From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Masaru Emoto (江本勝, Emoto Masaru?, born July 22, 1943) is a Japanese author known for his claim that if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets before they are frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be beautiful or ugly depending upon whether the words or thoughts were positive or negative. Emoto claims this can be achieved through prayer, music or by attaching written words to a container of water.

Since 1999 Emoto has published several volumes of a work titled Messages from Water, which contains photographs of water crystals next to essays and "words of intent."

Biography

Born in Yokohama, Japan, Emoto graduated from Yokohama Municipal University with courses in International Relations. "In 1986, he established the I.H.M. Corporation in Tokyo and is currently the head of the I.H.M. General Research Institute, Inc., the President of I.H.M., Inc., and the chief representative of I.H.M.'s HADO Fellowship".[1] In 1992 he received certification as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine from the Open International University for Alternative Medicine in India, an unaccredited institute with minimal academic requirements. [2] "Subsequently, he was introduced to the concept of micro-cluster water and Magnetic Resonance Analysis technology in the United States, which began his quest to discover the mystery of water".[3]

Emoto is President Emeritus of the International Water For Life Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Oklahoma City, founded in 2005. He has three children and is married to Kazuko Emoto.

Water crystal work and criticism

Emoto's water crystal experiments consist of exposing water in glasses to different words, pictures, or music, and then freezing and examining the aesthetics of the resulting crystals with microscopic photography. A discovery was made by Emoto, and that is that there are “many differences in the crystalline structure of the water” depending on the type of water source, which were taken from all over the world. For example, a water sample from a “pristine mountain” stream would show a “geometric” design that is “beautifully” shaped when frozen. On the other hand, “polluted water” sources will show a “definite distortion” and will be “randomly formed”.

Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls, and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community. In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them open to human error influencing his findings.

In the day-to-day work of his group, the creativity of the photographers rather than the rigor of the experiment is an explicit policy of Emoto. Emoto freely acknowledges that he is not a scientist, and that photographers are instructed to select the most pleasing photographs.

In 2003, James Randi publicly offered Emoto one million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.

In 2006, Emoto published a paper together with Dean Radin and others in the peer-reviewed Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (of which Radin was co-editor-in-chief. They describe that in a double blind test approximately 2000 people in Tokyo could increase the aesthetic appeal of water stored in a room in California, compared to water in another room, solely through their positive intentions.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Water memory is a speculation that water is capable of retaining a "memory" of substances once dissolved in it to arbitrary dilution. Shaking the water at each stage of a serial dilution is claimed to be necessary for an effect to occur. The concept was proposed by Jacques Benveniste to explain the purported therapeutic powers of homeopathic remedies, which are prepared by diluting solutions to such a high degree that not even a single molecule of the original substance remains in each final preparation. Benveniste sought to prove this basic tenet of homeopathy by conducting an experiment to be published "independently of homeopathic interests" in a major journal.

While some studies, including Benveniste's, have reported such an effect, double-blind replications of the experiments involved have failed to reproduce the results, and the concept is not accepted by the scientific community. Liquid water does not maintain ordered networks of molecules longer than a small fraction of a nanosecond.

The Nature controversy

The most prominent advocate of this idea was the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste.[4] His team at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) diluted a solution of human antibodies to such a degree that there was no likelihood that a single molecule remained. Nonetheless, they reported, human basophils responded to the solutions just as though they had encountered the original antibody (part of the allergic reaction). The effect was reported only when the solution was shaken violently during dilution. Benveniste stated: "It's like agitating a car key in the river, going miles downstream, extracting a few drops of water, and then starting one's car with the water." At the time, Benveniste offered no theoretical explanation for the effect.

Benveniste submitted the research to the prominent science journal Nature for publication. There was concern on the part of Nature's editorial oversight board that the material, if published, would lend credibility to homeopathic practitioners even if the effects were not replicable. There was equal concern that the research was simply wrong, given the changes that it would demand of the known laws of physics and chemistry. The editor of Nature, John Maddox, stated that, "Our minds were not so much closed as unready to change our whole view of how science is constructed." Rejecting the paper on any objective grounds was deemed unsupportable, as there were no methodological flaws apparent at the time.

In the end, a compromise was reached. The paper was published in Nature Vol. 333 on 30 June 1988, but it was accompanied with an editorial by Maddox that noted "There are good and particular reasons why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgment" and described some of the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics which it would violate, if shown to be true. Additionally, Maddox demanded that the experiments be re-run under the supervision of a hand-picked group of what became known as "ghostbusters", including Maddox, famed magician-cum-paranormal researcher James Randi, and Walter Stewart, a physicist and free-lance debunker at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

In the first series of supervised experiments, the original experimental procedure was followed as it had been when the paper was first submitted for publication. The experiments were successful, matching the published data quite closely. However, Maddox noted that during the procedure the experimenters were aware of which test tubes originally contained the antibodies and which did not. A second experimental series was started with Maddox and his team in charge of the double-blinding; notebooks were photographed, the lab videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Randi went so far as to wrap the labels in tinfoil, seal them in an envelope, and then stick them on the ceiling so Benveniste and his colleagues could not read them. No memory effect was observed in the blinded experiments.

Nature published a follow-up report in the next issue: "We conclude that there is no substantial basis for the claim that antiIgE at high dilution (by factors as great as 10120) retains its biological effectiveness, and that the hypothesis that water can be imprinted with the memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful." Nevertheless, there was no suggestion of fraud; Maddox and his team initially speculated that someone in the lab "was playing a trick on Benveniste," but later concluded, "We believe the laboratory has fostered and then cherished a delusion about the interpretation of its data." Maddox also pointed out that two of Benveniste's researchers were being paid for by the French homeopathic company Boiron.

In a response letter published in the same issue of the journal, Benveniste lashed out at Maddox and complained about the "ordeal" he endured at the hands of the Nature team, comparing it to "Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions."[9] In both the Nature response and a following Quirks and Quarks episode, Benveniste especially complained about Stewart, who he stated acted as if they were all frauds and treated them with disdain, complaining about his "typical know-it-all attitude". In his Nature letter, Benveniste also implied that Randi was attempting to hoodwink the experimental run by doing magic tricks, "distracting the technician in charge of its supervision!" He was more apologetic on Quirks and Quarks, re-phrasing his mention of Randi to imply that he had kept the team amused with his tricks and that his presence was generally welcomed. He also pointed out that although it was true two of his team-members were being paid for by a homeopathic company, the same company had paid for Maddox's team's hotel bill.

Maddox was unapologetic, stating "I'm sorry we didn't find something more interesting." On the same Quirks and Quarks show he dismissed Benveniste's complaints, stating that the possibility that the results would be unduly promoted by the homeopathy community demanded an immediate re-test. In failing, the tests demonstrated that the initial results were likely due to the experimenter effect. He also pointed out that the entire test procedure that Benveniste later complained about was one that had been agreed upon in advance by all parties. It was only when the test then failed that Benveniste disputed its appropriateness.

The debate continued in the letters section of Nature for several issues before being ended by the editorial board. It continued in the French press for some time. For all of the arguing over the retests, it has done nothing to stop what Maddox worried about; even in the light of their failure they are still used to claim that the experiments "prove" that homeopathy works. One of Benveniste's co-authors on the Nature paper, Francis Beauvais, later stated that while unblinded experimental trials usually yielded "correct" results (i.e. ultradiluted samples were biologically active, controls were not), "the results of blinded samples were almost always at random and did not fit the expected results: some 'controls' were active and some 'active' samples were without effect on the biological system."

Subsequent research

After the Nature controversy, Benveniste gained the public support of Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate physicist with a reputation for openness to paranormal claims. Experiments continued along the same basic lines, culminating with a 1997 paper claiming the effect could be transmitted over phone lines. This was followed by two additional papers in 1999 and another on remote-transmission in 2000 by which time it was claimed that it could also be sent over the internet.

Time magazine reported in 1999 that, in response to skepticism from physicist Robert Park, Josephson had challenged the American Physical Society (APS) to oversee a replication by Benveniste. This challenge was to be "a randomized double-blind test", of his claimed ability to transfer the characteristics of homeopathically diluted water over the Internet. The APS accepted the challenge and offered to cover the costs of the test. When he heard of this, Randi also offered to throw in the long-standing $1 million prize for any positive demonstration of the paranormal, to which Benveniste replied: "Fine to us." ] in his DigiBio NewsLetter. However, Randi later noted that Benveniste and Josephson did not follow up on their challenge, mocking their silence on the topic as if they were missing persons.

An independent test of the 2000 remote-transmission experiment was carried out in the USA by a team funded by the United States Department of Defense. Using the same experimental devices and setup as the Benveniste team, they failed to find any effect when running the experiment. Several "positive" results were noted, however, but only when a particular one of Benveniste's researchers was running the equipment. "We did not observe systematic influences such as pipetting differences, contamination, or violations in blinding or randomization that would explain these effects from the Benveniste investigator. However, our observations do not exclude these possibilities."

Benveniste admitted to having noticed this himself. "He stated that certain individuals consistently get digital effects and other individuals get no effects or block those effects." The experiment is notable for the way it attempted to avoid the confrontational nature of the earlier Maddox test.

Third-party attempts at replication of the Benveniste experiment have failed to produce positive results that could be independently replicated. In 1993, Nature published a paper describing a number of follow-up experiments that failed to find a similar effect, and an independent study published in Experientia in 1992 showed no effect. An international team led by Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University of Belfast claimed in 1999 to have replicated the Benveniste results. Randi then forwarded the $1 million challenge to the BBC Horizon program to prove the "water memory" theory following Ennis' experimental procedure. In response, experiments were conducted with the Vice-President of the Royal Society, Professor John Enderby, overseeing the proceedings. The challenge ended with no memory effect observed by the Horizon team. For a piece on homeopathy, the ABC program 20/20 also attempted, unsuccessfully, to reproduce Ennis's results.

Research published in 2005 on hydrogen bond network dynamics in water showed that "liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure" within fifty millionths of a nanosecond.

The hundredth-monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number is reached. By generalization it means the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lawrence Blair and Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the myth is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources who have themselves misrepresented the original observations.

Popularization of the claim

The story of the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” was published in the foreword to Lawrence Blair's Rhythms of Vision in 1975.[1] The claim spread with the appearance of Lifetide, a 1979 book by Lyall Watson. In it, Watson repeats Blair's claim. The authors describe similar scenarios. They state that unidentified scientists were conducting a study of macaques monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952.[2] These scientists purportedly observed that some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys—in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. Watson then claimed that the researchers observed that once a critical number of monkeys was reached—the so-called hundredth monkey—this previously learned behavior instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

This story was further popularized by Ken Keyes, Jr. with the publication of his book The Hundredth Monkey. Keyes' book was about the devastating effects of nuclear war on the planet. Keyes presented the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” story as an inspirational parable, applying it to human society and the effecting of positive change. Since then, the story has become widely accepted as fact and even appears in books written by some educators.

The original research

In 1985, Elaine Myers re-examined the original published research in “The Hundredth Monkey Revisited” in the journal In Context. In her review she found that the original research reports by the Japan Monkey Center in Vol. 2, 5, and 6 of the journal Primates are insufficient to support Watson’s story. In short, she is suspicious of the existence of “Hundredth Monkey” phenomenon; the published articles describe how the sweet potato washing behavior gradually spread through the monkey troupe and became part of the set of learned behaviors of young monkeys, but she doesn’t agree that it can serve as an evidence for the existence of a critical number at which the idea suddenly spread to other islands.

However, the story as told by Watson and Keyes is popular among New Age authors and personal growth gurus and has become an urban legend and part of New Age mythology. Also, Rupert Sheldrake has cited that a phenomenon like the "Hundredth Monkey Effect" would be an evidence of Morphic fields bringing about non-local effects in consciousness and learning. As a result, the story has also become a favorite target of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and was used as the title essay in The Hundredth Monkey: And Other Paradigms of the Paranormal published by them in 1991.

In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer explains how the urban legend started, was popularised, and has been discredited.

The effect discredited

An analysis of the appropriate literature by Ron Amundson, published by the Skeptics Society, revealed several key points that demystified the supposed effect.

Unsubstantiated claims that there was a sudden and remarkable increase in the proportion of washers in the first population were exaggerations of a much slower, more mundane effect. Rather than all monkeys mysteriously learning the skill it was noted that it was predominantly younger monkeys that learned the skill from the older monkeys through the usual means of imitation; older monkeys who did not know how to wash tended not to learn. As the older monkeys died and younger monkeys were born the proportion of washers naturally increased. The time span between observations was in the order of years.

Claims that the practice spread suddenly to other isolated populations of monkeys ignore the fact that at least one washing monkey swam to another population and spent about four years there. It is also to be noted that the sweet potato was not available to the monkeys prior to human intervention: it is not at all surprising that isolated populations of monkeys started to wash potatoes in a similar time frame once they were made available.

Cultural references

This phenomenon is referenced in the comic Y: The Last Man and is suggested to be related to the phenomenon that is at the core of the series (the sudden, simultaneous death of almost every male mammal on the planet).

Karl Pilkington mentioned it in one of his monkey news items on the Ricky Gervais Show, XFM, on the 16th of August 2003.

Michael Ruppert mentions the story in the 2009 documentary film Collapse. However, in his story the potatoes are mentioned as coconuts and the reason for washing them was residual radioactivity from a nuclear testing site. The monkeys were placed on the site to see the effects of nuclear fallout and the probability of sustained existence. His version of the story has a greater impact on the movie's and his own personal agenda(s).

Carl Sagan briefly mentions the hundredth-monkey effect in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House & Ballantine Books, 1996).