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Originally Posted by wolfgang  That sounds like the mind/body connection, not the thoughts create reality connection. |
The former is surely a subset of the latter? In fact, many LOA books, such as the Hicks', would also discuss how to use your thoughts to improve the state of your health.
But anyway it is equally possible to do experiments whereby we investigate the effects of thoughts on some aspect of reality other than the thinker's own body. Some examples from the world's leading universities:
(1) Robert Rosenthal (Harvard University) has an experiment whereby certain people are tricked into believing that the rats that they have been given belong to some "superior" breed possessing high intelligence. Other people are tricked into believing that their own rats belong to some "inferior" breed and are mentally slow. (Actually the rats are of the same breed).
All the people are then required to train their rats to navigate a maze. Rats believed to be super-smart get through the maze much faster than rats believed to be stupid. (Many of the rats believed to be stupid never make it through the maze at all).
(2) William Tiller (Stanford University) gets a small group of experienced meditators to meditate and send positive energy to some fruit fly eggs. These eggs hatch faster, and the larvae grow faster, and the fruit fly live longer, than the eggs/larvae/flies in the control group.
(3) Robert Jahn (Princeton University / ex-NASA rocket scientist) has an experiment where there is a random event generator (think of it as an electronic coin flipper that in the long run, should produce heads and tails in a proportion that goes closer and closer to 50/50). He investigates the effect of a person's thoughts on the REG results (analogous to whether a person intending "Heads", "Heads", "Heads", will exert a statistically significant result on the final outcome).
Once you consider the (diverse) examples above, you will probably see that it's quite possible to devise all sorts of experiments testing the effect of thoughts on reality in different ways.
Rosenthal's experiment could be re-done in many different ways (eg by substituting rats with some other living things and substituting maze navigation with some other task). In fact Rosenthal's experiment has been replicated on human children (in place of rats, and with IQ tests in place of maze navigation) and that is the experiment for which Rosenthal is most famous.
William Tiller's experiment could also be re-done in many different ways (get experienced meditators to meditate on all sorts of different things - apple seeds? Cancer cells? Goldfish? - and compare results with the control group).
More interesting to me would be experiments along these lines (because I am really more interested in human beings, than in fruit flies or rats or electronic coin flippers):
take a big group of people involved in a certain activity; divide them into two groups; adjust for variables; and get one group to think positive thoughts. Then you check for statistically significant differences in the results of the activity done by the two groups.
Specific examples - you could measure the performance of students in a certain academic course; or the pass rates of soldiers in a certain military training course; or the recovery rates of alcoholics undergoing rehab; or the rate of promotion of 3,000 young executives, or whatever.
In each case, you'd have a control group, and you'd have another group where the members would, say, do a guided meditation or a hypnosis session or a visualisation exercise three times a week, focusing on thoughts with themes like "I am an excellent student"; "I can pass this course and become a commando"; "I do very well in my career". etc etc.
So, yes, the effects of LOA are not only testable, but testable in a wide variety of different ways.