Michael Persinger

Michael A. Persinger (1945-2018) was an American-born Canadian neuroscientist who spent his career at Laurentian University studying how weak electromagnetic fields, both natural (geomagnetic, tectonic) and applied in the lab, might shape brain activity, seizures, and subjective experience, including the "sensed presence" effects that made him famous.

Michael A. Persinger
Born	June 26, 1945, Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
Died	August 14, 2018 (aged 73), Sudbury, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	Canadian, American
Education	University of Wisconsin University of Tennessee University of Manitoba
Occupation	Professor of psychology
Known for	Consciousness Research, Neurotheology
Notable works	Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (1978) TM and Cult Mania (1980)
Website

Early life

Michael A. Persinger was born June 26, 1945, in Jacksonville, Florida, and spent much of his childhood moving between Virginia, Maryland, and Wisconsin.

Education and career

Persinger attended Carroll College in Wisconsin from 1963 to 1964 before transferring to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his B.A. in psychology (with an emphasis on psychochemistry) in 1967. He earned an M.A. in physiological psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1969, then a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba in 1971, with a dissertation on how pre- and neonatal exposure to extremely-low-frequency rotating magnetic fields affected conditioned behavior in rats.

He joined Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, in 1971 as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1975 and Full Professor in 1980, and remained there until his death in 2018. In 1983 he founded and directed the university's Behavioural Neuroscience Program, and he also directed its Consciousness Research Laboratory, publishing prolifically -- over 700 peer-reviewed papers and more than 17,000 citations -- on the neurological basis of religious, paranormal, and geophysical phenomena.

He was known as a demanding but popular teacher; for at least a decade he had first-year students sign a "statement of understanding" before lectures, acknowledging they might hear profanity and slurs used as part of demonstrations on how emotionally charged language interferes with rational thought. In December 2015 Laurentian's administration removed him from teaching the introductory course over the waiver's content; he refused to drop it, students petitioned in his defense, and the Faculty Association filed a grievance, ultimately winning a 2019 ruling upholding his instructional autonomy -- after his death.

Notable/unique

The "God Helmet"

Persinger's most famous contribution was the development of what journalists dubbed the "God Helmet" (originally the Koren Helmet, named after his collaborator Stanley Koren). Filmmaker Brad Abrahams, who interviewed Persinger for the documentary On the Back of a Tiger, described the device and its effects:

It was dubbed the god helmet by a reporter, it was like the Koren helmet, who was another neurologist. They did an experiment using mild electrical electromagnetic stimulation of the right hemisphere, which is where it had been determined that religious psychedelic experiences seem to be highly related to right hemisphere activity. So they set up this room, you sit in the dark room and they run the program, and a number of people experienced some sort of a feeling of presence. That was then filtered through their cultural eye, their lens: if they were religious then they might have had like a mystical religious experience of feeling like God was in the room. For other people it was more just like a presence, something that definitely seemed to have a strong effect on consciousness for some people.

— Brad Abrahams

Independent replication has been mixed. A 2004-2005 double-blind attempt by Pehr Granqvist and colleagues in Sweden applied Persinger's own published field parameters to dozens of participants and found no effect attributable to the magnetic field itself; reported "sensed presence" experiences instead tracked participants' baseline suggestibility and hypnotizability. Persinger and Koren countered that the Swedish exposures were shorter than their own protocol and that equipment differences distorted the intended waveform, and pointed to some 200 in-house replications with a 70-80% success rate; no further independent replication in a major journal has followed either side's claim.

The power-to-effect ratio stands out: how a field weaker than that of common household devices could produce such strong subjective effects.

The difference that there's such powerful fields in the environment, but that you can have profound changes in consciousness with just a very weak field that he used to apply, causing religious experiences for people, with something that has no more power than a hairdryer or something like that.

— Ray Peat

Peat separately cited Persinger's broader claim that everyone's brain resonates with the earth's own electromagnetic frequencies:

Michael Persinger, a neurologist, has argued for a resonance between everyone's brain and the electromagnetic resonance frequencies of the earth environment.

— Ray Peat

Tectonic Strain Theory

In parallel with his consciousness work, Persinger developed a "Tectonic Strain Theory" proposing that mechanical stress in quartz-rich crustal rock generates piezoelectric charge, producing luminous atmospheric discharges -- earthquake lights -- that he argued account for many reported UFO sightings and hauntings occurring in tectonically active regions in the hours or days before seismic events. Working with geophysicist John S. Derr, he analyzed UFO report databases against seismic and geomagnetic records, including the 1987 Rutledge, Tennessee UFO incident and a 1987-89 earthquake swarm near Del Norte, Colorado, reporting statistically significant correlations. A 2012 independent test of the hypothesis by researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, found no correlation between environmental magnetic fields and reported anomalous perceptions.

Geomagnetic activity and epilepsy

Persinger reported moderate correlations (r = 0.4-0.6) between geomagnetic intensity fluctuations and the incidence of epileptic seizures in both humans and animals, and in rat models of limbic epilepsy found that simulated geomagnetic-storm-like fields increased spontaneous seizures while steady fields of higher intensity suppressed them.

Inter-brain communication experiments

Persinger also experimented with linking two people's brain activity using matched electromagnetic fields.

He also did experiments with generating a field that he said was the same as the field of the Earth, around seven hertz, in a time of magnetic calm, and putting the exact same field around two people that he separated into two rooms that were dark, and flash a light in one person's eyes, and if they applied the same field to both people's heads, the flash would register in the other person's brain as well.

— Ray Peat

Work with Ingo Swann

Peat traced the origin of Persinger's inter-brain field experiments to earlier work with self-described psychics, including remote-viewer Ingo Swann.

I think that's what got Persinger started with those experiments, was he was working with someone who was somewhat of a clairvoyant, two different people: one who traditionally did remote viewing, Ingo Swann, and then another who was more of a traditional psychic who would be able to read people as they came into the room. And by enhancing the field, he found first that when someone came into the room, his brainwaves would sync up with whoever came in, and that seemed to be related to his ability to read them.

— Ray Peat

Quantum neurophysics

In later, more technical work, Persinger proposed specific temporal patterns of complex electromagnetic fields that could access and affect all levels of brain activity, calculating an optimal resonant "point duration" of 1 to 3 milliseconds for the most bioeffective magnetic fields.

Death

Persinger died on August 14, 2018, in Sudbury, Ontario, at age 73. Brad Abrahams and Jeremy Stewart of On the Back of a Tiger had recorded interviews with Persinger, Mae-Wan Ho, and Harold Hillman before their deaths.

Published works

Persinger was extraordinarily prolific, publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. Key works include:

Work	Year	Description
[[:File:Open_Library_1977_Space_time_Transients_And_Unusual_Events_part_1.pdf|Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events]] (part 1) / part 2	1977	Co-authored with Gyslaine Lafrenière; linked geomagnetic phenomena to paranormal reports
The Paranormal: Part I / Part II	1974	Early examination of neurological basis of paranormal
[[:File:Open_Library_1987_Neuropsychological_Bases_of_God_Beliefs.pdf|Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs]]	1987	Seminal work arguing religious experiences arise from temporal lobe activity
"The neuropsychiatry of paranormal experiences"	2001	J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2001 Fall;13(4):515-24
"A theory of neurophysics and quantum neuroscience"	2007	Int J Neurosci. 2007 Feb;117(2):157-75

Persinger's publications have been archived following his death, as his original websites went offline.

Open-library PDF copies

• Elf And Vlf Electromagnetic Field Effects (open-library scan)
• The Paranormal, Part 1 The Patterns (open-library scan)
• The Paranormal, Part II Mechanisms and Models (open-library scan)
• Space-time Transients And Unusual Events [part 1] (open-library scan)
• Space-time Transients And Unusual Events [part 2] (open-library scan)
• TM and Cult Mania (open-library scan)
• Weather Matrix and Human Behaviour (open-library scan)
• Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (open-library scan)