All in the Name of Science

Spent four hours at the Lucas Center at Stanford, part of the time inside a massive GE fMRI machine while wearing an electrode cap in order to conduct an EEG simultaneously. While scanning, it’s as loud as a jackhammer going off at five paces, though I surprisingly didn’t feel claustrophobic. It’s quite easy to fall asleep, which is a good thing as the researchers’ eventual goal is to study sleep apnea, though I was just a guinnea pig to calibrate some new EEG equipment. The tests themselves were banal – staring at changing checkerboard patterns, circles (beamed with a projector onto a mirror above my head), and listening to two alternating tones. I wish I could have seen if a different part of my brain is used when I read upside down, as I tend to do every now and then to see how I’ll fare.

The caption reads ‘always check that photoplethysmograph is mounted correctly.’

A few years ago a Canadian neuroscientist by the name of Persinger zapped the frontal lobes of his patients with a magnetic field and found that they pretty much all went through “religious” experiences, sensing another presence in the room. Unfortunately the paper was published in an obscure journal, but you can find coverage of the “God helmet” on BBC’s Horizon, Wired, and Discover.