Mark Pilkington writes:
> 
> Khem, I'm fascinated to hear that you worked with both Andrija Puharich 
> and Harry Smith - perhaps you can share some of your memories about 
> these characters with the rest of us?

One of the areas I was working in with Harry Smith and
Andrija Puharich involved an approach to psi that went out
of fashion, that of bioelectromagnetic transduction.

Early last century, some folks thought that the phenomena of
so-called telepathic communication might be accounted for by
the existence of a 'biological radio' functioning within
each of us.

Detecting and correlating electromagnetic emissions from
subjects alongside their 'hits' was one of the approaches
suggested in order to test that theory. Andrija took a
simpler and more negative approach.

Looking at the map, and seeing that what made all the
difference in this experimental instance was the presence of
electromagnetic emissions, he decided to shield his subjects
in a Faraday cage. If 'telepathic communication' involved
some form of electromagnetic radiation, the 'hits' ought to
have dropped off rather sharply toward the statistical baseline.

Instead, the cage appeared to *increase* the frequency of
the 'hits'.

Persinger and Ghislaine took a similar approach when they
assembled the records of geomagnetic fluctuations as an
electronic database and ran it alongside a database of
'Unusual Events'. They published that work as:

Michael Persinger and Ghislaine Lafreniere ~ _Space-Time
Transients and Unusual Events_, 1977.

A few citations of Persinger's papers more to the point:

Michael Persinger ~ 'Intense subjective telepathic
experiences occur during days of quiet global geomagnetic
activity',_Research in Parapsychology_ v.32, 1985.

Michael Persinger ~ 'Psi phenomena and temporal lobe
activity: the geomagnetic factor', _Proceedings of the
Parapsychological Association_, 1988.

Here are a number of pages on Laurentian's website with some
more information regarding various aspects of their research:

Behavioral Geomagnetic Correlates
http://tinyurl.com/8h7dx

Bioelectromagnetic Field Effects
http://tinyurl.com/djwve

Limbic Seizures
http://tinyurl.com/bzh9m

Sensed Presences and Mystical States
http://tinyurl.com/bprxe

Consciousness
http://tinyurl.com/dwp7x

Clinical Neuropsychology
(Acquired Brain Injury)
http://tinyurl.com/7fzw5

And a couple of related sites:

Tectonic Strain
http://tinyurl.com/7d27g

FEB - The Swedish Association
for the ElectroSensitive
http://www.feb.se/FEB/Links.html

A great deal of the research involving 'electrical
hypersensitivity' comes out of the EU these days, and what
is perhaps more surprising is that there is also evidence of
folks acting on that research; for instance, with more
stringent standards for cellphone emissions that take the
non-thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation into
account, unlike here in the States.

You may also be interested in the area of biophotonics. Here
are a few sites & related papers:

FUNDAMENTS OF COHERENCE IN BIOLOGY
G.J. HYLAND
University of Warwick, Department of Physics,
COVENTRY, CV4 7AL, UK
International Institute of Biophysics,
Kapellner Straße, ehem. Raketenstation,
D-41472 NEUSS-HOLZHEIM, Germany
http://tinyurl.com/dj2sf

"One of the most intriguing aspects of biophoton emission is
its likely coherence, a concept that was originally
introduced into biology much earlier by H. Fröhlich, some 30
years ago.

Fröhlich was probably the first to appreciate that, from the
point of view of Physics, living systems are open,
dissipative systems, whose metabolic activity holds them far
from thermal equilibrium.

In terms of a simple model involving a non-linear coupling
between the collective electric dipolar modes associated
with bioconstituents of a given kind and the surrounding
heat bath, he showed that what is now referred to as the
'self-organising' ability of such a non-linear system here
manifests itself (under certain conditions) in the emergence
of a single mode that is very strongly excited, well above
the level that would be realised in thermal equilibrium at
physiological temperatures.

The frequency of this supra-thermal excitation – which
Fröhlich called a coherent excitation - is that of
the lowest frequency, longitudinal electric mode, which is
typically (but not exclusively) in the microwave region.

Since the population of this mode is effectively
macroscopic, living systems supporting such coherent
excitations must be considered to be non-equilibrium,
macroscopic quantum systems, as repeatedly emphasised by
Smith.

Some implications of this will be discussed, including, in
particular, the possibility of a novel form of (energy-less)
biocommunication involving a magnetic vector potential
derivable from a scalar field, associated with which there
are no electric or magnetic fields."

Gaia and the Evolution of Coherence

Mae-Wan Ho
Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, U.K.

Fritz-Albert Popp
International Institute of Biophysics, Technology Center
Opelstrasse 10, 6750 Kaiserslautern 25, FRG.
http://tinyurl.com/bzwb5

"What we want to do in this paper is to present a vision of
ecological balance from contemporary Western biophysics
which shows just how intimately we are connected with one
another and with nature. How all nature is one resonating
and intercommunicating whole. We shall be drawing from the
work of many, including ourselves, who have derived
inspiration from the union of biology and physics."

Biophoton
  From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
http://tinyurl.com/7naod

International Institute of Biophysics
http://www.lifescientists.de/

Some Publications of the
International Institute of Biophysics
http://tinyurl.com/agdrb

Herbert Frohlich
http://tinyurl.com/8967f

Frohlich Coherence
http://tinyurl.com/dbvpt

Biophotons - The Light in Our Cells
http://tinyurl.com/9d3so

Biophotonik International
http://tinyurl.com/96o7v

Marco Bischof's site
http://tinyurl.com/7jcw7

BIOELECTRODYNAMICS
AND BIOCOMMUNICATION
http://tinyurl.com/ccr3n

Biosystems as macroscopic quantum systems
http://tinyurl.com/dg9ng

Bioenergetics and the Coherence of Organisms
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
Neuronetwork World 5,
733-750, 1995.
http://tinyurl.com/8of7n

Orchestrated Objective Reduction of
Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules:
The "Orch OR" Model for Consciousness
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose
http://tinyurl.com/alcek

Cytoplasmic Gel States and Ordered Water:
Possible Roles in Biological Quantum Coherence
Stuart Hameroff
Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology
The University of Arizona
http://tinyurl.com/dac46

Abstract

Water inside living cell cytoplasm fluctuates between phases
of disordered liquid (solution: "sol") and ordered solid
(gelatinous: "gel") determined by polymerization of the
actin cytoskeleton. Cycles of sol-gel transformations are
important in fundamental cellular processes (movement,
growth, mitosis, synapse formation, etc.) and are regulated
by calcium, which in turn may be regulated by other
cytoskeletal structures such as microtubules. Sol-gel
transformations are close to the nature of life, and of
consciousness enigmatic phenomena for which quantum
coherence has been suggested as an explanatory mechanism.

In a quantum coherent system which remains isolated from its
environment, spatially distributed components can exist in
coherent "superposition" of many possible states. This
property may explain the unity of biological functions in a
living cell, and of consciousness throughout macroscopic
portions of the brain.

The possibility of quantum coherence in biology is often
discounted because the disordered water environment is
assumed to dissipate any coherence. However, ordered water
coupled to the cytoskeleton may become part of its quantum
state. This paper argues that cycles of sol-gel
transformation in living cells correspond to cycles of
dissipation (sol) and isolation (gel) of quantum coherence
in microtubules and cytoplasm. Three models of biological
quantum coherence depending on actin gels and ordered water
are discussed: 1) super-radiance in microtubules [1]; 2)
cellular vision [2]; 3) orchestrated objective reduction in
microtubules [3].

ULTIMATE COMPUTING
Biomolecular Consciousness
and NanoTechnology
Stuart R. Hameroff
Department of Anesthesiology
College of Medicine
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A
http://tinyurl.com/8mh9l

Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life
Gerald Pollack
Review:
http://tinyurl.com/8gx8t

The Historical Symbolic Context
of Energy Field Concepts
Dennis Stillings
http://tinyurl.com/azs23

And perhaps some of us have read Ernst Benz' _Theology of
Electricity_?

"During my last visit to Stuttgard, I was walking down a
street when suddenly two boys came rushing out of a
backyard: a little boy who was being chased by an older boy.
Not only did the older boy appear to be much stronger, but
he also held a long wooden sword in his hand. Just before
the pursuer had reached his victim, the little boy suddenly
turned around, picked up a small piece of wood from the
ground, and with the courage of desperation attacked the big
boy with the long wooden sword. Brandishing his small piece
of wood, he cried, 'It's electric, it's electric!' The older
boy was so stunned that he dropped his wooden sword and
escaped, running off into he backyard. Thus I became a
witness to the genesis of a myth: the spontaneous creation
of the myth of the third Prometheus. Apparently the theology
of electricity has deep roots in human nature and in the
structure of the Universe."

~ Ernst Benz, _The Theology of Electricity_.

Cors in Manu Domine,


~ Khem Caigan
<[log in to unmask]>

"Today is the bull whose blood must fill the ditch,
so that spirits of the dead may appear at its edge."
~ Walter Benjamin