Six Feet Over

9. INSIDE THE HAUNT BOX Can Electromagnetic Fields Make You Hallucinate?

IT IS HARD to imagine being terrified in Sudbury, Ontario. A bland, friendly mining city 150 miles north of Toronto, Sudbury is best known for the Big Nickel, a thirteen-ton statue of Canadian pocket change. Curling is popular here. Under the category “Other Fun Stuff ” on the Sudbury website, the tourism people have listed a vegetable store.

Nevertheless, fear is on the agenda tonight. I’m heading to the Consciousness Research Lab at Laurentian University to be electromagnetically “haunted.” Michael Persinger, the neuroscience professor who runs the lab, has a theory about ghosts. The theory holds that certain patterns of electromagnetic field activity—both the earth’s own natural kind and the man-made kind created by wiring and appliances and power lines—can render the brain more prone to hallucinations. In particular, the sort that involve an invisible, sensed presence.

In a study published in 1988, Persinger compared thirty-seven years of dated Fate magazine haunting reports with geomagnetic activity for those dates. He found a nice correlation, and he wrote up his findings in Neuroscience Letters. In a similar study three years later, University of Iowa psychologists Walter and Steffani Randall examined monthly fluctuations in solar winds (which influence the earth’s geomagnetics) to see if they mirrored monthly ups and downs in “humanoid hallucinations” culled from old Society for Psychical Research records. Indeed, both showed peaks in April and September, with a trough in between.

Persinger then turned his attention to man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs). In 1996, a Sudbury couple had contacted him about strange goings-on in their house. They heard breathing and whispering sounds and at one point felt someone touching their feet as they lay in bed. The husband saw an apparition of a woman who appeared to move through the couple’s bed. Persinger and two colleagues drove out to the house and set up equipment to monitor EMFs in the various rooms. True to his theory, the house was an electromagnetic free-for-all. Wires were poorly grounded and circuits overloaded with electronic equipment. Not only were the EMFs most intense in the places where the couple had experienced their “ghosts,” but they showed the telltale irregularities that Persinger has come to see as the hallmarks of haunt-prompting fields.

If electromagnetic fields like these could be generating “hauntings,” then it’s reasonable to assume you could create what Persinger calls a synthetic ghost by exposing people to similar, laboratory-generated EMFs. This is what Dr. Persinger will, at my request, be doing to me tonight. In the back of his lab is a soundproof chamber—a haunt box—outfitted with a comfy chair, in which subjects sit while Persinger directs complex patterns of EMFs into their brains via an electromagnet-bedecked, wire-sprouting helmet.

Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain. But Michael Persinger has a university post and his papers are published in mainstream medical journals. How dangerous could it be? I’ve been pondering this in the back of the cab on my way to the university. The driver, a graduate of Laurentian, asks what sort of work I’m doing there. I tell him I’m visiting Michael Persinger. He swivels to look at me. “Strange guy. I heard he’s totally nocturnal, eh? And he keeps rats.”

It would seem that in Sudbury, Ontario, Michael Persinger is more famous than the Big Nickel. He is assuredly more interesting. “They say he mows his lawn in a three-piece suit.”

Dr. Persinger is not at the lab to greet me. I’m told he’ll be arriving later, after I’ve filled out some personality inventories, part of the protocol for whichever experiment my data will become part of. A research assistant seats me at a table just inside the door, and there I remain, for the next half hour, checking True and False boxes. I have been taken aboard a space ship. I sometimes tease animals. I certainly feel useless at times. There is something wrong with my mind.

I can’t imagine the sort of personality that would check True for some of these statements. Or maybe I can. I mow the lawn in a suit. I like rats.

The lab assistant gets up to run an errand. For some reason, she locks the door as she leaves. I sit awhile. I get up and pace. A table against one wall is stacked with plastic storage containers, each holding two large chunks of brain preserved in a clear liquid. Fascinating, I think, and then I notice the labels on the lids: “Sean and Kristy.” “Michelle and Holly.” “Brent and Derek.” On any other evening, I’d have assumed that these were the students who dissected the brains. On any other evening, it would not cross my mind that Sean and Kristy might BE THE BRAINS IN THE CONTAINER.

The door opens behind me. It’s a man in a three-piece suit. The suit is black, with pinstripes and a watch fob. Dr. Persinger, trim and white-haired and seemingly sane, introduces himself. Before he even sits down, he begins to scan my answer sheets. He seems in a hurry to get me into the chamber. I tell him I’d like to ask some questions first. He says that’s fine and that we’ll walk over to the Colony Room and talk there. I picture dark wood paneling, trustees conversing in hushed tones.

Dr. Persinger unlocks an ordinary-looking door on the other end of the building. Inside are two long walls of cages and a corresponding wall of smell: Colony, as in rats. But the rodents aren’t a hobby, as the cabdriver had made it sound; they’re subjects in various experiments on the beneficial effects of EMFs. (Persinger believes certain kinds of EMFs can be helpful in treating conditions as widely varying as depression and multiple sclerosis.) He tells me he returns several times during the night to make adjustments and gather data, often going to bed around four. Hence the reputation as a nocturnal being.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain—in particular, your right temporal lobe—will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause. Persinger adds that the emotions of bereavement produce stress hormones that may serve to raise the likelihood of these microseizures even further.

Persinger isn’t the only researcher to have examined the link between spirituality and tiny seizures in the temporal lobe. In a 2002 Psychological Reports study of 242 undergraduate volunteers, scores on a ninety-eight-item spirituality assessment were significantly predictive of scores on a questionnaire that assessed a cluster of symptoms of complex partial epilepsy, including hallucinations, fear, and a sense of detachment from one’s body. Also known as temporal lobe epilepsy, this condition often goes undiagnosed. Without a medical explanation for these mystifying experiences, patients may interpret them as spiritual events and adjust their belief systems accordingly.

It would seem that Persinger has the whole ghost business neatly sewn up. It’s true that people with naturally occurring microseizures—e.g., sufferers of complex partial epilepsy—often have hallucinations. It’s also true that EMF exposure dampens the body’s natural production of melatonin. This has been shown in rats and in dairy cows housed inside a “bovine exposure chamber” at the McGill University Dairy Cattle Complex[37] in Quebec.

The results of Persinger’s lab work suggest that you can indeed evoke that haunted feeling in a lab using EMFs. Of the approximately one thousand people who have had Persinger’s signature electromagnetic bursts applied to their right temporal lobes, eighty percent, he says, have felt a presence. In 2002, he published a paper on lab-generated hauntings in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Forty-eight university students were exposed to complex one microTesla electromagnetic fields either over the left temporal lobe or the right, or both. A fourth group received sham pulsations. Those whose right brains were exposed were more likely to report feeling fear and sensing a presence than were left hemisphere or sham exposures. Disappointingly, no other researchers have replicated Persinger’s work.

THE SOUNDPROOF chamber where Persinger haunts his guests is about as big as a freight elevator. It appears to have been decorated circa 1970; the floor is covered with yellow and brown shag carpeting, and the subject chair is padded with a messy drape of cheap Mexican blankets. I half expect someone to pass me a bong.

Linda St-Pierre, the lab manager, is sticking EEG leads to my scalp. While she does this, I ask Persinger about a statement he made in one of his papers: “Although these results suggest that these apparitions are an artifact of an extreme state-dependence, the possibility that they are associated with transient, altered thresholds in the ability to detect normally indiscriminable stimuli cannot be excluded.” Could the “normally indiscriminable stimuli” he’s speaking of be generated by someone dead? In other words, is it possible that—rather than prompting hallucinations—certain electromagnetic field patterns enhance people’s ability to sense some sort of genuine paranormal impulse or entity?

Persinger acknowledges that both explanations are possible. It could be that people are being physically affected by the electromagnetic fields and then applying their own cultural overlay (“Ghost!”) to explain the experience, and it could also be that people—at least some of them—are suddenly, as a result of the field’s effect on their brain, able to pick up, as Persinger puts it, “actual information that’s in the environment.” Persinger thinks the latter is likely. “Particularly,” he says, “in places where people experience the same thing again and again.” Before I arrived, I had thought Persinger was a skeptic, a debunker, but clearly he’s not.

As he talks, Persinger ties a worn paisley scarf around my head to secure the EEG leads. He says he’s been using it for years. He pauses. “Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that all along, it was the scarf?” Persinger slides an orange Skidoo helmet down over the scarf. Glued to the outside of the helmet are eight small electromagnets, which will deliver the milliseconds-long pulses to my brain. Persinger assures me that the exposure level is no higher than that of a hair dryer. It’s the pattern of the signal—its complexity—that matters. Then he shuts off the lights and backs out the doorway.

“Ready?”

No. “Yes.”

The door shuts with a heavy, whispering clumpf, like a space-station air lock. Five minutes pass. I want to feel a presence, but mostly I just feel absence: of sound, of light, of the eerie effects I’d hoped for. If you’ve ever waited quietly in the dark before a surprise party begins, then you know what I’m experiencing right now. I worry that I’m going to disappoint Dr. Persinger, much as I’m disappointing myself. I certainly feel useless at times. There is something wrong with my mind.

Toward the end of the session, I begin to see and hear some things. Glimpses of faces, utterances that flash through my conscious mind so quickly I can’t remember them a second later. At one point, I hear a police car off in the distance—the repeated whoop-whoops that signal a driver to pull over.

After it’s over, Dr. Persinger comes into the chamber and sits down on an ottoman to interview me about my experiences. I interrupt him. “Did you hear the police siren?”

“No.”

“I did. From over in that direction.”

Persinger looks up from his notepad. “This is a soundproof room.”

Ah. Then I must have been drifting off to sleep.

“You’re labeling,” says Dr. Persinger. “Don’t label.” He gets up to retrieve my EEG printout. He flips through page after page of taut, insistent scratchings. “You weren’t drifting off to sleep. Not even close.”

Whatever it was and as real as it seemed, it wasn’t something I’d interpret as a paranormal phenomenon. About five years ago, for a period of several months, I would occasionally be awakened in the night by someone knocking loudly and insistently at either the front or the back door. So clear and so convincing were the knocks that the first time it happened I got out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and stumbled to the door, greatly amusing my husband, Ed, who was in the living room reading. No one was there. There had been no knocks. That had seemed spookier than this, but maybe it’s the context: sitting expectantly in a lab versus lying alone in bed late at night.

Persinger says that based on my answers to the questionnaires, I’m left-hemispherically dominant. I’m a “least responder.” For comparison, he hands me a sheet of paper with passages from transcripts of the sessions of highly responsive, right-hemispherically dominant types:

“I felt a presence behind me and then along my left side….”

“I began to feel the presence of people, but I could not see them; they were along my sides. They were colourless, grey-looking people. I know I was in the chamber but it was very real.”

Most impressive, to me at least, was the response of paranormal researcher-turned-skeptic Susan Blackmore, who visited Persinger well into her skeptical years, for a New Scientist article: “I felt something get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall.”

It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.