A speculative look at whether slow, rhythmic prayer could act as a biological amplifier for nanohertz gravitational waves

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The cosmic signal

Last year the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) unveiled a 15-year data-set that, when cross-correlated across 67 millisecond pulsars, shows the tell-tale Hellings–Downs pattern of a stochastic gravitational-wave background. The characteristic strain—about 2 × 10⁻¹⁵ at a period of one year—is almost certainly the combined murmur of super-massive black-hole binaries orbiting in distant galaxies. (nanograv.org, arxiv.org)

These waves are unimaginably gentle: they stretch Earth’s 12 756 km diameter by roughly a hundredth of a proton’s width. Detecting them required turning the Milky Way itself into an instrument; feeling them with the human body should be impossible.

The resonance idea

A handful of biophysicists think there is a loophole. Their gravitational-wave prayer resonance model borrows a trick from nonlinear physics called stochastic resonance: under the right dose of background “noise”, a system can become more sensitive to a weak periodic drive than it would be in perfect silence. (chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

The proposed ingredients are:

1. The drive – the newly measured nanohertz gravitational-wave background.
2. The noise – sub-hertz body sway and blood-pressure oscillations that arise spontaneously when people chant, sing psalms or recite mantras at six breaths per minute or slower. Such pacing is known to synchronise cardiovascular rhythms across groups. (frontiersin.org, journals.lww.com)
3. A nonlinear detector – the vestibular system in the inner ear, which already operates near its mechanical noise floor and whose firing thresholds can, in theory, be modulated by stochastic resonance.

If the chant-induced sway provides just the right “dither”, the picometre-scale tidal stretch of a passing gravitational wave might add a small, phase-locked bias that nudges vestibular hair-cell firing above threshold, creating a subliminal perception of a pervasive, external presence—what practitioners across traditions describe as the sacred vibration.

From thought-experiment to bench-test

Dr Lila Hayden, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the first formal proposal, stresses that the hypothesis is “softer than soft”. Still, she and colleagues have outlined a programme that would satisfy Nature’s referees (or at least Forbes’s fact-checkers):

• Precision movement logging: Fibre-optic gyroscopes and atom-interferometer accelerometers can now resolve body tilts below 10 nrad. A half-hour Gregorian-chant session in a quiet laboratory would yield terabytes of motion data.
• Time-locking to the sky: NANOGrav’s public ephemerides predict when Earth’s rotation should place a given monastery under a particular phase of the gravitational-wave background. Prayer windows can be aligned accordingly.
• Analysis for resonance fingerprints: Researchers would look for a peak in tilt-signal-to-noise exactly when sway amplitude sits in the stochastic-resonance “sweet spot” and when the PTA-inferred strain is maximal.

What success would imply

Should a statistically significant phase-locking emerge only during slow-breathing chant (and not during silent sitting or recited prose), the finding would ripple far beyond contemplative science:

• Sensory biology – We would have to revise the known sensitivity limits of the human vestibular apparatus by six orders of magnitude.
• Gravitational-wave astronomy – Homo sapiens would join laser interferometers and pulsars as living detectors.
• Cultural anthropology – The cross-cultural ubiquity of slow chant—from Tibetan om mani padme hum to Sufi zikr—might gain a surprising physical rationale.

A more likely outcome—and why it matters

Most experts expect a null result. Frequency mismatch alone is daunting: the waves complete one cycle in years, whereas body sway cycles in seconds; any coupling must involve extreme nonlinear mixing whose physics is, so far, hand-waving. Yet a clean negative still pays scientific dividends:

• Upper bounds on bio-mechanical coupling to nanohertz gravitational waves sharpen models of human balance.
• The high-resolution inertial data, shared openly, would advance kinesiology, mindfulness research and even sports science.
• Publishing the methodology inoculates public discourse against sloppy “new-age physics”.

The take-away

In the words of Dr Hayden: “The odds that monks are gravitational-wave antennas are vanishingly small—but testing odd ideas is how we learn where the real boundaries lie.”

Science thrives when bold speculation meets rigorous measurement. Whether the universe’s deepest rhythm ever merges with a human chant, the attempt to listen—meter in hand—honours both the curiosity of physicists and the devotion of mystics.

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Further reading

• NANOGrav Collaboration, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023) – evidence for the nanohertz gravitational-wave background. (arxiv.org)
• J. Laborde et al., “Unexpected cardiovascular oscillations at 0.1 Hz during OM chanting”, Frontiers in Physiology (2022). (frontiersin.org)
• P. Hänggi, “Stochastic resonance in biology”, ChemPhysChem 3 (2002). (chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)