Michael Persinger

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Dr. Michael A. Persinger (born June 26, 1945), a cognitive neuroscience researcher, has worked since 1971 at Laurentian University, Canada.

Early life

Persinger, though born in Jacksonville, Florida, grew up primarily in Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. He attended Carroll College from 1963 to 1964, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1967. He then obtained an M.A. in physiological psychology from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba in 1971.

Research and academic work

Persinger focuses much of his work on the commonalities that exist between the sciences. He aims to integrate fundamental concepts of various branches of science. He organized the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University. This program became one of the first to integrate chemistry, biology and psychology.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of much of his work, Persinger insists on publishing his techniques and results within the public forum (the scientific literature). Except for $10,000 given to him in 1983 by a researcher from the U.S. Navy who had an interest in magnetic fields and brain activity, his private practice has supported all of his work. Laurentian University supplies only space and infrastructure. Recently, Persinger has received grants from a Canadian SIDS foundation.

Magnetic neurotheology

During the 1980s Persinger stimulated people's temporal lobes artificially with a weak magnetic field to see if he could induce a religious state (see God helmet). He found that the field could produce the sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room".

In 2005 Pehr Granqvist, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, questioned Persinger's neurotheological findings in a paper published in Neuroscience Letters. Dr. Granqvist believes Dr. Persinger's work failed to utilise "double blind" methodology. Those conducting Persinger's trials (often graduate students) knew what sort of results to expect, giving rise to the risk that they could transmit unconscious cues to experimental subjects. Persinger's group also frequently gave subjects an idea of what they expected by asking subjects to fill in (prior to the trials) questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences. Dr. Granqvist set about conducting the experiment double-blinded, and found that the presence or absence of the field had no relationship with any religious or spiritual experience reported by the participants.

Dr. Persinger stands by his findings. He argues that "Dr Granqvist and his colleagues failed to generate a 'biologically effective signal' in their subjects because of a failure to use the equipment properly". He says the Granqvist group "omitted our two major publications, with 148 people, that had been completed under double blind conditions".

In a December 2004 issue of Nature, reporting on the Granqvist/Persinger controversy, Susan Blackmore, a former academic psychologist and parapsychology researcher, expressed her reluctance to give up on the theory just yet: "When I went to Persinger's lab and underwent his procedures I had the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had." "I'll be surprised if it turns out to be a placebo effect."

Other critics state that Persinger uses magnetic stimuli orders of magnitude too weak to influence any brain activity. People routinely encounter magnetic-field strengths and frequencies similar to those used by Persinger when they cook over electric stoves or use electric hair-driers, yet people do not typically report religious experiences during these activities. In contrast, transcranial magnetic stimulation with commercial devices requires magnetic stimuli millions of times greater in strength either to marginally stimulate or to inhibit brain activity. This raises a problem as to what physical mechanism would account for the results Persinger claims to have induced in his subjects using far weaker stimuli.

Persinger theorizes, however, that the intensity of the magnetic field does not matter, but the pattern (information) that it carries does. For example, one can turn on a television set with just snow on the channel and increase the volume, yet it does not convey the same information as a network channel set on a minimum volume. However, how this explanation answers the criticisms (or how Persinger could test his explanation) remains unexplained. Studies currently continue which examine exposure to different patterns of electromagnetic fields with varying intensities in an effort to explain this phenomenon.

Tectonic Strain Theory

Tectonic strain theory (Earthlights)
Claims
Related scientific disciplines
Year proposed
  • 1975
Original proponents
  • Michael Persinger
Subsequent proponents
  • Persinger and Paul Devereux
(Overview of pseudoscientific concepts)

Persinger has also come to public attention due to his 1975 Tectonic Strain Theory (TST) of how geophysical variables may correlate with sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Persinger argued that strain within the earth's crust near seismic faults produces intense electromagnetic (EM) fields, creating bodies of light that some interpret as glowing UFOs. Alternatively, the EM fields generate hallucinations in the temporal lobe, based on images from popular culture, of alien craft, beings, communications, or creatures.

Canadian researcher Chris Rutkowski of the University of Manitoba has become a prominent harsh critic of Persinger's Tectonic Strain Theory. For one thing, Rutowski argues, in order to try to accommodate UFO sightings in regions far removed from faults, Persinger has claimed that UFO-like lights or hallucinations can manifest hundreds of miles away from an area of seismic activity. Not only does this place an absurdly great distance between the actual area of tectonic stress and the surmised significant EM field, it also makes the theory unscientific by destroying any possible predictive power. Nearly every place on the planet lies within a few hundred miles of a seismically active area. Rutkowski pointed out severe flaws in Persinger's statistical methodology, since he confused possible correlation (however weak) with causality. For example, one could more easily explain occasional clusters of UFO sightings along earthquake fault-lines by the fact that populations often occur there in higher densities and by the fact that transportation routes often follow major fault lines, such as the San Andreas fault in California.

As with criticisms of Persinger's claims that minute laboratory magnetic fields can invoke hallucinations, Rutowski also points out that Persinger's inferred seismic EM fields would have much less influence than what people commonly experience near electrical appliances like television sets or hair driers. This again raises the question as to why people don't experience UFOs or aliens far more often than they do, or why these hypothetical hallucinations from electrical devices wouldn't drown out any possible contribution from much weaker geophysical fields. Once again, Persinger notes that the magnitude of the EM fields may have less significance than the particular temporal patterns.

In the UK, Paul Devereux advocates a variant geophysical theory similar to TST, the Earthlights theory. However, unlike Persinger, Devereaux generally restricts such effects to the immediate vicinity of a fault line. Devereux's approach also differs from Persinger's in holding triboluminescence rather than piezoelectricity as the "more likely candidate" for the production of naturally occurring UFOs. Devereux doesn't advocate, as in Persinger's TST, that the phenomenon might create hallucinations of UFO encounters in people, instead proposing an even more radical hypothesis: that earthlights may possess intelligence and even have the ability to read witness' thoughts. [1]

That witnesses sometimes see very diffuse lights during (and sometimes before and after) very severe earthquakes may give weak support to some parts of TST and Earthlights theory (see Earthquake lights). However, whether such light phenomena can occur near fault lines not under severe stress and also manifest as confined rather than diffuse light, remains at best questionable and controversial. Even critics like Rutowski think such theories hold some promise for explaining a small percentage of UFO phenomena, but doubt that they can ever offer a comprehensive explanation for the vast majority of unexplained UFO cases.

Witnesses have reported earthlights-type phenomena (also referred to as "ghost lights") from around the world. Various theories other than TST have attempted to explain them. The Hessdalen Lights in Norway [2] provide a well-known example of repeatable light phenomena that have undergone intensive study. Whether these light phenomena will ultimately support either Persinger's or Devereux's theories will have to await further research.

The temporal lobes of epileptic rats

In one paper, Persinger also theorized that extremely tiny fluctuations in Earth's geomagnetic field caused some of his experimental lab rats prone to epilepsy to suddenly drop dead. Persinger considered these rats unusually sensitive to such fields because of their unstable temporal lobes that triggered epileptic seizures. Therefore, Persinger thought the fields affected the temporal lobes, a theme that carries through his present work. However, critics again portray Persinger's methods and theories as unscientific, noting that something like a simple lab infection in the animals would provide a far more likely cause of their sudden death. The matter remains unresolved, however, as such supposed "infections" do not usually occur widely or virulently across the laboratory, nor do they usually affect cagemates.

External links

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