Chapter 4: Electrical skin resistance -the key research
Maxwell
Cade’s six-year collaboration with Ann Woolley-Hart laid the foundations
for his future courses on biofeedback. During
this period they did the essential research that allowed him to link the
training in Eastern disciplines he had received as a child and young man
with the effect it had on the physical body - training which showed that
the mind affects the body and the state of the body affects the mind. Today
it is accepted that our emotional state affects our immune system and is
therefore an important factor in our health but in the early 1970s this was
a very radical idea.
Ann Woolley-Hart, when Max met her, was a researcher into biofeedback
in the medical electronics department of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London’s
oldest teaching hospital. They met at a talk he gave to the Society of Psychical
Research entitled Preservation of Health. During
the talk, he referred to Dr A H Morton Whitby’s studies in the 1960s
and the reaction of the medical establishment to his ideas.
Dr Morton Whitby had made an electrical skin-resistance (ESR) meter which
used a large contact for each hand, hoping that the reading of the electrical
characteristics of the subject’s skin could be used to diagnose susceptibility
to cancer. Such a radical approach
was not well received by his peers in the medical profession and this probably
led to him advertising his work to get it better known. For
this, he was struck off the British medical register. Morton
Whitby came to Max’s talk and afterwards introduced him to Woolley-Hart.
At this time Max was interested in hypnotic states and psychological
profiles and had developed a Cade Personality Development Inventory and Cade
Hypnotic Susceptibility Inventory, which attempted to categorise different
types of personality. By now
he was a member of the Medical and Dental Hypnosis Society through a meeting
with Andrew Spencer Pattison, a Harley Street psychiatrist.
Max had also used word-association tests originated by the psychiatrist
Carl Jung’s. We can assume
he knew Jung had used an ESR meter in about one fifth of his studies of the
functioning of the unconscious (refs 4-1, 4-2). Up
to this point Max does not seem to have been interested in electrical monitoring
but this was soon to change. On
the death of Morton Whitby in the late 1960s, his ESR machine came into the
possession of Woolley-Hart. In
using the machine, she frequently called on Max for help and this developed
into a close co-operation.
The collaboration brought together a powerful combination of knowledge
and experience. Woolley-Hart
was born in 1927 and trained as a physiotherapist. In her late twenties she
trained at the Middlesex Hospital, London, to be doctor. By her mid-thirties
she was a radiation biologist with a deep understanding of medical intervention
in the treatment of cancer patients. At the time she and Max met she was
pursuing research at the Wolfson Institute at Hammersmith Hospital. Because
of her specialised knowledge, she was asked to work at the government-run
Radiation Research Institute in Germany and spent three years there, returning
to Britain in 1965. She found work in London, in the medical electronics
department at St Bartholomew’s.
Their partnership at this point was a natural one. At St Bartholomew’s,
she was involved with helping patients suffering from a variety of conditions
to learn how to relax using biofeedback as a self-help method.
For some years though, Woolley-Hart had found the medical approach to
disease increasingly irksome, convinced that it was “too narrow”. In
a television programme later she said pointedly: “I’ve reached
a stage in my self-development when it’s quite impossible to stick within
the orthodox viewpoint of what's going on because something inside me will
go bust if I do.” The orthodox
viewpoint, she said, “deals with somebody who is at the end of the line
of health and not where it has begun to break down, and not with the mind-body
concept of an individual in a holistic way. Technically it’s brilliant
but that’s where it stops”.
The fruits of the research that Max and Ann Woolley-Hart carried out
was a series of published papers covering studies of hypnotic and psychic
phenomena. Their first studies, beginning in 1969, were an attempt to replicate
Morton Whitby’s work. As
Max explains in The Awakened Mind, they spent two years “studying electrical
skin resistance (ESR) as a possible clinical aid to diagnosis in preventive
medicine for symptomless disease, that is, disease in its early stages before
there are any overt symptoms”.
There had been conflicting studies of the usefulness of ESR in this context
so he and Ann Woolley-Hart decided to repeat many of the early studies. As
she was fluent in German, they had access to many papers that were unknown
in England and America, so they were uniquely qualified as a team to bring
a fresh understanding to the subject. It
quickly became apparent to them that the ESR reading could not be used for
clinical diagnosis because temporary emotional disturbances in the subjects
measured produced much larger responses on the meter than any underlying
pathology. Their review of this early research was published in the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in June 1971 (ref 4-3), together
with the first results of their own investigations.
Further studies were published during the early to mid-1970s. They included
in the research subjects from any group they could find: Woolley-Hart took
ESR readings from patients undergoing abdominal surgery at Chelsea Hospital
for Women; they also approached London schools and enlisted 500 pupils in
science classes to make their own ESR meters and record measurements.
They studied a group of meditators “and found several healthy-looking
subjects with a remarkable ability to sit cross-legged with closed eyes absolutely
motionless for ten minutes or more, without showing any objective evidence
for change in their physiological state at all . . . We also found two alleged
exponents of Transcendental Meditation who were proud of their ability to
(as they said) ‘lose all touch with the physical world’.” The
relaxation meter indicated that they were cat-napping. They
were “delighted” to be shown how to meditate properly, Max reported.
Gunzi Koizumi’s rebuke to him many years earlier when Max believed he
was he meditating must have rung in his ears.
Max and Woolley-Hart made two claims in their 1971 paper:
First, that the original studies could not be replicated
because differences of arousal occurring naturally between individuals tested
were far too great to allow exact values of the ESR readings to be related
to different states. They also
noted that the body’s natural daily rhythms, the circadian rhythms,
also caused variations in the ESR reading. By
good fortune, Max continued the research in his classes held in the evening,
which limited the circadian effect.
The second claim was that the relative change of the reading
was more important than the precise reading.
Max and Woolley-Hart also reported an unusual experiment as part of a
comparison into depth of relaxation in hypnotic and self-hypnotic states.
In 1970 Max was visited by Dr Allen J Hyneck, Professor of Astronomy at Northwestern
University, Illinois, who for 24 years was civilian consultant to Project
Bluebook, the United States Air force official body for the investigation
of unidentified flying objects. “Professor Hyneck, like psychologist
Carl Jung,” the paper reported, “had come to the conclusion that ‘flying
saucers’ were probably of a ‘psychic nature’ and he wanted
to know what would happen if a person were given an unstructured suggestion
that he would see a strange object in the sky. Would he see an unusual bird,
a novel aeroplane or balloon, a meteorite, or perhaps a detailed flying saucer?”
A volunteer was put into deep trance and told he would see a strange
object in the south-eastern sky; that he should carefully note as much detail
as possible in the few seconds it was visible; and he should also draw the
others' attention to it. “The
subject drew everyone's attention to what he later described as ‘a fast-moving
hunk of rock, travelling in a straight line and followed by several smaller
rocks’.” With some disappointment, they observed: “No little
green men were reported.” The
experiment, they concluded, had been “moderately successful”. Perhaps
an American subject would have been more likely to see flying saucers.
The last of the joint research showed how changes of the subject’s
ESR reading could be linked to different depths of relaxation. This
was based on Terry Lesh’s paper Zen Meditation and the Development of
Empathy in Counsellors (Ref 4-4). In
his paper of 1970, Lesh, a student counsellor working at the University of
Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, collected together many subjective reports
of experiences during meditation. Max
and Woolley-Hart were able to relate these descriptions given by Lesh to
changes of ESR reading and thus present subjects with an objective description
of their relaxation depth which the people could verify this for themselves
- internally by examining what was happening in their mind, then externally
by checking with the Lesh scale marked on the meter.
Based on these studies, they claimed that a 50% relative change of the
ESR meter reading was needed before the subject’s description of the
effect of relaxation showed that he or she had experienced a first “taste” of
a different experience of consciousness. They
claimed this degree of change was necessary before the effect of mental stress
on our immune system could begin to be minimised.
Proof of Ann Woolley-Hart’s belief in the methods they were exploring
in their research came when she was diagnosed as having cancer in 1973. Her
consultant advised her to have radiotherapy but she refused. She
pointed out she had studied radiotherapy’s effects for her advanced
medical degree and was in no doubt that radiation was harmful to the body’s
whole system. She told Max the consultant replied: “If you were my wife,
I would force you to have radiation or chemotherapy.” To which she retorted: “Well,
aren’t I lucky.” At
this, the consultant was furious and gave her no choice but to discharge
herself from the hospital. The
fact that she was as medically qualified as he was irrelevant to him since
she was there in the role of patient.
She presented herself to Max asking, “What do I do now?” Max
was already working on a one-to-one basis with clients to induce very deep
relaxation and at that level make suggestions of empowerment that could activate
a person’s ability to heal themself. He
used this technique with her and she reported eventually that the cancer
had disappeared. Woolley-Hart
died 20 years later, but not of cancer.
Returning to their research, as their work progressed they had begun
to use friends as subjects, checking changes of ESR reading with various
relaxation procedures. These trials were carried out at Hampton, on the western
outskirts of London, where Max and Isabel came to live in 1968. Among
the friends who joined in was a neighbour, Marianne Cartwright, who recalls
that though the research was in earnest, the trials themselves generated
a lot of hilarity among the participants because of the effects of the relaxation
exercises. “Max took the
whole thing very seriously, but some of us found the sessions an occasion
for levity which he endured with great good humour.” This
was a constant theme in the courses during the following years: Max’s
unconditional ways of promoting relaxation left his subjects feeling very
liberated.
The research was conducted on a very low budget, ie, whatever they could
afford. To begin with Max had only one meter with which to take readings,
making it difficult to work with larger groups. Needing more meters, he and Isabel made their own on the kitchen
table at home using suitable plastic boxes obtained from high-street stationers. The
hand contacts - metal buttons sewn on to pads - were made by Woolley-Hart’s
friend Christina Rankl.
Nevertheless the research showed clearly that traditional methods of
spiritual training could be enhanced by the use of meters. So
Max began to develop courses that would provide him with more subjects and
a small income with which to buy machines. Thus
he fulfilled a prophecy made by his master, Gunji Koizmi, when Max was quite
young, that he would become a teacher.
4-1 Collected
Works. Vol. 2 Experimental Researches. CG Jung. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
London, 1973.
4-2 Studies
in Word Association. CG Jung. Routledge & Kegan
Paul 1969.
4-3 Journal
of the Society for Psychical Research. Vol
46 No 748, June 1971
4-4 Zen
Meditation and the Development of Empathy in Counsellors. T. Lesh. Reprints
from Student Counselling Services, University of Lethbridge,
Alberta.