Effectiveness of distant healing for patients with chronic fatigue syndrome: a randomised controlled partially blinded trial (EUHEALS).

Background: Distant healing, a form of spiritual healing, is widely used for many conditions but little is known about its effectiveness.

Methods: In order to evaluate distant healing in patients with a stable chronic condition, we randomised 409 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) from 14 private practices for environmental medicine in Germany and Austria in a two by two factorial design to immediate versus deferred (waiting for 6 months) distant healing. Half the patients were blinded and half knew their treatment allocation.

Examining psychokinesis: the interaction of human intention with random number generators--a meta-analysis.

Séance-room and other large-scale psychokinetic phenomena have fascinated humankind for decades. Experimental research has reduced these phenomena to attempts to influence (a) the fall of dice and, later, (b) the output of random number generators (RNGs). The meta-analysis combined 380 studies that assessed whether RNG output correlated with human intention and found a significant but very small overall effect size.

Information storage capacity of incompletely connected associative memories.

In this paper, the memory capacity of incompletely connected associative memories is investigated. First, the capacity is derived for memories with fixed parameters. Optimization of the parameters yields a maximum capacity between 0.

Figure-ground segregation in a recurrent network architecture.

Here we propose a model of how the visual brain segregates textured scenes into figures and background. During texture segregation, locations where the properties of texture elements change abruptly are assigned to boundaries, whereas image regions that are relatively homogeneous are grouped together. Boundary detection and grouping of image regions require different connection schemes, which are accommodated in a single network architecture by implementing them in different layers.