Professionals in modern psychology, behavioral medicine, and psychoneuroimmunology are exploring ways in which we can "mentally" influence our own bodies through hypnosis, imagery, visualization, attention, intention, and other forms of self-regulation--for fostering physical and psychological health and well-being. Is it possible for us to use such techniques to influence others, even at a distance, for purposes of healing? Is it possible for us to influence the images, thoughts, behaviors, and physiological reactions of other persons--separated by distance--without conventional sensory means of interaction? Can these abilities extend to animals and even to cells (e.g., human red blood cells)? Might these abilities be involved in the efficacy of distant, mental, or spiritual healing and intercessory prayer? Might these influences even extend to events distant in time--even "backwards in time?" Do these influences have major implications for our scientific theories, our human identity, the interconnections between ourselves and nature, and our relationships with others? Careful laboratory work--described in detail in this book--suggests that the answer to all these questions is a resounding "Yes!" A personal introduction and 12 detailed chapters describe the evidence that supporst these important claims. The book also describes the factors that make such distant mental influences more or less likely, so that anyone might use these distant influence skills more effectively and consistently for their own benefit and for the benefit of others.

Here, a Russian psychologist records in precise detail his scientific experiments in distant mental suggestion and behavior modification. He reveals how mental suggestion can influence motor acts, generate visual images and sensations, and induce sleeping or waking states. The book describes the world landscape of scientific research into mind-to-mind communication before, during, and after World War II.

The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate in clinical drug trials. While these experiments often provide those in need with vital and previously unattainable medical resources, the outsourcing and offshoring of trials also create new problems. In this groundbreaking book, anthropologist Adriana Petryna takes us deep into the clinical trials industry as it brings together players separated by vast economic and cultural differences. Moving between corporate and scientific offices in the United States and research and public health sites in Poland and Brazil, When Experiments Travel documents the complex ways that commercial medical science, with all its benefits and risks, is being integrated into local health systems and emerging drug markets. Providing a unique perspective on globalized clinical trials, When Experiments Travel raises central questions: Are such trials exploitative or are they social goods? How are experiments controlled and how is drug safety ensured? And do these experiments help or harm public health in the countries where they are conducted? Empirically rich and theoretically innovative, the book shows that neither the language of coercion nor that of rational choice fully captures the range of situations and value systems at work in medical experiments today. When Experiments Travel challenges conventional understandings of the ethics and politics of transnational science and changes the way we think about global medicine and the new infrastructures of our lives.

In six essays, poet and novelist Anne Simpson traces the paths of her thoughts, from observation to association, through poetry, language and metaphor, otherness and wilderness. Walking the beaches and trails near her home in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Simpson studies the connections between outdoors and inner life. A hike along a local ridge and the sighting of an owl spurs an examination of birdsong and its kinship with poetry, whose own perch is somewhere near the edge of grammar, beyond sure knowledge, where resonance and insight take the place of certainty-what Thoreau called "tawny grammar." Following the owl, Simpson takes us to the underworld, also home to otherness, and to the Spanish concept of duende, the imminent presence of death in life. In the work of other artists-Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and lesser known visual art, and the fiction of Nabokov, Borges and Dostoevsky-Simpson ponders the location of the other in what is presented as subject. For in this impasse between what readers and viewers and even the subjects themselves see and cannot see resides the death in life, the wilderness on the edge of grammar. Along the way, Simpson shares some of her own poetic process. The final piece in the collection recounts attempts to write poetry in response to a friend's photographs. Simpson writes of missteps and her eventual decision to abandon grammar in an effort to move closer to the emptiness that form illuminates and that illuminates form. This consideration of form takes on board the Buddhist teachings found in the Heart Sutra, the commitment and responsibility we have to imagine what we are not. Here then is the other that compels the poet to write, to occupy a place on the outside edge of onself. "This book is a kind of wild walking," Simpson says, "because, as I was writing it, my thinking became a little wild, brambly and overgrown-a kind of elderberry bush. The walking and writing became almost indistinguishable. I'd be busy turning something over in my mind-imagining a world without grammar, for instance-while walking in the woods at the Fairmont Ridge, and be startled out of it by the drumming of a ruffed grouse. In winter, walking across ice, I began thinking that the descents and ascents of poetry were like those of the shamanic journey. And why was poetry so intimately concerned with suffering-did it reveal voyeurism or a depth of care?These essays range around Nova Scotia, as I kept returning to the way this province has become the home of my thinking, not just the place where I live. The final essay, which seemed to grow out of the marram grass along the barrier beaches of the Northumberland Strait, traces the connection between the Heart Sutra and poetry. I guess the real question, in each of these essays, is the way writing depends upon otherness-and how it arcs toward a relationship with the other."

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

For centuries mankind has been exploring the nature of reality. The materialistic scientific worldview would have us believe that physically measurable phenomena are all that exist. Yet the answers to the key of reality go far beyond this mindset. This book explores the clues we have about the nature of reality, especially those aspects that cannot yet be proven. If we can understand the most baffling aspects of reality, then we will move closer toward understanding its ultimate cause and nature.