>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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
First of all, thank you for responding in the spirit of the thing. Cheers!
Experimental design for Reiki would be a big challenge. Without getting into a lot of details (that would sound outlandish anyway) much of these suggestions wouldn't work.
Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
> you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work
You couldn't though: if a student were worthy the "fake" training would work anyway; conversely a "real" training would not work for a student who wasn't worthy.
Like I said above, I don't think Reiki can be studied scientifically, although I'd like to try.
>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
Ascribing emotion and intention to a hypothesized nonliving object is a step too far for me. Put up or shut up.
The most parsimonious hypothesis I have come up with is that Reiki is life. (That's a bit of a cop-out because both terms are somewhat loosely defined so there's enough wiggle room to simply equate them, and it doesn't really add much to a scientific conversation does it?)
Check out: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"
Honestly, I'm just some weirdo on the internet. I'm in SF, if you're ever out this way hit me up and I'll demonstrate Reiki for you. There are Reiki practitioners in your city no doubt. If you're really interested you should go meet some of them. I'm willing to keep answering your questions but if you want to really see hard science doing some wild "supernatural" stuff, Levin's work (above) is much more worth your time.
Cheers! :-)
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edit: I was rereading my replies and it occurred to me that since, as I told AgentME, there is apparently no distance limit to Reiki, we could attempt a demonstration. To wit: if you reply within, say, 24 hours with a time (Pacific Standard if you would be so kind) I'll go ahead and do a distance treatment on you. The image from your Github account is enough to "dial it in". (For sake of parity I'll tell you that I'm "calroc" on that site. You can see what I look like. ;-) Maybe nothing happens, maybe something. YMMV
If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then there must be some possible test to differentiate them. I don't mean this just in some abstract definitional way, but in a pragmatic way too: if there's no imaginable test that could distinguish them, then Reiki can't be any more capable than a psychosomatic effect. That doesn't make it nothing. It would be useful to study a psychosomatic effect that can reliably make people feel good or energized. There doesn't need to be a mystery behind it. Solving the mystery would mean that people would know to make use of Reiki better and know exactly what problems to turn to Reiki for and what not to.
If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then it should feel surprising that they can't be differentiated. If you immediately predict every possible test to differentiate them will fail, then I wonder if your brain is modeling them as equivalent concepts and only "believes that it believes" they're different. This post on the subject is excellent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
I guess it could be that Reiki is both a psychosomatic effect and a special "spiritual energy" working together: the psychosomatic effect causes the subject's mind to open up the body to be affected by the spiritual energy. You would rightly expect a negative result on all the experiments I proposed previously if this was the case because all of those experiments were based around eliminating the possibility of a psychosomatic effect being involved at all. Moving on from trying to rule out the psychosomatic component, there's still more possibilities for investigation:
* Is it possible to trigger the psychosomatic effect without the spiritual energy part, or vice versa, and get a result that's different from triggering both or neither?
* Does the spiritual energy cause the body to react in a way that wouldn't be possible for the psychosomatic effect to do alone? Say that the psychosomatic effect part is found to release a signalling chemical in the blood (a psychosomatic effect doesn't necessarily work like this, just as example), and we injected a person with the chemical continuously for a long period of time. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect, then we'd expect that the chemical is telling the body to use energy it already has stored quicker, and the person will eventually become very exhausted. If the chemical is allowing the body to take in an outside "energy", then the person should stay energized. There could be downsides to taking in so much continuously, but it would be suspicious if the downside of that looked exactly like the downside of a chemical that made the body use energy it already had.
* If the spiritual energy gives someone more energy, then it's imaginable that we should be able to to track that. Imagine that we can very carefully track a person's weight, measure their caloric intake, and measure their caloric outtake (the amount of physical exertion the person does including muscle use and body heat, and the chemical contents of their sweat, exhalation, urine, and feces) to an accuracy level where there's no discrepancy between a normal person's intake and outtake. Now imagine we do that with someone using Reiki. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect that causes the body to use the energy it has in a different way, then there should still be no discrepancy. If there is a spiritual energy component, then there should be a discrepancy, otherwise it's completely explainable by psychosomatic effect alone.
>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
Most of the experiments I mentioned could be changed so that the person administering the Reiki doesn't know that there's an experiment going on. In the experiment I described in the previous post where you go into another room and flip a coin to decide whether or not you should beam Reiki, you could use the coin to decide whether to call up a Reiki practitioner to come do the beaming who doesn't know an experiment is going on. Sure, in this plain setup, the intention still isn't to (directly) heal people, but it's easy enough to reframe the experiment so it's in a context mainly about healing people. Imagine that this is done as part of a hospital's procedures during treatment of certain conditions. When a patient comes in with a certain condition, they always see a doctor, but there's a certain percent chance that additionally, a Reiki practitioner will be invited into the hospital to try to help them, but isn't allowed to enter the room with them and can only do it on the other side of a one-way mirror that the patient may think a doctor is behind. The intention is to heal, but the hospital is also keeping records and doing its own tests on procedures as it does in all of its processes. The concept of hospitals randomizing experimental treatments isn't anything new.
For the experiment about mis-teaching Reiki to practitioners, you could instead teach the control group to practice an invented energy/enthusiasm-boosting psychosomatic effect without telling them it's just a psychosomatic effect. (A super basic example would be to teach them to do an arbitrary ritual that involves giving someone attention and telling them a non-explanation like "Science confirms that this ritual gives people energy and enthusiasm. It's called Foo and has a long history in _ culture.".) Do the groups get different results? What if you tell the control group the invented thing is called Reiki? (Assuming that both groups are selected to be people who weren't previously knowledgeable enough about Reiki to spot any of the lies that are told to the control group.) What if you include one specific true minor detail about Reiki and a bunch of fake ones? Where is the line that will cause the control group to get results indistinguishable from Reiki? (And are any of the results unexplainable by placebo effect?)
If it works differently based on whether someone is testing it, that just means there should be even more ways to test for it. If you secretly installed a lot of measurement devices at the location where someone practiced Reiki and took notes on the people that did it there, would they start complaining that Reiki was no longer working, and possibly go seek out other places that Reiki worked? If so, then anyone who really wanted to get a building they knew didn't have any surveillance devices could decide to only buy buildings that previously had successful Reiki practitioners. What if someone funded opening a Reiki temple -- but had no other interaction with it -- with the hope that if Reiki is truly a supernatural phenomenon, then getting it more exposure would eventually attract people who would directly study it there? Would that Reiki temple automatically be less successful because of the intent than a Reiki temple in the same area created with funding from a similar hands-off person who just loved Reiki? What if both of those people helped fund the same Reiki temple opening together 50-50? The idea of something reacting differently to the intention of testing at a distance seems even more untenable than the base claim.
First let me say again that I am really grateful that you're coming at this in the same spirit as I am. And I'm sorry that I can't give you better answers.
From the very beginning of my experience with Reiki I assumed that part of the effect was psychosomatic, due to the simple natural reaction to sitting calmly for ~20 minutes while someone peacefully and attentively did the hand motions. For a lot of people that's enough to be seriously mind-altering (because of our stressful and sleep-encouraging daily grind, etc...)
But there's something else, something that seems perceptually a little bit like electromagnetism, but different.
When I was first learning I would go up to friends and stand in front of them and have them put their hands up perpendicular to the ground. Then I would put my hands in front of theirs about 1-2 cm away (airgap) and "charge" or "power up" my Reiki field. Most people felt something, and many of them would jump as if from a sort of "joy buzzer" or something.
There were also times when I used Reiki without making any visible motions. My experience lead me to believe that the physical hand motions and rituals are pretty much window-dressing. It also works on animals and plants. So, yeah, not entirely psychosomatic.
> Does the spiritual energy cause the body to react in a way that wouldn't be possible for the psychosomatic effect to do alone?
It seems to me that the fact that Reiki engenders general healing, and not just physical but mental and emotional too, is very significant. The people who trained and initiated me straight out said that Reiki was intelligent. (Although, perhaps oddly, it's not a person or a god. But it's not not a person either, if you feel me...)
Are there any factors known to be universally healing? (I imagine you could mainline ATP[1] directly to your bloodstream but even that would presumably just power you up, eh?)
> If the spiritual energy gives someone more energy, then it's imaginable that we should be able to to track that. Imagine that we can very carefully track a person's weight, measure their caloric intake, and measure their caloric outtake (the amount of physical exertion the person does including muscle use and body heat, and the chemical contents of their sweat, exhalation, urine, and feces) to an accuracy level where there's no discrepancy between a normal person's intake and outtake. Now imagine we do that with someone using Reiki. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect that causes the body to use the energy it has in a different way, then there should still be no discrepancy. If there is a spiritual energy component, then there should be a discrepancy, otherwise it's completely explainable by psychosomatic effect alone.
Yes, this might (I think) be pretty effective. Some of the dramatic healings I've seen would have to have been accompanied by significant caloric uptake (sorry if my terminology sounds stupid) yet no one ever feels tired afterward. You always feel refreshed and revived, both parties.
> Most of the experiments I mentioned could be changed so that the person administering the Reiki doesn't know that there's an experiment going on.
I think that would work well, provided the experimenter has "pure" or "good" intentions. I don't think there's any way to isolate or shield Reiki, so if the experimenter were working out of some sort of selfish or impure motive then that would affect the results.
There is also the problem of (what I call) "conceptual leverage". What I mean is, let's imagine that you could produce scientifically incontrovertible proof that there was a "fifth fundamental force"[2] and that it healed people. There would be a massive clashes and upheaval in world belief systems, because the meaning or significance of such a discovery would be deep and profound to so many people but it would also be different for different people. The Catholic Church has already grappled with this[3]. Now some scientists are going to tell them that God lives in Japan?
If I may be forgiven for anthropomorphizing Reiki again, it doesn't care. Reiki can heal people without scientific recognition. Therefore it is at least consistent logically that it would not "sit still" to be scientifically incontrovertibly proven. In fact the ambiguity serves Reiki's deeper purpose.
Cheers! I really appreciate the time and thought you put into this.
> What if someone funded opening a Reiki temple -- but had no other interaction with it -- with the hope that if Reiki is truly a supernatural phenomenon, then getting it more exposure would eventually attract people who would directly study it there? Would that Reiki temple automatically be less successful because of the intent than a Reiki temple in the same area created with funding from a similar hands-off person who just loved Reiki?
My prediction based on my experience is, yes, that temple would be less successful. Remember that this subthread started with questioning the distinction between supernatural and natural. Reiki could well be the effect of some kind of natural biological EM communication. (But then the implication is that there are no hard boundaries between our unconscious minds, which of course is standard Jungian doctrine, eh?)
> The idea of something reacting differently to the intention of testing at a distance seems even more untenable than the base claim.
I know. I did warn you. This is the Rabbithole of Rabbitholes.
I haven't been able to determine a distance limit for the sensitivity of the phenomenon.
As I told the other fellow, you might be better off reading up on Micheal Levin's work on thought and communication "Outside the Nervous System" than talking to me. Although I'm happy to answer any questions as best I can.
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?