Is it possible to influence the human body with the help of thought from a distance? On the one hand, remote treatment is one of the recognized areas of alternative medicine, several articles have been published with fairly positive results; and on the other hand, for the average person, the idea looks very fictional when a person has a headache or the blood pressure spikes, he can call or send an SMS to a healer who is thousands of kilometers away, hypothetically in another country or even on the other side of the Earth, and he, within a few minutes, relieves pain or normalizes blood circulation. Is this possible?
Before discussing the issue of treatment (as a concrete and tangible action), we need to understand: does the thought have a material form, and can the thought exist outside the brain?
Dmitri Burshtyn (physics): Thought, like any other brain activity, manifests itself as the electrical activity of neurons. Like any other dynamic activity (movement, oscillations) of electric charges, this is a source of electromagnetic radiation. That is, any thought is radiated by our brain in the form of electromagnetic radiation and spreads in space to infinity, gradually fading.
The electrical activity of the brain has been studied and used in medicine (and in technology!) for a long time – this is encephalography. And in technology this has found a very funny application – in computer games. A helmet with electrodes is used by gamers to control games by thought (usually – shooters). These kind of helmets with electrodes are planned to be used in paralyzed people to control speech (through a computer) and wheelchairs by thought.
That is, the fact that thought has a material shell has not only been proven for a long time, but it is already used in technology.
Samyon Ristov (information technology): Since a thought has its roots in electricity, then the closest analogy from the technological world is computer memory. Computer memory is stored on flash disks and hard drives, and keeps working even when they are off without any supplied power.
However, recently another technology was brought to the mainstream, that provides a better analogy: deep learning, also known as neural networks. These computer programs and the associated hardware actually simulates the brain’s thinking process and store thought-like information in software and hardware “neurons”. These networks are installed in our cars, cameras and more, having a solid physical presence in the physical world.
Leonid Livshits (biology): It can be assumed that thought is the result of changes in the activity (at the level of biochemical and biophysical processes) of specific areas of the brain. Since such processes also have a physical manifestation (for example, the movement of molecules as a result of the redistribution of charges and thermal energy), and taking into account the fact that all parts of our body are interconnected and affect each other, then the thought (in particular, a long-term one, that takes a significant amount of time) and multicomponent (and, therefore, affecting the broader region of the brain) should have a physical effect at least on the human body that generates this thought. And, if we assume constant contact of the person with the outside world and perceive the person as a part of the ecosystem, the thought should have a physical effect on the world around as well. So that, in general, the answer is – yes.
Administrator’s word: In general, we received a positive answer to the question of the materiality of thought. But the common sense says that the physical changes produced by one thought of one person will clearly be insufficient for any tangible effect on the world or its specific part. Another thing is if such a signal (thought) acts like a trigger that activates a more powerful system in another person or in any other object configured to receive this signal. Is it possible?
Dmitri Burshtyn (physics): Yes, it is possible. The principle is the same as in any radio communication. A walkie-talkie (a handheld transceiver) or a cell phone transmits a weak signal in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The receiver receives this signal, amplifies it and translates it, for example, into sound. It is only necessary for the receiver to be tuned to the frequency of the transmitted signal.
The same principle can be involved in the treatment with thought – the attending person transmits the thought (electromagnetic radiation with a modulated signal) to the attending person, the attendee’s brain receives this signal, decrypts, amplifies and transfers it to the endocrine system, nervous systems, etc. That is, those systems that produce macroscopic changes in the body of the patient.
Moreover, physical experiments were carried out proving that the human brain responds to the thought of another person thousands of kilometers away.
[Jeanne Achterberg, Karin Cooke, Todd Richards, Leanna J. Standish, Leila Kozak, and James Lake, Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine VOL. 11, NO. 6]
Samyon Ristov (information technologies): One can ask how this message, this thought, can be received by a specific person. After all, we have almost 8 billion people on earth. Can we address a specific message to that many people? Won’t we lose it because of the surrounding noise of other people’s thoughts?
In the technology world we solve these problems on a daily basis, constantly improving our techniques. In the internet, the idea is to have a unique address per computer (whether it’s a desktop PC, smart phone, smart watch or a sensor in the field). An address is like a signature, or personal ID, something that uniquely identifies a destination of a specific message. The recently adopted technologies already allows way more addresses than hundreds of billiards. So, addressing is not a problem.
But what about noise, will other thoughts interfere with a specific thought? There are many techniques to modulate a radio message, and while we constantly develop new methods, we already have a modulation method that resists well interference (the effect of the collision of multiple waves, causing the waves to mix-up with each other) and permits the signal’s power to drop below the noise threshold without any loss of information. In other words, we already have a method to send signal that is resistant well to interference of other people’s thoughts and won’t be detectable without knowing the right “key” to decipher it.
So yes, it’s possible to send a specific message to a specific person.
Leonid Livshits (biology): Every molecule, cell, tissue, organ, organism, etc. are in a certain balance through coordinated reactions aimed at maintaining dynamic equilibrium (a process called homeostasis). To upset the balance, even an insignificant trigger is enough, and then the system is activated for self-regulation – by restoring the previous balance, or by creating a new one. Hypothetically, a focused thought through an amplifier (in our example, the healer’s body) sends a signal that is perceived by the receiver (the patient’s body), is amplified by the patient’s body and the patient’s body self-corrects itself.
Administrator’s word: To summarize: cure by the power of thought is possible. Do you have any other hypotheses? We turn to questions and suggestions from our readers at the comments section.