New EMF Study

A new report by Christopher French of London College details an experiment he conducted using a fake "haunted room". Building upon Michael Persinger's experiments and his newer work attempting to link EMF and haunting phenomena, French and his team constructed a room fitting out with electromagnetic generators and low frequency sound generators.

Subjects were placed in the dimly lit and cool room for a period of time and told they might experience some "unusual" sensations. Each participant was rated on the Australian Sheep-Goat scale which seeks to classify where someone falls on the scale between true believer (sheep) and hard core skeptic (goat).

The average EMF generated was in the range of 50 microtesla or 500 milligauss. These are huge readings and far above anything someone might experience in their home or a "haunted location." Most homes with decent wiring have base readings of around .1 mG. The spikes near refrigerator coils and appliances sometimes reaches 50mG (5 mT). It is rare to find anything approaching even 100 mG.

However, the researcher reported that during their experiment many people felt odd sensations ranging from dizziness to even terror. Yet, the results ranged through both the control group and the group actually receiving the bursts of EMF and/or Low Frequency Sound. At the end of the experiment French's team could not conclude that EMF or LFS had played a significant role in the reported phenomena and reactions.

French insists such research can reveal important truths about the human mind, including questions of memory and delusions. "Within psychology, people talk about reality monitoring, trying to understand how we make distinctions between mental events and events that take place out there in the real world," he says. "It's something we take for granted: Did you really lock the door before you went to bed, or did you just think about it?" On the extreme is schizophrenia, in which the brain makes no distinction between the real and the imagined.

"There's a continuum, and this kind of framework is useful when you're talking about hallucinatory experiences," French says. "People are mistaking their attribution, feeling a product of their own mental processes as something that's taking place in the real world. Anything that can lead to making your mental events more similar to events that take place—a vivid imagination, for example—will make it more difficult to distinguish between the two."

French noted that he began his study of parapsychology by visiting supposedly haunted places. He has theorized, not to originally, that people in those situations or who are hunting ghosts "psych themselves out" and imagine noises, shadows and other things that aren't in existence in reality. "I wish it was a bit more spooky," he says of his time waiting for apparitions to appear in dank, musty castles. "I'm sitting in the dark, in the cold. I wish something more would happen."

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