After the weekend's private house investigation, one part of which involved a bedside clock-radio that emitted EMF on the scale of a small power station, led me into a little research on the effects of EMF on the brain.

If you look in Wikipedia under 'God Helmet' (you ought to if you don't already know what this is) there's a link to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, which I'd never heard of.

As a medical treatment (and if I'm reading the article correctly - it's fairly heady (pardon the pun) ) it's still in the 'fringe' area, but it does suggest that magnetic fields applied to the brain definitely have effects. The field strength they're talking about is in the range of 1-10 mT (milliTesla) = 10-100 Gauss. (Anyone who knows their physics - please correct me if this conversion is wrong.)

We were reading 100 milliGauss at about 20cm from the clock-radio, so they're talking about fields from 100 to 1000 times stronger than thins for TMS therapy, and concentrated on certain parts of the brain. However, Michael Persinger's research with the Koren (God) Helmet involved much lower EMF strengths close to the skull (but they were "weak but complex", according to Persinger).

Anyway, this is an interesting field (pardon pun) of research: does EMF of the magnitude and nature found in home/workplace situations have any chance of affecting human perception and/or behaviour?
Any thoughts or experimental results?

Link: God Helmet video

My wife Denise got this book from the library, and, commandeering it, I managed to read most of it in one session, something I can't often do. "Scepticism and Critical Thinking 101" is one way of describing it, but the book covers cosmology, ethics, belief systems and other big topics in a way designed to get the reader thinking and then (hopefully) looking for more. Dr Spackman (a Kiwi) fills the text with engaging analogies that make some quite complex topics accessible to a wide readership. His introduction to Quantum Theory - a subject that makes everyone's head spin, including the people who developed it - is brilliant.

Dr Spackman covers territory that a number of greater names (Dawkins, DeBotton, et al) have addressed in depth, and he offers them as suggested readings not in an appendix but within the text, usually including a picture of the book cover. Gotta love that. (Also, footnotes are avoided, which is refreshing.) But Dr Spackman includes a lot of original thinking, and, in the final chapters, some realistic solutions to some of the real-world problems he's highlighted.

The main reason I'm reviewing The Ant and the Ferrari here is that I believe anyone who is seriously interested in investigating paranormal phenomena needs to develop their critical thinking skills. These skills are, unfortunately, not only absent from the NZ school curriculum but, unless you pursue certain courses of study, aren't included in many university degrees either. (I would also recommend "Oddzone  - Paranormal phenomena, alien abductions, animal mysteries, psychics and mediums and other weird kiwi stuff" by Vicki Hyde. New Holland Publishers NZ Ltd, 2006.)

Entitled 'Something Spooky is Going On', Chapter 11 is a bit of an orphan in the book, but it is particularly interesting regarding the paranormal. Dr Spackman describes an uncanny encounter with a woman who divulges information to him that, apparently, she could only have acquired by mental telepathy. He introduces the chapter thus:
"If you're beginning to think I'm a 'dyed-in-the-wool' scientist who has little room for 'mystical' experiences, you'd better fasten your seat belt, because we're about to take a radical change in direction.
"I'm going to tell you about an experience I had that went against everything I had previously believed. I'd much rather it hadn't happened, because until then my view of the Universe made comfortable sense in my own mind. ... Suddenly my complacency came to a screeching halt. ... If anything it makes this book far more difficult to write and I would prefer that it hadn't happened."

I was expecting a rational explanation for the event, or for Dr Spackman to discount the whole thing later in the book, but he doesn't. It would've been so easy for him to leave Chapter 11 out of the book entirely, epsecially as it doesn't vitally connect with any of the other themes discussed, but I love that it's there, even though it will leave him open to ridicule by hardcore sceptics.

Accounts of paranormal experiences are quite common; I reckon about every other person has had something unexplained happen to them; but when someone as clear-thinking and (you would expect) otherwise not disposed to having paranormal experiences is prepared to publish one, it counts for a lot.

You'll have to acquire the book to read the account, as I'm not going to quote any of it here. Happy reading.

Links:

• www.kerryspackman.com
• antandferrari.com
• Oddzone: www.newhollandpublishers.co.nz
• Buy online in NZ: www.mightyape.co.nz