Electromagnetic Induction of Psi States: The Way Forward in Parapsychology
By Peter Maddock
Judged according to acceptable standards of repeatability, the status of the evidence for parapsychological phenomena is still so poor that there remains considerable scepticism in the scientific Establishment concerning their reality.
Attempts to produce repeatable ESP in laboratory testing both by investigating the extent to which ESP might be affected by psychological parameters—personality characteristics, empathy, mood, heightened motivation, expectancy, or by belief in psi, etc.—and by using hypnosis, meditation, biofeedback, sensory deprivation, drugs and other methods to generate ASCs, have produced no consistent marked improvement in target-guessing scores. Moreover, it is impossible to ignore objections that once the controls are tightened, displays of PK phenomena ostensibly produced by Geller and other exponents seem not to manifest, in spite of their complaints that controls tend to inhibit psi ability. Because of these factors psi research is regarded by some investigators as having reached an impasse, and by many sceptics as an invalid field of enquiry.
But other researchers remain confident that the mass of anecdotal and experimental evidence so far obtained does warrant further systematic studies, and consider it reasonable to hope that certain essential conditions may be identified, which determine the occurrence of the phenomena and which could prove capable of being induced artificially in subjects.
The pursuit of this goal at Parascience Centre is necessarily a physics and biosciences oriented one.
Because it is an electro-chemical and bio-organism, the physical concomitants of thought and other brain processes are essentially electromagnetic in nature, and if psi exists, electromagnetism and psi must couple at a micro level within certain structures in the brain whenever phenomena occur. Since both spontaneous case and experimental evidence indicates that ESP and PK are generally speaking capricious, transient or intermittent in character, it may be inferred that such coupling must be delicately balanced, and usually unstable.
How then to enhance this coupling, and gain scientific control over the subject’s capacity to undergo psychic processes?
An essential clue is provided by the correlation that has been established between ESP and memory, which indicates not only that telepathic psi must interact with the brain’s memory system, but that because memory is encoded by nucleo-protein macromolecules in cortical neurons, these memory traces must be psi-interactive biomolecules (PIBs). If this is true it follows that the coupling of electromagnetism with psi will inevitably be governed by precise quantum energetic criteria, which immediately explains why telepathic receptivity as well as psi-interactive states in general are so critically balanced.
It also provides an insight into why the conventional methods of trying to improve ESP ability, mentioned above, have lamentably failed. They are evidently incapable of stabilising appropriate electroenergetic conditions in the cortex sufficiently to enable impinging patterns of psi information to keep on being transduced into corresponding patterns of neuron firing, so that subjects can undergo vivid, continuous, and fully dissociated ESP.
What then is the alternative? It would seem that the only way of bringing about truly stable psi-interactive states in the brain will be to employ an electromagnetic method of induction.
There is already empirical evidence to support this contention. For example, the case reported to the Parapsychology Foundation by a Washington electronics engineer who claimed: ‘Working with high frequency machinery my colleagues and I have suddenly found we are on occasions telepathic.’ Also, as long ago as 1924, the physician W. E. Boyd inadvertently discovered, while investigating electrical methods for diagnosing and treating disease, that impressively above-chance scores in target-guessing tests (as high as P<10-7) were consistently obtainable by connecting the subject’s scalp to a damped oscillatory electrical circuit, tuned to resonate at about 100 Megahertz frequency, which therefore probably represented the first crude demonstration of a receiving system for cognitive psi. Unfortunately Boyd’s results, which were carefully validated by a committee of government scientists under Sir Thomas Horder at the time, have remained virtually unknown, and so their immense importance has been overlooked by para-psychologists at large.
It must be emphasised these ideas do not imply that psi effects propagate by means of electromagnetic waves. This appears unlikely. It means, simply, that electromagnetic methods might nevertheless be developed as a physically precise and non-harmful way of manipulating the brain, for the purpose of stabilising either a telepathically receptive, or transmissive state in it, or indeed a state under which it can exert psychokinesis.
The technical details have been discussed more fully in papers I have presented at Parascience Conferences held at the City University and Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, respectively, in 1976 and 1977.
Hopes for a breakthrough on these lines are therefore well founded, and research has commenced at Parascience Centre, but progress has been greatly hampered so far by lack of adequate funds for this programme, and help is urgently needed.
Such a breakthrough would open up a dramatic new era in the history of man’s control over nature, for when psi-energetic systems have been developed to a sophisticated stage it is expected that not only will repeatable psi be readily demonstrable, but that the capabilities of psychic subjects when subjected to electromagnetic induction will vastly surpass the performance of even the best natural medium or sensitive when working unaided, such as to make both telepathic communication and other forms of technological use a practical possibility.
It should not however be assumed, even if certain macro-molecular structures in the brain do comprise the interaction sites with psi, that this presupposes a naively monist view of reality, or that the concept of post-mortem survival is excluded, since it is conceivable that PIBs represent the interface between the material and non-material universe, or between the brain and mind, and it is precisely the study of phenomena associated with PIBs which will help modern science to probe into the nature and mode of propagation of psi, into the fundamental question of consciousness, and possibly throw light on the meaning of existence itself. Perhaps a great new knowledge-discipline, capable of encompassing facts about what we somewhat arbitrarily denote as the ‘non-physical’ world, and about man’s own spirituality, will eventually emerge from this.