Logically the whole concept smacks of utter woo woo. Any claim that decreases in positive outcome with the increase in rigour should raise a few question marks.

I ran the methodology of the experiment past a statistician afterwards and he made some valuable suggestions:

1. Instead of having your assistant eyeball the health of the leaves, you should have a formal assessment system, probably involving change in color, surface area and/or mass from baseline.

2. Instead of being optimistic about one in six leaves, you should only have two leaves and only be optimistic about one of them.

3. You need to do this with a bunch of different pairs of leaves. Assuming conservatively that the true effect of primary perception is that 60% of the time the optimism leaf would have the better outcome, while 40% of the time it would be the non-optimism leaf that had the better outcome, you’d need to repeat the experiment 107 times to have 80% power (probably of positive result given true effect) to detect an effect at a significance level of alpha = .05 (two-tailed).

I discussed this with my friend who’s a believer in primary perception and even he wasn’t interesting in running the experiment to this degree of rigour. I have to say I don’t blame him. I’m pretty much done with it as well.

I’ll leave it to the enthusiasts and will let this experiment count as a miss.

If I were a scientifically inclined new-ager, I’d word it thus: You’re attempting to translate a mental thought into a spiritual energy. That energy then has to retranslate to the physical level to affect a change. And untrained mind with little understanding of the energy it is trying to direct is going to be terribly inefficient at the job. Additionally, there has to be fairly significant loss at least in the spiritual->physical translation. And perhaps most difficult of all is the change you’re trying to effect….extending life, preventing millions of cells from dying of thirst or starvation for a little while longer. When you look at the physical mechanisms you’re working with, it’s even likely that sending them some energy would only hasten their demise.

So firstly, instead of dying leaves, I’d switch to something like attempting to affect the rate of growth of something like bread dough. Assisting growth of life rather than attempting to delay its inevitable demise. It’s easier to work with nature rather than attempting to oppose it. Carefully measured flour, yeast, and water in a graduated cylinder maybe. Constant temperature between experiments, and see if you can speed up or retard how long it takes for the volume to double. Use a real bread recipe, and even if the experiment is a failure, you’ll at least get a tasty treat out of the deal.

Of course, there’s still the issue that you’re attempting to use a form of spiritual energy to generate a result that has no inherent spiritual value. It would help if you actually loved the yeast.

But it’s all pretty much useless, scientifically speaking, because mankind has not yet learned how to properly qualify or quantify the primary input into the experiment. “Positive thoughts”? How many? What was the content of these thoughts? Were they all the same or all different? Were they the only conscious thoughts in your head at the time, or were they sullied by doubt or other distractions? How pure were these thoughts? With what level of conviction were they held? If you were sure, at a lower level, that you were wasting your time, would not that have affected the quality of the thoughts themselves? How do they compare between experiments? Perhaps the manner in which you thought actually produced a field effect rather than a directed flow due to inexperience or other factors?

At the very least, you should keep track of your brainwave frequency; if there is anything to this at all, that’s likely fairly important. It’s pretty much certain that you’ll not be successful if you’re hanging out in Beta. Form the thought in Beta, and then move to Alpha or preferably Theta. This, along with keeping the “positive thoughts” clear and singular in your mind, will be easier if you’re well-experienced with any meditation techniques.

To me, there’s also a critical importance in truly holding the belief that it will work. Optimism isn’t quite the same. Science experiments typically don’t depend upon the belief of the scientist, but there is a distinct probability that experiments such as this need the thought patterns of the belief as an input, held in the same mind simultaneously with the “positive thoughts”. There is an inverse relationship between the level of doubt and the probability of success. The higher the doubt, the more improbable the desired outcome is reached. Remember that according to scripture, Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”