Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  We spoke with Lynne McTaggart to ask her what it’s like to become a fictional character, what she thinks of the attention Dan Brown has brought to the field of noetics, how much of what he writes about is accurate, and how she responds to a less-than-receptive scientific establishment.

  Did you have any communication with Dan Brown before the publication of the book?

  No, absolutely none. The book was a complete shock and surprise. When I first heard about it, I had my head down writing my new book. My editor e-mailed me, saying something to the effect of, “You’re featured in The Lost Symbol.” I didn’t know what The Lost Symbol was. I thought someone had written a book annotating The Intention Experiment. I had to Google The Lost Symbol to find out what it was. Then I found out it was Dan Brown’s new novel, and after I picked my jaw up from the floor, I ran to the phone and called my husband to tell him to get a copy. It was surreal. You expect your work to generate a certain amount of publicity, but you don’t expect this publicity to come from a blockbuster novel. I was a little bit out of my body for a week or so.

  How good was he with the facts?

  It was fun to see how careful he was in creating a crazy quilt of sorts to describe Katherine Solomon and the field in which she works. He was very faithful to the details. He based all of the equipment Katherine uses on equipment that’s out there. She uses random event generator machines, which a physicist named Helmut Schmidt invented to test the power of thought on electronic equipment, and which were used most famously by Princeton University’s former dean of engineering Robert Jahn for his PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) program. She uses CCD cameras to record the light coming from the hands of healers. University of Arizona psychologist Gary Schwartz, one of my partners in the Intention Experiment, has done that. We just finished carrying out a clean water Intention Experiment using similar equipment. Katherine does experiments in making seeds grow. We’ve made food grow faster and seeds sprout higher with thought. I’ve run that particular experiment with Dr. Schwartz and replicated it six times. Katherine’s experiments on the magnification effect of group intention also owes a great deal to our work. Even the Cube that Katherine uses as her lab is similar to the special experimental unit used by Marilyn Schlitz, the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and its senior scientist, Dean Radin.

  Just a few small details about noetic science in The Lost Symbol could be said to stretch the limits of what is now possible. For instance, Katherine’s Cube lab is supposed to be able to block out thoughts. Thoughts appear to be impervious to most barriers or distance. And the electrically shielded room in the IONS lab doesn’t block out the effects of intention. Nevertheless, experiments with special magnetically shielded rooms do affect the ability of healers to send healing thoughts to others.

  What kind of impact does this massive bestseller have on the attention given to noetics?

  It’s huge. Just judging by my own experience, my book sales in the United States increased by up to three hundred percent and our Web traffic at the Intention Experiment Web site (www.theintentionexperiment.com) has quadrupled. At this writing, The Lost Symbol hasn’t been released outside the English-speaking world yet. When it does, I assume it will also increase sales of my books in foreign languages. The only person on our team who isn’t enamored of Dan Brown is our Webmaster, because we suddenly may need a far bigger server to run intention experiments.

  Has being such a major theme in The Lost Symbol legitimized noetics?

  Featuring this kind of frontier science in a bestselling blockbuster has certainly brought these ideas to a massive mainstream audience. If their interest is sparked, they can discover through my books and the work of many scientists just how much evidence there is to support what appear at first glance to be fantastical ideas. It’s also given a good deal of attention to the term noetic science, a phrase I believe was coined by the former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Among most scientists involved with studying the power of thought, this science is generally considered consciousness research. Their work suggests that the mind can receive information through extrasensory means and that it can have an effect on the physical world. This includes “mind over matter”: the power of thought—or intention—to affect and change the world.

  This novel seems to have a very hopeful sensibility to it. Does it seem that way to you as well?

  I think that it is very hopeful. Dan Brown is signaling a new age that returns power back to the individual. For a very long time, we have accepted the notion that the universe is composed of a lot of separate entities jostling around in space, and that human beings are essentially lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe. Dan Brown is very much advocating the idea that we create our world and that we can affect it for the good. That’s what Katherine Solomon is doing. She’s very much an idealist—a woman after my own heart—talking about a second age of enlightenment, where we finally recognize that we are masters of our fate, and that we create our reality. Katherine believes that the power of thought has the capacity to change matter. The idea that we are cocreators of our world is ultimately an extremely optimistic message.

  In the book, Katherine claims to be on the verge of substantial scientific breakthroughs. How close do you think we are to those breakthroughs?

  Well, I think she’s a little further along than we are on the Intention Experiment, that’s for sure. We’re just taking baby steps right now, trying to prove the effect of mass thought. I’ve run nineteen intention experiments with our scientists and sixteen have shown very significant positive results, from making food grow faster to altering essential properties of water, to even lowering violence. It’s been gratifying to see that the experiments have captured the public imagination, attracting thousands of participants from ninety countries, in every continent except Antarctica, who come on the Intention Experiment Web site and follow our instructions to send the same thought at exactly the same moment to a target sitting in a laboratory thousands of miles away.

  I created the Intention Experiment out of frustration. When I was researching the power of intention for my book, I was especially interested in the power of group thought and whether it magnifies the effect of intention generated singly. I found a lot of tantalizing evidence about this, but nothing conclusive. One night, my husband said to me, “Why don’t you run these experiments yourself?” That sounded ridiculous to me because I’m not a scientist and I hadn’t done an experiment since tenth-grade biology class. But I realized I was in a unique position because I had lots of readers around the world—my books are in twenty languages—and these readers could provide an enormous potential experimental body that most scientists don’t have. My primary role in the Intention Experiment is to enlist scientists who will work with me to design experiments testing the power of group thought to heal aspects of world problems. As a writer, I try to bring attention to this important work and communicate complicated ideas about this cutting-edge science and these experiments in a comprehensible way for laypeople.

  When we started, I immediately wanted to test whether we could do something to alleviate the catalog of suffering on the planet. Let’s save cancer victims, let’s save people from starving, I thought. When Dr. Schwartz generously agreed to run experiments with me, he said, “Let’s start with a leaf.” I was really let down. I said, “A leaf? That’s hardly going to set the global mind on fire.” He said, “We’re trying to do something that’s never been done before. We have to start with something simple.” So we began there and the results have been astounding. They’ve surprised everyone working on this project. If you do something once in a scientific experiment, it’s a demonstration. If you replicate it six times, you’re moving toward something more conclusive. The results of our various experiments are available on the Intention Experiment Web site, as is information about how people can participate in our global experimen
ts.

  One of the points The Lost Symbol makes is that everything we need to know is already out there, that the ancients had uncovered all of these secrets long ago, but that history and other agendas have buried this knowledge. Do you agree with that sensibility?

  I think science is now proving what the ancients have espoused. Belief about the power of thought is nothing new; what’s new is the scientific explanation for it. Other new ideas in frontier science aren’t revolutionary in many cultures. Only Western minds believe that we are all separate entities that end with the hair on our skin. Many other cultures past and present don’t see the world this way.

  If a scientist—a real-life Katherine Solomon—were able to offer unassailable proof of these discoveries, what kind of impact would that have on the world?

  Scientists are offering unassailable proof. There have been many, many studies showing that thought can have an effect on everything from machinery and equipment to cells to full-fledged organisms like human beings. The problem is that science is ruled right now by scientific fundamentalists who consider anything outside the accepted paradigm “junk” science. Frontier science is always about asking the impossible questions. Can I make a big, heavy object fly? Will I fall off when I get to the end of the earth? Those questions move science forward; if we didn’t have impossible questions, we’d never have any kind of progress.

  But right now, a lot of scientists—the neo-Darwinians, for instance—believe that the scientific discoveries from several centuries ago have already given us all of the answers. They aren’t willing to acknowledge that science is a story. Somebody will write a chapter and it will be valid for a while. Then someone will rewrite these chapters and add new ones. We have to understand that it’s an ongoing process. The discoveries made by the real-life Katherine Solomons are creating a new paradigm. They will be accepted, but probably not for another generation or so because that’s what happens with frontier science. Most of the discoveries I wrote about in The Field were made thirty years ago, and it’s going to take another twenty years for them to be accepted.

  So this resistance we’re seeing now is not anything new?

  Frontier scientists and true explorers of every variety have always been treated as heretics. I think what conventional scientists find most threatening about these new ideas is that they overturn our accepted paradigm of the way things work. Our central idea, that consciousness affects matter, lies at the very heart of an irreconcilable difference between the worldview offered by classical physics, the science of the big, visible world, and that of quantum physics, the science of the world’s most diminutive components. The discoveries made in consciousness research offer convincing evidence that all matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence. This overrides many of what conventional science now considers the laws of the universe. The world is a good deal more complicated than we once thought, and it is fundamentally different from the well-behaved universe of traditional Newtonian science.

  Because of The Lost Symbol, the blogosphere is burning up with a wide range of discussions about noetics. Some of it is very dismissive. How do you answer critics who say that the methods used by you and others in this field are not scientifically based?

  I’d say they haven’t looked at the vast body of research in this area. Many critics have a vested interest in debunking consciousness research because they are committed to a very comfortable paradigm that they don’t want shaken. Some have invested entire careers in their worldview.

  Our Intention Experiments, for instance, don’t just have controls. We have controls of the controls. The scientists involved in consciousness research are not fringe scientists. They are prestigious academics at Princeton, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Arizona, the University of Edinburgh, and so on. These are top physicists, biologists, engineers, and psychologists. The only difference between them and conventional scientists is that they’re open-minded.

  Consciousness research is not only the stuff of fiction. With every unorthodox question asked, with every unlikely answer, frontier scientists such as those featured in my books—and now Dan Brown’s—remake our world.

  —Interviewed by Lou Aronica

  Noetics

  The Link Between Modern Science and Ancient Mysticism?

  by Lou Aronica

  In his first Robert Langdon book, Angels & Demons, Dan Brown explored the tension between science and religion, set off in history through the conflict between Galileo and the Vatican. He suggested there were two nonoverlapping magisteria, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, one the Cathedral of Science (the advanced physics lab at CERN), the other the Cathedral of Religion (St. Peter’s Basilica). Still, there were hints that Dan Brown was thinking about a grand reconciliation. Among the clues was a copy of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, a real-life book that was on the bookshelf of the fictional physicist Leonardo Vetra, and one among four dealing with the full spectrum of the science/religion debate. Capra’s argument is that humanity needs both physics and Eastern mysticism.

  Seven years later, it is clear that Dan Brown has fully adopted this argument in The Lost Symbol, using noetic science as his vessel. (Brown here also continues his tradition of mentioning real books and real persons. In TLS the mind-altering possibilities of science are reflected in the reference to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and the real-life tribute is to two of the most visible proponents of noetics, Lynne McTaggart and Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, both of whom are featured in this chapter.)

  Noetic science has its champions, but it also has more than its share of critics, “hard” scientists chief among them. The doubters point to the fact that there have been no independent, double-blind experiments that support the thesis that mind moves matter, mind heals bodies, or that the soul literally resides in the body. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the noted astrophysicist, once wrote a column in which he cleverly reflected the prevailing view of all such “mental” science: “. . . the persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what’s going on is non-sense rather than sixth sense.”

  To sort this out for us, we asked Lou Aronica to take a more detailed look at Dan Brown’s new favorite science. Aronica has been a highly successful writer and publisher. Among dozens of other titles, he published Lynne McTaggart’s What Doctors Don’t Tell You. As a writer he has authored numerous books, among them Miraculous Health: How to Heal Your Body by Unleashing the Power of Your Mind (with Rick Levy). His latest book is The Element (written with Sir Ken Robinson), which is a New York Times bestseller. He starts us off with an apt quote.

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  The late, great Arthur C. Clarke was a “hard scientist.” He is credited with developing the concept of the geosynchronous satellite and he is the author of numerous bestselling works of science fiction and nonfiction, most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet Dr. Clarke was also fully aware, as the quotation above indicates, that much that we now regard as science once seemed purely fanciful. If you asked an eighteenth-century scientist about space travel, beaming sound across the globe, or a box with vast computational capacity he would have scoffed. Such notions would have seemed back then like nothing more than so much hocus-pocus (or, as Dan Brown might render it, Avra KaDabra, the child magicians’ “abracadabra,” “I create as I speak” in ancient Aramaic). What, then, feels like magic to us now that we will regard as hard science in the future? In some ways, this is the question posed by those who work in the field of noetic science.

  The potential discoveries made by noetic science underlie one of the most pervasive and compelling themes in The Lost Symbol, one that drives it from beginning to, literally, the final word. Katherine Solomon has dedicated her life to this study and her brother, Peter, has built a l
ab for her at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center where she can confirm discoveries that she believes will change the way every person on the planet thinks. In chapter 11, according to the omniscient narrator of TLS:

  Katherine’s experiments had produced astonishing results, particularly in the last six months, breakthroughs that would alter entire paradigms of thinking. Katherine and her brother had agreed to keep her results absolutely secret until the implications were more fully understood. One day soon, however, Katherine knew she would publish some of the most transformative scientific revelations in human history.

  In later chapters, Katherine notes that “We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities,” and that “Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass.” She mentions how random event generators became less random after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 caused much of the world to come together in response to a shared tragedy, and how she finds Lynne McTaggart’s book Intention Experiment fascinating. In chapter 15, we hear further that:

  The most astonishing aspect of Katherine’s work, however, had been the realization that the mind’s ability to affect the physical world could be augmented through practice. Intention was a learned skill. Like meditation, harnessing the true power of “thought” required practice. More important . . . some people were born more skilled at it than others. And throughout history, there had been those few who had become true masters.