Michael Persinger
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Early Life
Persinger was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but primarily grew up in Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. He attended Carroll College from 1963-1964, 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
During the 1980s Dr. Persinger simulated people's temporal lobes artificially with a weak magnetic field to see if he could induce a religious state. He found it to create the sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room." In some circles Persinger's findings have been widely heralded and regarded as a landmark study.
Dr. Persinger focuses much of his work on the commonalities that exist between the sciences and to integrate the fundamental concepts. He organized the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University. This program was one of the first to integrate Chemistry, Biology and Psychology.
Because much of his work is interdisciplinary, Dr. Persinger insists that the techniques and results are published 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 was interested in magnetic fields and brain activity, all of his work has been supported by his private practice. Laurentian University supplies only space and infrastructure.
Criticism
In 2005 Pehr Granqvist, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, questioned Persinger's findings in a paper published in Neuroscience Letters. Dr. Granqvist believes Dr. Persinger's work was not "double blind." Those conducting Persinger's trials, who were often graduate students, knew what sort of results to expect, with the risk that the knowledge would be transmitted to experimental subjects by unconscious cues. They were also frequently given an idea of what was happening by being asked to fill in questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences before the trials were conducted. 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 still stands by his findings. He argues that "Dr Granqvist and his colleagues failed to generate a 'biologically effective signal' in their subjets because of a failure to use the equipment properly."
Another criticism that has been levied at Persinger is that he uses magnetic stimuli orders of magnitude too weak to create 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 to either marginally stimulate or inhibit brain activity. It is therefore difficult to understand what physical mechanism would account for the results Persinger claims to have gotten in his subjects using far weaker stimuli.
External
- Microwave Mind Control Symptoms & Published Evidence (http://educate-yourself.org/mc/listofmcsymptoms05jun03.shtml)