Sudbury, July 10th, 2014
Our trip to see cognitive neuroscience researcher, Dr. Michael Persinger, took us to Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Brad and I met in Toronto where we rented the rest of our gear and a car. We made the five hour drive to Sudbury, the home of Laurentian University. Persinger is both a professor and director of the Behavioral Neuroscience department there. His office has been in the basement since 1971.
When possible we like to see our shoot location before hand. So we were happy Dr. Persinger agreed to meet us the night of our arrival. We met towards the end of his work day, which was around 1:00am. He usually wraps his day up by three or four in the morning. He does this 6 days a week, and has apparently kept it up for decades.
The Behavioral Neuroscience department inhabits a collection of windowless, mid-century looking basement labs and offices. The late hours of work and setting made it seem that much more clandestine. The most character is probably revered for his impressively cluttered office, where we conducted our interview. He and his staff took us through their current experiments conducted throughout the building.
One of the most famous rooms (probably on the whole campus?) houses his old experiment, dubbed “the god helmet”. Though it's somewhat primitive compared to their current work, the room has an interesting history. It's hosted a vast number of international journalists and well known characters including Richard Dawkins. The lab as it was in the 70s is largely preserved, almost like a museum. They still receive around a hundred interview requests a year on that subject, but most are turned down.
He told us frankly that he accepted our request precisely because we weren't focusing on the "god helmet". Our line of questioning cycled around their findings on the effects of EMFs on consciousness and disease. We also asked about the department’s interdisciplinary approach to its research, spanning psychology, biology, chemistry, and more. He's been forced to self fund most of his research, so he also had much to say on the difficulties of doing things unconventionally.
Some of their current areas of study include; correcting impaired brain functioning in mice using magnetic fields, measuring the earth's photon emissions to predict earth quakes, measuring shared sensory experience of two subjects located in different physical spaces, entangling the ph of water at a distance, and using pulsed magnetic sequences to kill cancer cells...
Look out for a more complete teaser from this interview soon.
