Joniversity | The Rice Intention Experiment - Background, Thoughts and Results @Joniversity | Uploaded November 2010 | Updated October 2024, 13 hours ago.
Unlike many skeptics out there, I try not to dismiss everything that sounds foolish or ungrounded. This is why I still engage in long discussions with "spiritualists", religious people, UFO enthusiasts and even conspiracy theory nutters. But when you can test things for your own, the appeal of trying becomes, for me, almost irresistible.
*Background:
I first came across what is known as Masaru Emoto's Rice Hado Experiment (AKA "Rice Intention Experiment" or simply "Rice Experiment") - about two years back while I was taking a course in Quantum Mechanics and as part of my general curiosity watched the notoriously imprecise and misleading film called "what the bleep do we know". In that film a short segment was dedicated to Masaru Emoto's original experiment in which water was labeled and meditated upon with what one can call "conscious intention" consisting of positive and negative terms and sings. Afterwards the water is then frozen and the frozen crystals demonstrated in a visual manner a sort of correlation to the "conscious intention" they were subjected to - meaning: good intentions gave rise to "beautiful" snow-flake like crystals and bad intentions produced "ugly" non-symmetric shapes).
Now there's plenty of criticisms on how rigor the scientific study was and there were problems replicating the experiment's results, which conveniently enough fits in the general theory of Hado (if you're doing the experiment in bad faith - it won't work)... But in any case the general idea of the experiment was to demonstrate that there is some sort of correlation between the "power of consciousness" and the "consciousness " of water, or at least it's susceptibility to consciousness. And the idea itself is generally influenced by what is known as "Hado".
The conductor of the experiment, Dr. Masaru Emoto, came up with an alternative experiment which can be done at home with very humble means. It involves rice in water or boiled rice and the consciousness intention focused on the rice should affect the water and thus result in speeding up or allowing down the process of decay and mold growing.
*My experiment and its outcomes:
The rice version of Dr. Emoto's experiments comes in a few variants, all of them more or less similar. My experiment was the version in which you take boiled rice and place it in three identical closed jars (make sure the rice was all exposed to the same amount of air, and try to keep the jars as clean as possible or even sterilized). Then you label the Jars; one with a positive statement or word (in my case Love), one is labeled with a negative term (mine is Hate) and the third one is left blank -- it will serve as the control.
For the next 2 months I woke up every day, said kind words to the love jar and focused positive thoughts at it (you can imagine how stupid I felt), cursed the hate jar and focused negative thoughts at it, and completely neglected the control jar (blank).
Although gradual and very slow, after a two months the jars started to show real change. The love jar remained completely white, the hate jar grew mold and the control simply turned yellow. I then left the jars alone, as for now more than two years have passed without me paying attention to any of them. The results are presented in the video.
Personal anecdote: You must be wondering why my wife is sitting there besides me... well one more interesting outcome was that Jenny, my wife, who at first wasn't very impressed by me on our first date, saw the experiment and thought to herself "well maybe he's not as cynical as he seems"... So whatever the experiment itself might imply, I at least owe it that.
*Main criticism of my own experiment:
1. The jars were not sterilized (though they were subject to the same amount and kind of contamination).
2. Jars might not be all sealed to the same degree (unlikely)
3. To make it statistically impressive way more than 3 jars are needed. In this case the chances of getting the experiment in the right order is 1 to 27 (chances of winning the Powerball are about 1 to 120 million).
*My Quantum Mechanics clip:
youtube.com/watch?v=gZ10qbpvCh4
*A video debunking the experiment
youtube.com/watch?v=oi_gW-OKzjQ
*Background material and interviews with Dr. Emoto
- Segment from 'what the bleep do we know':
youtube.com/watch?v=2_dmYT83ZKY
- An interview with Masaru Emoto:
youtube.com/watch?v=rZDOPQRdxJM
- Masaru Emoto's original rice experiment:
youtube.com/watch?v=xO25wNYohtw
*Additional links:
-Dr. Masaru Emoto's site:
masaru-emoto.net/english/e_ome_home.html
-What the bleep Do We (K)now!? (2004) - IMDB link:
imdb.com/title/tt0399877
Unlike many skeptics out there, I try not to dismiss everything that sounds foolish or ungrounded. This is why I still engage in long discussions with "spiritualists", religious people, UFO enthusiasts and even conspiracy theory nutters. But when you can test things for your own, the appeal of trying becomes, for me, almost irresistible.
*Background:
I first came across what is known as Masaru Emoto's Rice Hado Experiment (AKA "Rice Intention Experiment" or simply "Rice Experiment") - about two years back while I was taking a course in Quantum Mechanics and as part of my general curiosity watched the notoriously imprecise and misleading film called "what the bleep do we know". In that film a short segment was dedicated to Masaru Emoto's original experiment in which water was labeled and meditated upon with what one can call "conscious intention" consisting of positive and negative terms and sings. Afterwards the water is then frozen and the frozen crystals demonstrated in a visual manner a sort of correlation to the "conscious intention" they were subjected to - meaning: good intentions gave rise to "beautiful" snow-flake like crystals and bad intentions produced "ugly" non-symmetric shapes).
Now there's plenty of criticisms on how rigor the scientific study was and there were problems replicating the experiment's results, which conveniently enough fits in the general theory of Hado (if you're doing the experiment in bad faith - it won't work)... But in any case the general idea of the experiment was to demonstrate that there is some sort of correlation between the "power of consciousness" and the "consciousness " of water, or at least it's susceptibility to consciousness. And the idea itself is generally influenced by what is known as "Hado".
The conductor of the experiment, Dr. Masaru Emoto, came up with an alternative experiment which can be done at home with very humble means. It involves rice in water or boiled rice and the consciousness intention focused on the rice should affect the water and thus result in speeding up or allowing down the process of decay and mold growing.
*My experiment and its outcomes:
The rice version of Dr. Emoto's experiments comes in a few variants, all of them more or less similar. My experiment was the version in which you take boiled rice and place it in three identical closed jars (make sure the rice was all exposed to the same amount of air, and try to keep the jars as clean as possible or even sterilized). Then you label the Jars; one with a positive statement or word (in my case Love), one is labeled with a negative term (mine is Hate) and the third one is left blank -- it will serve as the control.
For the next 2 months I woke up every day, said kind words to the love jar and focused positive thoughts at it (you can imagine how stupid I felt), cursed the hate jar and focused negative thoughts at it, and completely neglected the control jar (blank).
Although gradual and very slow, after a two months the jars started to show real change. The love jar remained completely white, the hate jar grew mold and the control simply turned yellow. I then left the jars alone, as for now more than two years have passed without me paying attention to any of them. The results are presented in the video.
Personal anecdote: You must be wondering why my wife is sitting there besides me... well one more interesting outcome was that Jenny, my wife, who at first wasn't very impressed by me on our first date, saw the experiment and thought to herself "well maybe he's not as cynical as he seems"... So whatever the experiment itself might imply, I at least owe it that.
*Main criticism of my own experiment:
1. The jars were not sterilized (though they were subject to the same amount and kind of contamination).
2. Jars might not be all sealed to the same degree (unlikely)
3. To make it statistically impressive way more than 3 jars are needed. In this case the chances of getting the experiment in the right order is 1 to 27 (chances of winning the Powerball are about 1 to 120 million).
*My Quantum Mechanics clip:
youtube.com/watch?v=gZ10qbpvCh4
*A video debunking the experiment
youtube.com/watch?v=oi_gW-OKzjQ
*Background material and interviews with Dr. Emoto
- Segment from 'what the bleep do we know':
youtube.com/watch?v=2_dmYT83ZKY
- An interview with Masaru Emoto:
youtube.com/watch?v=rZDOPQRdxJM
- Masaru Emoto's original rice experiment:
youtube.com/watch?v=xO25wNYohtw
*Additional links:
-Dr. Masaru Emoto's site:
masaru-emoto.net/english/e_ome_home.html
-What the bleep Do We (K)now!? (2004) - IMDB link:
imdb.com/title/tt0399877
