Detecting Hand Energy

In energy healing, healers believe they can sense other people's energy with their hands as they work. I've already discussed that I believe that people have energy fields (see here), but is it possible for people to be aware of other people's energy fields?

Scientists at the University of Arizona have conducted multiple experiments to test this question.^[1] Subjects, mostly college students, were blindfolded and asked to sit in a chair with hands out and palms facing up. Another person holds his or her dominant hand over one of the subjects' hands for about half a minute and the subject must guess where the other person's hand is. Subjects were also asked to say whether they had guessed correctly or not.^[1] How do you think the subjects did?

Statistically, if the subjects were not able to detect the other person, they should still be able to guess the correct answer 50% of the time. In one experiment, subjects were 59% accurate, and in a larger second experiment, subjects were 70% accurate.^[1] These results are statistically significant, meaning that the results are due to something other than chance. In both experiments, the subjects thought they had done worse than they actually had.^[1]

Another interesting thing to come out of the experiments was that it appeared that some individual subjects seemed consistently more able to detect the other person's hand than other subjects. The subjects could be divided into 4 groups based on ability: poor (42% average detection), low (58% average detection), medium (70% average detection), and high detection (85% average).^[1]

The experiments I've described here don't "prove" that people can sense the energy of others, but it is one of the most plausible explanations of the results. Basically, there is the possibility that people can detect the energy fields of others, even if they think they can't, and there does seem to be a certain level of talent involved in the energy detection.

So if people can detect other people's energy fields, maybe there is the possibility that people can "read" those energy fields. It may even be possible that people can change another person's energy fields. Energy healers and others, such as myself, believe these possibilities are true and that working with energy can be beneficial for people.

[1] Gary E. Schwartz with William L. Simon, The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power To Heal (New York: Atria Books, 2007).