Campus Research Lab

IONS’ laboratory is used for many projects, including the exploration of nonlocal interactions among two or more participants. These interactions are often accompanied by subtle changes in states of consciousness, which can be inferred by measuring fluctuations in participants’ physiology. Measuring changes in brainwaves, heart rate, and skin conductance provides a model to study distant healing in the laboratory.

The “senders” and the “receivers” in these experiments are isolated from one another. One experimental variation tests “the feeling of being stared at” by displaying the video image of a receiver to a distant sender at randomly selected times. After 30 minutes of the sender either gazing at the receiver, or paying attention to something else, at randomly counterbalanced times under double-blind conditions, the experimenter examines the receiver’s recorded physiology to see if the sender’s attention affected the receiver’s nervous system.

Research co-pioneered by IONS’ director of research, Dr Marilyn Schlitz, indicates that when two people are isolated in this way, with no normal means of communicating, the stared-at person still shows significant nervous system changes. This supports the idea that even subtle shifts in intention and attention have measurable, nonlocal properties.