The God’s Helmet

Conventional science has long held that spiritual experiances simply reduce to the mysterious workings of the physical brain.

Dr. Michael Persinger, affliated with the Behavioural Neurosciences pregram at Laurentian University, believes NDEs are no different.His research that centres around a less-than-conventional line in headwear, nicknamed ‘The God Helmet’, was said to induce in eight out of ten subjects the feeling of a presence of a being beside them.

The converted snowmobile helmet contains  solenoids placed in position over the temporal lobes, stimulating these regions by a way of weak but complex magnetic fields, producing what in some subjects as spiritual experiences.

This precess supposedly replicated spiritual NDE which, Persinger claims, is an artefact of micro-seisures that occur within the deep structures of the temporal lobe; the interpretation and extent of which may be explained by a person’s ingrained beliefs and possible sensitivity to magnetic disturbance.he claims it is no coincidence that similar experiances are often reported in case of temporal lobe epilepsy(TLE); a condition that may leave the sufferer especially sensitive to magnetic fields.

Persinger’s primary studies, performed under stringent double-blind conditions , were published in major referred journals. As in nature of mind-brain dynamics however, these claims shrouded in doubt. In response, Neuroscience Letters recorded a Swedish team of scientists that attempted to replicate his studies under double-blind conditions. This method, which aimed to curb any bias by way of controller or subject from influencing the outcome, failed to verify the effect.

For Persinger it was hardly surprising:

’They did not replicate our procedured. The computer programs they utilized distorted the presentation of magnetic field patterns. It is relevant that our patterns responsible for the “sensed” effects in humans also produce clear analgesia( absence of pain while conscious) in rats and evoke molecular pathways in cell cultures; neither of which were pursued or tested by the Swedish researchers’.