The Science of Prayer, Intention, and Healing
In the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital in 1988, 393 patients were randomly assigned to two groups. One group received standard medical care.
The Science of Prayer, Intention, and Healing
The Invisible Medicine
In the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital in 1988, 393 patients were randomly assigned to two groups. One group received standard medical care. The other received standard medical care plus intercessory prayer — from born-again Christians who were given only the patients’ first names and diagnoses. The patients did not know they were being prayed for. The staff did not know which patients were in which group.
The prayed-for group had significantly fewer complications. They required fewer antibiotics, had fewer cases of pulmonary edema, were less likely to need intubation, and had fewer deaths — though the mortality difference did not reach statistical significance.
Cardiologist Randolph Byrd published these findings in the Southern Medical Journal, and the medical world did not quite know what to do with them. The study was methodologically sound — prospective, randomized, double-blind. It just measured something that was not supposed to be measurable.
Welcome to the science of prayer.
Larry Dossey and Era III Medicine
Larry Dossey, an internist and former chief of staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital, spent decades cataloging the evidence for what he calls “nonlocal mind” — consciousness that is not confined to the brain or the body.
Dossey proposes three eras of medicine:
Era I — Mechanical medicine. The body as machine. Drugs and surgery. Consciousness is irrelevant.
Era II — Mind-body medicine. Thoughts and emotions affect health. Psychoneuroimmunology, stress reduction, meditation. Consciousness matters, but only your own, inside your own body.
Era III — Nonlocal medicine. Consciousness extends beyond the individual. One person’s intentions can influence another person’s physiology at a distance. Prayer, distant healing, and intentionality become legitimate therapeutic tools.
Dossey’s 1993 book Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine documented over 130 studies suggesting that prayer, intention, and directed mental focus could influence biological systems — from bacterial growth rates to human wound healing. His argument was not that prayer replaces medicine but that Era III phenomena are real, measurable, and deserve the same rigorous investigation we give to pharmaceuticals.
The Key Studies
Byrd 1988
Randolph Byrd’s study at San Francisco General remains the landmark. Its elegance lay in its simplicity: standard randomized controlled trial methodology applied to prayer. Critics pointed out that “fewer complications” was a composite endpoint, that the scoring system was somewhat subjective, and that the intercessors were not standardized in their prayer methods. These are valid methodological concerns. But the study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, its design was sound for its era, and its results were positive.
Harris 1999
William Harris and colleagues at the Mid America Heart Institute replicated Byrd’s study with 990 coronary care patients, publishing in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Their methodology was tighter — they used a weighted, blinded scoring system for complications and did not inform the intercessors of patient outcomes during the study.
Result: the prayed-for group had significantly lower complication scores. Harris noted that the effect size was modest but real — comparable to many accepted pharmaceutical interventions.
The STEP Trial (Benson 2006)
Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist famous for documenting the “relaxation response,” led the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer — the largest and most rigorous prayer study ever conducted. Published in the American Heart Journal, it enrolled 1,802 coronary artery bypass patients across six medical centers.
Three groups: prayed for and told they might be; not prayed for and told they might be; prayed for and told they definitely were.
The results shocked everyone. The two “uncertain” groups showed no significant difference — prayer appeared to have no effect. But the group that knew they were being prayed for actually had more complications (59% vs. 52%). Benson suggested this might reflect “performance anxiety” — patients who knew they were being prayed for may have felt their condition was more serious than they realized.
The STEP trial is often cited as definitive disproof of prayer. But the study had critical design issues: the prayer was done by strangers with no relationship to the patients, the “dose” was standardized in a way that may have stripped prayer of its most active ingredient (genuine caring connection), and the told-they-were-prayed-for group introduced a confound that obscured the main question.
What STEP may actually demonstrate is that mechanical, assigned, impersonal prayer does not work the way pharmaceutical interventions do — which is precisely what contemplative traditions have always said. Prayer is not a pill. Relationship, compassion, and authentic intention may be essential components, not optional variables to control away.
Gregg Braden: The Lost Mode of Prayer
Gregg Braden, a former senior computer systems designer who became a researcher of ancient spiritual technologies, proposes that Western culture has largely forgotten how to pray effectively. In his book The Isaiah Effect, he describes what he calls “the lost mode of prayer” — a form of prayer practiced in indigenous and mystical traditions that differs fundamentally from petitionary prayer.
The key difference: conventional Western prayer asks for something to happen in the future. “Please heal this person. Please bring peace.” The lost mode of prayer feels the prayer as already answered. You do not ask for rain — you feel the rain on your skin, smell the wet earth, see the crops growing, give thanks for the harvest. You pray from the place of fulfillment, not from the place of lack.
This is not positive thinking or visualization. Braden grounds it in quantum physics — specifically the observer effect, where the act of observation influences what is observed. When you hold the feeling of the already-answered prayer, you are, in quantum terms, collapsing the wave function toward the reality you are experiencing internally.
Whether the quantum analogy holds up to physicist scrutiny is debatable. What is less debatable is that feeling-based, gratitude-centered prayer induces dramatically different physiological states than anxiety-based petitionary prayer. Heart coherence, parasympathetic activation, frontal lobe engagement — the neuroscience supports what the mystics describe.
Masaru Emoto’s Water Crystals
Masaru Emoto, a Japanese researcher, published photographs in his 1999 book The Hidden Messages in Water showing that water exposed to positive words, beautiful music, and prayer formed symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing ice crystals when frozen, while water exposed to negative words and harsh music formed disordered, fragmented crystals.
The scientific community has largely dismissed Emoto’s work. His methodology lacked rigorous blinding, his crystal selection process was subjective, and his results have not been consistently replicated under strict double-blind conditions. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conducted a triple-blind pilot study that showed modest positive results, but the evidence remains preliminary.
Yet Emoto’s work persists as a powerful metaphor — and metaphors shape behavior. If water responds to intention, and the human body is roughly 60% water, then the quality of your thoughts and words may literally shape your internal landscape. As metaphor, this is compelling. As science, it remains unproven. Both matter.
Lynne McTaggart: The Intention Experiment
Lynne McTaggart, a British investigative journalist, took the science of intention out of the laboratory and into the public arena. Her Intention Experiment, launched in 2007, organized groups of thousands of people to focus collective intention on specific, measurable targets — from seeds in a University of Arizona laboratory to water purification in a lake in Japan.
Working with researchers including Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona and Fritz-Albert Popp (the biophoton researcher) in Germany, McTaggart’s experiments showed that group intention could measurably affect seed growth rates, the biophoton emissions of plants, and even water quality parameters.
What emerged most clearly from McTaggart’s work was the power of the group. Individual intention produced inconsistent results. Group intention — especially when focused, simultaneous, and emotionally coherent — produced effects that were statistically significant across multiple experiments. Something about the collective focus amplified the signal.
McTaggart also documented what she called “the rebound effect” — participants in the intention experiments reported significant improvements in their own lives, even though they were directing intention toward external targets. The act of practicing focused, compassionate intention changed the practitioners themselves.
HeartMath and Heart-Coherent Intention
The HeartMath Institute, under Rollin McCraty’s research direction, provides perhaps the most physiologically grounded model for how prayer and intention work.
Their research demonstrates that the heart generates a measurable electromagnetic field that changes in structure and coherence based on the person’s emotional state. When someone enters a state of heart coherence — characterized by a smooth, sine-wave pattern of heart rate variability — and then directs intention from this coherent state, the effects on external systems (including other people’s physiology and random event generators) are significantly stronger than intention directed from an ordinary, incoherent state.
The practical implication: the state from which you pray matters more than the words you use. A coherent heart, feeling genuine appreciation and compassion, generates a field that appears to influence biological systems. An anxious, desperate prayer — no matter how sincere the words — generates an incoherent field.
This aligns precisely with what contemplative traditions teach: center yourself before you pray. Come to stillness. Let the prayer arise from the heart, not the anxious mind.
Indigenous Prayer Traditions
Q’ero (Andean)
The Q’ero do not petition God. They engage in ayni — reciprocity — with the living cosmos. Every prayer is accompanied by an offering. Every request is preceded by gratitude. The k’intu (three coca leaves blown with prayer) is not a message sent upward to a distant deity. It is a conversation with Pachamama, apus, and the living energies of the natural world — beings who are right here, present, listening.
Aboriginal Australian
Aboriginal Australians maintain the Dreaming — the ongoing creative process through which the ancestors continue to sing the world into existence. Prayer in this tradition is participation in creation, not petition to a creator. Ceremony, songlines, and sacred sites are the technologies through which humans maintain their relationship with the dreaming forces that sustain reality.
Native American
Native American prayer traditions vary enormously across nations, but common elements include: tobacco offerings (carrying prayers upward with the smoke), the pipe ceremony (the union of sky and earth, masculine and feminine, through the act of smoking together), the sweat lodge (prayer through heat, darkness, and steam), and the vision quest (extended prayer through fasting and solitude in nature).
Centering Prayer: Thomas Keating
Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk who died in 2018, developed Centering Prayer as a Christian contemplative practice that bridges Western mystical theology with Eastern meditative methods. The practice involves:
- Choosing a sacred word (a symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence)
- Sitting comfortably with eyes closed, silently introducing the sacred word
- When you notice thoughts, gently returning to the sacred word
- Sitting in silence for two minutes at the end before opening your eyes
The method is strikingly similar to mantra meditation in the Hindu tradition. Keating acknowledged this openly, arguing that the contemplative core of every tradition points to the same reality — what he called “the divine indwelling.”
Keating’s concept of “divine therapy” proposes that Centering Prayer gradually releases the “emotional programs for happiness” laid down in childhood — security, affection, control, and esteem needs that drive unconscious behavior. Over months and years of practice, the false self constructed around these programs dissolves, revealing what Keating called the True Self — the person you are in God, before culture and trauma shaped you into someone else.
Creating a Personal Prayer Practice
A prayer practice that bridges traditions might include:
Morning — Heart coherence (HeartMath Quick Coherence technique: heart focus, heart breathing, heart feeling). From this coherent state, hold your intentions for the day — not as requests but as felt experiences of the already-unfolding reality you are co-creating.
Throughout the day — Brief prayers of gratitude and awareness. The Q’ero practice of ayni — silently offering thanks to the earth as you walk on it, to the water as you drink it, to the food as you eat it.
Evening — Centering Prayer or silent meditation. Twenty minutes of releasing the day’s accumulations and consenting to the presence of the sacred. Examen — the Ignatian practice of reviewing the day to notice where Spirit moved and where you resisted.
Weekly — A longer period of prayer or meditation. A fire ceremony. A despacho. A walk in nature as prayer.
The form matters less than the consistency and the quality of attention. As Dossey writes, the evidence suggests that it is not which religion you practice or which words you use. It is the quality of love, the depth of intention, and the coherence of the heart from which you pray.
If your prayer were not a request sent upward but a field generated outward — what would change about the way you enter it?