Blog · Power of Eight
An investigative journalist turned intention researcher, a practice built around groups of eight, a signature "mirror effect" — and a body of evidence that is almost entirely self-reported. This is the fair version of the story: what the claim says, why the number eight exists at all, what would genuinely be left standing if the psi part failed, and how Ashta tests it.
Lynne McTaggart did not arrive at group intention from mysticism — she arrived from investigative journalism. Born in New York in 1951, she began as an award-winning investigative reporter whose exposé of international baby-selling rings led to testimony before the US Congress and her first book. She has lived and published in London for decades. Her turn toward consciousness research came through a series of popular books: The Field (2001), which argued that a "zero-point field" connects living things; The Intention Experiment (2007), which recruited readers into mass online experiments; The Bond (2011); and the book this article is about — The Power of Eight (2017).
It matters to say plainly that her scientific reputation is contested well beyond the intention work. The magazine she co-founded, What Doctors Don't Tell You, has been repeatedly criticised by science-communication campaigners and sanctioned by the UK Advertising Standards Authority over health claims, and major retailers withdrew it from shelves. None of that settles whether intention groups do anything — claims stand or fall on their own evidence — but an honest profile includes it, because credibility context is part of how a reader weighs self-reported results.
The practice the book describes is simple. A small group — around eight people — nominates one member as the target. The group agrees a specific, concrete intention for that person, and holds it together in silence for about ten minutes. The book reports case after case of rapid, sometimes startling improvements — and one further claim that became its signature: the "mirror effect," the observation that the senders report improvements in their own lives, as if intention rebounds on the giver.
Where did the number eight come from? By McTaggart's own account: accident. At a 2008 workshop in Chicago she split the audience into groups "of about eight" on a whim, expecting a pleasant exercise, and was startled by what participants reported. There is no theory behind the number, no dose-response study that landed on eight — it is a workshop headcount that stuck. We say this without mockery: many real phenomena were noticed before they were explained. But it means the number eight is a historical artefact of the claim, not a finding. Ashta uses clusters of eight precisely because that is the claimed unit — test the claimed dose, and the claim has nowhere to hide.
McTaggart has run large web-coordinated "Intention Experiments" since 2007, several with psychologist Gary Schwartz's lab at the University of Arizona: germination experiments where audiences directed intention at seeds, water experiments, and "peace intention" weeks aimed at conflict zones. The reported results are consistently positive — targeted seeds growing taller, violence declining after intention weeks. But the publication record tells its own story: the flagship results live on her website, in her books, and in fringe-conference proceedings, not in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. The Sri Lanka peace experiment of 2008 illustrates the interpretive problem: violence actually spiked during the intention week (a government offensive was under way), and the subsequent decline tracked the ordinary course of a war — attributing it to intention is exactly the post-hoc leap that pre-registration exists to prevent.
The strongest measured item in the Power of Eight literature is modest: a qEEG study at Life University recorded the brains of intention senders and found significant reductions in alpha, beta and gamma band activity — in six usable participants, with no control group, published as a conference abstract. Read honestly, that is evidence that holding a focused, altruistic intention changes the state of the person holding it — a meditation finding, fully at home in mainstream science. It says nothing about effects on a distant recipient. The wider distant-intention literature — intercessory prayer trials like STEP, and the Cochrane review — has not supported distant effects under rigorous conditions.
Here is the charitable, scientifically grounded reading, and it is not nothing. Being the focus of eight people's undivided care is a rare and powerful social experience; belonging and social connection are among the best-evidenced predictors of health and longevity in all of epidemiology. Focused, altruistic attention demonstrably calms the practitioner — the one thing the qEEG data actually measured. Expectation and meaning responses produce genuine, physiological change. Group ritual bonds people, and bonded people do better. In other words: the experiences McTaggart's participants report can be entirely real even if the proposed mechanism — intention travelling non-locally to a target — is never vindicated. The phenomenology and the physics are separate questions.
That separation is exactly what Ashta's protocols are built to make: our group-intention tests compare pre-registered intention periods against sham-intention and no-intention controls, so "being cared about" and "distant effect at a specific time" stop being the same measurement. If the effect survives those controls, that is extraordinary and we will publish it. If it does not — and the null is our default expectation — we will publish that with equal prominence, and the genuinely valuable part (what committed groups of eight do for the people in them) still stands on ordinary, defensible science.
McTaggart continues to run Power of Eight groups, masterclasses and annual intention experiments through her platform, with new work announced into 2026. Ashta has no affiliation with her organisation. We name her in our research lineage the same way we name every originating claimant — as the source of a specific, testable claim, framed honestly: compelling reports, a devoted community, and no independent, pre-registered replication of the core distant-intention effect. That is not a dismissal. It is a to-do list. See also: the Power of Eight evidence review, the Global Consciousness Project, and Rupert Sheldrake's experiments.
