Dr. Michael Persinger

There’s a relatively recent interview at the Scientific Paranormal Investigative Research Information website with Dr. Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Laurentian University.

Persinger has been doing some interesting work over the years. There’s a series of lectures of his on the topic of Psychotropic Drugs and the Nature of Consciousness on YouTube, beginning here [the video has since been removed].

I wish I could have taken his class!

Persinger appears briefly in my book. At one point Persinger noticed that areas associated with hauntings tended to be “electromagnetically noisy,” and he did some research in this area. From my book:

When asked if there was any possibility that the EMF fluctuations in the field might represent an intelligent presence, Persinger answered, “Stan Koren and I wrote a chapter for Houran and Lange (Hauntings and Poltergeists, 2001) where we discuss the possibility that configured magnetic flux lines within a small space (such as the luminosities seen in haunt and in ghost light areas) might have the energy density, intraspatial complexity (e.g., similar to trillions of synapses in the human brain) and timing to allow “intelligence” to emerge, at least transiently. Of course this intelligence could be suspended, just like ours when we enter deep sleep at night, only to return when the functional reconfiguration occurs again. This is a hypothesis well worth pursuing.” In an earlier paper he wrote, “there is some evidence that some paranormal experiences may be transformations of information not normally accessible.” The answer appears to be “maybe.” A fleeting apparition might simply be an intermittent signal or information, available only to those with the proper tuning or filtering mechanism.