Discovery Lab Answers

Lynne McTaggart is a journalist and author, not a laboratory scientist, which shapes everything about her experimental record. Her work sits at the intersection of science communication and participatory consciousness research. The ESP-Nexus profile for her is at Lynne McTaggart.

Experiments

McTaggart’s primary experimental contribution is The Intention Experiment — a large-scale, online, participatory program designed to test whether collective human intention can correlate with measurable effects on physical targets ^[2]. The program recruited thousands of participants worldwide to focus coordinated intention on specified targets in real time, making it a citizen-science model rather than a conventional laboratory protocol.

Her books — particularly The Field (2008) and The Intention Experiment (2007) — function partly as science communication and partly as frameworks motivating the experimental program ^[2][3]. They are cited in the broader consciousness-research community as influential syntheses, and Debra Lynne Katz, for instance, cites both works when connecting quantum-physics concepts to intention research. McTaggart also participated as a speaker at the 2009 ISSSEEM conference, where her ideas were presented alongside other researchers working on energy medicine and consciousness ^[1].

The retrieved sources do not name specific collaborating scientists who co-designed or co-ran the Intention Experiment protocols, so those attributions are left open here rather than guessed.

Methodology

The Intention Experiment’s design departs fundamentally from standard laboratory parapsychology. Key features, as the ESP-Nexus profile describes:

• Online, distributed participation — experiments were conducted via the internet rather than in controlled laboratory conditions, with participant counts in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds typical of laboratory studies.
• Collective intention focus — participants directed intention toward a specified physical target (plants, water samples, or other measurable systems) simultaneously, with outcomes measured before and after the intention period.
• Participatory transparency — results were reported publicly, consistent with the citizen-science framing.

The retrieved sources do not contain detail on randomization procedures, blinding protocols, or pre-specified analysis plans for specific Intention Experiment trials, so those design specifics cannot be stated here from the retrieved material. Readers wanting protocol detail should consult the primary publications directly.

Data

The retrieved sources do not supply quantitative outcome data — no effect sizes, z-scores, hit rates, or p-values — for any specific Intention Experiment trial. Source ^[2] discusses The Intention Experiment as a book and concept, and source ^[3] references The Field as a theoretical framework, but neither carries trial-level statistics in the retrieved excerpts.

What the sources do record is the scale and framing: the program engaged thousands of participants globally and was designed to test whether collective consciousness can influence measurable physical phenomena. Whether the individual trials produced significant results, and at what magnitude, is not established by the retrieved passages — readers should consult the primary published reports of each trial for those figures.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism of McTaggart’s experimental work — no named critic, methodological objection, failed replication, or reanalysis appears in the retrieved material. The sources carrying her name treat her work in a receptive or descriptive register ^[1][2][3], and no critical engagement with the Intention Experiment’s methodology or results is present in what was retrieved.