Weird Science

Science and strangeness

A part of the brain that, when stimulated, makes people sense ghostly presences. A structure on Mars that looks (to some eyes anyway) disturbingly like a face. A huge increase in human bite injuries (that’s right, people biting each other) on weekends and statutory holidays. A 2000-year old mechanical computer recovered from a Roman shipwreck.

Science has explanations, or is looking for them – but the explanations can be even odder and more provocative than the original question… ... Better yet, the search for explanations can lead to new insights about phenomenon we thought we had long since figured out.

A look at some of the strange phenomena scientists are confronted with and how they try to explain them.

 

Gods, ghosts and magnetic fields

 

Since time immemorial, people have been reporting strange, inexplicable presences in places  where humans cannot possibly be. Ghosts? Divine apparitions? Creatures from another dimension?

 

Now neuroscience offers another possibility – a “scrambling” of the brain’s delicate circuits by weak electromagnetic fields. Dr. Michael Persinger, head of the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University, has used magnetic fields to produce the sensation of an alien presence in healthy volunteers.

Subjects don a modified football helmet which then stimulates specific parts of the brain with low-intensity magnetic fields. Subjects have reported a variety of subjective experiences, including the strong sense of an alien presence in the room. Some also experience extreme emotions, such as anger or fear.

The startling effect of low-intensity magnetic fields on perception may help account for a number of phenomena, including reports of alien abductions and encounters with non-human entities from ghosts to gods.