 Hello and welcome to another edition of Leader's Room with the Iklif Leadership and Governance Center. My name is Rajiv and I'm here today with Dr. William Bengston, a professor of sociology at St. Joseph's College in New York and president of the Society for Scientific Exploration, which is a group of scientists that explore anomalies. His area of specialization includes research methods and statistics. For over 25 years, Bill has been doing research into anomalous healing and has numerous publications in scientific and other journals. Bill, great to have you with us. Welcome to the Leader's Room. Bill, I guess the first question I have is you're known to have cured cancer simply by using hands-on healing. So tell me about that. What does that entail? What is it all about? Well, the healing of cancer with hands-on healing came about many, many years ago when I was actually studying a psychic who had turned into a healer. And I come to all of this from a skeptical point of view. I don't default to belief in any way at all. And I started to design studies to see if he was able to do psychic stuff. And he actually morphed into a healer quite spontaneously. And the urge to go to cancer came not from any reasoned thought, but rather just trying, putting your hands on and see what happens. And it turns out that in this particular healing system, malignant tumors or malignant growths respond very quickly and dramatically and benign growths don't. And so I was drawn simply trial and error, nothing more than trial and error. Let's play and find out what works and what doesn't work. Can you tell us that? Just put your hands there and the cancer goes away? Well, it's a little bit more than that. But when we started clinically, we were literally, we didn't know what to do. We didn't know how long to do it. And we'd go around. I was actually the first person that this guy, his name was Bennett Mayerich, ever fixed. And we were sitting in a kitchen one day and I was in particular pain from my back. I'd had chronic back pain for years. And he was telling me of all of these things that neither of us believed, psychic things. And he was telling me that when he was doing readings, the person he was doing a reading on, he would get the physical symptoms on his own body. And that person was claiming to have a reduction in their pain. And neither of us believed that. And I said, well, come on over and put your hands on my back. He came over and put his hands on my back. And my chronic back pain is the last pain I ever had. And so we then started to go around. What happens if we do this? What happens if we do that? So we did literally hundreds of people by trial and error. And we found certain patterns, certain things worked and certain things didn't. When I eventually moved into the lab to try to do this under control conditions, I simply went with the strength of what we had seen playing around without knowing what we were doing. And so cancer, since it responded, I went in and started doing control studies on cancer. So since you mentioned lab conditions and controlled studies, so there is a scientific basis for this? Oh, there's a scientific basis in terms of data. I don't know that you could say there's a scientific basis in terms of understanding how it works. So if we talk about does something happen, I would say yes, there's no question at this point. I've done many, many, many, many experiments in many, many places on all sorts of things. I've done them on animals and plants and we've tried just about anything you could think of and under extremely tight conditions. And it's not even an interesting question whether healing happens. The question really from a scientific point of view is what's the mechanism and how do we try to explain it? And that we can argue all day and all night and the bottom line would be I would be speculating. And that's really not that different from other scientific areas. So nobody's going to run around and say there's no such thing as gravity, but if you put 10 physicists in a room they're going to get into a fight over how it works. So I think at this point, if you know the data, it's not interesting whether healing happens. But how does it happen? Where does it come from? How do you turn it on? How do you turn it off? What does it work on? What's the mechanism? These things got many more lifetimes to go. So science now confirms that this is happening, but the how and why is still unknown. Just in my experiments I have 13 experiments in five different medical schools. And I go from lab to lab in part because they have different facilities and they're working on different projects. So in a way I'm following the early work that we did clinically. We're going to try to find out what happens. I'll try this on anything to see the more data the better. There's no such thing as bad data. We simply learn new stuff whenever we try experiments. So for those people who are able to heal, does the mind or human attention or thought have anything to do with it? Well among the experiments I've done, I've done experiments on intention, I've done experiments on attention. I've done experiments with EEGs. So we've hooked people up to synchronize the EEGs to see what happens when they try to heal. We've played with functional MRIs where the healer is in the MRI and the healer is out of the MRI. We've tried to then reverse the process. And there is something is happening in the brain, but I don't know, I mean that's for sure, but I don't know whether it's the brain itself which is the real impetus behind healing. That's still unknown. Certainly if you're going to undertake a healing experiment and you're going to, I tend to work with skeptical and experienced volunteers, and if you're going to spend hour after hour in a lab putting your hands around a cage of mice, or a petri dish or whatever we're doing in the lab protocol, you have the intention to do it, but intention is not the same thing as belief. And it's not even necessarily the same thing as attention. Attention, it would be something more akin to focus, and healing doesn't seem to be related at all to focused attention, but you can't do anything without intention. Okay, so you're saying that you have to have the intention to heal, but we don't know yet whether that is necessarily a prerequisite? Well, I don't know that you could do an experiment without some intention. So let's say that you were a volunteer in one of my experiments, and I say, would you come and do this, and I give you a protocol, and I give you a cage of mice, and I give you whatever you have to do, and you have to show up every day for a month. Well, then you have to have some intention to go through this. But that's very different from saying, I believe this is going to work. And it's also very different from you saying, I need to be focused on healing. I don't think that healing itself, I don't think the instigation of healing comes from the conscious mind willing something. I don't think it's anything like a psychokinetic effect. I think rather healing has its own set of laws, patterns and such, which we still need to try to uncover. So I'm curious, you met somebody who was a healer, and you said you were a skeptic. And what did you have to do to become a healer yourself? Well, to become a healer, I have to say that I'm still skeptical. That doesn't mean that healing doesn't happen, but I'm skeptical of any simple answers to how it works or why it works. I'm not a reductionist by nature. And so if you say, oh, I haven't figured out this is it, I'm going to sit there and go, I'm skeptical, I need to test it. And so in the 35 plus years that I've been doing this, whenever I think I have something figured out, I still need to skeptically take it to the lab, gather data and find out if I'm on the right track. And I'm not often on the right track. This is a pretty complex problem to solve. But you've clearly healed a lot of things in people. Oh, sure. And so do you have any special abilities? I don't know that I have any special abilities. I've never thought of myself as a healer, not even for a second. Although if I'm going to do an experiment, sometimes I'll use me as the healer. Sometimes I use faculty members. Sometimes I use students. Sometimes it depends on the circumstance. But I don't know that I have anything special going on. But the fact that you've cured so many mice and healed so many people. Yeah. Well, healing happens. But I'm simply responding to your, do I have something special? I don't know if I have anything special. And it actually turns out to be a pretty intriguing question about who is special and who isn't. I haven't found anyone in my experiments unable to do this. But I don't know the source of their being able to do it. Is it a technique that I teach? Is it visualization? Is it mindfulness? Is it intention? Is it lack of attention? I don't know. But so far it turns out a lot of people can do this. What I don't know is whether I'm just giving them permission to try something crazy. So you're saying, excuse me, the next question. You do these experiments sometimes with yourself as a healer and sometimes with other people. Yeah. And they are generally skeptical. Oh, yeah. And so ordinary people can learn this and do this. I don't, I've never used a believer for the simple reason that believers scare me. Believers have a tendency to try to defend their beliefs. And I'm not interested in defending beliefs. I don't know enough to have too many beliefs to try to defend. So I'm playfully trying to follow the data. So I don't have any buddy who I've tested who can't do it. And then I train them and then they can do it. So I don't have any good data that would indicate some sort of pre-post, I don't know. I don't know. No, but you have a training method. I have a training method. So what I'm asking is that can ordinary people attend your training and do some of those things? Well, ordinary people certainly have attended it and they do it. And I guess I'm just making kind of a quibble here as to what the source of their healing ability is. But I give a certain number of workshops a year where people come and they learn the techniques that I've essentially used in my experiments. And I've trained hundreds of people to do this. Those who continue and to take it seriously are often doing very interesting things. They're off anecdotally, not under controlled lab conditions, but anecdotally we're having tremendous amounts of healings in very, very interesting areas. So what's your one message to ordinary people who don't know anything about this? Can they use what you've learned? Excuse me, over 35 years to better their own development? Can they use the skills in any way to become better people, helping other people? The techniques that I use and the techniques that I teach, and I don't have any proprietary techniques, they're all part in the public and people can see them and look them up and all of that. All the techniques that I use seem to produce, some people have used it for healing, some people have used it to be in circumstances that they find better for themselves. People use it for all sorts of selfish reasons and I encourage people to follow their patterns, follow their bliss and use the techniques to help. Well, one last question. How many experiments have you done roughly? And let's say how many mice or other living things have you cured? In terms of experiments, I have 13 controlled experiments with mice. I have many with cell cultures, some with plants. I have many experiments with EEGs, with functional MRIs, with EKGs. In terms of how many mice total many hundreds at this point, in terms of people, many hundreds. So there have been many hundreds and if you add all the people who have learned the techniques and are out doing this, I don't know where they are and what they've been doing. And of all the people that have attended your programs have learned the techniques, how many would you say are actually able to do this? I would say the question is how many people seriously go after it when I teach them? Because my techniques aren't all that simple to learn. They take practice and they take effort. And so I've heard, I don't know really comparative healing techniques, but I've heard there are healing claims that you can learn to be a great healer in 10 minutes. Mine isn't that way. Mine takes effort, some dedication, a whole lot of practice. And I would say realistically the percentage of people who take the workshops who become real practitioners are probably who stick to it 10%. I'm making up the number. The others seem to get a lot out of it. They seem pretty happy about it. And I suspect that some of them use it in their daily lives. But I'm talking about a serious commitment to do it. And the people who have seriously committed are doing pretty interesting things. Very good. Well, thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you. Very well. Thank you.