Our Conscious Mind Could Be An Electromagnetic Field

16-May-2002 - Are our thoughts made of the distributed kind of electromagnetic field that permeates space and carries the broadcast signal to the TV or radio.

Professor Johnjoe McFadden from the School of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Surrey in the UK believes our conscious mind could be an electromagnetic field.

"The theory solves many previously intractable problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence, and even life and death," he said. Most people consider "mind" to be all the conscious things that we are aware of. But much, if not most, mental activity goes on without awareness. Actions such as walking, changing gear in your car or peddling a bicycle can become as automatic as breathing. The biggest puzzle in neuroscience is how the brain activity that we're aware of (consciousness) differs from the brain activity driving all of those unconscious actions.

When we see an object, signals from our retina travel along nerves as waves of electrically charged ions. When they reach the nerve terminus, the signal jumps to the next nerve via chemical neurotransmitters. The receiving nerve decides whether or not it will fire, based on the number of firing votes it receives from its upstream nerves. In this way, electrical signals are processed in our brain before being transmitted to our body. But where, in all this movement of ions and chemicals, is consciousness? Scientists can find no region or structure in the brain that specializes in conscious thinking. Consciousness remains a mystery.

"Consciousness is what makes us 'human,' Professor McFadden said. "Language, creativity, emotions, spirituality, logical deduction, mental arithmetic, our sense of fairness, truth, ethics, are all inconceivable without consciousness." But what's it made of?

One of the fundamental questions of consciousness, known as the binding problem, can be explained by looking at a tree. Most people, when asked how many leaves they see, will answer "thousands." But neurobiology tells us that the information (all the leaves) is dissected and scattered among millions of widely separated neurones. Scientists are trying to explain where in the brain all those leaves are stuck together to form the conscious impression of a whole tree. How does our brain bind information to generate consciousness?

What Professor McFadden realized was that every time a nerve fires, the electrical activity sends a signal to the brain's electromagnetic (em) field. But unlike solitary nerve signals, information that reaches the brain's em field is automatically bound together with all the other signals in the brain. The brain's em field does the binding that is characteristic of consciousness. What Professor McFadden and, independently, the New Zealand-based neurobiologist Sue Pockett, have proposed is that the brain's em field is consciousness.

The brain's electromagnetic field is not just an information sink; it can influence our actions, pushing some neurons towards firing and others away from firing. This influence, Professor McFadden proposes, is the physical manifestation of our conscious will.

The theory explains many of the peculiar features of consciousness, such as its involvement in the learning process. Anyone learning to drive a car will have experienced how the first (very conscious) fumblings are transformed through constant practice into automatic actions. The neural networks driving those first uncertain fumblings are precisely where we would expect to find nerves in the undecided state when a small nudge from the brain's em field can topple them towards or away from firing. The field will "fine tune" the neural pathway towards the desired goal. But neurons are connected so that when they fire together, they wire together, to form stronger connections. After practice, the influence of the field will become dispensable. The activity will be learnt and may thereafter be performed unconsciously.

One of the objections to an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is, if our minds are electromagnetic, then why don't we pass out when we walk under an electrical cable or any other source of external electromagnetic fields? The answer is that our skin, skull and cerebrospinal fluid shield us from external electric fields.

"The conscious electromagnetic information field is, at present, still a theory. But if true, there are many fascinating implications for the concept of free will, the nature of creativity or spirituality, consciousness in animals and even the significance of life and death. "The theory explains why conscious actions feel so different from unconscious ones ­- it is because they plug into the vast pool of information held in the brain's electromagnetic field," Professor McFadden concluded.

The University of Surrey is one of the UK's leading professional, scientific and technological universities with a world class research profile and a reputation for excellence in teaching and research.

(Reference: The paper "Synchronous firing and its influence on the brain's electromagnetic field: evidence for an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness" by Johnjoe McFadden is published in the current edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with a commentary by Dr. Susan Pockett.) - unisci.com

Uri Geller wiped Computer data

One of the most exciting experiences I have had with my friend Uri was in March 1985, in my Zurich office. All of us who witnessed it, including myself, were completely taken aback. For my part, I freely admit that I got goose-pimples, and I would not be surprised if the flesh of some of my staff began to creep as well.

This is what happened:

The day Uri and Shipi Shtrang came to see me, I happened to have had a short session at my personal computer. Uri asked me to give him a diskette, a floppy disc used for working and writing with personal computers. Due to a slight misunderstanding, I thought he wanted to read the contents of the diskette with his mind, so I gave him one with an important legal text which my secretary [Barbara] had just finished processing. I thought it was a good idea to let him work on a clear and coherent draft of a document. Uri took the diskette and went next door into my private office, a large well-furnished room with a solid round antique conference table near an old Louis XIII wardrobe which serves as a filing cabinet. The rest of us followed. He sat down at the round table and the others standing around and watching him were Matthias Meister, one of my associate lawyers, his secretary Beatriz, Barbara and myself.

He carefully slid the diskette into a light plastic folder in front of him on the table. We all held our breath in silence. Then Uri clenched his fists, held one above the other and brought them close to the diskette in its plastic folder.

He never touched the diskette, and there were no instruments or anything else around that might have been hazardous to floppy discs. The plastic folder was supplied by us. He made some strange twisting movements with his fists directly above the diskette, and I could see him concentrating all his will-power on it. His eyes gleamed and flashed - it was as if lightning were about to strike the table in front of us.

Then he suddenly spoke the word 'Erase'. He repeated it, then leaned back and relaxed. I quickly took the diskette from inside its plastic folder. 'Now try it,' said Uri. 'Whatever was on it has gone.'

We went back into the other room where the computer was. Barbara took the diskette and inserted it in the disc drive of the IBM PC computer. Then she started the program to retrieve the contents of the diskette. The tension rose, and I expected something sensational to happen. We were all staring at the display screen when the message appeared: 'ERASED'!

Barbara was worried, because a full day's work had been saved on that diskette. She had naturally believed me when I told her that Uri just wanted to read its contents. In disbelief and anger, she tried to reload and retrieve the text, but to no avail. It had all gone. The diskette was empty, dead. Matthias Meister, the computer enthusiast among my attorneys, also tried to retrieve the text and found that Uri had even erased the format on the diskette. A floppy disc must be formatted before it can be used on a personal computer, but the formatted part had been removed as well, making the diskette virgin and temporarily useless.

- Computers and Scientists The Geller Effect by Guy Lyon Playfair and Uri Geller

Uri Geller reading Henry Kissinger's mind. Rosalynn Carter (next to Geller) holds a recently bent spoon, which continued to bend in her hand. On her left is Senora Carmen Romano de Lopez Portillo, the President's wife.

Uri Geller & the CIA

I do not know how it all started. I do not know who said what to whom, when or where, so I cannot tell you the whole story. I can only put on record what I know.

With the first publication of this book in Britain in October 1986, I soon learned that there was a sudden revival of interest in me. Scraps of information coming my way from friends, and from friends of friends, led me to believe that some of my former colleagues in the US defence and intelligence communities were asking themselves why they had let me go, and why they no longer asked me to do anything for them.

Then, late in December 1986, I received a most unusual telephone call. The dialogue, to the best of my recollection, went like this.

'Mr Geller? My name is Casey. You may have read about me in the papers lately. I've known about you for many years.'

Somebody had to be kidding me. The only Casey I had been reading about was the newly appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the late William Casey. I forget what I replied, but my voice must have betrayed my suspicions.

'If you're psychic you'll know this isn't a joke,' said the caller. He sounded to me like an elderly man of some authority. He could well have been the CIA chief, so I decided to go along with him and see what developed.

'OK,' I replied. 'I believe you. How can I help you? I'm quite astonished and flattered that you're calling me out of the blue like this. Did anybody tell you to get in touch with me?'

'No, no, Mr Geller. I just wanted to ask if you could do something for me over the 'phone, just for my personal satisfaction?'

'Well, I've done it in the past, but I don't know if it'll work.' I gathered he wanted to do some kind of telepathy test, and I remembered that my first contact with the CIA had been very similar to this one.

'I'm looking at something,' he went on. 'Can you describe it for me?'

I closed my eyes and went through my usual visualization method. Then I drew what I had picked up and described it to my caller. I told him I had seen a dagger with an ornamental tortoise-shell or ivory handle.

There was a long silence. I wondered if we had been disconnected. Then came the reply.

'I'll - be - darned! You got it. OK, OK, that was enough for me. It was nice talking with you, Mr Geller.' And that was that.

I had already met Senator Claiborne Pell socially. He and I turned out to have close friends in common, so there was nothing unusual about our initial meeting. It came about when an old friend of mine, Princess Luciana Pignatelli, introduced me to a member of the British Royal Family, the German-born Princess Michael of Kent.

During my conversation with the Princess (which was private and as far as I am concerned will remain so) she mentioned the Senator as an old friend who not only had a very distinguished public career - he was now chairman of the US Foreign Relations Committee - but was also very open-minded towards psychic and spiritual matters.

Although I did not know it at the time, the Senator's interests were on the record back in 1984, when an article in the New York Times (10 January) quoted him as having 'discussed the parapsychology field with Soviet researchers during a visit to the Soviet Union in August . . .'

- Epilogue - Mind Over Missile? The Geller Effect by Guy Lyon Playfair and Uri Geller