Not a Machine but a Flame | The Biology of Energy at Columbia and Beyond

About this episode

What is “energy” in energy healing? Every healer in this series uses the word. Every patient reaches for it. Ancient healing traditions built entire systems around it. And modern researchers are striving to study it. But what is energy — biologically, physically, measurably — and how does it move through the body to influence health and healing? In this episode, three renowned scientists offer remarkable visions that, taken together, start to answer this question. Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University has spent his career studying mitochondria, the body's cellular power sources, and has found them far more connected to our inner experiences, our consciousness, than biomedicine ever assumed, and likely far more central to how we heal. Richard Hammerschlag, PhD, co-authored the paper that helped define the modern science of the biofield: the organizing fields of energy and information that operate within the body and extend outward from it.  Like the nested Qi fields of older traditions, these are dynamic interrelating layers — energy running all the way in and likely all the way out. Neil Theise, MD, of NYU helped identify the interstitium, a remarkable recent major dis