Psi phenomena: Rouleau excerpt #16

Rouleau writes: Humans have always shared and preserved stories of unique individuals who could apparently perform extraordinary acts or, by David Hume’s definition of miracles, “violations of the laws of Nature”. Contemporary equivalents of those once mythologized as prophets, oracles, soothsayers, and other special beings, are often regarded as frauds or charlatans – and many of them likely are. Of course, the convenient argument that unique abilities may be incompatible with measurement or the highly controlled environments of scientific laboratories could be valid; however, it is an untestable hypothesis and therefore not scientific – or rather, a limitation of the scientific method.

Regardless, there are also many credible reports of individuals who have reliably demonstrated unique abilities including better-than-chance outcomes that also exceed the average performance of other humans. Beginning with the 1886 publication of “Phantasms of the Living” and well into the 20th century, scientists and scholars began to operationally distinguish these unique phenomena from the typical behaviors and mental states under the dominion of the newly formed field of psychology.

Thus, parapsychology research was first initiated to investigate infrequent, transient, esoteric, and fringe phenomena that I will refer to as “psi phenomena”. Classically, these include mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, remote-viewing, different types of extrasensory perception, as well as near- death experiences, post-mortem apparitions, synchronicities, and other oddities. Most are intrinsically subjective but some including psychokinesis and poltergeist phenomena involve objectively measurable mind-matter interactions and are empirically linked to emotional states of arousal and interpersonal conflict.

The early 20th century was a genuinely exciting time to be scientist with an interest in psi phenomena – this is perhaps best illustrated by Duncan MacDougall’s famous experiment published in 1907, where he attempted to weigh the soul as it left the body by placing the beds of dying humans and dogs on an industrial-sized scale. His results indicated that the soul might weigh approximately 21 grams; however, his experiments suffered from low sample size and, without further investigation, his inconsistent results could reasonably be explained by variations in lung capacity and sweating.

Though it might seem like a digression, I claim that the likelihood that human consciousness survives permanent bodily death increases if the model of consciousness that accommodates it – the transmissive model – can also accommodate psi phenomena. Because, as I will demonstrate, some psi phenomena are measurable but unexplained by productive models of brain function. And if transmission can do what production cannot by successfully unifying psi with mainstream psychology, its strength as a theory will be further supported.

Also, because survival is dependent upon transmissive consciousness, demonstrating the validity of certain psi phenomena will, in turn, bolster the plausibility of survival itself. Further, if psi abilities can be suppressed, modulated, or enhanced by electromagnetic energies including EMFs and geomagnetic fluctuations, their convergence with

transmission and survival will be even greater by dint of a shared putative mechanism. Therefore, I will now present three cases of individuals who display psi abilities under experimental conditions with similar neural correlates localized to the right temporal lobe, and I will discuss how the individuals involved are affected by natural and artificially-generated EMFs. The details of each case were originally compiled by Persinger in his 2015 book chapter entitled “Neuroscientific Investigation of Anomalous Cognition”.

Sean Harribance is a representative example of an individual who displays telepathy – which is also known as “mind reading”. His ability to access the memories, experiences, and medical histories of other people, which is consistent under experimental scrutiny, has been assessed by several independent investigators. Harribance describes his process of “reading” people as a communion with an “angel”, experienced as a sensed presence, that is accompanied by the perception of images about the person that appear in his upper-left visual field, which corresponds to the brain’s visual receptive areas of the right temporal and occipital lobes. When engaged in a reading, Harribance’s brain expresses a distinct pattern of EEG rhythms over the surface of his right hemispheric temporo-parietal region, which becomes more prominent as his reports become more accurate. Source-localization methods have identified the right parahippocampal cortex as the locus of his unique right hemispheric activations, which is the area of the brain’s temporal lobe that links the experiential neocortex and the memory-accessing hippocampus.

As measured by magnetometers placed alongside his temporal lobes, local geomagnetic field intensity significantly diminishes over his right temporal lobe proportionally to EEG rhythms within the same region and returns to baseline intensity when he mentally disengages from the reading procedure. In other words, there is a conserved relationship between his brain activity and the geomagnetic field intensity on the right side of his head. Remarkably, Harribance’s right temporal lobe activity strongly coheres with the activity of his subject’s left temporal lobes when he is “reading” them as if their brains are functionally connected. The right side of his brain also emits many more photons when he “reads” his subjects or imagines white light and displays prominent EEG frequency signatures of Schumann resonances.

Finally, experiments have demonstrated that Harribance’s sensed presence experience and visions could be systematically induced by stimulating his right temporal lobe using artificially applied EMFs. A parsimonious integration of these findings can only be achieved by adopting a transmissive model of consciousness. Indeed, telepathy may represent a rare capacity to intentionally access the electromagnetic representations of personal information.

Experiences of unintentional access or exchanges during altered states and sleep could account for similar phenomena in average individuals. Further, it is conceivable that mediumship is the equivalent of telepathy, however, in the case of the former, the electromagnetic information is associated with a deceased individual instead of a live one. Whether individuals such as Harribance accesses information directly from the brains of their subjects, or indirectly by either intercepting transmissions of consciousness or retrieving stored data from the shared geomagnetic environment is unknown but likely testable.

 

Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.