Wearing a Coil on Your Head to "See Ghosts"? That Experiment Was Later Replicated

Canada has a neuroscientist named Michael Persinger, who did research at Laurentian University in Sudbury. Starting in the 1980s, he had volunteers wear a helmet equipped with coils that generated very weak magnetic fields on both sides of the head. The person sat in a dim, quiet room, eyes closed, wearing it for twenty minutes.

Many afterward said they felt something: it seemed there was "another person" in the room, standing behind them, or right beside them. Some felt it was God, some felt it was a deceased relative, and others felt it was something unfriendly. Persinger's explanation was that weak magnetic fields stimulating the brain's temporal lobes would produce a sensation of "a presence." He believed religious experiences and the feeling of seeing ghosts might be the same thing.

This helmet later came to be called the "God helmet," and it appeared in many magazines and TV programs. The British biologist Dawkins wore it in 2003 for a documentary, and he said he only felt a bit dizzy and noticed changes in his breathing, nothing special.

In 2005, a Swedish team repeated the experiment, this time with a double-blind design: neither the participants nor the experimenters were told when the coils were on. The result was that there was no difference in volunteers' experiences whether the coils were on or off. Those who had strong experiences were mostly people who were usually more suggestible: they entered that room, were told "there might be strange sensations," and then really felt them.

Persinger was not convinced, saying the Swedes' equipment was different and the exposure time was wrong. He never recanted until his death in 2018. Other laboratories have not later consistently produced the same results as his.

So to this day, the academic view is mostly that this experiment is not very reliable; but it does show one thing: that people in a dark room, told there will be "something," really do feel as if there is.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #科学