pg 241-242

THE 2am WOW CHAMBER

The 2am wow is a phrase coined by Michael Persinger of Laurentian
University, Sudbury, Ontario. (see "St. Teresa's Ecstasy... in a Helmet" page
232). It's that rush you get when you've been up all night meditating,
reading, or just thinking all by yourself, and suddenly you're overcome with
the profound conviction that you're at one with the universe.

Psychologists Persinger and Katherine Makarec have created a special chamber
that induces the 2am wow almost at will; it has worked on more than 200
subjects. Persinger and Makarec place their subjects in a quiet, dimly lit
room, play them a recording of soothing astral sounds, and bathe them with a
gently flickering strobe light. About one of every fifteen subjects reported
experiences of "intense meaningfulness," and one even saw a figure of Christ
outlined in the strobe light. Persinger and Makarec have analyzed the special
brain-wave patterns or the 2am wow, and speculate that the phenomenon is
stimulated by a drop in the brain's production of the chemical messenger
serotonin. Persinger calls these events "microseizures" and says they may
also be responsible for the imagery that drives artists and poets.

pg 232

ST. TERESA'S ECSTASY ... IN A HELMET

The young man floated toward a strange glow in the forest, whereupon an alien
entity gave him an "extremely meaningful message." But this was no UFO
encounter. The young man was wearing an experimental helmet fitted with
magnets that beamed a low-level magnetic field at his temporal lobes, brain
areas associated with time distortions, dream states, and assorted odd
psychic phenomena. The helmet is the invention of neuroscientist Michael
Persinger, of Laurentian Univeristy in Sudbury, Ontario, and persinger's
fifty test subjects routinely spend half an hour immersed in ecstatic,
mystical, visionary experiences while clad in his motorcycle-helmet-like
apparatus.

"The deep structures of the temporal lobe are electrically unstable and
sensitive to all sorts of things, including the biochemistry of stress,
psychological distress, insufficient oxygen, and fasting," says Persinger
"That could explain why, when mystics go through self-induced  stressful
rituals and yogis go to high mountaintops and fast, they report
transcendental events." Persinger says that electrical activity within the
temporal lobe is associated with such mystical experiences, so he uses his
electric helmet to sort of jump start his subjects into a transcendental
experience.

Persinger's subjects report feelings of floating, leaving their bodies, and a
sense of "great meaningfulness." Does this mean that St. Teresa, Buddha and
Muhammad had oddly wired temporal lobes? And can we all become prophets by
donning Persinger's helmet? Perhaps. The researcher's goal is to use his
device to trigger transcendental experiences in nonreligious people faced
with the fear of death.


RUSSIAN MIND-CONTROL MACHINE

For decades there has been a rumor circulating that the Russians have a
machine that acts on people's brains via radio waves.  Well, it's not a
rumor. It's true, though the machine cannot really "control" the brain with
any specificity.

It's called the Lida, and in the 1970's Russian scientists sent us a model as
part of a Soviet-American scientific exchange. The Lida turned out to be a
crude machine made of vacuum tubes and other components of World War II
vintage. But it worked. US Scientists placed a nervous cat in a metal cage
and positioned the Lida next to it. When the machine began to hum and
broadcast radio waves in the frequency of deep-sleep EEGs, the cat went into
a trance. W. Ross Adey, of the Pettis Memorial Veterans Administration
Hospital in Loma Linda, California, the scientist to whom the Russians loaned
the Lida, comments: "Instead of taking a Valium to relax yourself, it looks
as if a similar result could be achieved with a radio field." The Soviets
claim they have successfully used the Lida to treat insomnia, hypertension,
anxiety, and neurotic disturbances. And there are the usual rumors of a more
sophisticated machine that controls minds from a distance. Most scientists
pooh-pooh this notion. On the other hand, in recent years considerable
evidence had been amassed to indicate that the weak electromagnetic fields
produced by radar installations, microwaves, video display terminials, and
power lines can affect the brain. Is the day too far away when we can focus
this energy for beneficial purposes?