Scientists Have an Experiment to See If the Human Mind Is Bound to the Physical World

Spooky Action

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and interesting phenomena in quantum physics is what Einstein referred to as a “spooky action at a distance” — also known as quantum entanglement. This quantum effect is behind what makes quantum computers work, as quantum bits (qubits) generally rely on entanglement to process data and information. It’s also the working theory behind the possibility of quantum teleportation.

The long and short of it is this: entangled particles affect one another regardless of distance, where a measurement of the state of one would instantly influence the state of the other. However, it remains “spooky” because — despite following the laws of quantum physics — entanglement seems to reveal some deeper theory that’s yet to be discovered. A number of physicists have been working on determining this deeper theory, but so far nothing definitive has come out.

As for entanglement itself, a very famous test was developed by physicist John Bell in 1964 to determine whether particles do, in fact, influence one another in this way. Simply put, the Bell test involves a pair of entangled particles: one is sent towards location A and the other to location B. At each of these points, a device measures the state of the particles. The settings in the measuring devices are set at random, so that it’s impossible for A to know the setting of B (and vice versa) at the time of measurement. Historically, the Bell test has supported the spooky theory.

Human Consciousness and Free Will

Now, Lucien Hardy, a theoretical physicist from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, is suggesting that the measurements between A and B could be controlled by something that may potentially be separate from the material world: the human mind. His idea is derived from what French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes called the mind-matter duality, “[where] the mind is outside of regular physics and intervenes on the physical world,” as Hardy explained.

To do this, Hardy proposed a version of the Bell test involving 100 humans, each hooked up to EEG headsets that would read their brain activity. These devices would be used to switch the settings on the measuring devices for A and B, set at 100 kilometers apart. “The radical possibility we wish to investigate is that, when humans are used to decide the settings (rather than various types of random number generators), we might then expect to see a violation of Quantum Theory in agreement with the relevant Bell inequality,” Hardy wrote in a paper published online earlier this month.

If the correlation between the measurements don’t match previous Bell tests, then there could be a violation of quantum theory that suggests A and B are being controlled by factors outside the realm of standard physics. “[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can’t imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that,” Hardy said. “We’d want to debate as to what that meant.”

What it could mean is this: that the human mind (consciousness) isn’t made up of the same matter governed by physics. Furthermore, it could suggest that the mind is capable of overcoming physics with free will. This could potentially be the first time scientists gain a firm grasp on the problem of consciousness. “It wouldn’t settle the question, but it would certainly have a strong bearing on the issue of free will,” said Hardy.

Physicists weigh in on 9/11 stuff

Physicists Say Twin Towers Destroyed by Controlled Demolition on 9/11

By Darius Shahtahmasebi

Anti Media

September 13, 2016

Christmas has come early for “conspiracy theorists” around the world. An academic report published by Europhysics News in time for the anniversary of 9/11 is questioning the official explanation for the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, and their conclusion may make even the most rational person rethink their outlook. As the report from Europhysics News, a “ magazine of the European physics community,” notes:

“It bears repeating that fires have never caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise before or since 9/11. Did we witness an unprecedented event three separate times on September 11, 2001? The NIST [U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology] reports, which attempted to support that unlikely conclusion, fail to persuade a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists. Instead, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition. Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities.”

Entitled “15 Years Later: On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses,” the investigation was conducted by Steven Jones, a former professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and the Engineering Institute of Canada; Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer; and Ted Walter, author of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s Beyond Misinformation: “What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7.”

The Europhysics News report begins by questioning the official explanation for the collapse of the three buildings on September 11, 2001, as determined by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST began carrying out an investigation in August 2002, and their findings are still questioned to this day. The report reminds us that:

“Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally.”

The report explains why this would be the case, offering four main explanations why steel-framed high rises have endured large fires in the past without undergoing total collapse: (1) the heat of a fire and its duration do not typically generate enough energy to heat the large structural members to the point where they would fail; (2) most high-rise buildings have fire suppression systems (such as water sprinklers) that would further inhibit the fire from reaching anywhere near the heat necessary to create a total collapse; (3) the structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent the structure from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; (4) steel-framed high-rise buildings are designed to be highly redundant, meaning that the buildings can suffer a partial collapse due to a fire but would not result in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.

“Countless other steel-framed high-rises have experienced large, long-lasting fires without suffering either partial or total collapse,” the report points out.
It goes on to confirm the scientists’ doubts regarding the official explanation by referencing the head structural engineer of the buildings, John Skilling, who was interviewed by the Seattle Times following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Skilling, who was concerned about a possible airplane attack, performed an analysis that proved the towers would withstand the impact of Boeing 707:

“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed…The building structure would still be there…However, I’m not saying that properly applied explosives—shaped explosives—of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage…. I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.”

To put it politely, Skilling believed the only thing that could bring down the Twin Towers was controlled demolition, certainly not a fire alone – not even a “horrendous fire.”

A controlled demolition would better explain how the buildings were able to collapse in the manner that they did, the report argues:

“In general, the technique used to demolish large buildings involves cutting the columns in a large enough area of the building to cause the intact portion above that area to fall and crush itself as well as crush whatever remains below it. This technique can be done in an even more sophisticated way, by timing the charges to go off in a sequence so that the columns closest to the center are destroyed first. The failure of the interior columns creates an inward pull on the exterior and causes the majority of the building to be pulled inward and downward while materials are being crushed, thus keeping the crushed materials in a somewhat confined area—often within the building’s ‘footprint.’ This method is often referred to as ‘implosion.’”

The lesser-known WTC building 7, which also collapsed that day, is “remarkable because it exemplified all the signature features of an implosion.” According to the report:

“The building dropped in absolute free fall for the first 2.25 seconds of its descent over a distance of 32 meters or eight stories. Its transition from stasis to free fall was sudden, occurring in approximately one-half second. It fell symmetrically straight down. Its steel frame was almost entirely dismembered and deposited mostly inside the building’s footprint, while most of its concrete was pulverized into tiny particles. Finally, the collapse was rapid, occurring in less than seven seconds.”

In relation to WTC Building 7, the report criticizes the official NIST explanation by pointing out some heavy flaws with their investigation. The NIST investigation began with the conclusion that fires brought down WTC building 7 but then had trouble trying to reconcile the evidence with that predetermined conclusion. The NIST report also attempted to deny the building fell at free-fall speed. However, independently verifying NIST’s computer modeling is currently impossible because NIST refuses to release a large portion of its data, arguing doing so “might jeopardize public safety.”
The most surprising aspect of this report, however, is that it goes further than any “conspiracy theorist” would ever have expected it to by questioning the explanation for the collapse of the Twin Tower buildings, as well. The report acknowledges:

“Thus, the definitive report on the collapse of the Twin Towers contains no analysis of why the lower sections failed to arrest or even slow the descent of the upper sections—which NIST acknowledges ‘came down essentially in free fall’—nor does it explain the various other phenomena observed during the collapses. When a group of petitioners filed a formal Request for Correction asking NIST to perform such analysis, NIST replied that it was ‘unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse’ because ‘the computer models [were] not able to converge on a solution.””

Lastly, the report briefly argues that to this day, there is still a significant volume of unexplained evidence that further supports the theory controlled demolitions took place on that tragic day fifteen years ago, including the fact that videos and photographs show numerous high-velocity bursts of debris being ejected from “point-like sources”; the well-documented presence of molten metal throughout the debris field; and a number of eyewitness accounts (some 156 witnesses) stating they saw, heard and/or felt explosions prior to and during the collapses.

As the authors of the report note, until their hypothesis is the “subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities,” we will never know the truth of what happened for sure. People will continue to speculate, and those of us who question the official story will continue to be labeled “crazy” despite the fact that there are many unanswered questions.

For example, if it’s crazy to question why media outlets reported on the collapse of WTC Building 7 before it even collapsed, then perhaps we should never question anything.

As rapper Lupe Fiasco wrote in his song “Words I Never Said”:

“9/11, Building 7, did they really pull it?”

No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning

 via phys.org

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

Old ideas revisited

The physicists emphasize that their quantum correction terms are not applied ad hoc in an attempt to specifically eliminate the Big Bang singularity. Their work is based on ideas by the theoretical physicist David Bohm, who is also known for his contributions to the philosophy of physics. Starting in the 1950s, Bohm explored replacing classical geodesics (the shortest path between two points on a curved surface) with quantum trajectories.

In their paper, Ali and Das applied these Bohmian trajectories to an equation developed in the 1950s by physicist Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri at Presidency University in Kolkata, India. Raychaudhuri was also Das's teacher when he was an undergraduate student of that institution in the '90s.

Using the quantum-corrected Raychaudhuri equation, Ali and Das derived quantum-corrected Friedmann equations, which describe the expansion and evolution of universe (including the Big Bang) within the context of general relativity. Although it's not a true theory of quantum gravity, the model does contain elements from both quantum theory and general relativity. Ali and Das also expect their results to hold even if and when a full theory of quantum gravity is formulated.

No singularities nor dark stuff

In addition to not predicting a Big Bang singularity, the new model does not predict a "big crunch" singularity, either. In general relativity, one possible fate of the universe is that it starts to shrink until it collapses in on itself in a big crunch and becomes an infinitely dense point once again.

Ali and Das explain in their paper that their model avoids singularities because of a key difference between classical geodesics and Bohmian trajectories. Classical geodesics eventually cross each other, and the points at which they converge are singularities. In contrast, Bohmian trajectories never cross each other, so singularities do not appear in the equations.

In cosmological terms, the scientists explain that the quantum corrections can be thought of as a cosmological constant term (without the need for dark energy) and a radiation term. These terms keep the universe at a finite size, and therefore give it an infinite age. The terms also make predictions that agree closely with current observations of the cosmological constant and density of the universe.

New gravity particle

In physical terms, the model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.

In a related paper, Das and another collaborator, Rajat Bhaduri of McMaster University, Canada, have lent further credence to this model. They show that gravitons can form a Bose-Einstein condensate (named after Einstein and another Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose) at temperatures that were present in the universe at all epochs.

Motivated by the model's potential to resolve the Big Bang singularity and account for dark matter and dark energy, the physicists plan to analyze their model more rigorously in the future. Their future work includes redoing their study while taking into account small inhomogeneous and anisotropic perturbations, but they do not expect small perturbations to significantly affect the results.

"It is satisfying to note that such straightforward corrections can potentially resolve so many issues at once," Das said.

The Universe Really Is Weird: A Landmark Quantum Experiment Has Finally Proved It So

via IFLScience

Only last year the world of physics celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bell’s theorem, a mathematical proof that certain predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with local causality. Local causality is a very natural scientific assumption and it holds in all modern scientific theories, except quantum mechanics.

Local causality is underpinned by two assumptions. The first is Albert Einstein’s principle of relativistic causality, that no causal influences travels faster than the speed of light. This is related to the “local” bit of local causality.

The second is a common-sense principle named after the philosopher Hans Reichenbach which says roughly that if you could know all the causes of a potential event, you would know everything that is relevant for predicting whether it will occur or not.

Although quantum mechanics is an immensely successful theory – it has been applied to describe the behaviour of systems from subatomic particles to neutron stars – it is still only a theory.

Thus, because local causality is such a natural hypothesis about the world, there have been decades of experiments looking for, and finding, the very particular predictions of quantum mechanics that John Bell discovered in 1964.

But none of these experiments definitively ruled out a locally causal explanation of the observations. They all had loopholes because they were not done quite in the way the theorem demanded.

No Loopholes

Now, the long wait for a loophole-free Bell test is over. In a paper published today in Nature, a consortium of European physicists has confirmed the predictions required for Bell’s theorem, with an experimental set-up without the imperfections that have marred all previous experiments.

A Bell experiment requires at least two different locations or laboratories (often personified as named fictional individuals such as Alice and Bob) where measurements are made on quantum particles. More specifically, at each location:

    a setting for the measurement is chosen randomly
    the measurement is performed with the chosen setting
    the result is recorded.

The experiment will only work if the particles in the different laboratories are in a so-called entangled state. This is a quantum state of two or more particles which is only defined for the whole system. It is simply not possible, in quantum theory, to disentangle the individual particles by ascribing each of them a state independent of the others.

The two big imperfections, or loopholes, in previous experiments were the separation and efficiency loophole.

To close the first loophole, it is necessary that the laboratories be far enough apart (well separated). The experimental procedures should also be fast enough so that the random choice of measurement in any one laboratory could not affect the outcome recorded in any other laboratory be any influence travelling at the speed of light or slower. This is challenging because light travels very fast.

To close the second, it is necessary that, once a setting is chosen, a result must be reported with high probability in the time allowed. This has been a problem with experiments using photons (quantum particles of light) because often a photon will not be detected at all.

The Experiment

Most previous Bell-experiments have used the simplest set up, with two laboratories, each with one photon and the two photons in an entangled state. Ronald Hanson and colleagues have succeeded in making their experiment loophole-free by using three laboratories, in a line of length 1.3km.

In the laboratories at either ends, Alice and Bob create an entangled state between a photon and an electron, keep their electron (in a diamond lattice) and send their photons to the laboratory in the middle (which I will personify as Juanita). Alice and Bob then each choose a setting and measure their electrons while Juanita performs a joint measurement on the two photons.

Alice and Bob’s measurements can be done efficiently, but Juanita’s, involving photons, is actually very inefficient. But it can be shown that this does not open a loophole, because Juanita does not make any measurement choice but rather always measures the two photons in the same way.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, was very technically demanding and only just managed to convincingly rule out local causality. This achievement could, in principle, be applied to enable certain very secure forms of secret key distribution. With continuing improvements in the technology one day this hopefully will become a reality.

For the moment, though, we should savour this result for its scientific significance. It finally proves that either causal influences propagate faster than light, or a common-sense notion about what the word “cause” signifies is wrong.

One thing this experiment has not resolved is which of these options we should choose. Physicists and philosophers remain as divided as ever on that question, and what it means for the nature of reality.

Is Space Digital?

via Scientific American

The Nature of Space and Time...

    Space may not be smooth and continuous. Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits. Physicists have assumed that these bits are far too small to measure with current technology.

    Yet one scientist thinks that he has devised a way to detect the bitlike structure of space. His machine—at present under construction—will attempt to measure its grainy nature.

    The experiment is one of the first to investigate the principle that the universe emerges from information—specifically, information that is imprinted on two-dimensional sheets.

    If successful, the experiment will shift the foundations of what we know about space and time, providing a glimpse of a new physics that could supplant our existing understanding.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v23/n3s/full/scientificamericanuniverse0814-104.html

Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?

via hopesandfears.com

Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?

We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.

Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D.

Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)

"What is our metric for determining what is real?  That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.

When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains.  We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not."

Sean Carroll

Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology

"How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.

There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.

The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.

The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.

The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.

We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.

The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it."

Fredrick Barrett

Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

"With psychedelics or "classical (serotonergic) hallucinogens", individuals can often distinguish between perceptual disturbances, visualized experiences (it feels as if I was in another place, or I had traveled to another time, but I realized my physical body was still "here"), and whatever is happening "outside" in the "real" world. However, in psychosis (for instance, in the midst of a psychotic break in a person who has schizophrenia), hallucinations are quite clearly defined as something that an individual believes is real, persistent, and seemingly independent and autonomous in the world.

The "hallucinations" of schizophrenia and psychosis are accepted as real, and individuals with schizophrenia often do not have insight into the nature of their hallucinations as being "not real" to the rest of us. This highlights a bit of a misnomer in the name of the drug class "hallucinogens", in that the experiences with these compounds are not taken as consensual reality in the same way that psychotic hallucinations are taken as "real".

How or Why can we tell the difference between reality and what is perceived during the acute effects of psychedelics? I'm not sure science has definitively answered that question ... but I think it may have to do with access to the insight that you've consumed a substance that can have these effects. It also may have to do with the transient effect of many perceptual disturbances and visualizations that can occur with hallucinogens. Maybe if the subjective effects of hallucinogens acted more like every-day perceptions (i.e. they weren't so extraordinary) or if they were more fixed or persistent (i.e. they didn't shift, warp, or morph so often) they would seem more real to the individual experiencing them."

George Musser Jr

Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

"The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is ​constructed​ out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.

The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm ​not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.

Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the ​interpretation of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is ​our​ reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)"

Karl Friston

Institute of Neurology, University College London, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director, Fellow of the Royal Society

"First, you pose an extremely interesting question about how do we know we are hallucinating. Strictly speaking, one never has insight into a true hallucination, if one does, these are generally referred to as pseudo-hallucinations, which are not unrelated to illusions. The very distinction between illusions and hallucinations is itself fascinating. This is because it suggests we have the capacity to represent our own representations – or representational validity. This speaks to all sorts of deep philosophical issues; for example, auto epistemic closure (in the sense of Thomas Metzinger), metacognition, self-awareness, lucid dreaming and so on.

The very fact that we can infer are perceptual influences are false speaks to a hierarchical composition of mind and perception; in which not only do we have perceptual influences but also inferences about those inferences (CF metacognition). The implications for self awareness are clear. This is why people like Allan Hobson are so fascinated by lucid dreaming. This provides a wonderful test bed to compare situations in which dream reality is perceived as real and when one becomes aware of the fact that it is a dream. Neurobiologically, this seems to rest on frontal lobe activity, suggesting, again, a hierarchical aspect to our fantastic organ (i.e. the brain – that generates fantasies that are checked against reality).

The usual notion that perception is just hallucination grounded by sensations is somewhat subverted by the fact that we can, on occasions, know that our perceptual inference is false."

Rich Oglesby

Creator and editor of Prosthetic Knowledge

"There is a well known phrase: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (often associated with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, although it was actually a quote from Father John Culkin, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York). This makes sense from an anthropological perspective - to put it crudely, whilst early humans evolved the ability to speak, the controlled sounds and utterances gained meaning to each other through localized consensus. Fast forward to the twentieth century and industrial nations, one can discover technologies that we can recognize their purpose yet have differences to our own, depending on our cultures and others - for example, the differences with electricial sockets or which side of the road you drive from one country to another. This was noted in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition which he labelled 'mirror-world'. Technology alsocan become taken for granted and familiar over time unless we find ourselves taken out of our habituated situation - nothing so easily reminds ourselves of change as a power cut, taking us back a couple of centuries.

In the past twenty years or so in the industrial world, the biggest impact on our experiences has been from the field of computing. While many focus on the internet as the biggest game changer, it neglects developments and permutations which other computing tech has reached - how the computer monitor tech has crossed over into television displays, graphics cards have altered how we work with colours transforming Pantone, photography and printing, sound cards and music sequencers, mp3 and Flac. Personal computing technologies have radically changed the way we make, define and experience the world we exist in. To describe the last twenty years, the best term I can think of is the Recon-Naissance, combining the terms reconaissance (the practise of gathering, formulating or expressing information) and renaissance (both 'rebirth' and revival of interest), it is the widespread outcome of ideas and production of post-WW2 investment in computational and telecommunication technologies. The Renaissance Man polymath has been replaced with the Renaissance Machine - the personal computer. The same PC could be used by scientist or businessperson, coder or student, in the office or in the warehouse, in the studio or in the bedroom. This has been most advantageous to the modern creative.

With the development of the smartphone ten years ago, modern computing became pocketable. With it, computing components became smaller. Due to commercial popularity, upgrade cycles changed from a year and a half to just one. Information creation and reception became domesticated. It became mainstream and more conveniently portable. Music, photography and video could be captured and seen on the same device, replacing the personal media player and the portable camera. Life could be documented and experienced 'en plein Hertz'.

But the developments of the smartphone benefitted a once neglected but now up-and-coming field: Virtual Reality. With small displays and accelerometers now refined and cheaper, and gave the opportunity to start ups to produce a new experiences with a new computing medium. Initially produced to complement video games, other startups are producing other narratives, such as 360 documentaries, animations and first person tools for creativity and design. Whilst the consumer implementation of these ideas are not truly available yet, the technology is being used by scientists, architects, artists and gamers with current developer builds. It would appear how we engage and relate with information will change again - the Recon-Naissance is still going strong."

Brad Burge

Director of Communications and Marketing: MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

"These aren't really scientific questions per se though they are fascinating and valuable to think about. I think it comes down to our definitions of both "hallucination" and "reality"—to what extent is any experience we have really "real"? That may be one the main things that hallucinations teach us, regardless of whether they're caused by drugs, neurological conditions, or intense meditation: to trust in our own experience, while always remembering that our experience is always our own."

Could all really come from nothing?

via NPR

The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.

It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"

This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.

Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.

Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.

Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.

Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.

Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.

What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)

Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.

Black holes are not ruthless killers, but instead benign hologram generators

 via ScienceDaily

Are black holes the ruthless killers we've made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the recently proposed idea that black holes have "firewalls" that destroy all they touch has a loophole.

In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom.

In fact, he says the world could be captured by a black hole, and we wouldn't even notice.

More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His "fuzzball theory" helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.

But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur's theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.

According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly. In fact, the idea is called the firewall theory because it suggests that a very literal fiery death awaits anything that touches it.

Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they've come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.

They believe that when material touches the surface of a black hole, it becomes a hologram, a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist just as before.

"Near-perfect" is the point of contention. There is a hypothesis in physics called complementarity, which was first proposed by Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind in 1993. Complementarity requires that any such hologram created by a black hole be a perfect copy of the original.

Mathematically, physicists on both sides of this new fuzzball-firewall debate have concluded that strict complementarity is not possible; That is to say, a perfect hologram can't form on the surface of a black hole.

Mathur and his colleagues are comfortable with the idea, because they have since developed a modified model of complementarity, in which they assume that an imperfect hologram forms. That work was done with former Ohio State postdoctoral researcher David Turton, who is now at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the CEA-Saclay research center in France.

Proponents of the firewall theory take an all-or-nothing approach to complementarity. Without perfection, they say, there can only be fiery death.

With his latest paper, Mathur counters that he and his colleagues have now proven mathematically that modified complementarity is possible.

It's not that the firewall proponents made some kind of math error, he added. The two sides based their calculations on different assumptions, so they got different answers. One group rejects the idea of imperfection in this particular case, and the other does not.

Imperfection is common topic in cosmology. Physicist Stephen Hawking has famously said that the universe was imperfect from the very first moments of its existence. Without an imperfect scattering of the material created in the Big Bang, gravity would not have been able to draw together the atoms that make up galaxies, stars, the planets -- and us.

This new dispute about firewalls and fuzzballs hinges on whether physicists can accept that black holes are imperfect, just like the rest of the universe.

"There's no such thing as a perfect black hole, because every black hole is different," Mathur explained.

His comment refers to the resolution of the "information paradox," a long-running physics debate in which Hawking eventually conceded that the material that falls into a black hole isn't destroyed, but rather becomes part of the black hole.

The black hole is permanently changed by the new addition. It's as if, metaphorically speaking, a new gene sequence has been spliced into its DNA. That means every black hole is a unique product of the material that happens to come across it.

The information paradox was resolved in part due to Mathur's development of the fuzzball theory in 2003. The idea, which he published in the journal Nuclear Physics B in 2004, was solidified through the work of other scientists including Oleg Lunin of SUNY Albany, Stefano Giusto of the University of Padova, Iosif Bena of CEA-Saclay, and Nick Warner of the University of Southern California. Mathur's co-authors included then-students Borun Chowdhury (now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University), and Steven Avery (now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University).

Their model was radical at the time, since it suggested that black holes had a defined -- albeit "fuzzy" -- surface. That means material doesn't actually fall into black holes so much as it falls onto them.

The implications of the fuzzball-firewall issue are profound. One of the tenets of string theory is that our three-dimensional existence -- four-dimensional if you count time -- might actually be a hologram on a surface that exists in many more dimensions.

"If the surface of a black hole is a firewall, then the idea of the universe as a hologram has to be wrong," Mathur said.

The very nature of the universe is at stake, but don't expect rival physicists to come to blows about it.

"It's not that kind of disagreement," Mathur laughed. "It's a simple question, really. Do you accept the idea of imperfection, or do you not?"

The future running backward...

Physicists Demonstrate How Time Can Seem To Run Backward, and the Future Can Affect the Past

by Jay Kuo

We all agree, past events can affect the present. And present events can affect the future. But few would credibly argue that future events can affect the past.

That might all change soon. Welcome to the world of quantum physics.

To the average person, the observable, classical world of Newtonian physics feels like common sense. Time moves forward; things exist in only one place at a time; if a tree falls in the woods but no one sees it, we assume it still fell. But a team of physicists at Australia National University are saying, “Not so fast.” Enter quantum physics. And it’s really weird.

A new study published in Nature Physics appears to show that time in fact may move backward, things may exist in multiple states, and whether a tree fell in the woods not only may depend on whether anyone ultimately saw it, but also on whether something somehow knew it would be seen. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

This absurd-sounding conclusion derives from two experiments, one of which has been around for some time, and one of which was just successfully performed only a few weeks ago.

First, the older experiment. Scientists have long observed the strange behavior of light particles, photons, in something called the Double Slit Experiment. Here’s how that worked: When light was shone at a screen with two narrow slots in it, the photon particles acted rather schizophrenically. One the one hand, the photons acted like particles, casting a direct glow on the wall behind the slits. But they also acted like waves, generating an “interference pattern” like waves of water might, creating a mysterious second pattern beyond two simple strips of light.

This principle lies at the heart of quantum physics. A particle like a photon acts as if it has indefinite, suspended states. It lacks any physical properties, and is defined instead as a set of “probabilities” that exists in any one particular state. (These “probabilities” aren’t just some laboratory or academic theory. They underlie all of our modern notion of chemistry, and they make microprocessors and nuclear reactions possible. Our modern world would not exist without these bizarre properties of particles.)

If you’re lost, this video explains the Double Slit experiment and the probability wave in quantum mechanics:

But then there’s the second weird thing. When scientists try to observe a photon in the experiment, the very act of watching it “collapses” into a definite state–either a particle or a wave. No matter what they do, whenever they go to observe, it is as if the photon “decides” what state it is in. The act of observation is said to pull that photon into a definite reality. (This is at the heart of the Schrödinger’s Cat parable, where a hypothetical cat inside a box is neither alive nor dead until you open the box and look inside.)

This second weird notion–that observation defines reality–has been around a long time, along with an experiment famously proposed by John Wheeler back in 1978, and thought to be impossible to carry out. It was called the “delayed choice thought experiment.” It was a “thought experiment” because it was presumed it could not actually be facilitated. That experiment sought to answer the question, “So precisely when does a photon choose to act like a particle or act like a wave? When it is first fired, before it goes through the slit, or perhaps even…after?”

As explained in Digital Journal, one of Wheeler’s proposed thought experiments went something roughly like this: What if you could insert a second screen, but only after something has passed the first screen? The second screen, which would sometimes be inserted and sometimes not based on random chance, was designed to cause interference similar to the first. That way, in theory, you could observe the state of the photon when it passed through the first screen and see if it remained consistent going through the second.

The technical difficulty was that no one was able to insert that second screen in time, that is, after the item had passed through the first but before it struck the back wall. That task seemed insurmountable. But now that experiment has been tried out, and the results are rather mind-boggling.

The team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom which, though much more massive than a photon, would also theoretically act like a photon. That is, it would also exist in an indefinite state, then act either like a particle or like a wave, once observed. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.

What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate’s very existence in the path was random. And what’s more, it hadn’t happened yet.

In other words, it was as if the helium particle “knew” whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first. The possible future presence of that second grate appeared to be determining the past state of the atom as it passed through grate #1. Whether it continued as a particle or changed into a wave depended on something that might happen in the future.

But how could a future event–the insertion of the second grate–determine the past state of the helium atom? Time would have to run backward, or something would have to know in advance that the second grate was going to be in place.

“The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wavelike or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” Truscott said. If we are to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths, then one has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom’s past, he concluded.

The notion that the future is affecting the past has profound implications beyond the rarified world of quantum physics. It calls into question, for example, the very question of free will, or whether there are multiple worlds with multiple realities. These studies and findings will no doubt be challenged and presumably replicated, but one thing is clear: This new wrinkle adds more questions than answers.

We’re going to need a bigger cat box.

In the beginning was the code

The universe seems incredibly complex. But could its rules be dead simple? Juergen Schmidhuber’s fascinating story will convince you that this universe and your own life are just by-products of a very simple and fast program computing all logically possible universes.

Juergen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA (since 1995), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland (since 2009), and Professor SUPSI (since 2003).

He helped to transform IDSIA into one of the world’s top ten AI labs (the smallest!), according to the ranking of Business Week Magazine. His group pioneered the field of mathematically optimal universal AI and universal problem solvers. The algorithms developed in his lab won seven first prizes in international pattern recognition competitions, as well as several best paper awards.
Since 1990 he has developed a formal theory of fun and curiosity and creativity to build artificial scientists and artists. He also generalized the many-worlds theory of physics to a theory of all constructively computable universes – an algorithmic theory of everything.

He has published nearly 300 peer-reviewed scientific works on topics such as machine learning, artificial recurrent neural networks, fast deep neural nets, adaptive robotics, algorithmic information and complexity theory, digital physics, the formal theory of beauty & humor, and the fine arts.

In 2008 he was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

via disinformation

Strange Physics: Is reality a grand illusion?

You know the saying, “things are rarely what they seem”? The phrase is meant to encourage us to examine the way in which we view the people, and the world, around us. In fact, this phrase applies to the very laws of nature.

As we know, due to the finite speed that light travels in an almost-perfect vacuum, we are incapable of seeing things in “real time.” We see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, the Sun eight minutes ago, Proxima Centauri (the closest star to our solar system) as it was more than four years ago, and the Andromeda galaxy (our closest galactic neighbor) as it was more than 2.5 million years ago.
In essence, astronomy is “miraculous” in the sense that, just by  looking out into the night sky, we are traveling through time. In the same way, observers in other parts of our galaxy could look at Earth’s development over the course of our evolutionary timeline, and they would see the Earth as it appeared hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago (depending on which part of the galaxy they live in and how far they are from Earth).

The same phenomenon allows us to study the universe as it appeared mere hundreds of millions of years after the big bang occurred—The most distant sources of light that were emitted from the first generation of stars and galaxies, which sprang up around 13.4 billion years ago.

We Only See a Fraction of Our Surroundings:

Something else that limits our perception of the universe is our inability to see light in all of its various forms. Light—which has properties of particles and waves—is just like the universe in that it is an expression of energy. Albeit, an extraordinarily unique expression of it. Most obvious to us is light at optical wavelengths. Then there is light at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

Astonishingly, our Sun only emits about 44% of its total electromagnetic radiation at optical wavelengths, the rest of its emissions come in frequencies invisible to the naked eye (but their true nature can be discerned using special tools and filters, like what we have on our telescopes).
Things of this nature are most obvious at large distances, but they are also applicable in our day-to-day lives as well, though the effects are not nearly as extreme or noticeable. Don’t believe me? Let’s participate in a little thought experiment:

First, close your eyes and extend both of your index fingers (though, unless you can see through your eyelids, you should probably read  the rest before doing this….which may defeat the purpose, but ah well). After you’ve done that, take one of your fingers and touch your nose. With the other finger, touch your knee or ankle. Repeat this a few times (even better, have someone else do it), and you should be able to feel your fingers touching your nose and ankle simultaneously. Think about this for a second…the nerve signal from your ankle had to travel much farther (about twenty times over) to get to your brain than the signal from your nose did, but it feels simultaneous, doesn’t it?

Basically—and this is trippy—we aren’t sure if the ankle and the nose were truly touched at the same time, or if they were touched at slightly different moments, and the brain reassembled asynchronous signals, which led to the sensory information being put together at the exact same time.

There was actually an experiment done on this very subject (see the diagram below) where scientists had a group of volunteers press a button that would cause a light to flash after a small delay. After several rounds of this, they found that the volunteers were seeing the flash only milliseconds after they pushed the button, as the brain steadily “edited” the delay as it continued to get use to it—suggesting that our brains modify sensory information in different ways. Inevitably, some researchers conclude that our consciousness may exist in the past to some degree…similar to a few second delay.

Now, let’s tie some of this together… if you were to stick your hand straight in front of your face, you will not see a present image of it. Instead, it will be delayed over the course of a few milliseconds due to the constraints of Einstein’s theory of special relativity (given the time that it takes light to illuminate your hand, and the biological processes we must undergo before our brain can register stimulus). In addition, we must also factor in the speed of nerves traveling to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, where visual information is sorted through and the “speed of thought,” which is largely different from person to person.

In conclusion, many things on a micro and macroscale are directly influenced from our perspective due to a myriad of variables placed on us by the laws of physics and our anatomy itself. There is the reflection and refraction of light scattered in our atmosphere, the observer effect witnessed with subatomic particles, light at various frequencies, and even the properties of time itself, or time dilation more specifically, whose effects can be seen on our satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and the event horizons of black holes. All of this brings up an interesting philosophical question… Are we really observing reality, or can we only see into the past—glimpse the world as it was a nanosecond ago? Are we, in a sense, time travelers?

What are your thoughts?

From http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/the-reality-of-perception/

Fritjof Capra - Bootstrap physics

by Fritjof Capra

In the last two chapters of my book The Tao of Physics, I discussed a theory known as “bootstrap theory,” which was very popular in the 1970s, and on which I worked myself during my ten years at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. This theory, proposed by Geoffrey Chew, is based on the idea that nature cannot be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental constituents of matter, but has to be understood entirely through self-consistency. All of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.

This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional spirit of basic research in physics, which has always concentrated on finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same time, it can be seen as the culmination of the conception of particles as interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web, which arose in quantum theory and acquired an intrinsically dynamic nature in relativity theory.

The bootstrap philosophy abandons not only the idea of fundamental constituents of matter but accepts no fundamental entities whatsoever — no fundamental laws or equations, and not even a fundamental structure of space-time. The universe is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties of any part of this web are fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their mutual interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the bootstrap theory was eclipsed by the success of the standard model, which is very different, as it postulates the existence of fundamental fields and their corresponding particles. And today, bootstrap physics has virtually disappeared from the scene. However, if a theory of quantum gravity continues to remain elusive, and if the a priori assumption of the structure of space-time is broadly recognized as the essential flaw of string theory, the bootstrap idea may well will be revived someday, in some mathematical formulation or other.

Read the entire essay here:  http://www.fritjofcapra.net/the-unification-of-physics/

Zuse's Thesis: The Universe is a Computer

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995; pronounce: “Conrud Tsoosay”) not only built the first programmable computers (1935-1941) and devised the first higher-level programming language (1945), but also was the first to suggest (in 1967) that the entire universe is being computed on a computer, possibly a cellular automaton (CA). He referred to this as “Rechnender Raum” or Computing Space or Computing Cosmos. Many years later similar ideas were also published / popularized / extended by Edward Fredkin (1980s), Jürgen Schmidhuber (1990s – see overview), and more recently Stephen Wolfram (2002). Zuse’s first paper on digital physics and CA-based universes was:

Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, vol. 8, pages 336-344, 1967. Download PDF scan.

Zuse is careful: on page 337 he writes that at the moment we do not have full digital models of physics, but that does not prevent him from asking right there: which would be the consequences of a total discretization of all natural laws? For lack of a complete automata-theoretic description of the universe he continues by studying several simplified models. He discusses neighbouring cells that update their values based on surrounding cells, implementing the spread and creation and annihilation of elementary particles. On page 341 he writes “In all these cases we are dealing with automata types known by the name “cellular automata” in the literature” and cites von Neumann’s 1966 book: Theory of self-reproducing automata. On page 342 he briefly discusses the compatibility of relativity theory and CAs.

Contrary to a widely spread misunderstanding, quantum physics, quantum computation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bell’s inequality do not provide any physical evidence against Zuse’s thesis of a CA-computed universe! Gerard t’ Hooft (Physics Nobel 1999) in principle agrees with determinism a la Zuse: proof by authority :-)

Continue Reading:

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle made simple

“God Helmet” Inventor, Dr. Michael Persinger interviewed about telepathy experiments

from skeptiko.com

Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.

Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles.  Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980’s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.

Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy.  “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”

While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”

Read the interview with Alex Tsakiris:

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and before we get started with today’s interview, and a very fascinating interview it is with Dr. Michael Persinger, I’m going to take a minute and invite you to connect – connect with this show, Skeptiko, and with me personally.

In the last few months as I had a chance to talk to more and more researchers and dig into all the science surrounding human consciousness and spirituality and where science is leading us, I felt a stronger and stronger need to connect with you and to create a community, if you will, of like-minded people. So in the last week or so I’ve tried to take some steps in that direction.

I’ve finally gotten on Facebook and Twitter and I’m going to try and post there more regularly. But I’m going to invite you to join me. To follow me and to allow me to follow you and see if we can create a community, if you will, of like-minded people who are interested in following the data wherever it leads, as I say. So you’ll find all the links on the Skeptiko Web site for following me and please connect up and I’ll do the same.

But for right now, let’s move into this interview that I have with Dr. Michael Persinger.  And quite a fascinating interview it is. I really, really admire the courage that the maverick scientist has, and that’s where Dr. Michael Persinger is. You know, he gets it from both sides. He really is a materialist and very much a mind equals brain guy.

That’s not where I see the data leading but it’s certainly where he sees the data leading, and he really approaches it from a “let’s get down and prove it, here’s the research.” He doesn’t shy away from that. He doesn’t throw extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof kind of bullcrap. He just says, “Hey, here’s what I’m finding, here’s what I think, here’s the way I think things are showing themselves.” I find that very refreshing.

But he also gets it on the other side because while he is very much of a materialist and a neuroscience guy, he also has some surprising data when it comes to telepathy, that you’ll hear about, where he says he’s basically proven it in his lab and can replicate this quantum entanglement communication thing that you’ve heard about maybe on this show and certainly a lot of other places. So very, very interesting. In my mind it’s what makes Skeptiko so exciting for me and makes it hopefully interesting for you to be able to hear from these researchers who we really, really don’t hear enough from. So stay with me for Michael Persinger.

I’m joined today by Dr. Michael Persinger, an internationally renowned cognizant neuroscience researcher and professor at Laurentian University in Canada. He’s probably most famous, and many of you I’m sure have seen him on TV or especially in a YouTube video with his God Helmet, a device that he has used experimentally to demonstrate that electromagnetic disturbances in the brain maybe the source of mystical and spiritual experiences. So, Dr. Persinger, thank you very much for joining me today on Skeptkio.

Dr. Michael Persinger: You’re quite welcome.

Alex Tsakiris: And let me start by as I kind of stuttered through that introduction, is there anything that I may be didn’t quite get right there in describing, I guess, the research that most people associate with you, and that is with the God Helmet and the electromagnetic stimulation of the brain to create mystical experiences.

Dr. Michael Persinger: No, that was very succinctly stated. I mean, effectively what we’ve been doing all these years is to try to understand the brain basis to all experiences. The basic assumption is that all experiences are generated by brain activity, determined in large part by the structure of the brain.

Alex Tsakiris: That point that you just made, is you started with the idea, the materialistic notion that all conscious experience originates with the brain. I think what’s fascinating, if we’re going to dive right into this and make the most effective use of your time, is what do you think about some of the research that seems to be pointing in a different direction?

We could look at the research of folks who have just concentrated on the spiritual experience like a colleague of yours in Canada, Dr. Mario Beauregard or we could look at Dr. Andrew Newberg, or Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, who have all looked at various kinds of spiritual experience and maybe seem to be leaning towards another direction. And that’s that perhaps the neurocorrelates that we see firing one that they may not just be in the right temporal lobes but also that they may point to a kind of different nature of consciousness. I know that’s a lot to kind of bite off, but I’m sure this is stuff that you think about, talk about, and write about all the time. So just jump right in.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Our research starts on the basic premise that all experience is generated by brain activity. Now, the critical thing is that all experience means your experience of love, or memories, or having a mystical experience, must be associated with specific patterns of brain activity. That brain activity in large part is determined by the brain structure. Many of these things, because structure dictates function, may be relatively unique to the human being itself.

Now, although that’s our assumption, the most powerful tool of science is the experiment. So if we want to understand these experiences and how they are generated by brain activity, we have to reproduce them in the laboratory. So the basic approach then was, okay, if people have mystical experiences and they’re associated with brain activity then if we imitate them in the laboratory and we understand the physical conditions that produce them, we should be able to 1) understand the areas of the brain and the patterns of activity responsible for these experiences, and 2) we should be able to control them.

And if they’re a natural phenomena, and we think that mystical experiences, including the God experience, the God belief, are natural phenomena, we should be able to reproduce them easily if we have the correct parameters in the laboratory, control them and understand how they may be manipulated by others with less honorable goals.

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s what intrigues me. You’ve really pioneered this work and I think you have some very interesting comments that I’ve seen in previous interviews about what it’s been like to be a pioneer, the old adage of  you know, the pioneer cause he has arrows not just in the front but in the back as well. And I think you’ve experienced a little bit of that just in terms of delving into an area that touches on so many hot buttons on both sides, either believers or non-believers.

Maybe you’d like to comment about that. But in particular, comment about that within the framework of where some of the research into what’s being called “neurotheology” is going. I threw out the spiritual brain, Mario Beauregard, Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, Davidson at Wisconsin, you know, folks who are also looking at the spiritual experience and maybe coming to a slightly different conclusion than you are about the relationship between the brain and the neurocorrelates and that spiritual experience.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, in terms of trying to understand the neural basis to these powerful experiences that determine the history of human behavior, I mean, don’t forget more people have been killed in wars under the auspices of who’s god is correct, either directly or indirectly than most plagues. So this is a powerful phenomena that may be intrinsic to the nature of the human brain. It may have had a adaptive function over the years. For example, we know that people who believe in God and have God experiences have reduced death anxiety, which may allow them to be more productive.

The whole concept of the immortality is implicitly tied to this experience and the belief in immortality actually reduces anxiety about death and sometimes can make individuals more adaptive to their environment. But ultimately, all of this has to be related to the brain function and there may be different approaches. For example, some of my colleagues have said that there is a non-physical component that’s very difficult to understand because in the history of science those phenomena which were considered to be non-physical ultimately we did find a physical basis. And that when we found the physical basis then we understood it.

If you talk about a phenomena as being sort of ephemeral and non-testable and something beyond measurement, then effectively it’s an empty hypothesis and you never will be able to test it.

To answer your question about people’s approaches, I think it’s really important to have a versatile approach and have people have different ideas, have open ideas, but ultimately the end point must be measurement and reproduction in the laboratory. For example, some of the stuff by Beauregard with the MRI studies, what he really did was look at memories. He asked the people to remember their experiences and found patterns of activity that were basically typical of a memory.

That’s quite different than direct stimulation of the brain and producing the experience, so although we can have different approaches, and I think that’s really important for science to be open-minded and to basically exclude no one. The ultimate measure is going to be 1) can you reproduce it in the laboratory and 2) can you actually product the same phenomena by experimental techniques? And that’s the powerful tool to demonstrate you have a causal connection.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, and we can jump into that causal connection because there’s a couple of points. Let me back up. I’m not as totally familiar with Beauregard’s work although I did remember that he did FMRIs while these nuns were in this peak spiritual state, so I think he did have that…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Actually they were remembering the peak spiritual stage.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, well Newberg certainly did at the University of Pennsylvania…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Newberg did. And Newberg found completely different patterns which were really similar to what we find when we measure the electroencephalographic activity of individuals having mystical experiences and basically is the same area that we focus upon when we stimulate it with the weak electromagnetic fields generated by the God Helmet. So again, the critical thing is the instructions you give to your subjects in large part will influence different patterns of the brain and that’s why that precision is so important in understanding the neural basis to the God experience.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, let’s move into I think probably the most challenging research given what you’ve just said, and that’s the research that’s been done in near-death experience. We can point to just a whole bunch of people, but Peter Fenwick is someone who’s been on the show and Raymond Moody, of course, has been on the show, although I don’t think he’s as active in the field.

What do you make of the rather substantial amount of evidence that has come back that suggests that in some way that we don’t totally understand, there is this continuation of consciousness after a period when there is no EEG and no EKG for a number of patients that have been verified clinically  in a hospital setting by the people we normally trust to kind of gather that kind of information.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, first of all, the electroencephalogram or brain waves simply measures a very, very small component. It’s in the microvolt range. It’s about a thousandth times smaller than the actual steady state potential of the brain itself which can last for several minutes to half an hour under sort of deprived conditions. The EEG also reflects only the cortex. It doesn’t tell you very much at all what’s going on deep within the cortex. So when you have these near-death experiences and flat EEGs, that just tells you what the cortex is doing. It doesn’t tell you necessarily the integrity or the activity taking place deep within the brain.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, but…

Dr. Michael Persinger: The second feature…

Alex Tsakiris: Go ahead. I was just going to say, I was just going to interject here. But I’ve heard that argument before from materialists and I just – I don’t get it. I mean, at this point we have tens and tens of thousands of EEGs and we know how your EEG is supposed to look when you’ve having the kind of experience that these people describe. And it certainly never looks flat. I mean, we don’t have any record of that in any that I’m aware of, where anyone has done an EEG of a live person and say, oh, it’s flat and then they say yeah, but I had this incredible experience. How do you kind of connect those two?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well I certainly can. And I think the reason is we’re looking at the fact that out of body experiences, which is what you’re talking about in near-death experiences in large part, the idea that you’re detached from your body and you’re somewhere else. It is not due to a homogeneous source. For example,  a near-death experience after a flat EEG is quite different, for example, when someone is wide awake or in an altered state and experiencing an out of body experience. In that case, the activity is very, very clear and very, very systematic. You usually get certain kinds of alphoid activity which is in the order of a low frequency over the right parietal region.

Mind you, the same thing can be done by stimulating, as reported in Nature a few years ago. The right parietal region, you can actually get a feeling of being detached or being somewhere else. The so-called mental bipolaria of being two places at once. So when people are awake and the experience takes place that’s quite different than when people have been in a medical situation where they’re considered to be dead and then the EEG returns to normal and they report what they think they’ve experienced.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m still not getting that. I mean, my understanding is that all our understanding of this tool we have, called an EEG, suggests that this other kind of very ephemeral thing that we’re trying to get our arms around called consciousness, that there’s some correlation between the way we measure the two. And I just can’t accept the idea unless maybe you can point me to the research where I can find that. Where people are saying, “yes, you can have this complex conscious experience and we would not be able to measure it with an EEG.” I just don’t see where anyone has demonstrated…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, I agree with you, I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you totally. If there’s an experience there’s going to be brain activity. And if you can articulate the experience, that is, at the time the person’s having the experience, measure the EEG, particularly quantitative EEG, there are very specific patterns over very specific regions of the brain that relate to that kind of experience. That’s well known in the quantity EEG literature. So when someone says, “I have an experience, ” be it mystical or whatever, you can actually measure the brain, which we’ve done on many occasions and see very specific signatures taking place.

Even with those that are so-called psychic experiences we tested Shawn Haribands, who is a very reliable individual for sort of guessing and feeling people’s memories. When he’s doing that, there’s very specific patterns that take place over his right parietal temporal lobe. The number of those that take place is directly related to how accurate he is in how many of these statements he makes. So you can relate quantitative EEG or brain activity to very specific experiences.

Alex Tsakiris: I mean, I think that’s a whole fascinating area and I’d love to kind of jump in there, but I don’t want to quite yet leave this near-death experience because I want to understand fully what you’re saying. So my understanding in reading the near-death experience research is we have some pretty – a handful, dozens, on the order of dozens or maybe a hundred, of very well documented cases where we do have EEG and EKG records of folks who have had cardiac arrests and during that whole process, then we’re also able to verify that they had some kind of experience when they were resuscitated and they have some kind of conscious experience that seems to correlate time wise to the time when we had no EEG from them, so I’m just wondering what you make of that.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, like I’ve said, if you’re talking about having out of body experiences in a waking person, there are very specific patterns over the right parietal temporal lobe that are measured reliably. This has been known for at least 30 or 40 years. Now, the near-death experiences which are also out of body experiences but usually occur in specific settings, for example, like in a hospital or fatigue or following a crisis or a trauma, yes EEG can change remarkably and sometimes be flat-lined for a protracted period. When the person wakes up and the EEG becomes normal, they report these interesting experiences.

Those experiences in large part reflect the areas of the brain that were activated during that time and many of the patterns of near-death experiences are very specific, very reliable. That’s why they show up across all humans in all cultures, of changes within the vasculature, that is the blood vessel activity or blood flow, in the areas that are most vulnerable. That’s why first you get the tunnel effect and the moving through the tunnel and then of course the out of body detachment. Then you may get memories and you may have the invariably the sense of presence of a deceased entity or a cultural icon, for example, it could be a religious icon. These are very predictable patterns if you know the part of the brain that is slowly becoming over-active because it’s in a failure state.

Alex Tsakiris: But wait a minute. I’m still not making the connection. No EEG, conscious experience. How can that be?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, first of all, during the flat EEG, okay the person’s not saying anything. They’re in a state that’s not – they’re making not any state. When they come out of the flat EEG and they begin to talk, they talk about experiences. Now it’s important to realize that the EEG is measuring only the cortex, which is the outer 2-3, 3-5 millimeters of the brain. It’s a tool that’s only measuring 1,000 potentials, all those fluctuations, but when you flat-line, there’s still tremendous potential. The DC potentials are there. It’s like a pool. If you have a pool that’s 100 meters deep and only the top one meter is fluctuating, if you flatten out the fluctuating and make it nice and flat, that doesn’t mean that the 100 meters has gone away. It’s just not moving anymore.

And so the measurement will look like it’s flat, but there’s still potential difference. That’s a very important technical aspect of EEG work that most people don’t realize.

The second feature is that the electrical ability or electrical storage of memory is about 30 minutes. So every – right now as you and I are chatting, our brains are going to store this information in electrical form for about 30 minutes before it’s ultimately transformed into the small microstructures, the synapses that allow us long-term memory.

Now that information is being stored deep within the brain. It’s not in the cortex at all and you can’t even see it from an EEG. For example, the areas of the brain we call the hippocampus that store memory, you can’t even see the activity from a EEG. You have to actually put electrodes deep into the brain in order to see that activity. So there’s a common misconception that a flat EEG means no brain activity. In actual fact, it simply tells you a kind of activity is no longer common.

Alex Tsakiris: So that’s interesting. So you would speculate that that’s what’s happening in these near-death experiences, at least the ones that we can verify where there is no EEG measurable. You suspect that there is the same kind of conscious experience that they report going on but it’s at some level deep inside the brain that we just can’t measure. Is that correct?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, that would be very close. In fact, when the person wakes up after 20 or 30 minutes or at some particular protracted time, what they’re doing is telling you what they experienced. So they’re not necessarily conscious at the time. They’re reporting experiences that they’ve had. And I think that’s a very important distinction that deep within the brain that information is being consolidated and so if you suddenly become active again, then you can have access to the information. Very much like during a good portion of the night you’re not dreaming.

There’s all kinds of activity going on within your brain. All kinds of metabolic activity and information being represented. During the dreaming state you suddenly have access to it and if you wake up you can actually remember it, even though it may have been going on for several minutes to tens of minutes. You now are aware of it and you can now report it. So it’s like suddenly becoming on-line, so to speak, in terms of a computer. The information’s been there for quite a while. Now you can talk about it and remember what happened.

Alex Tsakiris: Interesting. What do you make of the reports of people retrieving information that they wouldn’t normally know? Being able to say, “Yes, I recall that you were the one who resuscitated me.” Dr. Penny Satori has actually done some research of the ability of people who’ve recovered from cardiac arrest, those who have experienced a near-death experience are better able to recollect, if you will, I don’t know if that would be the correct term – the actual procedures that happened during the resuscitation.

Then a control group who were resuscitated but didn’t have a near-death experience. What do you make of the fact that people routinely in these near-death experience accounts say, “I was able to travel. I was able to see inside the room. I was able to travel home and see what Mom was cooking for dinner. Or see what was going on in these other places.” What do you make of that?

Dr. Michael Persinger: I think those are very interesting experiences and I think the critical thing is the information may be very accurate but the explanation and the perception the person has may not. For example, most of us would agree that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you’re in Ptolemies’ day, the perception would be it’s because the sun is moving around us. That’s the perception. Now, of course, we realize that’s not the case. It’s because the Earth rotates. The sun is not going around us. But the perception is similar, so the interpretation will change.

And the same thing happens with these near-death experiences in the sense that yes, information may be obtained but that of course is then filtered through how the brain interprets information. For example, right now if you’re looking at someone nearby, you see an integrated image. But in actual fact, from the time that the retina picked up that image, all the parts of that image were broken apart into more than 3, 4, a dozen different kinds of components. What the color was, how the person was moving, their facial characteristics, goes to different parts of the brain and then is re-integrated according to how the brain is organized and your expectations.

So in large part, memory is a reconstruction of the experiences. So the same thing happens here. The information may be there but how you interpret it and report it is going to be a function of how your brain is organized, your belief system, and how you accommodate language and information.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m not sure I totally got that. So how would someone know something that was happening at a distance? Happening far away, three floors above them in the hospital where they saw something?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Oh, okay, now in terms of looking at something that’s a distance away, again, information is around us all the time and we’re typically not aware of it. Let’s first of all address that first comment about how can people be aware of things when they’re under anesthesia? Well, first of all, for over 30 years we’ve known that if you’re sleeping and deep sleep, and we whisper your name in your ear, your EEG will show a response or evoke potential, will show response even though you’re never aware of it. So the brain never really goes away, even though it may be in a state of anesthesia.

The second feature: if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a near-death experience and is exotic, it wouldn’t be as impressive because if you look at the functional MRI of a brain of a person reading and you suddenly change the text, very subtly, there are areas of the brain that are activated even though the person is not aware of what’s going on. In other words, the brain responds even though there’s no awareness associated with it.

And in another example, so-called psychic blindness, these are individuals who are blind but yet as they are walking about they can move around objects and if you look at their brains you find that a small amount of their occipital cortex is activated enough for the unconscious reflex systems to respond and move around the objects, but not enough critical mass for them to say, “I’m aware of what I see.” So the critical thing is you can have a lot of changes and detect a lot of changes in your environment without necessarily awareness.

Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.

The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that – and indeed, altered states in general – is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. You just gave a definition there that I guess you could take in a number of different directions. Now you took it in a kind of very – ordinary is probably the best word – ordinary direction in terms of, hey, maybe you can tune into radio waves or other signals at a distance. But you also seem to leave open the possibility that you could tune into other communication along the lines of the experiment you said you did with the psychic who seems to be able to tune into certain kinds of information at a distance. Any thoughts on that? And I guess that would also tie into…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the critical thing about science – and again, this is how I started at the top of our interview – is it’s really important to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. And sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not individuals who are mystic believers. It’s scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like. In science we have arbitrarily divided nature into increments we call scientific disciplines into physics and chemistry and psychology and so forth. But in actual fact, this division is quite artificial.

And natural phenomenon – and there’s lots of natural phenomenon to study – really are the subject matter of science and pursuit of the unknown is the subject matter. So that means we have to remain open-minded. The only difference between a scientist and a religious believer or a mystical believer is the fact that we measure. And once we measure it we can reproduce it experimentally. If you can experimentally reproduce it, you can control it. And then you understand how it works. That’s the only difference to science is open-minded. Anything is possible.

Alex Tsakiris: What an interesting way to maybe start to wrap things up. Can you maybe in the last few minutes that we have, tell us some of the most interesting things that are going on in your lab today, and some of your most current discoveries?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, what’s going on in the laboratory – and I have some fantastic graduate students and we work together as a team – and what we have found for example, is that if you place two different  brains, two different people at a distance, you put a circular magnetic field around both. There’s a magnetic field going around like a coil, around both brains even at a distance. You make sure both coils are connected to the same computer which means they’re generating the same configuration of two different spaces.

If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement. And if that’s true then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical application and application, for example, in space travel because there’s no time involved with it. That’s one thing we’re looking at. That’s one of our more exotic hypotheses.

Other ones we’re looking at, for example, how various kinds of patterns of electromagnetic fields generated from the brain may influence cell cultures in terms of influencing their outcome in terms of their molecular chemistry, which may someday add to the understanding of how somebody being nearby can influence the physiology and health of a person. We know about individuals with green thumbs. We know that certain physicians are better than others just by touching the patient. And it’s more than just a placebo effect. What’s the mechanism? We’re trying to understand that.

And the third thing I think is really important is we’re trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. And of course, consciousness is probably more like an over-inclusive term. It’s probably not consciousness but a variety of complicated processes and we just slam this word on it that are involved with individuals have these unique skills, like the Shawn Haribands and the Ingo Swanns who seem to have access to information that others do not have. So we’re trying to understand the neurophysical basis to it and to try to integrate it in terms of the known energies around us so that someday we can also replicate it. That really is the real test of a hypothesis or an idea. Can you replicate it with an experiment?

Alex Tsakiris: Wow, very fascinating stuff. It does lead me – I can’t resist asking this one more question. If you do seem to be kind of leaning in the direction of saying that there might be other ways that consciousness interacts with other consciousness, you know, the telepathy thing with the light flashing, then are you open to the possibility that maybe the physical structure of our brain is more of a transceiver than the agent that creates consciousness, as some people have suggested. Is that on the table for you, or…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Absolutely. The idea that the brain, of course,  is a source of all experiences because the brain, obviously if you terminate it you don’t have experiences, but the counter hypothesis – actually it’s not even counter, it’s a parallel hypothesis – that the brain is microstructured. This infinitesimal, complex pattern, is microstructured so that it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns.

And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else. That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.

Alex Tsakiris: What a wild ride you have there in your lab, huh? You must wake up – also in your interview I read how your work ethic is quite impressive. Do you still work until the wee hours of the morning every day?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Yes, we do. We work until about four in the morning.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. That’s great. Well, we’ll all stay tuned to the exciting and interesting things that are sure to come out of all your work. Thank you, thank you so much for joining us today on Skeptiko, Dr. Persinger.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well thank you for asking me.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. Michael Persinger for joining me today on Skeptiko. If you’d like more information about this show, including all those links that I spoke about in terms of connecting up with me and connecting up with this show, please visit our Web site. It’s at skeptiko.com. You’ll find links to all our previous shows. You can also post your comments right there, or you can go to the Skeptiko forum and post your comments there, as well.

That’s going to do it for today. I have some very interesting interviews along this line coming up, so stay with me for that. And until next time, bye for now.