Yes, soon. (in Russian)
by
Sergei Speransky
Lee West, Novosibirsk, 2003,
296p.
Review by Savely
Savva
Doctor
of Biological Science, Sergei Vladimirovich Speransky, is the Head of Hygienic
Toxicology Laboratory of the Novosibirsk Institute if Hygiene. However, his
deepest interest and his outstanding scientific contributions lie in the field
of parapsychology. His book is a brilliant popular, and at the same time,
professional presentation of his almost 40-year-long experience of using
laboratory animals, mostly mice, to register effects of human intent or just
experimenter’s expectation on physiology and behavior of animals.
When
almost 30 years ago we first met in Leningrad he shared with me results of his
observation of psi communication between mice bound by belonging to a common
“social group.” We both were excited because, if confirmed, it would open a way
for further study of the physical nature of this communication. This is what he
did. Two equally selected groups of mice, twenty in each, were kept together
for a week to 10 days to establish social order and presumably bonds among mice
within a group. The hypothesis was that after being separated, the mice would
maintain this bond and communicate among themselves. So, halves of these two
groups were placed in a common tray and fed unlimitedly while one of the other
halves was fed and the other one was starved. If the communication exists,
those “friends of the hungry” would eat more and gain more weight than the
“friends” of the well fed. The experiment was repeated many times, and indeed,
the friends of the hungry gained much more weight. During three weeks the
difference in weight between ten friends of hungry and ten friends of the fed
rose up to 18 grams. Later three different laboratories repeated the experiment
with the same result. We talked about varying the distance between the
separated halves, electromagnetic screening of them, possible imposing external
magnetic and electromagnetic fields, etc.
Then,
I fled the Soviet Union and, as Dr. Speransky writes in his book, a
biophysicist from Moscow advised to run the experiment in a “blind” way, i.e.,
the experimenter wouldn’t know which of the removed halves is fed and which is
kept hungry. In other words, he wouldn’t know what to expect. The experiment
was run and fell through: no difference in weight gain. This led Speransky to
recognize that there was no communication between mice but they behaved as the
experimenter subconsciously expected them to. This was an unexpected and a very
important discovery relevant to the methodology of any experimental research
involving living organisms as well as to the practice of medicine in general.
It explains, for instance, why some medicines worked for ten years and then
stopped working and even had been later empirically proven to be inefficient (I
remember the wide-spread use of ‘red streptocide’ in the USSR of my young
years). Even now the standard methodology of working with living organisms does
not require that tests should be “blinded” to experimenters. Even now the
standard methodology of working with living organisms does not require that
tests should be “blinded” to experimenters. Even though some major journals
prefer publishing blinded experiments, they do this on the assumption that
experimenters may subconsciously misinterpret results rather than affect the
animals reaction. Later in my articles I called this effect of experimenter’s
attitude “Speranski’s Effect.” The mechanism of this effect may be akin to that
of placebo but either is unexplainable by current biophysics.
In
addition to the standard methodology of using mice for toxicological purposes
that he substantially improved by lowering the level of noise associated with
“social instability’ (my term – S. S.) in groups of mice being tested,
Dr. Speransky developed, applied and described in his book new methodological
tools such as muscle strength measurement; rate of catabolism – loss of body
mass after 18-hour-long food deprivation; appetite – weight gain after forced
starvation; accumulative threshold – tolerance to electric impulses applied to
front and rear legs with increasing voltage; motion activity, memory, time of
falling asleep after injection of a narcotic, and other. Just as an example, to
measure muscle strength a string of 3g weights was connected to a metallic wire
screen, which the animal instinctively grabs with all four legs. Then, holding
the mouse by the tail, one slow and uniformly raises it together with the
screen and the weight string. When the mouse can no longer hold the increasing
total weight it loses it.
Using
these measurements (sometime a few of them) and standard statistical treatment
of results Dr. Speransky discovered that mice are sensitive to human’s
conscious intent, as well as to experimenter’s subconscious expectation. He
developed a scale for comparative evaluation of human’s “energy healing”
efficacy and tested 95 professional healers. He observed a distinctive nervous
system reaction of mice to emotional excitement of humans – mice were located
near patients undergoing dental treatment without anesthesia (common in the
USSR of that time) and students passing exams; observed extension of bull’s
spermatozoids life by human intent directly and through impression of the
intent on a neutral object; observed physiological and behavioral effects of
water charged by humans’ intent. These and many other similar observations
showed probability of null hypothesis p<0.02. Particularly valuable are
preliminary observations that suggest directions for further experimental
studies, using author’s methodology, of what we call the biofield.
The reader is captivated not only by the scientific contribution of the author but also by many observations and self-reflections, by his scientific curiosity and philosophical generalizations. I would’ve recommended this book to everyone if it were in English. So, I do recommend translating and publishing the book in English.