Useful things to look into to make more sense of this matter:
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Plants have been observed to grow differently based on what type of music they are exposed to. Soundwaves are not just soundwaves, after all. Vedic Chants, Classical Music and the like seem to have produced much better growth than disharmonious music or even Rock Music(I love rock music, but it is what it is I guess).
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There is the famous Masaru Emoto, that Japanese guy who did experiments on how water seems to be influenced by human emotions. He also observed differences in rice decay based on what intent was projected on them. However, the scientific community seems to have dismissed him (as in, they cannot replicate his experiments in a statistically significant way).
Interestingly though, I have often come across observations in various cultures that water acts as an amplifier/container, especially for emotions. For example, the archeologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge discussed this many times in his books. The most noteworthy examples are negative strong emotions(such as the places where people commited suicide) leaving an “imprint” for a long time after the passing of the person, which were noticed by people who didn’t know about the events of the place. They would step into a specific spot, and suddenly feel deeply depressed or suicidal, and were shocked to find that just stepping away a few steps would change their emotions again. The key was that there was usually a river, underground river or waterfall nearby. Of course, these are anecdotes, but I doubt there will ever be mass-scale studies on this due to a lack of interest from science. The question is also if these things can be tested on a mass-scale, since scientific double/triple blind experiments assume that humans are largely the same(or that the scientist assumes his independent existence from what he observes), when they clearly are not, at least when it comes to the perception of subtler phenomena.
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In Southern India, I’ve personally met local healers that have explained to me that the industrial production of medications cannot replicate home-made drugs that were made with careful thought and the right emotions. In fact, they go as far as saying that the alchemist himself is an ingredient in any alchemical operation, meaning that if you were, for example, to materially replicate an Alchemist experiment, but your consciousness wasn’t pure or in the right mindstate, it will not work as described. This in itself could also be one of the reasons why many techniques from a long time ago no longer seem to produce the described outcomes, the vessels have changed since most modern people unconsciously operate on the same materialist framework now, even in India.
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It is a common belief in multiple cultures that engaging in spiritual practices such as chanting specific mantras a long period of time while wearing amulets or bracelets made from specific materials such as metals somehow affects these items, and thus, putting these items on has been individually observed to induce drastic changes. Same, but to a much lesser extent, with clothes. Same as with the plant experiments above- soundwaves seem to affect matter in ways that can sometimes be felt but not measured in a meaningful way yet. But interestingly, mantra practice in India often quickly progresses from spoken words to thought syllables, so there are no sound waves in that instance, but thought forms. And that leads to the same thing this thread is discussing, can thought forms in the form of emotions affect the quality of food?
Now, Luther seems to argue that these are essentially reducible to mere anecdotes and/or the placebo effect- and he is mostly right about that. However, as @JCDenton has already pointed out above, the placebo and nocebo effects are themselves hard to explain, and I find it interesting that psychology so casually uses them, when some instances of placebo are really hard to explain(like placebo drugs curing cancer in some instances I’ve read). If mind was something separate from matter, how can it self-destruct or heal seemingly physical matter? Psychology itself is founded on a a bunch of unproven assumptions(brain creates consciousness, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter) and has been used to deal with observations that make materialist people uncomfortable- and the way out for them is physicalist reductionism. My doctor will always assign things he doesn’t understand in my body to “psychosomatic” symptoms, and with that, he simply dresses up ignorance in fancy sounding words. They still happen. I can report them. But they don’t seem measurable and what cannot be measured does not exist, according to materialist science. I think @emperor_obewan made a good point somewhere on these forums that traditional forms of meditation were often designed to make the meditator aware of his unmeasurable consciousness that is behind the manifold forms it takes in thoughts, emotions and so on. But even here, the materialism seeps through in that people usually chase “sensations”, “phenomena” and things that can be measured. They are implicitly seen as the only real thing.
- A classic argument by materialists is that people like Emoto were blinded by confirmation bias. The argument of the scientific community is that double/triple blind trials eliminate this issue- but they still choose the setup of the experiment and what cases/papers to look at and what phenomena to look at or to dismiss, which is also based on confirmation bias(set of assumptions driving your interpretation). Going further, it has been argued before that the strength of conviction influences an experiment in these spheres- for example, someone could be a legitimate psychic, but the presence of the 100% sceptical James Randi would make the psychic fail, even if they didn’t have the intent to scam(I don’t know if this happened, this is just an example). Essentially, this boils down to the idea that in order for magic to work, everyone in the room also has to share the belief in its efficacy. This is actually explored seriously in Medical Anthropology, especially in India. A sceptical mind can be “overridden”, but only by someone who is absolutely sure of themselves/has a “stronger” conviction.
Something in this direction needs to be explored to find out why many things that people experience on a daily basis don’t replicate that well in statistical scientific trials.
My guess, there are unexplained “confounders”- variables researchers are not accounting for, because they either are subtle and outside of the knowledge framework people use right now(philosophical materialism). If this is the case, there will be no change anytime soon, as the framework itself guarantees that most scientists concerned about their “scientific standing” will never want to even touch these topics, and those that do, influence the outcome of their studies with their own predictable assumptions about reality. And the few studies I’ve found that were actually confronted with troubling results that go against the assumptions of neuroscience(such as the paper that dealt with the observation that people that experienced the highest intensity in terms of subjective experience, as in near death experiences or strong hallucinogens like Ayahuasca, are measured to have next to no brain activity, which doesn’t make sense in neuroscience, as the opposite is assumed), usually end the paper with “more studies need to be done” and ignore the implications of their experimental outcomes.
In any case though, Luther’s statements seem far too certain given that he cannot possibly know all instances of such phenomena, and there are no large scale studies to my knowledge that would conclusively prove any of the following statements:
What is certain though is that we are sitting on many centuries of anecdotes and people continue to experience such things. We cannot dismiss these things as hogwash based on a very recent perspective introduced by atomists/materialists. So I would suggest just sticking with what works for you- if you are sensitive to these things- work with them!
