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Braud was very selective in the systems he studied. If the creatures are not labile enough, or too sluggish, it is often too difficult to get them started. If the animal's behavior is very near the activity ceiling, it may be exhibiting all the action you can expect from it. For instance, a gerbil would be a better target than a snail or a slug, or a hummingbird or a bee. It would be very hard to get the snail's attention, and similarly difficult to increase the activity level of the hummingbird. |
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Although most of Braud's highly successful work involved increasing and decreasing the degree of relaxation of people at a distant location, our concern is with the experiments he did to psychically come to the aid of threatened red blood cells. In all the other experiments he did with living systems, the creature (even the goldfish) had a level of consciousness which could, in principle, be affected by a distant person. In the experiments we are now going to describe, subjects in the laboratory were asked to influence the behavior of red blood cells, which to the best of our knowledge have not shown any independent consciousness. |
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In these studies, the cells were put into test tubes of distilled water, which is a toxic environment for them. If the salt content of their solution deviates too much from that of blood plasma, the cell wall weakens, and the contents of the cell go into solution. This unfortunate situation is dispassionately called hemolysis. The degree of hemolysis is easily measured, since the transmission of light through a solution containing intact blood cells is much less than through a solution of dissolved cells. A spectrophotometer is used to measure the light transmission over the duration of the experiment. In each series, twenty tubes of blood were compared for each of thirty-two different subjects. The subjects, situated in a distant room, had the task of attempting to save the little sanguinous corpuscles from destruction from too little salt in their ten target test tubes. The blood cells in the ten control tubes had to fend for themselves. Braud found that the people working as remote healers were able to significantly retard the hemolysis of the blood in the tubes they were trying to protect.
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These experiments are important because each is a case where the mind of the subject/healer was able to directly interact with a living system, and |
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