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THE SCIENCE OF MIND AND MATTER

Illuminate
8 min readAug 9, 2021

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“If darkness is trying to understand darkness, it will never know since it is darkness itself. But bring in light and darkness vanishes. It is simply not there.”

Unknown source

By Sajal P. and Sacheth K.D.

NOETIC SCIENCES

The extraordinary powers within us of which our ancestors talked about, for which numerous scriptures were written, but which slowly got shaded by materialistic interpretations, are now emerging as topics of research again. It is speculated that our succeeding generations will attain that powerful wisdom and tap that power within, to become the best of what the human race has ever seen.

One such emerging domain exploring these possibilities is Noetic sciences, which is “a multidisciplinary field that studies the complete range of human experience by combining objective scientific methods and methodologies with subjective inner knowing”. A few topics that it covers are universal connectedness, consciousness after death, power of thoughts and emotions, precognition, and psychokineses. Parallelly a lot of research has been going on to explore topics for which it is hard to find any objective material result or prove through scientific arguments, but these topics nevertheless are intriguing and deserve to be known.

THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

There is mounting evidence that our consciousness has an impact on our physical environment. It has an impact on our health, actions, and life, and can reveal a lot about who we are and what we’re capable of. Also, one of the bestselling novels of all times with a high recommendation rate, The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy, talks about how the workings of the conscious and subconscious thoughts are the cause of life occurrences. He offers practical methods for changing one’s fate, mostly through focusing and diverting the magical energy that is within each of us.

The way a group observes, attends to, and makes sense of the world is referred to as collective consciousness. The results from various studies support the hypothesis that we are actually interconnected. This makes sense since, according, to the Big Bang theory everything was connected at the time.

Below are minor examples of how powerful consciousness can be.

Research by the Institute Of Noetic Sciences(IONS) suggests that psychophysical interactions between focused intentions and polarization of light appear to cause photon scattering or absorption. It was observed that during the periods of intense directed attention, there was a decrease in light intensity.

Compelling arguments have been provided through a series of studies, on whether one person’s thoughts, feelings, or intentions can affect another at a distance. In one of the experiments, the sender sat in a room with a live video feed that showed the receiver on a regular basis. When the sender saw the recipient on the screen, they were instructed to send as much intention as possible to the receiver. Meanwhile, the receiver sat in an electrical and magnetically insulated enclosure, linked up to various gadgets that monitored his or her nervous system. When the sender focused an intention towards the recipient, the receiver’s physiology altered immediately.

However, more research is required to back up the above-mentioned claims.

Although criticized, here is another magical experiment about the power of our thoughts, conducted by Dr. Masaru Emoto who believed that the formation of snowflakes is impacted by music, thoughts, and environmental conditions. In his experiment pure water, classical music, and even pleasant thoughts all made beautifully pleasing snowflakes. However, when water molecules were subjected to heavy metal music and negative sentiments, deformed and incomplete flakes formed.

CAN LOVE OVERCOME THE PHYSICAL DISTANCE?

Psychologist Charles Tart devised a series of well-known experiments in which pairs of emotionally attached people were separated and connected to Electroencephalography(EEG) devices to analyze brain activity, through the recorded brain wave patterns. After that, one person was subjected to a series of randomized stimuli, such as light flashes. When this happened, the other person’s brain activity spiked dramatically.

In a similar experiment, Duane and Behrendt divided twins into two groups and asked one of them to close their eyes, which naturally increases alpha brain waves. They discovered a comparable increase in alpha wave activity in the other twin when this happened.

Rupert Sheldrake conducted a series of experiments to see if participants could predict who was calling them out of a group of four close persons. By pure guesswork, the correct caller would be guessed 25% of the time. Sheldrake, on the other hand, discovered that the average success rate was 42%, which is well above chance possibility.

Further research is going on to establish solid bases for these topics, and counterarguments continue to surround it, to keep the quest going.

PRECOGNITION

Precognition is a scientific term for a set of abilities that involve understanding or utilizing knowledge about the future without relying on the five senses, memory, or logic. Based on thorough studies, there is statistically impressive evidence for both conscious and unconscious precognition. And unconscious precognition i.e., precognition that we don’t detect in our daily lives because we aren’t aware of it appears to be fairly prevalent. According to a 2012 study of 26 tests, physiological changes occur more frequently before emotional events than before dull events. These are changes in heart rate, sweat, breathing, and behavior that occur seconds before violent or erotic images are shown to volunteers for these experiments at random. Precognition is increasingly becoming a topic of debate, with scientific data progressively supporting it.

THE IDEO - MOTOR EFFECT

It is a psychological phenomenon wherein a person’s ideas and thoughts influence his/her actions unconsciously. The term was first used by psychologist William Carpenter in 1852. This is one reason why in popular culture people advise others by telling them to think positively, as whatever we think can affect our actions without ourselves knowing it is happening.

This principle is reflected in many of our behaviors like the movement of ouija boards to specific positions. Instead of thinking of something supernatural happening around us, it’s most of the time explainable by the workings of the unconscious mind. A very good example of this effect could be demonstrated by ourselves. You can hold a necklace with a pendant with any two of your fingers with the pendant facing towards the ground. Now you can think of moving/swinging the pendant towards the left side. Within seconds you can observe that it has actually moved towards the left side. The same can be done for the right side as well.

It is also important to note that whatever we think cannot turn into reality just because we think in a specific way. By just saying “I will pass the exam” repeatedly would not necessarily fetch you a good result unless you work hard enough!

The Expectancy Bias and Its Relations with Ideomotor Effect

There is a strong interconnection between the above-mentioned phenomena. Before we describe it, you need to be aware of dowsing. Dowsing is a pseudoscientific method through which people claim to detect the presence of ground-water, gems, “negative energies”, etc. that are present under the surface of the earth. It involves a person using 2 L-shaped sticks or metal rods. Each rod is held in each hand parallelly. The rods supposedly cross or deflect from each other when something is “found” in the ground. This crossing/deflection of rods is an ideo-motor response. Whenever the subconscious mind notices or perceives the target (for example, water), it influences the movement of these rods through the dowser’s hands as he/she moves towards it. It is important to note here that the dowser himself/herself will not be aware of the movement of the rods.

The ideo-motor influence behind this can be revealed in a few ways. You can lie or misguide the dowser about the existence of the target in a particular distance and it is highly likely that you can see the detection after the dowser moves approximately to that distance. This happens as the subconscious mind of the dowser expects the presence of the target in that mentioned distance and hence it influences the dowser’s movement of the rods.

EMOTIONS AS BRIDGES

Another indirect route through which our thoughts can influence our actions could be through emotions. When we think about positive experiences at the same time avoiding the negative ones, it lifts our mood. There is a dopamine and serotonin surge that we can observe. These increased levels of our mood and associated emotional states could possibly make us work more productively. But here again, we do have a limitation. We cannot exactly point out specific thoughts that can pave the way for specific behaviors through any objective methods. Thus emotions do act as conduits for our thoughts to influence our behavioral outcomes.

THE ART OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES

The Freudian school of thought believed that large parts of our personality are embedded in our unconscious minds. It included desires, impulses, and motives that we ourselves are not aware of. Freud said that direct methods like, self-report are not reliable tools to test and analyze one’s personality as the subject is likely to give biased answers.

Instead, projective tests were made that supposedly derive information about one’s personality that is present in their unconscious. These tests are based on the assumption that an unstructured and confusing test can allow unconscious information to flow into the subject’s responses. Examples of such tests include Rorschach inkblot tests, Sentence completion tests, etc. The inkblot test involves the subject identifying what he/she can make out from the inkblot immediately after it is shown. The sentence completion test involves the subject completing half of a sentence that is left with blanks. The completion of the sentence can be a way through which the subject reveals his/her hidden feelings or desires about another person.

The biggest drawback of the usage of such tests is that the interpretations are highly subjective. Since everyone’s personality differs, we cannot standardize the most possible responses for any test item to come to conclusions about the nature of the personality of the subject. Another limitation is that these tests are based on an assumption that most of our personality traits are hidden from our conscious sense of self. But there is increasing evidence that shows that even though some parts of our personality can be through unconscious influences, a larger part of it is actually present in the conscious mind.

FEW LAST WORDS

The above-mentioned topics come with their own pros and cons, to some they are highly unbelievable but to those who have seen the data first hand, they seem acceptable. It is entirely upon the people reading this to believe or not to, but the authors simply intend to make the readers aware of the intriguing happenings being researched around the world, with no intentions to hurt anyone’s beliefs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brain
Neuropsychology
Consciousness
Psychoanalysis
Subconscious
Power

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Illuminate

Written by Illuminate

107 Followers

Two sophomores, dwelling on the lesser read topics, concerning the unbelievable powers of the brain. Aiming to gain and share the least touched wisdom.

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