Ongoing Research

The “Love Study”

Of the top ten alternative healing practices, the most popular according to a 2004 survey of adult Americans was prayer for self. The second was prayer for others. Prayer for self as a healing practice is not especially controversial because a substantial body of research shows beneficial effects associated with meditation and placebo effects. But the idea that praying could improve the health of a distant person is highly contentious, mainly because there are no widely accepted theories explaining how such effects could work.

The goal of the IONS “Love Study,” so-called because it was partially funded by the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, was to measure what would happen in the nervous system of one person exposed to strong intentions from another, distant person. This laboratory study recruited long-term, loving couples as participants, and explored whether training and practice in sending intentions would modulate any measurable effects. Rather than specifically testing prayer per se, one person was assigned the role of sending directed intention (the “sender”), and another the role of receiving those intentions (the “receiver”). And rather than attempting to assess healing outcomes, we focused on measuring short-term changes in the receiver’s physiological state.

Participants were assigned to one of three groups. Two of these groups consisted of adult couples, one of whom was healthy and the other was undergoing treatment for cancer. The healthy partners in one of these groups, called the “trained group,” attended an educational program on the cultivation of compassionate intention, defined as the act of directing selfless love and care towards another person. They practiced this intentional meditation for three months before they came to the lab to be tested with their partner. The healthy partners in the “wait group” came to the lab with their partner before taking the training program, and the third group consisted of healthy couples without special training, practice, or motivation other than curiosity.

When a couple arrived at the lab, the experimenters attached electrodes to each person to monitor five physiological variables. In this brief report we will mention the results of just one measure: skin conductance. The receiver was asked to relax for 30 minutes in a reclining chair inside the IONS double steel-walled, shielded chamber. The receiver was told that the sender would be viewing his or her live video image from a distant location for an unspecified length of time, and at random intervals, and that during those periods the sender would make a special intentional effort to mentally connect. Neither the sender or receiver knew in advance that the intentional periods were 10 seconds in length, and no one, including the experimenters, knew when the intentional periods would occur because they were randomly determined by a computer.

The hypothesis was that the sender’s intention would cause the distant receiver’s sympathetic nervous system to become activated. We also explored the role of motivation and training in modulating the hypothesized effect.

A total of 36 couples participated in the study: 12 in the trained group, 10 in the wait group, and 14 in the control group. Analysis of data combined across all couples showed that the receiver’s skin conductance substantially increased over the course of the average 10-second intentional sending period (p = 0.00009). A half-second after the sender began to direct intention, the receiver’s average skin conductance began to rise. It continued to rise and peaked at the end of the 10-second period, then it began to decline. This is most unexpected because when a person is asked to relax quietly in a shielded room with no external stimuli, their skin conductance normally just declines, indicating relaxation.

Comparison of the receivers’ skin conductance across groups revealed that receivers in all three groups responded when their partner began sending intention, but the controls’ response subsided after 4 seconds, the wait group’s response subsided after 5 seconds, and the trained group’s response subsided after 8 seconds. These observations suggest that training plus motivation was more effective than just motivation, and motivation more effective than mere interest. In sum, this study, and many others previously reported, suggest that prayer for others is the second most popular alternative healing modality for a very simple reason: It has a measurable effect on the human body, hopefully one that is perceived as beneficial.

Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Larry Dossey, Mitchell Krucoff, John Astin, Fred Luskin, Brother David Stendl-Rast, Jessica Utts, Russell Targ, Edwin May, and the staff of the Institute of Noetic Sciences for helping to raise funds to complete this experiment. The investigators in this study were Dean Radin, Jerome Stone, Ellen Levine, Shahram Eskandarnejad, Marilyn Schlitz, Leila Kozak, Dorothy Mandel, and Gail Hayssen. We dedicated this study to our late friend Elisabeth Targ, a pioneer in the study of distant healing.

Back