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>If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is ju

>If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated. Well dang. A priori, I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. (Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?) But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Assuming it is psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?

carapace 7y ago
> But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Yes! I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects. > ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done that. > what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects? Indeed. Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would love to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together. For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its least astonishing properties.
- carapace 7y ago
  (I have nothing better to do this morning.) I went looking for anyone who had "done science to" it. It turns out that something has been discovered, hyped, lost, and re-discovered in the West over and over again for about two centuries, going back to Mesmer[1] himself. E.g. Baron Von Reichenbach's "Odic" force[2]; "Theron Q. Dumont" wrote about "Vril"; Reich's infamous "Orgone"[3]; the modern burgeoning of "Energy medicine"[4], a term that usually includes Reiki. And of course, there's "Qi"[5], known since time immemorial in the East. I couldn't find anything that looked like a scientific theory for the "energy". It seems to be impossible to scientifically test. It seems vaguely related to light somehow. All this stuff is on the Internet now, but it was not all easy to find in the late 90's I can tell you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
- AgentME 7y ago
  >Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental. The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads. (It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject and interviewer.) Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait, so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.) If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act differently, but it's still something.

carapace 7y ago

> But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Yes! I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects. > ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done that. > what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects? Indeed. Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would love to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together. For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its least astonishing properties.

carapace 7y ago
(I have nothing better to do this morning.) I went looking for anyone who had "done science to" it. It turns out that something has been discovered, hyped, lost, and re-discovered in the West over and over again for about two centuries, going back to Mesmer[1] himself. E.g. Baron Von Reichenbach's "Odic" force[2]; "Theron Q. Dumont" wrote about "Vril"; Reich's infamous "Orgone"[3]; the modern burgeoning of "Energy medicine"[4], a term that usually includes Reiki. And of course, there's "Qi"[5], known since time immemorial in the East. I couldn't find anything that looked like a scientific theory for the "energy". It seems to be impossible to scientifically test. It seems vaguely related to light somehow. All this stuff is on the Internet now, but it was not all easy to find in the late 90's I can tell you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_medicine [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
AgentME 7y ago
>Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental. The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads. (It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject and interviewer.) Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait, so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.) If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act differently, but it's still something.