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This is something I toy with a lot, the whole question of whether or not thoughts can influence our external world and those around us. I think yes to some degree, but... It's all such a murky business. Too many variables are involved in this argument. Do fortunate people suffer because others are thinking negative thoughts or is it because the fortunate person is paranoid and projecting their own anxiety onto someone else? How is it possible to measure something like that? It's all so subjective.

Superstitions were a relatively simple way of making sense of the world in a time when not much was known about it. But does that mean that these modes of thought are meaningless in today's world? In a way, we're even more uncertain about the world now than we were a few centuries ago. Physicists in the beginning of the last century thought they had solved all of the world's great mysteries. Then they realized that they really knew nothing at all and we're still not any closer to unraveling our world's secrets. What's to say that the major points we're teaching in science textbooks now won't change in ten years? It's almost guaranteed that they will. What's to say that these superstitions don't reveal something important about ourselves and about the natural world at large?

I know that everyone and their brother has seen this movie and talked about it to death, but this seems like something straight out of What the Bleep Do We Know? And the whole concept does make sense in a way. After all, if thoughts supposedly arise from physical structures (i.e. neural connections) then why can't thoughts influence those physical structures in turn?