God Helmet inventor induces out-of-body experience in under six minutes using quiet magnetic fields

April 7, 2012 - PRLog -- Dr. Michael Persinger, known as the developer of the God Helmet, an experimental apparatus that let a few people see God in his laboratory, recently published a laboratory report in which a subject had an out-of-body experience immediately after magnetic brain stimulation that lasted only five minutes.

The equipment, the 64 Coil Shiva Circumcerebral Neural Stimulation Headset, is based on Persinger’s “Octopus" device, used in his oft-reported experiments with telepathy.  In one of these experiments, two subjects each wore a headset that circled flickering magnetic fields around their heads.  One of them looked at a slowly flashing light.  The other one sat in another room. Their brain waves were monitored by EEG.  The EEG traces from the second subject, who wore a blindfold, showed their brain waves changing in time with the flashing light in front of the first subject in another room.  The experiment was the first to show that a psychic connection between two brains could be artificially induced, and to show it with brain imaging, the all-important quantification science looks for.

In the out-of-body case, the flickering magnetic fields duplicated a complicated wave that appears when a lump of brain tissue, called the amygdala, is firing on and off in bursts.  The brain can pick up the information from Persinger’s low intensity magnetic fields because they match the strengths of the fields in the brain naturally appearing from its own electrical currents.  Persinger uses magnetic fields weaker than common refrigerator magnets to ensure that the brain isn’t being affected by the raw magnetic fields.  These reach the brain because there isn’t any such thing as magnetic insulation.  The brain responds to the information in Persinger's complex magnetic signals the same way it responds to its own information.  He uses the same technique with his God Helmet and “Octopus” devices.

This out-of-body experiment used a helmet that held 64 magnetic coils which circled the same flickering magnetic fields around the entire head, and not just a circle around its edge.  The subject was a 27 year old male science student.  A few seconds after the five-minute stimulation ended, the student reported: “’A feeling of lightness, especially in the limbs’. The feeling of lightness then became a sense of floating as if ‘my body was oscillating around the place in the chair like a pendulum oscillating around its resting point even though I knew my body was sitting".

The subject felt some anxiety and nausea (which happens in 8% of all OBES), which “… culminated with the subject feeling his head was floating above the spot where his body was sitting. He could not distinguish between his limbs, his torso, or the surrounding space and objects in the room. During this intense experience, he considered asking the experimenter to terminate the procedure.”  He was tired afterwards and had a headache.

The EEG data showed that the Left Temporal Lobe and the Right Frontal Lobe both showed an abnormal amount of theta and beta activity.  The subject’s brain waves in these areas also became less complex during his OBE.  In addition, Persinger’s group found EEG patterns that other researchers, such as Charles Tart, have also seen.

Science is one step closer to producing Out-of-Body experiences on demand.

Kevin Saroka, Bryce P. Mulligan, Todd R. Murphy and Michael A. Persinger “Experimental Elicitation of an Out of Body Experience and Concomitant Cross-Hemispheric elctroencephalographic Coherence” NeuroQuantology |December 2010 |Vol. 8 |Issue 4 |Page 466-477

The summary for the report can be seen here:  http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/...