*coff* I realize this is an older article and my post is unlikely to be read as a result, but Ben, come on.

I went to the illustrious LU back in the 80′s. You haven’t lived until you had to walk to the school store in 40 below weather, *brrr*. I’m pretty familiar with Michael Persinger, as most of us in the science wing were. This was mostly a passing familiarity in my case, I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of taking one of his classes (I don’t mean that in any snide way, apparently he’s a great prof).

One of my fellow students did have the pleasure, and related a little story: while interviewing Persinger in his office they needed to leave for some reason. Persinger stopped for a second, looked at the student to be sure that he was listening, and then stated that he should return quickly to be sure he didn’t miss any calls, because he was the “world’s leading authority”. On what? Just wait…

I’m going from memory here so bear with me, but I believe Michael’s been a talking-head expert on topics such as:

Crop circles. According to an interview on CBC radio, they are supposedly minor seismic events that cause electricity to be released by piezo crystals underground, which then magically causes all the grain above them to lie down in such a wonderful fashion. I believe there was also some mention of “balls of light” that are associated with such events, that were supposed to be the electrical discharges.

Ghosts. Using a similarly tortuous line of reasoning, he claimed that ghost sitings in famous buildings are actually a sort of “psychic energy” recording encoded into piezo crystals in the rocks making up the walls and floors of castles. Walking down hallways somehow triggers the release of this energy, which causes people to hallucinate due to the same sort of reactions that lead to the God Helmet.

UFOs. UFOs are “simply” ball lightening (or something similar) released by other geoelectrical events.Alien abductions are simply the God helmet effects, interpreted differently.

ELF and health. Yes, Michael had an opinion on this one as well, all negative of course. It was during an interview on this topic that he made the “world’s leading authority” claim to my fellow student. In my books, claiming to be the world’s leading authority on the health effects of EMF is likely a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong, Michael has done real research and published real results in real journals. Mostly about magnets and the brain. Maybe there really is something of interest in there, but he’s been working on this since the 1970s and still hasn’t published anything terribly exciting.

But this seemingly limited set of results hasn’t stopped him from claiming all sorts of outlandish conclusions based on nothing more than outright conjecture. In case after case he attempts to explain not the everyday world, but the most crankish pseudoscience that anyone here would dismiss out of hand. That has to make you go “huh”.

Here, try this one on for size. It’s a quote from Persinger’s article about worldwide magnetic mind control:

“This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the
approximately six billion brains of the human species without meditation through classical sensory modalities by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed.”

Gotta love it! I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader:

www.mindspring.com/~txporter/persemf.htm

The guy who does this is an artist, Dean Booth, but his scientific method is impeccable.

This God Helmet thing reminds me of the case of Christian mystic Abess Julian of Norwich, who prayed to God to give her a near-deadly illness so that she could have religious visions. Seems like even when religious types acknowledge that their visions are due to an acute abnormal brain function, they don’t care, because clearly they’re talking to God. I wonder what the likelihood would be amongst the Religious vs. the Skeptical that the emotional experience would completely short-circuit the rational faculties like that? We could design a God Helmet experiment!!!

“Your prayers will be 74% more likely to be answered! Remember, the God Helmet is not available in any shops. Call NOW, and get a free set of coasters featuring the religious icon of your choice!”

Is it just me or does “Persinger’s helmet” sound like a Chris Morris invention? Like “Shatner’s Bassoon” in the excellent “Cake” episode of The Day Today.

As far as I recall, if it hadn’t been for the religious element then the story would have been quite short and straightforward, and as it was, it was mostly the protagonist’s life flashing before his eyes, I think. So to speak.

Apparently it is against this new religion to prevent comets from slamming into the earth and extincting all higher life forms, and when a comet passes by (or rather doesn’t) and someone proposes to stop it before it gets here, they are inclined to practise direct action.

Evidently Clarke saw no need to hypothesise an upper limit on the mental disorder of religious adherents. Come to think, he had a solo nutter in [The Fountains of Paradise]. Another that was rather fun… apparently carbon nanotubes actually do not quite live up to expectations (the book proposes an elevator rope up to the sky, which is also seen in [3001] and [The Science of Discworld]), but I wonder if putting one on Mars would be worthwhile? That comes into [FoP] as well, with a rather interesting and presumably accurate twist…

I think what I like about Clarke is that he supposes that in the future we will have wonderful stuff and more of the population of the world will get to enjoy it. Satellite television got to India before the UK I think – he was all for that. Well, almost all… he wrote a story about the perils of… I’m not sure if that was after Rupert Murdoch got into it.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly.

I have long said that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development is the extension of the scientific method into the field of computer science. The entire community comes together and shares their ideas and innovations with each other, demonstrating clearly what works and what doesn’t.

I’m glad I’m not just some Slashdot-esque zealot, and someone else apparently agrees with me.

I’m torn between seeing electromagnetically induced religious experience (if it works) as a bad thing that religions will be using pretty soon, or a useful demonstration in de-programming people who got sucked into cults.

I’m trying to remember which of Arthur C. Clarke’s books includes a religion based on previous religions (I think it’s called Chrislam), a charismatic prophet (female), and virtual-reality indoctrination.

There was a BBC Horizon programme on Persinger a while ago (including the Dawkins test) and you can read the (rather long but fascinating) transcript here:

www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbraintrans.shtml

Is this convergent evolution? It’s similar to the Need to Know motto. I’m sure they would agree with hte rest of the final paragraph too.

Bob