Unheralded and Unsung
Despite publications in major journals, Becker's work has been largely unnoticed. He has often worked on his own time and without funding. Scientists are hyperfocused on moleculemolecule interactions and don't believe that electricity or magnetism are significant. Unexplainable results don't seem to prompt new ways of' looking at things. A medical student assigned to spend time in my office told me of research in which she had participated. Chick and quail embryos had their nascent, developing regions of tissue, known as somites, rearranged or removed. Somehow, the little embryos knew what was supposed to be where, and things redeveloped in their proper places. The researchers could not figure out how, but remarked that the teeny birds could alter their somite count "to one more compatible with the host's pattern" and that "the location and size of somites could also be adjusted by the host." To Becker, this is a clear example of the embryo's electromagnetic template in action.
How proteins fold-i.e., configure themselves-is another area of mystery. Conformation to an electronic blueprint, an unexplored avenue, could explain it. Becker even believes that DNA's helical form results from its evolution within a similarly shaped field.
In a 1999 study (in The Journal of Neuro.ucu•nce), embryonic human brain stem cells were transplanted into the brains of adult rats. The human cells then proceeded to migrate, as if they were rats' stem cells, to the precise sites where they would be needed, where they became the appropriate cell types. The authors call this migration a response to "guidance cues and signals," but aren't more specific.
The implications of a morphogenetic field invite speculation. Is it formed at the union of sperm and egg, or does it somehow pre-exist? Rupert Sheldrake, a British Ph.D. biochemist who has written a number of delightful books on the unexplained powers of the mind, believes that the field is not a classical electromagnetic one, but rather a variant not yet known to physics. He postulates that similar fields, as from the same species, resonate with one another, a possible explanation for shared traits, even a collective unconscious. Sheldrake sees out-of-body experiences as those of a morphogenetic field leaving a body and returning. Phantom limbs-the perception of a missing arm or leg as still being there, even feeling pain-can be viewed as a whole-body field effect.
Becker does not know where the fields come from. He has measured them, even mapped them out in amphibians and humans, at least in their direct-current format. His salamander's field map, taken with surface electrodes, was published in Inotitute of Radio Engineers Transaction, in Mec)aal Electronics in 1960. He believes there is a dual nervous system: the conventional one, where impulses travel along nerves, and a more primitive version, where direct currents travel alongside nerves and transmit different kinds of information.
As a matter of fact, most of the cells within the nervous system don't conduct impulses. Known as glial cells, we are taught that they are there to "support" the nerve cells. This could be structural support, protection from infection, or to make something a nerve needs; but, largely, we don't really know what they do. Which is odd, because glial cells are much more numerous than nerve cells: almost half the brain's volume is taken up by glial cells. (They are smaller than nerve cells, so despite greater numbers they don't occupy more space.) Becker thinks one of their functions is to conduct direct-current electricity-a primitive nervous system that augments and completes our more developed, conventional version.
A recent publication in Nature from the University of Rochester suggests that epilepsy may be triggered by glial cells, rather than by nerve cells, as is commonly believed.
Meanwhile, no one is currently pursuing Dr. Becker's line of research.
Nineteen
The God Helmet and the
Temporal Lobes: The Work
of Michael A. Persinger
Michael A. Persinger, Ph.D., is a professor of neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, a good two hundred miles from Toronto up in the mining country north of Lake Huron. He has been there since 1971. A NIED- LINE search using "persinger ma" (October 2005) brings up almost three hundred publications he has authored or coauthored. Nevertheless, the medical colleagues with whom I rub shoulders on a day-to-day basis at an American medical school are unfamiliar with him and his work.
He was already a chemist and a physicist when he decided to become a psychologist. But he combined his science training with his study of human behavior, figuring that brain biology had to be correlated with emotions, fears (real or imagined), and most other aspects of psychopathology that afflict us. While most of the research in this field looks at the diagrammable dance of the brain's molecules, Persinger realized (as did Robert Becker) that the brain was an electric and magnetic organ as well, capable of transmitting and responding to electrical and magnetic fields. This energy is depicted in waveforms that traverse and affect the brain, as do the individual molecules that fall under their influence.
The Rhythms of Brain and Earth
An electroencephalogram (EEG) records minute rhythmic voltages from the scalp. These are the orchestrations of nerve firings, conducted from deeper within the brain. Why, exactly, do nerves fire in synchronous rhythms? We don't really know. In the heart, all the muscle fibers contract in unison so that the heart can function as a pump. Why the resting brain "beats" is a mystery.
Can one look at the brain as an electrical organ? Karl Pribram felt that the nerves' connections (synapses) trafficked electricity in addition to molecular messengers. Becker, as mentioned, believes that the abundant glial cells constitute a primitive nervous system that uses direct electrical currents. Persinger feels that all levels of the brain are responsive to the sea of electricity and magnetism generated by the body and by the earth, and this opens many possibilities.
Persinger's work has been particularly attentive to the effects of the earth's geomagnetic field on behavior. As mentioned, the earth is a big magnet. Living things, by virtue of the electric currents they generate, are little magnets. Little magnets are affected by big magnets and, to a much lesser extent, by each other. Persinger has published research linking variations in the earth's natural magnetic properties to such diverse happenings as commercial air crashes, UFO sightings, visions of religious figures, sudden infant deaths, poltergeists and haunted homes, apparitions of the dead, and impending earthquakes.
Before elaborating on these, a few words about the earth's fields. There is a constancy, which makes compasses reliable; and then there are fluctuations, small but measurable. These include a pulsatile component, at about the same frequency as the brain's basic alpha waves (Becker considered this "breathing with the earth"), and many minor ripples, at intensities similar to the body's own fields. The weather, particularly thunder and lightning storms; the moon, whether it's day or night; and energy radiating from the sun-all affect the earth's field. So although it's always there, it is going to vary at different times and places.
And that becomes one basis for Persinger's studies. Most of' this work was published in the MMEI)I_INE?-indexed journal Perceptual acrd ,lfotor Skill.,, usually with one or two colleagues. As I cite it, I'll just give the year.
• From records of commercial airline crashes (2004), 373 mishaps from 1940 through 2002 were examined. These were attributed to one of four problems: computer error, pilot error, mechanical failures, and, of course, unknown factors. Persinger looked at global geomagnetic activity on the days of the crashes and for three days before and after. He found significantly greater activity on the days of pilot or computer failures, but not when the problem was mechanical or unknown. He hypothesizes that "some factor or factors associated with relative increases in geomagnetic activity may affect complex electronic systems composed of either silica (computer) or carbon (brain) aggregates."
• In "Relations Between UFO Reports within the Uinta Basin and Local Seismicity" (1985), Persinger and seismologist John Derr looked at seismic (earthquake-type) activity in a mountainous area of northeast Utah and rel
ated it to UFO sightings. There was a correlation within about a hundred miles of the activity, but not beyond that. The epicenters here were mere ground vibrations rather than knock-the-cups-off-your-shelf earthquakes, and as they shifted through the area, so did the UFO reports. Persinger believes the strains between the earth's tectonic plates (which can culminate in a quake) generate electrical and magnetic fields that cause both distortions in human perceptions and in the earth's atmosphere.
• In 1989 and in 2001, Persinger and John Derr examined sightings of the Virgin Mary, and related them to electromagnetic changes in the terrain. First, at a Coptic Christian church in Zeitoun, near Cairo, Egypt, hundreds of thousands of people reported seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary from 1968 to 1971. Photos of these showed "irregular blobs of light," according to Persinger. These were of two types: small, rapidly moving lights, perceived by onlookers as doves, or a persisting, rounded glow at the top of the church, visualized as the Virgin Mary. (Pictures of these are available on Web sites, which is to say, not from the medical literature, and these posted photos, for whatever it's worth, show a pretty good rendition of doves and the Virgin Mary.)
An unusual tenfold increase in seismic activity was noted some two hundred miles away. While this is a considerable distance, the concept of linking naturally generated electromagnetic forces with "luminous phenomena" is interesting.
• Subsequently, mid-1990s reports of religious experiences at a Canadian town halfway between Toronto and Ottawa prompted a study. The enlightened area was near a hilltop adjacent to an open-pit magnetite mine (magnetite is an iron ore from which the first magnets were made). Water poured continuously into the mine, which increases the strain on earthquake-prone land masses. Seismic epicenters drifted closer to the hilltop. These unusual "geophysical" conditions made the spot ripe, theoretically, for unusual human perception. Persinger and co-author Lynn Suess were able to associate increases in geomagnetic activity, as well as measurable changes in ambient magnetic fields, with the experiencers' reports.
In both of these "luminous phenomena" events, the belief is that pressure along fault lines generates electromagnetic activity to which some people's brains are sensitive. Whether the perceptions are projections from within the brain, or an enhanced ability to see what normally isn't seeable-that's another question. Persinger recently told writer Mary Roach13 that he can't rule out the latter possibility.
• The brain's pineal gland secretes a hormone called melatonin, which regulates some other hormones and also enhances the immune system. The pineal, in the midline not far behind the eyes, is lightsensitive. More melatonin is made at night (which is why it's sometimes used as a sleeping pill), and its production is affected by other types of'electromagnetic waves as well. Persinger and colleague R. P. O'Connor hypothesized that specific ranges of'geomagnetic activity that cause sudden decreases in nocturnal melatonin might also precipitate sudden infant death, usually a nighttime phenomenon. Their 1997 publication found certain ranges of geomagnetism to correlate with cases of sudden infant death.
In a follow-up paper in 2001, the two looked at occurrences of sudden infant deaths and of hospital admissions of adults with electrical cardiac rhythm disturbances, postulating that geomagnetic blips might be a common denominator. They found that both conditions do vary in tandem with the earth's geomagnetism.
• Poltergeists are literally "noisy ghosts." Persinger (1986) observed their association with strange noises and movements of objects, as well as "electromagnetic peculiarities" and odd human behaviors. Some geographic locales had a lot of cases; others had none. Persinger and Livingston Gearhart, a professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo, found that these hauntings seemed to parallel sudden increases in global geomagnetic activity. Working with geomagnetic records and with reports of poltergeists, similar patterns were observed in Europe and North America: Poltergeist episodes were more likely on or just before days of geomagnetic turbulence.
Try This On
But the singular thing for which Persinger is best known, media-wise, is his electromagnetic helmet. This is a motorcycle-style hard hat fitted with coils and wires that deliver a variety of signals through the brain. These are imperceptible, low-frequency, low-intensity waveforms that can simulate the earth's own fields, and can be adjusted to create different types of brain "experiences." Volunteers so outfitted sit in a sensory-deprivation chamber (it's soundproof, and volunteers' eyes are covered) and may feel relaxed, see God, encounter ghosts or space aliens, go "out-of-body," believe they have lived before, sense a vague "presence," or have no such visions.
Reporters have called this contraption "The UFO Machine" (Spectrum magazine) or "The God Helmet" (Saturday Night magazine), or referred to the experience as "This is Your Brain on God" (Wired magazine) or "God on the Brain" (BBC Two). Here is a sampling of helmet studies-or "transcerebral, weak, complex magnetic fields," as Persinger refers to them:
• (1996) Twenty-one otherwise normal young men and women who believed they had lived a past life were compared to fifty-two who did not. Persinger's surveys of students at his Canadian university consistently show that 25 percent of students believe that they have lived before. Surveys of Americans show the same percentage. Under stimulation for thirty minutes, the "believers" were more likely to experience spinning, tingling, detachment from their bodies, and intrusions of thoughts not their own. Women were more likely than men to be so stimulated. Right-brain tweaking brought more results than left-brain. Persinger uses fields that could occur in the environment under some conditions, and finds some brains more susceptible.
• (1997) Three-minute magnetic bursts were applied to fifteen volunteers and to one "exceptional" subject, chosen because he felt that he could sense people's health problems by looking at their photographs. Nine of the fifteen sensed a "presence," a sort of "you are not alone" feeling. The special subject sensed presences rather easily, including the times when the fields were turned on without his knowing. Persinger believes that the "sensed presence" is a common phenomenon, which includes religious experiences of God or angels, as well as spirit visitations.
• (2000) A forty-five-year-old man who had previously been troubled by a haunt experience had the haunting reproduced in Persinger's laboratory within ten minutes of a field application to the right-brain hemisphere; he even saw the apparition, and said that this "synthetic" ghost was much like the one that had found him on its own.
The three previous studies were reported in Perceptual and Motor SkllL+. The next two are from the International Journal of Neuroscience.
• (2001) People were told an emotionally charged story and then given a recap, either accurate or inaccurate. Different types of complex magnetic fields were fed in as well. One week later, subjects were asked to retell the story. The combination of right-hemisphere stimulation plus the inaccurate summary produced three times as many false memories as did either of these alone.
• (2005) In this one, Persinger and associates waited for squalls of natural geomagnetic activity and then zapped in the weak fields. This turned out to be a more effective way of eliciting a sense of a supernatural presence or sentient being. The question, then, is to what extent turbulence in the electromagnetic weather brings out this perception in people who, by virtue of a little electrical instability in the right side of their brains, are susceptible.
Persinger claims that eighty percent of the people he's helmettested have some sort of altered consciousness during the trial, usually a sensed presence. Generally, the experiences are pleasant; occasionally, they're frightening or unpleasant, or they may include a sensation of someone grabbing you. The Wired reporter tried on the hat and then conjured up a few childhood memories, including one of his girlfriend when he was fourteen. Saturday Night's writer had some pleasant, kaleidoscope-type visual hallucinations. The BBC's correspondent told of the helmet experience of one of Britain's most renowned atheists: His breathing and his arms and legs felt different; he
did not find God.
Persinger's helmet work is hard to confirm, to the extent that it requires his equipment. A Swedish team visited his laboratory, had the equipment demonstrated to them, and then were sent a portable version to try. They concluded that "Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak magnetic fields." They found that "individuals with a high degree of openness to unusual experiences" who, like good hypnosis candidates, were suggestible, were more likely to report an experience. Persinger felt that the researchers used his machinery incorrectly; it does appear that their attempt was made in good faith.
The Temporal Lobe Has Tales to Tell
The electromagnetic stimuli under Persinger's command are usually directed toward the brain's temporal lobes. To the extent that the brain, from the side, resembles a boxing glove, the temporal lobe would be the thumb. This is an interesting part of the brain. The more mundane parts control things like movement, sensation, vision, breathing. But stimulation of the temporal lobe, as neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield did in his epilepsy patients, evokes memories, emotions, hallucinations of sights, sounds, or smells, or deja vu. British neurologist Adam Zeman, writing in the Neu' Eirgland Journal ofMediciiu (January 13, 2005), in a piece called "Tales From the Temporal Lobes," calls them "a monumental library equipped to catalogue, store, and retrieve the experiences of 'a lifetime." He points out how disturbances in their function, such as epilepsy, can create amnesia, incongruous emotions, or even out-of-body experiences.
Thus, some "paranormal" phenomena can be attributed to seizure activity within the temporal lobes. Temporal lobe attacks are currently called partial seizures; consciousness may or may not be lost. They've been also called psychomotor or temporal lobe epilepsy. These attacks are different from generalized seizures, which result in whole-body-shaking, fall-to-the-floor unconsciousness. A partial, or temporal lobebased, seizure might trigger such a full-blown convulsion, or it might merely cause episodes of bizarre behavior with amnesia rather than a classic epileptic fit. Psychiatric texts make mention of this.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 19