As much as what the eye can see…

How much would that be? In answer I guess most people would offer something that would depend on visual acuity, or the absence of visual obstruction. While it seems perfectly normal that what you see is what you percieve, quite the opposite is true.

A recent physics article in physorg.com explained it as follows:

This is a consequence of the eye's main characteristic, namely as a detection threshold. Below a certain threshold number of incoming photons, the eye remains blind (no light is seen), whereas above the threshold the efficiency (i.e. the probability of seeing) is close to one.

In their calculations, the authors also considered the influence of experimental imperfections, such as photon losses, which are inevitable in a real experiment. They found that the setup is surprisingly robust. A strong Bell violation can be obtained even in case of high losses, demonstrating the presence of entanglement. This is a very astonishing feature since entanglement is generally an extremely fragile property, highly sensitive to experimental imperfections such as losses.

I may have this wrong, but what I think it means is that our eye’s make things up, in this particular case it is photon’s, but it could be just about anything you see.

If you can imagine your perception as a flat screen TV in which there are increasingly more pixels dead, our perception of the degrading picture will remain as it was without any dead pixels.

But perception is not the only ability that can be influenced by entanglement? It also plays a role in something known as the placebo effect.

Modern science fails medicine

Contemporary medicine has come a long way since the Ancient Greeks, where getting a cure meant sleeping over in a temple where a deity would appear to give us advice in a dream, but there is many a wisdom that has endured, and much of the knowledge they gained we have lost.
 

With the high-tech tools at every clinicians beck and call, and modern day diagnostic devices to prod and to probe every cavity and crevice we have, the familiar Rod of Asclepios may seem like a rock to an Apple, but the traditional system of medicine as practiced by the ancient Greeks still form the foundation of Western Medicine.

 

In the East, the Indian system of Ayurveda is in practice much the same way as it was, centuries before Hippocrates formulated his Oath, but it was the Greeks that started to shift the focus of healing from a spiritual practice to a physical science. 

Since the dawn of the scientific method, modern day medicine has established rigorous research methods, where the results are testable and reproducible, and where there is little room for veda’s or pressure points or any of the other “alternative” medical practice. As science and technology developed, medicine became more and more reliant on medications, and the practice of finding remedies and cures in the natural environment slowly gave way to the pharmaceutical industry that we have today. 

The development of biologically active chemical compounds introduced medicine to statistical measures to ensure therapeutic value. It also gave raise to concepts like the Bell Curve distributions we commonly see in study populations, and anomalies like the Placebo Effect that we still can't explain. Far from being the infallible measuring tool, the scientific method is at a loss it would seem and the attitude of most researchers have typically been to keep a good eye on it, and then cautiously ignore it. 

While some are insisting on finding a reason for the anomaly, others are starting to wonder if the scientific method is the staff of good measure that we claim, and every so often there are murmurs that question the validity of biomedical research, particularly as practiced by the pharmaceutical industry.

While the Temple of Asclepius may have long since crumbled to dust, there are those that wonder if the smoldering smoke doesn't mean there's a fire after all. Meanwhile the "art" of Ayurveda is still alive and well, and like traditional Chinese medicine it has seem to have stood the test of time. Though neither may  be able to provide the answers with statistically proven relevance, I cannot help thinking there's more to the so-called 'ancient' arts of healing than most of our physicians would care to admit.