatening illness, if not kill us.
In this, our first exploratory experiment into pH, we discovered that positioning of the beakers may matter, as Beaker #2 had consistently lower pH and temperature values than Beaker #1 in both our ACTIVE and DUMMY Experiments.
Nevertheless, the observed effects of our intention on the pH and temperature were larger than any possible effects from position, Dr. Schwartz concludes.
As we replicate this experiment in the future, we’ll get enough data to control for position. We’ll also examine the pH levels over longer periods of time to determine whether our changes remain constant.
Our thanks and blessings to Dr. Schwartz, Mark and their entire University of Arizona lab and also to our web team at Copperstrings for pulling off a flawless experiment.
So this, our 19th experiment, is also our 16th successful Intention Experiment – demonstrating, once again, that our collective thoughts have the power to change – perhaps even heal – our world. Every experiment brings us that much closer to understanding what intention can and cannot do.
What happens next?
It’s time to focus, for the first time, on a real live target — namely a real and highly polluted body of water. I’m partnering with Masaru Emoto and four prominent scientists (to run four Intention Experiments on Lake Biwa, near Kyoto in Japan on March 22, which also happens to be the United Nation’s World Water Day. See: http://lakebiwaevent.com if you would like to come to this historic event. And stay tuned for more information about our planned simultaneous Intention Experiment, which I hope to run live over the internet so that all of you can take part.
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