by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
May 18, 2026
from PierreKoryMedicalMusings Website

Ancient texts, water chemistry,

sound, plants, and the nervous system

all kept pointing to the same principle:

ordered input supports alignment,

while chaotic input disrupts it...

Since I was, in effect, writing two books at the same time, my mind kept moving between lines in Scripture and deeper dives into water chemistry and geology.

Going back and forth like that, I kept coming back to the same impression.

Ancient texts kept returning to the same themes:

light and darkness, purity and corruption, order and disorder.

Scripture did it. The War Scroll did it. Alchemy did it...

Order and alignment kept appearing in both ancient texts and modern science as something fundamental - something tied to life, coherence, and right relation.

The more ordered a thing became, and the more its parts were brought into alignment, the more it seemed to hold together, to function, and to endure.

I started with a hunch and decided to follow it.

Water drew me in early because its mineral composition - and the ionic environment that arises from it - shape its state, and as that state becomes more ordered and internally aligned, its capacity to carry, transmit, and sustain biological processes changes with it.

What Emoto was actually Seeing

That brought me back to a topic I had explored months earlier in From Volcanoes to Vitality, the work of Masaru Emoto, who became widely known for,

flash-freezing and photographing water after it had been exposed to different inputs - spoken words, written labels, prayer, and music - and for reporting that "positive" inputs produced ice crystals with symmetrical, ordered patterns while "negative" ones yielded fragmented and irregular formations.

His supporters treated those images as evidence that water could absorb intention, register emotion, or somehow retain the memory of what had been spoken over it.

His critics dismissed the whole thing as pseudoscience. I believe that both sides misunderstand the chemistry of water itself.

Water does not respond to emotions or remember words. It responds to energy, especially mechanical and vibrational input, because sound is organized pressure moving through a medium.

As vibrations propagate through water, they induce motion of ions and water molecules in patterns that reflect the frequency, wavelength, and amplitude of the input, sometimes promoting alignment and symmetry, and at other times disrupting and dispersing.

Water does not "understand" language in any cognitive sense.

 

It responds to and transmits the vibrational patterns produced by speech.

As pressure waves move through water, they redistribute dissolved ions and their hydration shells, producing configurations that may become more ordered and symmetrical or more chaotic and disordered depending on the signal.

The critical step in Emoto's work was the freezing process, which effectively flash-froze a dynamic system into a static lattice at a single moment in time.

The photograph did not record the meaning of what was said.

 

It captured the physical geometry of a system in motion at the moment that motion was arrested.

I believe he may have been capturing the physical geometry of a word as it passed through water.

That changed my interpretation of his work. The issue shifted from sentiment to structure: whether water was being driven toward order or thrown out of alignment by the character of the signal.

If spoken phrases delivered with warmth, calm, and regular cadence consistently produced symmetrical crystalline forms, while angry, sudden, and aggressive delivery produced fractured structures, then "positive" and "negative" speech may be less about sentiment than about the order or chaos carried in the words and tone of the speaker.

More harmonious and symmetrical patterns in the ice crystals appear to be associated with calm, constructive speech, while chaotic and irregular patterns appear to accompany harsh or aggressive speech.

Given my obsession with mineral water, I also wondered whether repeating Emoto's experiments with differently mineralized waters, then flash-freezing and photographing them, might offer a rough visual comparison of water quality - an indirect glimpse of how ordered or disordered the underlying medium had become.

I briefly considered building such a setup myself, if only to see what Rock Water would look like next to my tap water.

Then again, I might prefer not to know...

Ordered Input, Biological Response

Dorothy Retallack's work in the mid-twentieth century showed a similar relationship in plants.

Plants exposed to classical music grew more vigorously and leaned toward the source.

 

Plants exposed to loud, chaotic noise showed stress or died.

Later work clarified the mechanism.

Plants were not judging the music being played, just as water was not carrying meaning.

 

Plants were responding differently to different physical inputs.

Similar observations have been reported in informal classroom rice experiments in many places around the world.

Cooked rice is placed into two separate jars, labeled "love" and "hate."

One is repeatedly exposed to speech delivered in a calm tone, with a regular cadence and measured amplitude - words expressing care, patience, and kindness.

 

The other is subjected to loud, irregular, and aggressive speech - words expressing anger, hostility, and contempt.

The reported outcome is strikingly consistent:

the rice exposed to the latter tends to degrade more rapidly.

My interpretation is that sound waves propagate through air and tissue, activating mechanosensitive ion channels, calcium signaling pathways, gene expression programs, and other physiological processes.

Plants appear to fare best when exposed to,

ordered, rhythmic, and properly aligned input, while irregular, chaotic, or excessive vibration seems to burden them.

Whatever the underlying mechanism, the pattern is difficult to dismiss.

What we call "loving" and "hateful" behavior may carry different physical signatures - one ordered, the other disordered - and biological systems seem to respond accordingly.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the human nervous system follows the same pattern.

Studies have shown that highly structured auditory input can reduce baseline anxiety, improve attentional focus, and enhance mood regulation.

Long-term classical musicians have been found to have gray matter volumes in regions governing memory, emotion, and executive function that are 19 percent larger than those of others.

 

Rhythmic, patterned music can reduce abnormal cortical activity in some seizure disorders.

 

Even brief exposure to complex, highly structured compositions has been associated with transient improvements in spatial reasoning performance.

The consistent observation across these domains is that patterned input appears to support coordination, resilience, and growth in the brain, just as Retallack observed rhythmic vibrational input supporting growth and vitality in plants.

Order versus disorder.

 

Physics, not psychology...