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laboratories. Each of the mind-body studies that we describe below was conducted in coherent experimental series. Together, the research presents a significant body of data supporting the concept of distant healing effects.
Mind-to-Mind or Mind-to-Body?
In 1965, Douglas Dean, at the Newark College of Engineering, showed conclusively that the autonomic nervous systems of subjects in his laboratory responded to the thoughts of a distant person. 28 Participants lay quietly in a darkened room, while a plethysmograph optically measured changes in their fingers' blood volume. These changes provide a measure of autonomic nervous activity. The sender, seated in another room, looked at randomly ordered cards with names on them, and tried to mentally transmit the names. The distant participants' autonomic activity increased markedly when the sender focused his or her attention on names that had personal significance for the participant (mother, sweetheart, stockbroker, etc.), as compared with random phone book names. At the same time, the participant was unaware of when the significant names were being observed by the experimenter.
Underwater Telepathy
Because the experiment just described took place during the Cold War, Dean thought that his demonstration of a robust mental telegraph might be useful for communication with submerged submarines. He proceeded to conduct a successful underwater experiment where an experimenter was given a slate on which the significant target names were written in grease pencil, and then she went scuba diving to a 35-foot depth. The emotional content of the key names was successfully transmitted to a distant percipient connected to a plethysmograph. The experiment showed that seawater was not a barrier to psi.29
Rather than assuming that the agent somehow directly affected the subject's vascular system, we interpret the changes in the subject's blood

 
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