Update on the neurotheology front: the science journal Nature has an article about a Swedish team which has tried to duplicate Persinger’s electronic stimulation of religious experience.
In the past, scientists have claimed that religious or out-of-body experiences result from excessive bursts of electrical activity in the brain. In the 1980s, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at the Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, began exploring this idea through a series of experiments.
Participants wore helmets that targeted their temporal lobes with weak magnetic fields, of roughly the same strength as those generated by a computer monitor. Persinger found that this caused 80% of the people he tested to feel an unexplained presence in the room.
[...] A group of Swedish researchers has now repeated the work, but they say their study involves one crucial difference. They ensured that neither the participants nor the experimenters interacting with them had any idea who was being exposed to the magnetic fields, a ‘double-blind’ protocol.
Without such a safeguard, “people in the experimental group who are highly suggestible would pick up on cues from the experimenter and they would be more likely to have these types of experiences,” says Pehr Granqvist of Uppsala University, who led the research team.
[...] In contrast to the results from Persinger and others, the team found that the magnetism had no discernable effects.
The debate rages on though, as Persinger and others say that the original conditions of the experiments were not reproduced and that he had (sometimes) used double-blind procedures.
If you ask me though, what we have here is the potential for a new science-based religion: something along the lines of Scientology 2.0. See, Scientology already uses an electronic gadget called the E-Meter. But this doesn’t actually induce religious experience. It just measures electrical resistance in the body (vaguely like a lie-detector). Imagine if the Scientologists or some other quasi-religious group took up Persinger’s technology, and said “Fuck double-blind studies.” They could easily just set up a corporation which uses intiatory rituals that combine science and spirituality, and apply the electronic burts in the brain. They could easily and justifiably sell their product as effective, and in this instance the fact that the operators know what to expect would likely enhance the experiment for people. They could even sell a home version of the God-Helmet. Who knows though, maybe this is what Persinger has been doing all along. Maybe it’s already in the works. Just have to wait and see, but this has New Religious Movement (the modern politically correct term for “cult”) written all over it.
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9 Comments
William Henry “Cloak of the Illuminati”
^^check it out.
gimme a little more info
well that’s great. so once we’ve strangled all the legitamate paths to death, chemically castrated all the true seekers, and erased any memory of actual realisation from the history books, we can instal god-boxes on every street corner and really do the aldous huxley deluxe theme park.
quite frankly you’re more likely to prove science with religion than the other way around. hell, science was religion up untill a few hundred years ago. fucking descarte got his inspiration from a vision of an angel!
zach,what happened two hundred years ago that made science stop being a religion?we are asked to accept the big bang on faith…..the list goes on.string theory,evolution(theory).at least bell was honest enough to maintain the theorum aspect of his idea.try disputing the validity of any of the above with scientists.
by the way,sir issac newton was an alchemist.the king made him chancelor of the exchequer because issac promised that he could turn base metals into gold.useful,as the king needed to pay for the mercinaries in gold in the war with france.
the king believed that then.what does science ask us to believe for money now?
i think(mho)that if it was possible to create religious experience via a box and a hat someone would have francised the process by now.
in a nutshell, alistair, and please don’t take my enthusiasm as an attack…science split from spirituality when it rejected subjective interior experiences as valid datum, and then pronounced that only experiments conducted in the exterior world were ‘real’ science.
this is what upsets me about this mechanistic approach to spirtuality. you cannot ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ an interior experience with an exterior object. bell’s theorem proves/disproves the square root of fuck all in relation to buddha-mind
contemplative traditions follow the exact same methods as true science. people who can’t be bothered to run the experiment and see if there ‘really’ is a god should just take a chill pill and go play with thier toys.
yeah,i just don`t think scientists realise the distinction of exterior vs.exterior,except those who dicuss the implicate/explicate unfolding in quantum mechanics.q.m. is desperately trying to compare it`sself to spirituality….see,see we can describe it! and i have to say that anyone who focusses on problems as quantum physicists and mathematicians do are bound to experience some spiritual stuff as a consequence.
the only time the practical mind goes deep inside is to provide answers to material concerns.some scientists recognise the effect of conciousness.cleve baxter did some interesting things with plants and minds.in my field we discuss things such as yogurt knowing yogurt.take a pot of yogurt and put it in two dishes.hook one up to a galvanic response meter.in another room pour milk over the other dish.record changes in galvanic respose.it knows.
your enthusiasm is appreciated.
http://site.williamhenry.net/
william henry, definitly your boy.. he is an “Investigative Mythologist”
description of “Cloak of the Illuminati”:
i enjoy his work very much (although i dont always agree with his conclusions, he does good work)
one
human?
oh, the investigative mythologist… ive definitely heard of him. ill look into it more, thanks
About the idea that a new religious movement might be in the process of being created: Back in 1973, the U.S. government comissioned a report from SRI International entitled Changing Images of Man. This report concluded that the spread of so-called “new values”- spiritual and ecological awareness and self-realization movements - had become unstoppable. They also predicted that if left unchecked this would bring about a transformation of society that would undermine ‘modern industrial-state culture and institutions’ and result in ’serious social disruptions, economic decline, runaway inflation, and even institutional collapse’. The report anticipates a lessening of trust in authority and a reaction against a regimented, tightly controlled society. In order to prevent this “worst case scenario”, SRI recommended identifying existing institutions or traditions that could be used to control and contain the impetus of the new movement - in other words, they recommended that the government infiltrate and co-opt the movement for meaningful spiritual/ethical re-definition and social change (Freemasonry was suggested as a particularly useful vehicle for this co-option).
So if a new science-based religion is in the making, something approved by the voice of Official Authority, something safe, neutered, materialistic, perhaps it is a part of a bigger plan. There is no question, that if you look at where we were 35-40 years ago, where we appeared to be going with all this, something has gone off-track. All the progressive possibility that seemed to be opening up in the wake of ’60’s new thought… this kind of thought hasn’t exactly disappeared, but it certainly hasn’t had much of a revolutionary effect either, the new boss is pretty much the same as the old boss, only with better public relations. What was supposed to be unstoppable has been confined to the fringes, and the Great Powerful Machine has kept rolling right along. It’s interesting to me that we hear about the Brookings Report all the time, in discussions of possible UFO secrecy, but the SRI report is never mentioned and seems to be almost completely unknown, even though its potential applicability covers a lot more territory, and even though SRI is very well known among alternative knowledge communities because of it’s CIA-sponsored remote viewing experiments. It makes you wonder if there aren’t some gatekeepers at work here, carrying out their assignments with a high degree of efficiency.