Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts
Friday, October 22, 2010
Ashtar Command Gravity (Official Full Length Music Video) plus documentary
Debut full length Ashtar Command video plus opening documentary, directed by Marc-Edouard Leon. Uncensored version online for the time being. Music video starts at 6:08. Spread the Light!
Friday, March 26, 2010
Ashtar Command featured on Grey's Anatomy
Ashtar Command "holding out for love" on ABC's Grey's Anatomy.
Song plays for about the first 3 minutes of the episodes at the opening.
listen to the song on youtube here
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Metalocalypse episode 201 "Dethecution"
Buy at iTunes
check me out in action at 2:05 in
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
lockhead martin senior scientist boyd bushman interview on anti-gravity,
click beneath for parts 2, and 3
Monday, July 14, 2008
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Kenneth Anger Films available for online streaming
Brilliant director and Angeleno Kenneth Angers' landmark films are available for online streaming
http://www.subcin.com/anger.html
Scorpio Rising
Invocation of My Demon Brother
Lucifer Rising
Friday, July 11, 2008
KLF videos
here is a small collection of videos, interviews, and documentaries about one of the most important bands of the 20th century
klf burn a million pounds
More...
the last train to trancentral
what time is love
the rites of mu
fuck the millenium
timelords-doctorin the tardis
kylie said to jason
3AM Eternal
KLF the documentary
KLF interview
KLF-it's grim up north
KLF behind the scenes
klf burn a million pounds
More...
the last train to trancentral
what time is love
the rites of mu
fuck the millenium
timelords-doctorin the tardis
kylie said to jason
3AM Eternal
KLF the documentary
KLF interview
KLF-it's grim up north
KLF behind the scenes
french spiderman Alain Robert
Bio
Alain Robert (born as Robert Alain Philippe on 7 August 1962), is a French rock and urban climber, from Digoin, Saône-et-Loire, Bourgogne, France. Nicknamed after the Marvel Comics character "Spider-Man," or "The Human Spider" he is famous for scaling skyscrapers.
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Alain Robert climbing Petronas Tower 2 in March 2007
Robert has scaled 85 giant structures around the globe including many of the world's tallest structures, most of which he has scaled using only his bare hands and climbing shoes.
Robert began climbing as a young boy, scaling rock cliffs in the area around his home. His buildering career began at the age of 12 when he forgot his keys and was locked out of his parents' eighth-floor apartment. Instead of waiting for them to return home, he simply scaled the exterior wall to his home.
In 1982 he suffered two accidents, the first in January at the age of 19 and the second in September at the age of 20. He fell 15 metres (49 ft) on both occasions. He suffered multiple fractures and now suffers from permanent vertigo. The doctors considered him 60 percent handicapped and told him he would not be able to climb again. However, within 6 months he was climbing again. He kept taking on more and more challenging structures and improving his skills. He polished his rock-climbing skills in the French Alps before turning to buildings.
Strategy
Because authorities will not normally give him permission for such dangerous exploits, Robert usually appears, at dawn, on the side of whichever giant skyscraper he has chosen to climb. His exploits attract crowds of onlookers who stop to watch him climb, in awe of what is happening. As a consequence, Alain has been arrested many times, in various countries, by law enforcement officials waiting for him at the end of his climb. The arrests and trials are normally little more than brief formalities and he has always been discharged.
Robert's physical conditioning and expert climbing technique allow him to climb using the small protrusions of building walls and windows (such as window ledges and frames). Many of his climbs provide him no opportunity to rest and can last over an hour. At 1.65 m (5'5") tall, he is short and light, attributes that enhance his dexterity while climbing. He sometimes has a small bag of climbing chalk powder (similar to powdered rosin), which is used to absorb sweat, fastened around his waist.
Career
Robert's urban climbing career has been characterized by an ever-expanding list of famous landmarks which includes the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Montparnasse Tower in Paris, as well as the world's tallest skyscrapers. In the 1990s, as his exploits brought him worldwide media exposure, speculation began as to whether or not he would attempt the tallest building in the world at the time: the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Although Malaysian authorities were expecting his attempt, they were still astonished when one day in 1997 he suddenly appeared several floors up on the side of the tower. He was eventually arrested at the 60th floor, 28 floors below the top.
While scaling the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois in 1999, he encountered the most challenging climbing conditions in his career. Near the top of the 110-story building, a thick fog set in that covered the glass and metal wall of the last 20 floors with moisture, making it dangerously slippery. Although the climb became agonizingly slow and very strenuous, Alain Robert overcame the difficulties and reached the top.
In 2000, Robert climbed the 23 metres (75 ft) high Luxor Obelisque in Place de la Concorde, France.
In February 2003, he legally climbed the 200 metres (656 ft) National Bank of Abu Dhabi, UAE, watched by about 100,000 spectators.
It has become more frequent for Robert to be paid to scale buildings as part of publicity efforts. In May 2003 he was paid approximately $18,000 to climb the 95 metres (312 ft) Lloyd's of London to promote the premiere of the movie Spider-Man on the British television channel Sky Movies.
On October 19, 2004, he scaled the 187 metres (614 ft) headquarters of the French oil company Total while wearing a Spider-Man costume.
Robert scaled Taipei 101 on December 25, 2004, a few days before its grand opening as the tallest building in the world. The 508 metres (1,667 ft) climb was legal, part of the week's festivities. The skyscraper's outwardly slanting sides posed no apparent difficulty for him, but heavy rains in Taiwan resulted in a climb lasting four hours--double his estimate.
On June 11, 2005 he climbed the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong, scaling 283 metres (928 ft) to reach the top of the 62-story tower.
On September 1, 2006, he climbed the tallest building in Lithuania and the Baltic States - Europa Tower, 148 metres (486 ft), in Vilnius. Wearing a black suit and using a safety rope, which he detached several times, he reached the observation deck of the building, 114 metres (374 ft), in 40 minutes. In 2006 he also climbed Torre Vasco da Gama in Portugal as part of an advertisement for Optimus, a national mobile operator. He finished the year climbing the Santa Fe World Plaza in Mexico City, on December 7th. On 23 of February 2007, he legally climbed the headquarters Building of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) on the coast of Abu Dhabi city (United Arab Emirates).
On March 20, 2007, he again climbed the Petronas Twin Towers, marking the tenth anniversary of his previous ascent of this building. Upon reaching the 60th floor, he allowed himself to be apprehended . He flew the Malaysian flag and drew applause from waiting police, fire crew, and media representatives before handing himself in. He was handcuffed and escorted off the premises before being driven to a police station.
On May 31, 2007, he scaled the 88-story Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, then China's tallest skyscraper, once again wearing a Spider-Man costume. Robert was later arrested and jailed for 5 days before being expelled from China. In November 2007, Robert was invited by the local government of Zhangjiajie, a scenic region in the southern province of Hunan, to climb the 1,518 metres (4,980 ft) Tianmen mountain to boost the profile of the region and bring in tourists.
On September 4, 2007, he climbed the 244 metres (801 ft) Federation Tower office building in Moscow, (Russia's tallest skyscraper), in 30 minutes using a ladder. Detained by police, he could face a fine for violating safety norms at a construction site despite being told by his sponsor that permission had been granted for him to climb safely.
On December 18, 2007, he climbed the 29-story Portland House office building in London, (Westminster's tallest building). It took him just over 40 minutes. Police taped off the area and later arrested him for criminal damage and wasting police time.
On April 15, 2008, he climbed the 60-story Four Seasons Place in Hong Kong. The police and 4 fire engines were standing by and it took him almost 1 hour to reach the top. Alain encountered difficulty at the top when he found that the last 5 metres were impossible to climb. He had to climb sideways until he reached a corner and managed with difficulty to reach the top. He almost fell when a woman on the other side of the glass screamed and almost fainted. Witnesses said that he was detained upon completing the climb. He stated that his climb was intended to increase awareness of global warming.
On June 5, 2008, he climbed the New York Times Building in New York City, USA. He unfurled a banner with a slogan about global warming, and then was arrested by police on the roof. The banner read "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week" At the time, he was wearing a sweatshirt advertising his website: TheSolutionIsSimple.org
Notable climbs
Alain Robert climbing Torre Agbar (Barcelona, 2007-09-12.
A few of the more than 85 skyscrapers and monuments climbed by Alain Robert:[10]
Sydney, Australia – Sydney Tower and the Sydney Opera House
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Hotel Vermont
Montreal, Quebec, Canada – Crown Plaza Hotel
Hong Kong
Four Seasons Place
The Far East Finance Centre
The Cheung Kong Centre
London
One Canada Square
Lloyd's building
Portland House
Paris, France
Eiffel Tower
Grande Arche at La Défense
The Luxor Obelisk in Place de la Concorde
Tour Montparnasse
Tour Cristal at Front de Seine
Mercurial Towers at Bagnolet
Frankfurt, Germany – Dresdner Bank Tower
Milan, Italy – Banca di Milano building
Tokyo, Japan – Shinjuku Center Building
Warsaw, Poland – Marriott Hotel
Johannesburg, South Africa – IBM Tower
Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates – National Bank of Abu Dhabi and the Etisalat building
Abu Dhabi Investment Authority [ADIA], Headquarters Building, UAE
United States of America
New York Times Building– New York City
Empire State Building – New York City
Sears Tower – Chicago, Illinois
Golden Gate Bridge – San Francisco, California
Blue Cross Tower – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Luxor Hotel pyramid – Las Vegas, Nevada
Tampere, Finland – Hotel Ilves
Malaysia
Petronas Tower 1 – Kuala Lumpur (arrested at the 60th floor in 1997)
Petronas Tower 2 – Kuala Lumpur (arrested at the 60th floor in visit Malaysia year 2007)
Sabah Foundation Building – Kota Kinabalu, Sabah (for fund raising)
Melia Hotel – Kuala Lumpur
Singapore – Overseas Union Bank Centre (arrested at 21st floor in 2000)
Taiwan – Taipei 101
Venezuela – Parque Central Torre
Barcelona, Spain – Torre Agbar
Portugal
Torre Vasco da Gama
25 de Abril Bridge[11]
Mexico City- Santa Fé World Plaza Corporate Tower
Bratislava, Slovakia – Slovak Radio Building
Shanghai, China – Jin Mao Building
Moscow, Russia - West Federation Tower
São Paulo, Brazil - Edifício Itália[12]
[edit]Accidents
In a 2005 interview, Alain Robert said that he has fallen seven times in his life. The worst was his second fall in 1982.
On January 18, 1982, at 19, he fell 15 metres (49 ft) when his anchor and rope gave way during training. He fractured his wrists, heels and nose and underwent three operations.
On September 29, 1982, at 20, he fell 15 metres (49 ft) when his rope came undone during rappelling, (abseiling). He was in a coma for five days and fractured both forearms, his elbow, pelvis, and nose. His elbow was also dislocated and a nerve was damaged leaving him partially paralyzed. He also suffered cerebral edema and vertigo. He underwent six operations on his hands and elbow.
In 1993, he fell 8 metres (26 ft) while showing students how to rely on their legs when climbing. He kept his hands behind his back on an easy route but lost his balance and fell headfirst shattering both wrists. He went into another coma and spent two months in the hospital.
In 2004, he fell 2 metres (6.6 ft) when climbing a traffic light whilst posing for a photo in an interview. He landed on his elbow and needed forty stitches, but a month later he climbed the world’s tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, as part of its official opening week.
Arrests
On November 22, 2005, he was arrested as he began to climb the One Houston Center building in Houston, Texas. He was charged with criminal trespassing and misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance. The controlled substance charge was due to two pills that the police found in his possession. He claimed the pills were the prescription drug Urbanyl, a medication used to prevent epileptic seizures. He spent two days in jail and then appeared in court on November 29 and provided proof of a doctor's prescription for the medication, asking that the drug charges be dropped. On December 20 he climbed the Cristal Tower in Paris in protest of the arrest. His next court appearance was scheduled for January 4, 2006, but Robert said that he would be climbing in Mexico at that time.
On March 15, 2006 he climbed one of the 122 metres (400 ft) Mercurial Towers in Bagnolet in protest of the presumed seven-day sentence, prior to returning to Texas to serve the sentence. On March 31 he appeared before a Houston court. The drug charge was dropped because of the valid prescription, and the jail sentence was reduced to one day and a $2000 fine for trespassing. The previous time served in November was credited so Robert did not have to serve any more time in jail.
On May 31, 2007, after scaling the 88-story Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, he was arrested and jailed for 5 days before being expelled from China.
On February 27, 2008 he climbed the Edificio Italia, one of the tallest buildings in Brazil despite being unauthorized to do so. He was detained by the police after his successful attempt.
On April 15, 2008, he climbed the 60-story Four Seasons Place in Hong Kong. According to witness reports, he was detained by police upon completing the climb.
On June 5, 2008 (11:40 am local time), he climbed the 52-story New York Times Building, hanging a yellow banner on the 9th floor which read, "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week" He was arrested upon reaching the roof at 12:25 pm.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
God Helmet
The term God Helmet refers to a controversial experimental apparatus in neurotheology. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, stimulates the brain with magnetic fields. Some subjects reported experiences similar to spiritual experiences.[1] The leading researcher in this area is Michael Persinger.
Persinger uses a modified snowmobile helmet or a head-circlet device nicknamed the Octopus that contain solenoids which create a weak but complex magnetic field over the brain's right-hemisphere parietal and temporal lobes. Persinger reports that at least 80 per cent of his participants experience a presence beside them in the room, which they variously say feels like God or someone they knew who had died.
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There is controversy as to whether Persinger measured actual effects or just led his subjects into believing they experienced an electronically-induced epiphany. In December 2004 Nature reported that a group of Swedish researchers, replicating the experiment under double-blind conditions, was not able to verify the effect. Susan Blackmoreexperimental psychologist and experienced researcher of "paranormal" experiences, was reluctant to give up on the theory just yet. She said "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." Persinger, however, takes issue with the Swedish attempts to replicate his work. "They didn't replicate it, not even close," he says. He argues that the Swedish group did not expose the subjects to magnetic fields for long enough to produce an effect. He also stresses that some of his studies were double blinded.
A report of an experiment on Richard Dawkins in 2003 said The experiment is based on the recent finding that some sufferers from temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disorder caused by chaotic electrical discharges in the temporal lobes of the brain, seem to experience devout hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to the mystical experiences of holy figures such as St Paul and Moses
Dawkins was reported not to have experienced a religious feeling. The report said "Dr Persinger has explained away the failure of this >Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator. Before donning the helmet, Prof Dawkins had scored low on a psychological scale measuring proneness to temporal lobe sensitivity."
Direct link to this Wikipedia article
The following is an article written by Robert Hercz for the October 2002 issue of SATURDAYNIGHT magazine
THE GOD HELMET
By inventing a piece of wired-up headgear that induces "religious" experiences in the people who put it on, Sudbury neurologist Michael Persinger has shaken the foundation of faith and science. "Now remember, these are subtle effects," says Michael Persinger. "Don't try to force anything. Just relax and go with the experience." I feel him adjust the yellow motorcycle helmet, studded with electromagnets, that I'm wearing. I hear him step out of the soundproof chamber and pull the heavy door closed behind him. If all goes well, I am about to have a powerful mystical experience.
The time - a Saturday night in May - certainly feels ripe. Laurentain University in Sudbury, Ontario, is between semesters and eerily deserted. Besides Persinger and Linda St-Pierre, a research associate, the only living creatures I've seen on campus are lab rats preparing to die for science. Now I'm alone in an unnaturally quiet room with wires attached to my head, I'm wearing a blindfold, and someone working a control panel is about to bathe my brain in complex magnetic fields.
Astonishing things have happened in this chamber. One woman believed her dead mother had materialized beside her. Another felt a presence so powerful and benign that she wept when it faded. British journalist Ian Cotton understood that he was, and always had been, a Tibetan monk. Psychologist Susan Blackmore writing in New Scientist said she felt something "get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall... Totally out of the blue, but intensely and vividly, I suddenly felt anger... Later, it was replaced by an equally sudden attack of fear." Over a thousand volunteers have worn the helmet, and 80 percent of them, Persinger says, experienced a "sesed presence - the feeling that someone's standing near you, the feelings there must be something greater, the feeling of infinite possibilities."
I want some of that.
For the first half of my 60-minute session, though, nothing happenes. When something does, it is - alas - a subtle effect indeed. The field of swirls and blotches on the inside of my eyelids - the ordinary optical noise tat your brain generates when your eyes are closed - begins to brighten. The usual dull reds and browns give way to glowing purple streaks and zigzags with sharp, well-defined edges. It's a silent, vivid little light show that pleases me greatly, but it is over in a minute or two. More silence, more nothing. Then suddenly I feel my head being lifted, expanding, filling the chamber. It's a brief, distorting, yet enjoyable sensation - but it's not the Meaning of Life.
Ah, but I wasn't a good subject for the experiment, Persinger explains afterwards: I had come with expectations. Usually, subjects are told only that they're participating in a relaxation exercise, but I knew that my brain - specifically the first-sized regions under my temples, the temporal lobes - would be stimulated with magnetic fields that can evoke unusual experiences. That knowledge broke the spell. If those subtle effects had come unexpectedly (when I was alone on a mountaintop, perhaps) they might have taken on a much greater significance. And people have such experiences, on mountaintops, in deserts and on roads to Damascus, because the yellow helmet is optional. Some people, Persinger says, create those weak, complex fields by themselves. Others are particularly sensitive to the magnetic fields, natural and manufactured, that wax and wane around us. People who experience a presence that feels powerful, invisible and sentient often associate it with the supernatural. Not surprising - but wrong, Persinger believes. Religious experiences, he says, are creations of the brain.
My results aside, Persinger's work has put him at the forefront of a new field called neurotheology, the attempt to understand religion from the brain's point of view, or why, as another neurologist has said, "instead of God creating our brains, our brains created God." Such quests may capture the imagination of the public, but Persinger's efforts are disdained by the general scientific community. He expects no less. "Most scientists follow the wave. That's what drives granting... everybody follows like a herd," he says. "There are very few scientists who have the courage to pursue the essence of human existance."
Michael Persinger didn't build his helmet to find God. He set out to locate (and perhaps summon) the creative state of necessary for scientific discovery. A common type of epileptic seizure without obvious convulsions - an electrical storm in the brain that has long been associated with mystics and visions - is centered for the most part in the temporal lobes. Persinger guessed that by gently tickling those areas with a magnetic pattern programmed to resemble an epileptic seizure, he might induce similar feelings of insight and significance. Sure enough, his first subjects reported meaningful experiences, most commonly the "sensed presence." When asked to describe them, they didn't call the feelings creative or inspirational, but religious.
From these results with ordinary - that is, not epileptic - subjects, Persinger hypothesizes that true temporal-lobe epileptics aren't different from the rest of us in kind, but in degree. On the spectrum of temporal lobe excitibility (or lability), they're the most extreme cases. Plenty of people ("most of your musicians, artists or writers") have sensitive temporal lobes that undergo what Persinger has termed "micro-seizures." These aren't accompanied by outward signs such as convulsions, but they are sometimes accompanied by a mystical experience. The least temporally sensitive among us have microseizures only under extreme conditions such as anxiety, bereavement or prolonged fasting.
My less-than-supernatural experience with the helmet suggests that my temporal lobes aren't very excitable, which disappoints me. I wanted to be in the sensitive artists group. There is an upside, though. "If you're too temporally labile, you tend to self-medicate with booze and things," Persinger says. Maybe he's just trying to make me feel better.
Research into conciousness is in its infancy, so what actually conjures the sentient presence is anyone's guess. Current studies suggest that the sense of self - which maintains the boundary between you and the outside world - is created in the left temporal lobe. When you lose that boundary, you feel integrated with the whole universe; that's one kind of religious experience. Stimulating the right temporal lobe envokes a right-hemispheric equivalent sense of self, which the brain interprets as another entity. The "sensed presence," in other words, is the right hemisphere's sense of self, which we're only aware of when the signalsin the right lobe rise above normal levels. There are reports of such experiences in every culture, Persinger notes. The ancient Greeks called it the Muses. Moses, St. Paul, Joan of Arc and Mohammed - all of whom were probably epileptic, says some scientists - called it the voice of God.
After my session, we negotiated the basement warren of labs and officers that belong to the Neuroscience Research Group (essentially an alias for Persinger and his grad students) and settle into one of them to talk. Over Persinger's left shoulder are shelves of brains - rat, bear, human, whole, sliced, and quartered - sealed in Tupperware. Persinger, immaculate in a three-piece pinstripe suit, crisp white shirt and gold cufflinks, looks a little incongruois in juxtaposition, but no one has ever seen him in any other attire. "He mows the lawn in a three-peice suit," Linda St-Pierre tells me, which makes me laugh. "No, I'm serious," she says. Persinger later confirms this is true.
Michael Persinger was a navy brat, born in Florida to a chief petty officer attached to an atomic bomb delivery squadron (which took him away for six months at a stretch). He grew up in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin. As a boy he was less academically inclined than "extraordinarily inquisitive," testing electricity's effects on tadpoles and blowing apart bell jars in an attempt to recreate the beginnings of life.
According to his navy father, real men didn't go to college, so Michael was a double disappointment when he entered the University of Wisconsin (on a track and field scholarship) and then became a draft doger. Coming to Canada in 1969 was a serious step; he believed he was leaving the United States for ever. He arrived at the border prepared for a life of exle and conflict, both political and professional.
"I realised that the objectivity and methodology of science often brought you into confrontation with the society of the day," he says. "I knew from the history of science that this was not unusual."
Persinger (who became a Canadian citizen in the early 1970s) has spent his entire career in the psychology and biology departments at Laurentian. While in recent decades science has been sliced into increasingly narrow specialties, Persinger remains a big-picture thinker, as much natural philosopher as scientist. His personality precludes anything else. Ask him a question, and Persinger, talking rapidly, switching from chemistry to biology to psychology, will deliver a riff on the myriad associations your quetsion has triggered. He wishes more scientists thought his way.
"We're frontier researchers, the cutting edge, not necessarily because we're great, but because we do interdisciplinary research," he says. "And interdisciplinary research, unless we change our university system, is going to be gone. Most contemporary scientists are supertechs, the super technicians - and that's not an insult, that's the nature of the technology of our society. But we have to realize that certain problems aren't going to be solved unless you have the integrators. And this problem - the idea of mystical experience, the nature of consciousness, the brain basis to God - isn't going to be solved by any single discipline because it's human experience, which is not a single disipline."
He's an atheist, says religious belief is "a cognitive virus" and proclaims on his web page that his research has been "encouraged by the historical fact that most wars and groups degradations are coupled imlicitly to god beliefs." But he wants to be clear: he is worrid not about religion itself, but about the way it polarizes society. In fact, he says, being religious might be a valuable adaptive strategy, letting us "minimize the fear of death," through "the possibility of immortality." It has to be, or we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for it.
"Suppose you can anticipate your personal demise. Well, that precipitates tremendous anxiety, and anxiety is devastating to cognitive processes. So from a natural selection point of view, you can see why individuals would have been selected if they could minimize that anxiety," he explains. "The minute a person can affiliate themselves with this concept of infinite and forever, there is no personal death, and consequently there is no reason to have anxiety. You can see why people become addicted to it." When Karl Marx wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, he thought he was being metaphysical. Persinger thinks there's a good chance that Marx was writing the literal neurochemical truth.
This is just the sort of talk that has moved small groups to hold occassional prayer meetings on his office doorstep, but Persinger doesn't see why his helmet should ruffle feathers. He's only claiming that our brains are predisposed to generate religious experiences. He's not saying there is no God, though the way he delivers that message won't gladden the hearts of the faithful. "The way God is defined - infinite, forever - is an empty hypothesis. You can't test it one way or another. Perhaps everything is created by non-physical, invisible pink elephants."
Despite its mystical reverberations, Persinger foresees plenty of practical applications for his work.He's adapting the helmet technology for treating depression and pain; in tests on rats he's found a magnetic pattern that has the effect of morphine. He's also testing it as a means of preventing epileptic seizures. And he thinks the brightly coloured spots I experienced, properly directed, could send visual information directly into the brains of the blind, a kind of "visible braille."
There are more exotic applications. The technology's apparition conjuring ability has already been used for ghost-busting. In 1993 Don Hill, a broadcaster who hosted the CBC radio program Tapestry, bought a house in Canmore, Alberta, which he became convinced was haunted. He had such disturbing experiences that he sold the house in 1994 and began a four-year investigation, which led him to Michael Persinger's lab. In the soundproof chamber Hill re-experienced the ghost that had terrified him in Canmore. Persinger, monitoring Hill's brain activity from outside the chamber, stopped the experiment when Hill panicked. But Hill had seen enough, and the experience liberated him: knowing the ghost was a creation of his own brain extinguished his fear.
Persinger thinks that same sort of demonstration might have a salutry effect on the sorts of people who fly airplanes into buildings. "If we understand more about how the God experience occurs, the idea that it's truly true, without doubt, will at least be challenged. If I can imitate these experiences with a very simple technology, then we know it's coming from the brain, so when someone hears a voice saying, 'Hello, this is Allah, God, Buddha, whoever, go and smash your neighbour's head in,' then maybe there's another way of looking at it." Persinger's surveys show that an astonishing 40 percent of Canadian male university students who have temporal lobe lability, go to church once a week and had a religious experience before their teen years agree with the statement "If God told me to kill, I would do it in his name."
Finally, we come to Persinger's greatest hope for the helmet technology. "Can we use it to decrease the anxiety in an increasingly secular world?" he asks. "People dying of cancer, who don't believe in God - we could use that stimulation to allow the feeling of wholeness, to allow the feeling of personal development. In the future, you may find a space in the average home, much like in the Eastern tradition, which is basically your God centre, where you sit down, 'expose' yourself - it may not be a helmet by then - where you would be able to pursue your own personal development. Do we have a technology here that will allow us to purse the last greatest mystery, which is your own introspection?"
A consummation devoutly to be wished. Also a fine irony: the technology replacing the God it helps unseat.
Persinger's work on religious experiences has attracted a good deal of attention - he's been featured in stories in Wired and New Scientist and in a neurotheology cover story in Newsweek,among many others. But his God-in-the-head work is only a small fraction of his output. In 30 years, he has published more than 300 papers and seven books, and, except for the neurotheology material, the mainstream press doesn't even mention them in passing. Why? Because neurotheology is a safe, and the rest is not. (If neurotheology weren't safe, it wouldn't have made the cover of Newsweek. The new discipline's findings are absolutely consistent, after all, with what science has been doing to religion for 500 years. No one should be shocked. Titillated, maybe, but not shocked.) But Persinger's other interests? The world may not be ready.
The minute I met him, Persinger mentioned that Sean Harribance, a famous psychic, had come to Sudbury to be studied. He sat in the soundproof chamber while handling photographs in sealed envelopes, describing what he couldn't see. "His brain is quite different." After September 11, the Pentagon sequestered Harribance with some photos of its own, Persinger says. "I have a hunch who the pictures were of," he adds.
Persinger has also studied UFO sightings, and here too he occupies a unique spot on the skepticle divide. He believes UFOs aren't alien spacecraft, but electromagnetic discharges created by stresses in the tectonic plates that form the earth's crust. According to Persinger's Tectonic Strain Theory, these discharges can create real, luminous shapes in the air, or generate the inside-the-brain lightening I enjoyed under the helmet. He's found that UFO sightings are correlated with earthquake activity: as the tectonic strain that precedes an earthquake increases, so do the number of reported sightings. (Calling these phenomena spaceships, ironically, is merely a marker of our secular, science-oriented times, Persinger notes. He has published a paper pointing out that in 1968 and 1969, thousands witnessed luminous phenomena over a church in Egypt as seismic activity increased tenfold in the region. They were sure they'd seen the Virgin Mary. in the other eras, they would have seen a spirte or demon.)
There's more, much more, almost all of it built on the belief that we are influenced, in ways we have only recently been able to measure, by the magnetic fields around us. Those fields are thickening. "We're living more and more in a complex electromagnetic environment where the experiences of the effects may not be obvious," he says. Will he use a cellphone? "If I ever had to because of an emergency, yes."
Persinger has written dozens of papers illustrating these effects, describing everything from a young woman who slept with an electric clock 20 cm from her head and claimed to have been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, to geomagnetic storms - high solar activity that creates a worldwide disturbance of the earth's magnetic field - that apparently makes epileptic rats more aggressive and increase the rate of sudden cardiac death. But can these investigations (in truth, more speculations than investigations, most showing correlation, not causion) be called science? Other scientists don't think so, Peringer admits.
"Generally the response from scientists is two-sided - and two-faced," he says. "Under the anonymity of grant reviews, it's always, 'nonsense,' 'Why do it?' When they're in front of you, however, it's always, 'This is fantastic,' 'This is what science is, the pursuit of the unknown.' Initiatory research has never been accepted."
I've experienced that reaction myself, on Persinger's behalf. A few weeks ago, a retired scientist I know asked me what I was working on. I got as far as "There's this researcher who's built a helmet that lets you experience God -" when he interrupted: "In other words, a kook."
When they're on the record, as Persinger notes, scientists are much more generous, offering only mild or no criticism. Andrew Newberg, an assistant professor in the department of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has used brain imaging to study people in meditation and prayer. He, like Persinger, has concluded that the brain is pre-wired to experience spiritual states. Newberg is willing to quibble with some of Persinger's theories, for example that temporal lobe seizures cause all religious experiences (if they did, then most temporal-lobe epileptics should have such experiences; in fact only a small fraction actually do), but overall, he says, Peringer's brain research is sound. Still, as far as Persinger knows, not a single researcher has been intigrated enough by his magnetic stimulation to start experimenting with it, which is not an encouraging index of its impact. It also exacerbates Peringer's isolation, since in science there is no credibility without replication.
Funding agencies, where grant applications are peer reviewed under the protection of anonymity, offer another index of Persinger's status in the research community. For 30 years, Persinger has applied to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for a research grant, and 30 times he's been turned down (he's planning to apply again this year). Laurentian provides the space, but almost all of his research has been financed out of his own pocket from the money he makes as a clinical psychologist (which explains why his equipment looks more Canadian Tire than NASA). Last year, he got a small grant, his first in decades, from the Bial Foundation in Portugal, which funds the "scientific study of both physical and spiritual Man."
"The real cutting edge individuals never are funded because funding is a social decision, not a scientific one," Persinger says without a trace of bitterness. "The minute you refer to a peer group to see if they like it, you're asking for social consensus."
Speaking of peers, I'd like to talk to some. Who at Laurentian knows him best? "Actually very few people know me here at Laurentian. This may sound sad, or maybe arrogant, but there really isn't anyone that I interact with," he answers. Anyone? Not even at other universities? "That is correct. I interact more with my wife on these topics than any other peers." In fact, Persinger considers his wife, who has a master's degree in biology, to be his closest peer.
I'm sure his wife thinks he's a real scientist, and for what it's worth, I do, too - an indie scientist. As is the case with indie filmakers, being an outsider leaves him underfunded and ignored, but it gives him the freedom to do what he wants. Unlike them, however, being an "indie" scientist is not yet cool. That makes it all the more admirable.
The first explorers who reached our continent didn't spend years examining and cataloguing the beach they landed on. They wandered exuberantly over the whole face of the new terrain, noting its most prominent features. They wrote subjective impressions in diaries and drew inaccurate maps. They didn't bring home the gold or spices they were looking for, but oddities like tobacco, coffee and coca, whose future value there was no scale to measure. Persinger is the same. Because of a rare personality defect (or strength), he does not require peer approval or recognition. He's a loner content to explore his terra incognita, the magnetic ether we live in. And religious considerations aside, he has found at least one prominent feature of that landscape: with his helmet he seems to have shown that we can perceive a weak magnetic field not with our eyes, ears, nose, mouth or skin, but directly with our brains. That hints at something quite profound: the brain is a sense organ.
If he's right, paradigms will shift and he'll be celebrated. But even if he's wrong, it's still science.
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