Part 7 : The Body Electric...The Missing Chapter ...Breathing with the Earth

The Body Electric

by Robert O. Becker

Thirteen 

The Missing Chapter 

Medical students often experience a profound, ego-wrenching shock at the midpoint of their training, as the focus shifts from classroom to bedside. My experience was typical, since this division was even sharper in the 1940s than it is today. After two years' study of the scientific underpinnings of medicine, my classmates and I thought we were pretty smart. During long days and longer nights of lectures, notes, labs, books, reviews, papers, and exams, we'd drunk so deeply of the distilled wisdom of the ages that surely we must know all there was to know about bodies and diseases. All that was left, it seemed, was learning how to apply that knowledge as apprentice doctors. Then we began to study with the senior members of the clinical departments, veterans of a less scientific era, who brought us up short. Their message soon became clear: We didn't know so damn much after all; no one did. All our learning was fine as far as it went, but on the hectic wards of Bellevue things often didn't go by the book. 

The greatest teacher I had in those days was my surgery professor, Dr. John Mulholland, a granite cliff of a man whose iron-gray crew cut emphasized his uncompromising idealism. Any hint of laziness, impatience, or unconcern from his students brought a brusque reprimand, but Mulholland was gravely polite and compassionate to the dirtiest wino who needed a doctor. He showed us countless problems and techniques in his demonstration-lectures held in the nineteenth-century amphitheater, but he repeated one salient message over and over: "The surgeon can cut, remove, or rearrange the tissues, and sew up the wound, but only the patient can do the healing. Surgeons must always  be humble before this miracle. We must treat the tissues with sure, deft gentleness, and above all we must do no harm, for we are nothing more than nature's assistants." 

None of our textbooks could tell us the how and why of healing. They explained the basics of scientific medicine—anatomy, biochemistry, bacteriology, pathology, and physiology—each dealing with one aspect of the human body and its discontents. Within each subject the body was further subdivided into systems. The chemistry of muscle and bone, for example, was taught separately from that of the digestive and nervous systems. The same approach is used today, for fragmentation is the only way to deal with a complexity that would otherwise be overwhelming. The strategy works perfectly for understanding spaceships, computers, or other complicated machines, and it's very useful in biology. However, it leads to the reductionist assumption that once you understand the parts, you understand the whole. That approach ultimately fails in the study of living things—hence the widespread demand for an alternative, holistic medicine—for life is like no machine humans have ever built: It's always more than the sum of its parts. 

With delicate lab culture methods we can remove from an animal certain organs and tissues, such as bone, a heart, a pancreas, a brain, or groups of nerve cells, keeping them alive for days or weeks. Much of modern biology in the West is based on the behavior of such isolated systems, which is assumed to be the same as in the living body. Russian biology, based on Ivan Pavlov's concept of the body as an indivisible unit, has always been skeptical of tissue culture results, considering these "parabiotic" reactions only hints toward definitive studies of the entire animal. The good sense of this view is shown by the fact that life tolerates fragmentation very poorly: Except in the simplest species removal of anything more than a few cells always destroys the organization, and hence the organism. Even if we could culture separately all the organs and tissues and then put them together like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, we would still, at our present level of knowledge, have only a collection of different kinds of meat, not a living entity. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once wrote, "Biology is the science of the improbable," and seldom can we predict new discoveries from what we already understand. 

These limitations were clearly recognized by American medicine in the 1940s, but they seem to have been gradually forgotten. Today most M.D.'s tacitly assume that once a few blank spots are filled in, the established basic sciences will be all we'll ever need to take care of the sick. As a result, they're losing the forest among the trees. Of the disciplines that form medicine's foundation, only physiology tries to units structure and function into a complete picture of how the body works. Hence it's often called the queen of the biological sciences, yet even in this realm the synthesis is made organ by organ. There is, however, one organ group—the nervous system—that coordinates the activities of all the others; by receiving, transmitting, and storing information, it unites all the parts into that transcendence of fragments, the organism. Therefore the one discipline that comes closest to dealing with a living thing in its entirety is neurophysiology, which in the 1940s was already so sophisticated as to be almost a science unto itself. 

Even neurophysiology couldn't explain the mystery of healing, however. My best texts either ignored it completely or shrugged it off in a few vague paragraphs. Moreover, my experiences at Bellevue during my internship and early residency convinced me that a physician's success was largely due, not to technical prowess, but to the concern he or she displayed toward patients. The patient's faith in the doctor profoundly affected the outcome of many treatments. Certain remedies, such as penicillin used against bacteria susceptible to it, worked every time. Other prescriptions weren't so predictable, however. If the patient thought the remedy would work, it usually did; otherwise it often didn't, no matter how up-to-date it was. 

Unfortunately, the importance of the doctor patient relationship was being downgraded by the new scientific medicine. The new breed of physicians argued that this power of belief somehow wasn't real, that the patients only thought they were getting better—a bit of arrant nonsense that should have been quickly dispelled by a little open-minded, caring attentiveness on daily rounds. There was no known anatomical structure or biochemical process that provided the slightest reason to believe in such a thing, so it came to be dismissed as a mirage left over from the days of witchcraft. The placebo effect, as it's now called, wasn't documented until several decades later and still isn't fully accepted as an integral part of the healing process, but over the years I became convinced that it was a physiological effect of mind on body, just as real as the effects of wind on a tree. 

Our lack of knowledge about healing in general and its psychological component in particular sowed seeds of doubt in my mind. I no longer believed that our science alone was an adequate basis for medical practice. As a surgeon, I tried to apply the principle of interaction on my own wards, by spending more time talking with patients, letting them know that I cared for them as well as taking care of the m. Naturally, as I became a teacher, I tried to pass on my beliefs to others. As I gained experience, I grew more and more convinced that all the textbooks were missing a chapter—the one that should have tied it all together and helped us doctors understand the bodily harmony we were trying to restore. 

When I entered research, I aimed for a fairly limited goal among the many that lured me—finding out what stimulated and controlled the growth needed for healing—but always in the back of my mind were the larger questions that had haunted me since medical school: What unified an organism, making every cell subservient to the needs of the whole? How was it that the whole being could do things that none of its components could do separately? What made an organism self-contained, self-directed, self-repairing? When you get right down to it, I wanted to know what made living things alive. Intuitively I felt sure the answers needn't be forever hidden in mystic conundrums but were scientifically knowable. However, they would require a fresh approach from science, not the simple mechanistic dogmas left over from last century. As a result of the research on nerves and regeneration described in the foregoing pages, I believe I can now sketch at least an outline of that missing chapter. 

It had been known for centuries that the nerves are the body's communications lines. Still, all the information collected by neurophysiologists hadn't revealed the integrating factor behind healing. Marc Singer proved that nerves are essential for regeneration, yet the elaborate impulse and neurotransmitter system, which until recently constituted everything we knew about nerves, carries no messages during the process. Nerves are just as essential to simpler kinds of healing. Leprosy and diabetes sometimes destroy nerve function to the extremities. When this happens, a wounded limb not only fails to heal but often degenerates far beyond the actual injury. I often thought about this paradox in connection with the other realities that were poorly explained by nerve impulses, such as consciousness and its many levels, sleep, biological cycles, and extrasensory experiences. As a doctor, however, I was most concerned with the mystery of pain. 

This is the least understood of sensory functions, but it must have been one of the very first to evolve. Without it, living things would be so poorly designed that they couldn't survive, for they would never know what constituted danger or when to take defensive action. Pain is quite distinct from the sense of touch. If you place your finger on a hot stove, you feel the touch first and the pain appears a discernible time later, after the reflex has already drawn your hand away. Clearly the pain is conveyed by a different means. Furthermore, there are different types of pain. Pain in the skin is different from pain in the head or belly or muscles. If you ever want to embarrass a neurophysiologist, ask for an explanation of pain. 

Early in my work on regeneration it occurred to me that I'd stumbled upon another method of nerve function. I imagined slowly varying currents flowing along the neurons, their fluctuations transmitting information in analog fashion. Though I kept my main focus on the role of these currents in healing, I pursued other lines of inquiry on the side. I did so partly out of simple curiosity, but also because I realized that, no matter how much merit my DC theory might have for healing, it would have a better chance of being considered if I could fill in some of its details in a wider context. 

In the study of healing I dealt only with the output side of the system, the voltages and currents sent to the injured area to guide cells in repairing the damage. Cybernetics and common sense alike told me that, before an organism could repair itself, it must know it had been injured. In other words, the wound must hurt, and the pain must be part of an input side of the system. Certainly if the output side was run by electrical currents, it made no sense to assume that the input side relied on nerve impulses. 

At the same time another problem nagged me. The impulses and the current seemed to coexist, yet everything we knew about nerve impulses and electricity said they couldn't travel through the same neuron at the same time without interfering with each other. We now have solutions to both problems, thanks to serendipity. The ways in which the answers came show how one experiment often furthers an unrelated one, and how politics occasionally benefits science. 

The Constellation of the Body 

In the early 1960s, after I'd published a few research papers, I had an unannounced visitor, a colonel from the Army Surgeon General's office. He said he'd been following my work from the start and had an idea he wanted to discuss. He asked if I'd ever heard of acupuncture. 

I told him it wasn't the sort of thing taught in medical school. Although I'd read about it, I had no direct experience of it and didn't know whether it did any good. 

"I can tell you for sure it does work ," he replied. "It definitely relieves pain. But we don't know how it works. If we knew that, the Army might adopt it for use by medics in wartime. After reading your work, some of us wondered if it might work electrically, the same as regeneration seems to. What do you think?" 

That was a new idea to me, but right away I thought it was a good one. Although neurophysiologists had studied pain intensively for decades, there was still no coherent theory of it, or its blockage by anesthetics and anodynes. Because of Western medicine's biochemical bias, no pain-killers other than drugs were considered seriously. Maybe a physical method could give us a clue as to what pain really was. 

We talked for several hours, but afterward I heard no more from the colonel, and I didn't get the chance to follow up his idea until more than a decade later. In 1971, while touring China as one of the first Western journalists admitted by the Communists, New York Times columnist James Reston saw several operations in which acupuncture was the only anesthetic, and he himself had postoperative pain relieved by needles after an emergency appendectomy. His reports put acupuncture in the news in a big way. It was almost the medical equivalent of Sputnik. Soon the National Institutes of Health solicited proposals for research on the Chinese technique, and I jumped at the chance. 

At that time the prevailing view in the West was that if acupuncture worked at all, it acted through the placebo effect, as a function of belief. Hence it should be effective only about a third of the time, just like dummy pills in clinical tests. Many of those applying for the first grants began with this idea, and with the corollary that it wouldn't matter where you put the needles. Thus, much of our earliest research merely disproved this fallacy, which the Chinese—and apparently the U.S. Army—had done long ago. Recalling my talk with the colonel, I proposed a more elegant hypothesis. 

The acupuncture meridians, I suggested, were electrical conductors that carried an injury message to the brain, which responded by sending back the appropriate level of direct current to stimulate healing in the troubled area. I also postulated that the brain's integration of the input included a message to the conscious mind that we interpreted as pain. Obviously, if you could block the incoming message, you would prevent the pain, and I suggested that acupuncture did exactly that. 

Any current grows weaker with distance, due to resistance along the transmission cable. The smaller the amperage and voltage, the faster the current dies out. Electrical engineers solve this problem by building booster amplifiers every so often along a power line to get the signal back up to strength. For currents measured in nano amperes and microvolts, the amplifiers would have to be no more than a few inches apart— just like the acupuncture points! I envisioned hundreds of little DC  generators like dark stars sending their electricity along the meridians, an interior galaxy that the Chinese had somehow found and explored by trial and error over two thousand years ago. If the points really were amplifiers, then a metal needle stuck in one of them, connecting it with nearby tissue fluids, would short it out and stop the pain message. And if the integrity of health really was maintained by a balanced circulation of invisible energy through this constellation, as the Chinese believed, then various patterns of needle placement might indeed bring the currents into harmony, although that part of the treatment has yet to be evaluated by Western medical science. 

The biggest problem Western medicine had in accepting acupuncture was that there were no known anatomical structures corresponding to the meridians, those live wires supposedly just under the skin. Some investigators claimed to have located tiny clusters of sensory neurons where the points were, but others had looked for them in vain. My proposal offered a convenient way into the problem. If the lines and points really were conductors and amplifiers, the skin above them would show specific electrical differences compared to the surrounding skin: Resistance would be less and electrical conductivity correspondingly greater, and a DC power source should be detectable right at the point. Some doctors, especially in China, had already measured lower skin resistance over the points and had begun using slow pulses of current, about two per second, instead of needles. If we could confirm these variations in skin resistance and measure current coming from the points, we'd know acupuncture was real in the Western sense, and we could go on confidently in search of the physical structures. 

I got the grant and used part of the money to hire Maria Reichmanis, a brilliant young biophysicist who was Charlie Bachman's last Ph.D. student. Her combination of mathematical gifts and practicality got us results fast. Together we designed a "pizza cutter" electrode, a wheel that we could roll along the meridians to give us a reliable continuous reading, as well as a square grid of thirty-six electrodes to give us a map of readings around each point. 

Along the first meridians Maria measured, the large-intestine and pericardial lines on the upper and lower surfaces, respectively, of each arm, she found the predicted electrical characteristics at half of the points. Most important, the same points showed up on all the people tested. Since acupuncture is such a delicate blend of tradition, experiment, and theory, the other points may be spurious; or they may simply be weaker, or a different kind, than the ones our instruments revealed. Our readings also indicated that the meridians were conducting current, and its polarity,  matching the input side of the two-way system we'd charted in amphibians, showed a flow into the central nervous system. Each point was positive compared to its environs, and each one had a field surrounding it, with its own characteristic shape. We even found a fifteen-minute rhythm in the current strength at the points, superimposed on the circadian ("about a day") rhythm we'd found a decade earlier in the overall DC system. It was obvious by then that at least the major parts of the acupuncture charts had, as the jargon goes, "an objective basis in reality." 

ELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY MAPS OF SKIN AT ACUPUNCTURE POINTS 

Maria, Joe Spadaro, and I began a more sophisticated series of tests. We planned to record from six major points along one meridian as a needle was inserted into the outermost point. If the DC theory was valid, a change in potential should travel from point to point along the line. However, just as we were entering this second phase, the NIH canceled our grant, even though we'd published four papers in a year. Supposedly it had lost interest in acupuncture, at least in the kind of basic research we were doing on it. Even so, I was fairly satisfied. The input system worked as I'd predicted. The other major question remained: What structure carried the current so as not to interfere with the nerve impulses? 

Of course, I've given away the answer in previous chapters. The perineural cells appear to carry the current. In the early 1970s, however, we only suspected this. The evidence came unexpectedly by cross-fertilization from an unrelated project. 

One of the main problems of medical research is finding a suitable "animal model" for human diseases. The study of unmended fractures is especially hard, because people are endowed with lesser fracture-healing abilities than most other animals, for whom nonunions are a nonproblem. Based on what I'd learned about the importance of nerves in bone healing, I figured we could produce nonunions in rats by cutting the nerves to the broken leg, particularly if we removed whole segments of the nerves so they couldn't grow back. I assigned this part of the project to Dr. Bruce Baker, a young orthopedic surgeon who was then finishing his residency with an extra year on a fellowship in my lab. 

After Bruce had worked out the complicated surgical procedure, we anesthetized a series of rats, removed the nerve supply to one leg of each animal, and broke the fibula, or smaller bone of the calf, in a standard way. Then every day we anesthetized a few of the rats and took out the fracture area to mount it for the microscope. At the same time, Bruce checked the cut nerves to make sure there was no regrowth. Successful denervation was confirmed by the microscope and by complete paralysis of the affected leg. 

The results were encouraging yet puzzling. The nerves didn't regrow, and the broken bones took twice the normal six or seven days to heal, but heal they did, even though theoretically they shouldn't have knit at all without nerves. 

It was well known that the severed end of a nerve would die after a couple of days, but, since we'd cut the nerves at the same time as we'd broken the bones, maybe the cut ends had exerted a subdued healing effect while they remained alive. In another series of animals, we cut the nerves first. Three days later, after making sure the legs were fully denervated, we operated again to make the fractures. We felt sure the delay would give us true nonunions. To our surprise, however, the bones healed faster than they had in our first series, although they still took a few days longer than normal. 

Here was a first-class enigma. The only thing we could think of doing was to cut the nerves even earlier, six days before the fractures. When we got that series of slides back, we found that these animals, whose legs were still completely without nerves, healed the breaks just as fast and just as well as the normal control animals. Then we took a more detailed microscopic look at the specimens Bruce had taken from around the nerve cut. We found that the Schwann cell sheaths were growing across the gap during the six-day delay. As soon as the perineural sleeve was mended, the bones began to heal normally, indicating that at least the healing, or output, signal was being carried by the sheath rather than the nerve itself. The cells that biologists had considered merely insulation turned out to be the real wires. 

Unifying Pathways 

The experiments I'd done with psychiatrist Howard Friedman in the early 1960s, mentioned in Chapter 5, were the first to provide strong support for an analog theory of pain. In all animals, including humans, the normal negative potentials at the extremities weakened or vanished as an anesthetic took effect. Under deep total anesthesia, the potentials often reversed entirely, the extremities becoming positive and the brain and spine negative. At that time we didn't yet know about the two-way system, inward along sensory nerves and outward along motor nerves, but it was obvious that a current flow was being reversed by the pain preventing drugs. In lab animals and humans under local anesthetic, such as a shot of procaine in one arm, the negative potential was abolished only for that arm. The DC potentials over the head were unaffected—except for a little blip in the recording that registered the prick of the needle! 

In addition, the DC potentials react slowly enough to account for pain. A wound usually doesn't start to hurt in earnest until minutes, or even hours, after the injury. This delay has been especially hard to explain in terms of nerve impulses, which travel at 30 feet per second. However, when Friedman and I injured the limbs of salamanders while monitoring the potentials on their limbs and heads, we found that the change in the limb reading showed up in the head after a time approximating that of delayed pain. Acupuncture likewise involves a delay, usually twenty minutes or more, before its effects are felt. 

We also found we could work backward, using the currents to produce anesthesia. A strong enough magnetic field oriented at right angles to a current magnetically "clamped" it, stopping the flow. By placing frogs and salamanders between the poles of an electromagnet so that the back-to-front current in their heads was perpendicular to the magnetic lines of force, we could anesthetize the animals just as well as we could with chemicals, and EEG recordings of magnetic and chemical anesthesia were identical. We got the same effect by passing a current through the brain from front to back, canceling out the normal current of waking consciousness, as in electrosleep. 

One of the most exciting results of my collaboration with Dr. Friedman was proof that one's state of waking consciousness could change the perception of pain. Friedman, who already used hypnosis to control chronic pain in his patients, gave several of his best subjects hypnotic suggestions of arm numbness deep enough that they couldn't feel the prick of a needle. In each case, I found that the frontal negative potential of the head became less negative, often reaching zero, as the client attained deep trance. The reading changed in the same direction as in anesthesia, only not as far. Then, when the suggestion for pain control was given, the arm potential reversed just as it had in response to procaine. Conversely, when a control subject was asked in normal waking consciousness to concentrate forcefully on one arm, its sensitivity to pain increased, and the hand potential became more negative. We found we could use this difference to determine whether a person was really hypnotized or just cooperating. 

Some doubters (including myself, I'm afraid) had believed hypnoanalgesia was merely a state in which the patient still felt the pain but didn't respond to it, but these experiments proved it was a real blockage of pain perception. It seems that the brain can shut off pain by altering the direct-current potentials in the rest of the body "at will." There's every reason to suppose that pain control through biofeedback or yoga likewise works by using an innate circuit for attenuating the pain signal, which releases a shot of the body's own painkillers. 

When the signal is appropriately modulated, it releases endorphins (internally produced opiates), as shown by experiments in which an injection of the opiate-antagonist naloxone negates the anesthesia of acupuncture. I predict that research on this system will eventually let us learn to control pain, healing, and growth with our minds alone, substantially reducing the need for physicians. 

Direct evidence for the perineural DC system has been accumulating gradually for several decades. Electric currents were detected in the glial cells of rat brains as long ago as 1958, and good (though long-ignored) measurements of direct currents in the frog's brain go back to the work of Ralph Gerard and Benjamin Libet in the early 1940s. Electron microscope work has shown that the cytoplasm of all Schwann cells is linked together through holes in the adjacent membranes, forming a syncytium that could provide the uninterrupted pathway needed by the current. The other perineural cells—the ependyma and glia—are probably connected in the same way, for syncytial links have recently been found in the glia of the leech, whose nervous system is much studied because of its unusually large cells. Recent use of selective radiation to isolate Schwann cells has shown that they, and not the neuron fibers, supply the nerve stimulus essential to regeneration. 

The invention of a better magnetometer has yielded definitive proof that's now widely acknowledged. Any electric current automatically generates a magnetic field around itself. Hence, as the perineural current conveys information in its fluctuations, it must be reflected by a magnetic field around the body, whose pulsing would reveal the same information. When I first proposed this idea, many of my colleagues dismissed it as rank nonsense. I couldn't prove them wrong, because there were no instruments to measure a field as weak as that generated by such small currents. Everyone knew the human body had no effect on a compass needle or any other magnetic-field detector available at the time. 

Then, in 1964, a solid-state physicist named Brian D. Josephson invented the electronic device now called a Josephson junction, a simple item that won him a Nobel Prize. Basically it consists of two semiconductors connected so that current can oscillate in a controlled fashion between them. Today it has many applications, especially in computers. When cooled near absolute zero in a bath of liquid helium, it becomes a superconductor in which the current plays back and forth endlessly. Super conduction is the passage of electrons through a substance without the resistance normally found in any conductor. This apparatus, called a superconducting quantum interferometric device, or SQUID for short, is a magnetic field detector thousands of times more sensitive than any previously known.

In 1963, G. M. Boule and R. McFee just barely managed to measure the relatively large magnetic field produced by the human heart—using the best old-fashioned instrument, a coil with 2 million turns of wire. Then, in 1971, working in a null-field chamber, from which the earth's magnetism and all artificial fields were screened out, Dr. David Cohen of MIT's Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory, who'd been corresponding with our lab since the early years, first used the SQUID to measure the human head's magnetic field. Two kinds of magnetic fields have been found. Quickly reversing AC fields are produced by the back and-forth ion currents in nerve and muscle. They're strongest in the heart, since its cells contract in synchrony. The SQUID has also confirmed the existence of the direct-current perineural system, which, especially in the brain, produces steady DC magnetic fields one billionth the strength of earth's field of about one-half gauss. 

By 1975, Drs. Samuel Williamson, Lloyd Kaufman, and Douglas Brenner of NYU had succeeded in measuring the head's field without a shielded enclosure, even amid the electromagnetic noise of downtown Manhattan. More important, they've found that the magnetoencephalogram (MHG)—a recording of changes in the brain's field analogous to the EEG - is often a more accurate reflection of mental activity than the EEG. Because the magnetic field passes right through the dura, skull bones, and scalp without being diffused, an MEG locates the current source more accurately than EEG measurements. 

The NYU group has since begun correlating magnetic events with well-known cerebral responses, such as the reaction of cells in the visual cortex to simple patterns and flashes of light. When the brain reacts to any stimulus, it produces a wave of electrical activity that's contained in the EEG. It's invisible in a standard EEG recording, because so much else is always going on in the brain at the same time. However, when one simple stimulus is repeated many times and the EEG tracings are averaged by computer, the particular electrical response to that one stimulus—called an evoked potential—can be teased out. Several research groups have slowly built up a small vocabulary of wave forms with specific meanings, including a "surprise wave," an "intention wave," and a "double-take wave," which appears when the mind briefly tries to make sense of semantic nonsense, as in the statement "She took a drink from the radio." 

Taken together, the MEG research so far seems to be establishing that every electrical evoked potential is accompanied by a magnetic evoked potential. This would mean that the evoked potentials and the EEG of which they're a part reflect true electrical activity, not some artifact of nerve impulses being discharged in unison, as was earlier theorized. Some of the MEG's components could come from such additive nerve impulses, but other aspects of it clearly indicate direct currents in the brain, particularly the central front-to-back flow. The MEG doesn't show the EEG's higher-frequency components, however, suggesting that some parts of the two arise from different sources. 

Since every reaction and thought seems to produce an evoked potential, the DC system seems directly involved in every phase of mental activity. At the very least, the electric sheath acts as a bias control, a sort of background stabilizer that keeps the nerve impulses flowing in the proper direction and regulates their speed and frequency. But the analog structure probably plays a more active role in the life of the mind. Variations in the current from one place to another in the perineural system apparently form part of every decision, every interpretation, every command, every vacillation, every feeling, and every word of interior monologue, conscious or unconscious, that we conduct in our heads. 

This part of the analog system's job is much less well understood, however, than its integrative function throughout the rest of the body. Perineural cells accompany every part of the nervous system. Even the tiniest twiglets of sensory nerves in the skin, which don't have a myelin covering, are surrounded by Schwann cells. The perineural thus just as well distributed to integrate bodily processes as the nerves themselves. They reach into each area of the body to create a normal electrical environment around each cell, or a stimulatory one when healing growth is needed. Likewise they enable an organism to sense the type and extent of damage anywhere in the body by transmitting the current of injury, with its by-product of pain, to the CNS. One could take a "fantastic voyage" from the farthest Schwann cell outpost in the big toe through the spinal cord and into all parts of the brain. Indeed, electrons are making this trip every moment of our lives. 

Thus our bodies have an intricate and multilayered self-regulating feedback arrangement. We know, on the psychological level, that a person's emotions affect the efficiency of healing and the level of pain, and there's every reason to believe that emotions, on the physiological level, have their effect by modulating the current that directly controls pain and healing. 

These discoveries give us a testable physical basis for the placebo effect and the importance of the doctor-patient bond. They also may give us the key to understanding the "miracle" cures of shamans, faith healers, and saints, as well as the spontaneous healing reported by means of visions, prayer, yoga, or battlefield terror. At the Menninger Foundation, Elmer Green has long been using biofeedback to explore the mindbody relationship. Green has described the full yogic control of pain and healing developed by one of his subjects, an otherwise average businessman. He lay against a bed of nails with no pain, and, when informed that a puncture from one of the points was bleeding, he turned his head, gazed at the wound, and immediately stopped the flow. A combination of biofeedback, recording electrodes, and the SQUID magnetometer would seem to be the ideal setup for the next level of inquiry into the mind's healing powers. 

Moreover, since the analog system, like the impulse network, appears to work on both conscious and subconscious levels simultaneously, it's a likely missing link in several other poorly understood integrative functions that also cross from one realm to the other. It may lead us at last to fathom the twin wells of memory and emotion. It may even help us understand what happens when a new synthesis of creative thought, a.k.a. inspiration, bursts forth like a mushroom from strands of mycelia that have been quietly gathering their subterranean forces. Then science for the first time will begin to comprehend the artistic essence that makes its rational side productive. 

                                             Fourteen 

                                Breathing with the Earth 

Major changes in one's life often proceed improbably from the most minor events. So it was that I became involved in one of the most interesting parts of my work in 1961 because a dog bit someone I didn't even know at the time. 

My first electrical measurements on salamanders had just revealed part of the DC control system to me. Elementary physics told me that the currents and their associated electromagnetic fields would have to be affected in some way by external fields. In engineering terms, the biomagnetic field would be coupled to the DC currents. 

Hence changes impressed upon it by external fields would be "read out" through perturbations in the current. Outside fields would also couple directly to the currents themselves, without acting through the biofield as intermediary, especially if the currents were semiconducting.

In short, all living things having such a system would share the common experience of being plugged in to the electromagnetic fields of earth, which in turn vary in response to the moon and sun. 

In the late eighteenth century, the Viennese hypnotist and healer Franz Anton Mesmer proposed direct magnetic influences on earthly bodies from the heavenly ones, but his idea came from the scientifically unacceptable domain of astrology. 

With the notable exception of Nikola Tesla, most prominent researchers have derided it until recently. I figured the DC system must be the missing link in a very different, but very real, connection between geophysics and the responses of living things. I was eager to investigate it, but at first I didn't know how. 

I was an orthopedic surgeon, about as far removed as possible from the psychiatric expertise needed for a serious study of behavior. And suppose I did find something? Who would believe me if I ventured so far from my specialty? The whole idea was preposterous to the science of the time, anyway. Still, I had to do something. 

During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, I'd been a volunteer in the Aurora Watch Program. To find out whether the northern lights appeared simultaneously throughout the north latitudes in response to changes in the earth's magnetic field (they did), IGY organizers recruited a worldwide network of amateur observers to go out into their backyards every night and look at the sky. All of us got weekly reports on the state of the field from the national magnetic observatory at Fredericksburg, Virginia. I decided to go back through this data and see if there was any correlation between the disturbances in earth's field caused by magnetic storms on the sun, and the rate of psychiatric admissions to our VA hospital. 

Luckily for me, Howard Friedman, the hospital's chief of psychology, was collecting donations door to door for a local Boy Scout troop at about this time. At one house, the family dog took an instant dislike to him and bit his ankle. After bandaging the wound, Howard's doctor gave him a tetanus booster shot. As luck would have it, Howard came down with a rare allergic reaction that involved fever, fatigue, nausea, and painful swelling of all the joints. 

Since I was the nearest bone-and-joint man, Howard came to see me. This type of reaction is frightening, but not dangerous, and disappears of its own accord in a day or two. After I made the diagnosis and reassured him, we sat and talked for a few minutes. After some chit chat about the shortcomings of the hospital administration, he gestured at the papers tacked all over the walls of my office and asked, "What are all those charts?" I told him about my magnetic brainstorms. 

He obviously thought I was as crazy as the people whose admissions I was charting, and probably wondered about the advice I'd just given. However, after hearing the background, he agreed it wasn't as silly as it sounded, and offered to help. It was a real break for me, since he was already a respected researcher, and a practical, open-minded one to boot. My diagnosis was correct, and our collaboration lasted almost two decades. 

Howard's reputation got us access to the records of state psychiatric hospitals, giving us a sample large enough to be statistically useful. We matched the admissions of over twenty-eight thousand patients at eight hospitals against sixty-seven magnetic storms over the previous four years The relationship was there: Significantly more persons were signed in to the psychiatric services just after magnetic disturbances than when the field was stable. Of course, such a finding could only serve as a guide to further investigation, because so many factors determined whether a person sought psychiatric help, but we felt that other influences would even out over such a large number of patients. 

Next we looked for the same type of influence in patients already hospitalized. We selected a dozen schizophrenics who were scheduled to remain in the VA hospital for the next few months with no changes in treatment. We asked the ward nurses to fill out a standard evaluation of their behavior once every eight-hour shift. Then we correlated the results with cosmic ray measurements taken every two hours from government measuring stations in Ontario and Colorado. Since magnetic storms were generally accompanied by a decrease in the cosmic radiation reaching earth, we thought we might find changes in the patients' actions and moods during these declines. We decided to use cosmic rays instead of direct reports of the magnetic field strength because of problems in distinguishing between magnetic storms and other variations in the earth's field. 

The nurses reported various behavior changes in almost all the subjects one or two days after cosmic ray decreases. This was a revealing delay, for one type of incoming radiation—low-energy cosmic ray flares from the sun—was known to produce strong disruptions in the earth's field one or two days later. 

With this encouragement we went on in 1967 to confirm, by experiments described more fully in the next chapter, that abnormal magnetic fields did produce abnormalities in various human and animal responses. We found slowed reaction times in humans and a generalized stress response in rabbits exposed to fields ten or twenty times the normal strength of the earth's. Hence we suspected that the earth's normal field played a major role in keeping the DC system's control of bodily functions within normal bounds. The proof of this idea has come mainly from the work of two men: Frank Brown at Northwestern and Rutger Wever, working at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. 

Already a respected endocrinologist, Brown became interested in biocycles in the 1950s. It was common knowledge that most organisms had a circadian rhythm of metabolic activity, which most people assumed was directly linked to the alternation of night and day or, in the case of shore life, to the tides. Oysters, for example, would open their shells to feed whenever the tide came in, covering them with water. It was a simple, obvious observation, but Brown didn't take it for granted. To  his surprise, oysters in an aquarium with constant light, temperature, and water level still opened and closed their shells in time with their compatriots at the beach. To find out why, Brown flew oysters in a lightproof box from New Haven to his lab, in Evanston, Illinois. At first they kept time with Connecticut oysters, then in a few weeks gradually shifted to the tide pattern Evanston would have had if it had been on a seacoast. The oysters not only knew they'd been taken 1,000 miles westward, they also suffered from jet lag! 

In his search for a creature whose response to magnetic fields might tell him more about biocycles, Brown settled upon the mud snail Nassarius, at home in the intertidal zone anywhere in the world. In his lab he placed the snails under uniform illumination in a box with an exit facing magnetic south. When they left the enclosure in early morning, they turned west. When leaving at noon, they turned east, but took a westerly course again in early evening. Furthermore, at new and full moon, the snails' paths veered to the west, while at the quarters they tended more eastward than at other times. 

Brown's precise data from this and many other experiments showed that Nassarius had two clocks, one on solar time and one on lunar, and subsequent work with magnets told something about how the timepieces ran. The earth's magnetic field averaged 0.17 gauss in Evanston. When Brown put a 1.5 gauss permanent magnet facing north-south underneath the snails' doorways to augment the natural field, the animals made sharper turns, but their direction wasn't affected. 

Turning either the magnet or the enclosure through various angles made the snails change course a specific number of degrees. Brown concluded: "It seemed as if the snails possessed two directional antennae for detecting the magnetic field direction, and that these were turning, one with a solar day rhythm and the other with a lunar day one." This crucial experiment not only showed the dependence of biocycles on the earth's magnetic field, it also demonstrated the subtlety of the link. No longer could we expect changes in the magnetic environment to be as obvious in their effects on life as changes in oxygen levels, food supply, or temperature. 

The niceties of the earth's electromagnetic field itself became better known as Brown's work progressed. Far from a static, simple magnetic field like that around a uniform bar of magnetized iron, the earth's field has turned out to have many components, each full of quirks. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, geophysicists found that the earth's magnetic field varied as the moon revolved around it. In the same period, anthropologists were learning that most preliterate cultures reckoned their calendar time primarily by the moon. These discoveries led Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish natural philosopher and father of ion chemistry, to suggest that this tidal magnetic rhythm was an innate timekeeper regulating the few obvious biocycles then known. 

Since then we've learned of many other cyclic changes in the energy structure around us: 

The earth's electromagnetic field is largely a result of interaction between the magnetic field per se, emanating from the planet's molten iron-nickel core, and the charged gas of the ionosphere. It varies with the lunar day and month, and there's also a yearly change as we revolve around the sun. 

A cycle of several centuries is driven from somewhere in the galactic center. 

The earth's surface and the ionosphere form an electrodynamic resonating cavity that produces micropulsations in the magnetic field at extremely low frequencies, from about 25 per second down to 1 every ten seconds. Most of the micropulsation energy is concentrated at about 10 hertz (cycles per second). 

Solar flares spew charged particles into the earth's field, causing magnetic storms. The particles join those already in the outer reaches of the field (the Van Allen belts), which protect us by absorbing these and other high-energy cosmic rays. 

Every flash of lightning releases a burst of radio energy at kilocycle frequencies, which travels parallel to the magnetic field's lines of force and bounces back and forth between the north and south poles many times before fading out. 

The surface and ionosphere act as the charged plates of a condenser (a charge storage device), producing an electrostatic field of hundreds or thousands of volts per foot. This electric field continually ionizes many of the molecules of the air's gases, and it, too, pulses in the ELF (extremely low frequency) range. 

There are also large direct currents continually flowing within the ionosphere and as telluric (within-the-earth) currents, generating their own subsidiary electromagnetic fields. 

In the 1970s we learned that the sun's magnetic field is divided from pole to pole into sectors, like the sections of an orange, and the field in each sector is oriented in the direction opposite to adjacent sectors. 

About every eight days the sun's rotation brings a new region of the interplanetary (solar) magnetic field opposite us, and the earth's field is slightly changed in response to the flip- flop in polarity. The sector boundary's passage also induces a day or two of turbulence in earth's field. 

The potential interactions among all these electromagnetic phenomena and life are almost infinitely complex. 

For many years most scientists dismissed Brown's conclusions as impossible. Given the old premise that life was entirely a matter of water chemistry, none of these electromagnetic changes would have enough energy to affect an organic process in any way. Discovery of the DC system showed how the interaction could work without energy transfer; it gave living things a way of "sensing" the fields directly. 

Undaunted by the slow acceptance of his work, Brown went on to document Nassaria's sensitivity to electrostatic fields as well. He also found magnetically driven cycles in all other organisms he tested, including mice, fruit flies, and humans. 

Even potatoes in a bin showed a field-linked rhythm of oxygen consumption. 

In humans, hormone output and the number of lymphocytes in the bloodstream are but two of many variables that dance to the same beat. One of the most important is cell cycle time. The actual process of cell division—in which chromosomes appear, line up, split in half, and are distributed equally between the two cells—takes only a few minutes. It must be preceded by several longer stages, one of which is duplication of all the cell's DNA. All stages together take about one day. Thus all growth and repair, which depend on regulated cell division, are synchronized with the earth's field. 

Rutger Wever has done some even more telling work with humans during the last decade and a half. He built two underground rooms to completely isolate people from all clues to the passage of time. One was kept free of outside changes in light, temperature, sound, and such ordinary cues, but wasn't shielded from electromagnetic fields. 

The other room was identical but also field free. Observing several hundred subjects, who lived in the bunkers as long as two months, and charting such markers as body temperature, sleep-waking cycles, and urinary excretion of sodium, potassium, and calcium, Wever found that persons in both rooms soon developed irregular rhythms, but those in the completely shielded room had significantly longer ones. 

Those still exposed to the earth's field kept to a rhythm close to twenty-four hours. In some of these people, a few variables wandered from the circadian rate, but they always stabilized at some new rate in harmony with the basic one— two days instead of one, for example. 

People kept from contact with the earth field, on the other hand, became thoroughly desynchronized. Several variables shifted away from the rhythms of other metabolic systems, which had already lost the circadian rhythm, and established new rates having no relationship to each other. 

Wever next tried introducing various electric and magnetic fields into his completely shielded room. Only one had any effect on the amorphous cycles. An infinitesimal electric field (0.025 volts per centimeter) pulsing at 10 hertz dramatically restored normal patterns to most of the biological measurements. Wever concluded that this frequency in the micropulsations of the earth's electromagnetic field was the prime timer of biocycles. The results have since been confirmed in guinea pigs and mice. In light of this work, the fact that 10 hertz is also the dominant (alpha) frequency of the EEG in all animals becomes another significant bit of evidence that every creature is hooked up to the earth electromagnetically through its DC system. Recently a group under Indian biophysicist Sarada Subrahmanyam reported that the human EEG not only responded to the micropulsations, but responded differently depending on which way the subject's head was facing in relation to the earth's field. Oddly enough, however, the head direction had no effect if the subject was a yogi. 

The relationship has been conclusively proven by recent studies of the pineal gland. This tiny organ in the center of the cranium has turned out to be more than the vaguely defined "third eye" of the mystics. It produces melatonin and serotonin, two neurohormones that, among many other functions, directly control all of the biocycles. The lamprey, akin to the ancestor of all vertebrates, as well as certain lizards, has an actual third eye, close to the head's surface and directly responsive to light, instead of the "blind" pineal found in other vertebrates. The eminent British anatomist J. Z. Young has recently shown that this organ controls the daily rhythm of skin color changes that these animals undergo. 

For our story the most important point is that very small magnetic fields influence the pineal gland. Several research groups have shown that applying a magnetic field of half a gauss or less, oriented so as to add to or subtract from the earth's normal field, will increase or decrease production of pineal melatonin and serotonin. Other groups have observed physical changes in the gland's cells in response to such fields. The experiments were controlled for illumination, since it has been known for several years that shining a light on the head somehow modifies the gland's hormone output even though it's buried so deeply within the head in most vertebrates that, as far as we know, it can't react directly to the light. 

We likely have yet to discover many other ways that energy cycles in the solar system affect life on earth. They may strongly affect the outbreak of disease, for example. The last six peaks of the eleven-year sunspot cycle have coincided with major flu epidemics. 

A Soviet group under Yu. N. Achkasova at the Crimean Medical Institute, working with astronomer B. M. Vladimirsky of the Crimean Observatory, has found a connection between the sun's magnetic field and the Escherichia coli bacteria that live in our intestines and help us digest our food. The Russians found the bacteria grew faster when the sun's field was positive, or pointing toward earth, and slowed down when it was negative. Two days after the passage of each sector boundary there was a dip in bacterial growth corresponding to the maximum geomagnetic turbulence. The data also showed a decline in growth in response to large solar flares. 

Other Russian scientists have drawn a tentative correlation between the sector cycle and reports from two groups of persons with neurological diseases. The patients felt worse within sectors of positive polarity, when bacteria seemed to grow faster. Life's geomagnetic coupling to heaven and earth is apparently more like a web than a simple cord and socket. 

The Attractions of Home 

An animal's biocycles must be appropriate for its environment if it's to survive, so they must be precisely tuned to its geographic location. We might suspect, therefore, that many creatures would use magnetic information for their sense of place. A great deal of recent work has shown that they do. A built-in compass helps guide them in foraging or other local business, as well as migration over much longer routes. The latter feats often rival those of any modern navigator. Monarch butterflies travel from Hudson Bay to South America straight across the Caribbean without ever getting lost. The arctic tern breeds in summer on the northern ice cap, then moves to Antarctica for the other hemisphere's summer, flying 11,000 miles each way. Some salamanders, only inches long and built very low to the ground, travel up to 30 miles of rugged mountain country in California to set up housekeeping, then return to their home stream to breed. Such activities are hard to experiment with, however, so we've learned more about day-to-day travel. 

Karl von Frisch was the first to attack the problem, with his famous 1940s studies of the honeybee dance, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1973. He established that on clear days bees navigated by combining the sun's angle with their sense of time, the way Boy Scouts are taught  to use wristwatches as compasses. The bees also had a polarized light system that could determine the sun's direction through light clouds or forest canopy. Even more amazing, Frisch found, the scouts told workers back at the hive where the flowers were by means of a dance using the sun's angle and the direction to earth's center (the gravity vector) as references. However, Frisch noted that bees could still navigate between food and home just as well on completely overcast days, when the sun's angle and polarized light weren't available. There had to be a backup system. 

It soon turned out that homing pigeons had the same abilities. In 1953 G. Kramer inferred that the birds must have a compass in addition to a map of remembered landmarks from the way they immediately pointed their beaks toward home after circling once after release. Soon others found the same kind of sun compass as bees used, but the pigeons could also steer perfectly on cloudy days. Back in 1947, H. L. Yeagley had had the temerity to suggest in the Journal of Applied Physics that pigeons might have a magnetic sense that allowed them to use the earth's field just as we use magnetic compasses. He was ridiculed and "refuted" by a few inadequate experiments—such as placing a pigeon in a variety of electromagnetic fields and noting that it seemed to be comfortable! Others, including Yeagley, attached small magnets to the birds' heads or wings, but found no clear-cut changes in their flight patterns. 

Only a few researchers quietly looked into the matter further. After Hans Fromme of the Frankfurt Zoological Institute noted in the late 1950s that caged European robins faced longingly in their normal southwest migratory direction even when they were kept from seeing sun and stars, their usual signposts, his co-worker Friedrich Merkel discovered that, insulated from the earth's field by a steel cage, they no longer faced in one particular direction. Furthermore, by changing the orientation of the surrounding field with coils, he could give the birds a false sense of where southwest was. The experiment was validated with indigo buntings several years later. 

There the matter rested until 1971, when William T. Keeton of Cornell realized that the pigeon's magnetic sense, if it existed, would be overshadowed by its sun compass, so naturally magnets affixed to the birds would have no effect on clear days. He soon found that the same birds released on a cloudy day got lost. 

To study this magnetic interference in any weather, Keeton made translucent contact lenses for his birds, then released them in the mountains of northern New York. Simulating dense clouds, the contacts blocked the sun's angle and polarized light, and with 1-gauss magnets attached to their heads the birds couldn't find their way home. However, each avian Ulysses who wore the lenses but no magnets faultlessly navigated the 150 miles southwest to Ithaca, then flew ever tighter circles around the loft and fluttered in like a helicopter to a perfect blind landing. 

Carrying the work forward after Keeton's untimely death soon after this experiment, Charles Walcott and Robert Green of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, working with James L. Gould of Princeton, outfitted pigeons with miniaturized electromagnetic coils that let the researchers vary the type and orientation of applied field at will. They discovered that if the south pole of the field was directed up, the birds could still find home, but with the north pole up they flew directly away from it. 

That meant they were using magnetic north as a reference point. At about the same time two German scientists, Martin Lindauer and Herman Martin, analyzed half a million bee dances and found a "magnetic error" in them—a compensation for the difference between magnetic north and true north. They were also able to introduce specific angles of error in the dances with specifically oriented coils around the hive. Here was proof that magnetic guidance systems existed in both the birds and the bees. * The next question was how the systems worked. 

* Recent work by Cornell biologist Kraig Adler showed that the magnetic sense of salamanders was many times more acute than even even that of pigeons. Not only could the amphibians find home without tight or other common cues; in addition, when Adler tried to confuse them with artificial fields, they quickly adapted to the interference and oriented themselves correctly in relation to the weaker geomagnetic background. 

In 1975 Richard P. Blakemore, then a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, astonished the world of biology with the announcement that some bacteria, the lowliest of all cells, also had a magnetic sense. Blakemore made the discovery when, studying the salt marshes of Cape Cod, he noticed that one type of bacterium always oriented itself north-south on his microscope slides. Soon he found magnetotactic bacteria (those reactive to magnetism) near Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he set about studying them with Richard Frankel of MIT's magnet lab. 

The direction to magnetic north points through the earth somewhat down from the horizon, and the scientists became convinced that the bacteria were using the field to guide themselves ever downward to the mud where they thrive, since they were too small to sink through the random molecular motion of the water around them. 

This idea was later confirmed by findings that microbes at Rio and in New Zealand were south-seekers. 

Blakemore's electron micrographs soon revealed a surprising structure. Each bacterium contained within it, like a chain of cut jet stones, a straight line of magnetite microcrystals. Surrounded by a thin membrane, each of these particles was a single domain, the smallest piece of the mineral that could still be a magnet. 

Blakemore's bacteria led Gould to look for similar crystals in bees and pigeons. Since an electron microscope survey of even a bee's brain would take several lifetimes, he examined the insects with a SQUID magnetometer. After confirming that they were magnetic, he dissected them and narrowed the location down to a part of the abdomen. Using the same method, Walcott and Green dissected the heads of two dozen pigeons, gradually subdividing them with nonmagnetic probes and scalpels. 

After a painstaking search the investigators found a tiny magnetic deposit in a 1- by 2-millimeter piece of tissue richly festooned with nerves, on the right side of the head, between the brain and the inner table of the skull. The same dot of tissue contained yellow crystals of the iron-storage protein ferritin, indicating that the pigeons, like the bacteria, synthesized their own lodestone crystals. 

As usual, these recent answers have raised plenty of new questions. The existence of magnetic sensors in such diverse creatures as bacteria, bees, and birds—the current count of species with magnetic organs is twenty-seven, including three primates—suggests that a magnetic sense has existed from the very beginning of life, perhaps only to be perfected by creatures that need to get around a lot. Do all animals, then, have the same sensors, and do they always serve the same function? How is the information read out of the crystals by the nervous system and translated into directions? What aspect of the earth's field do these organs sense? 

Keeton noticed an especially odd thing about his pigeons' flight patterns. When flying on visual flight rules by sun compass, they would circle once, get their bearings, then move off straight toward Ithaca. But when using their magnetic compass, the birds would fly due west from their release point until they got out over Lake Ontario, due north of Ithaca. Then, out of sight of land, they would make a right-angle turn to the left and follow the exact meridian of home. Keeton told me this but never published the observation because he didn't know what to make of it. 

He said, "I asked a physicist: 'Are they making contact with a certain magnetic line of force?' The man said, 'No, magnetic lines of force an just an arbitrary convention we use to symbolize a field and describe anomalies in it, such as occur around iron ore deposits. 

As far as we know, the lines have no equivalent in reality, and if they did, they would vary all over the place as the earth's field changes, anyway.'" Do pigeons then follow some maplike structure in the earth's field itself, a grid like that described by dowsers and geomancers since ancient times, something we can't find today even with our SQUID? 

Some migrating birds make a dogleg to the east in their north-south flyway, sailing out of sight of land over Lake Superior. Do they go out of their way to avoid being disoriented by iron ore deposits in the Mesabi Range? We can suspect, but we don't yet know. 

To most people, of course, the most interesting questions concern themselves. Do we, too, have compasses in our heads? 

On June 29, 1979,R. Robin Baker, a young University of Manchester researcher into bio-navigation, led a group of high school students into a bus at Barnard Castle, near Leeds,England. Baker blindfolded and earmuffed them, then gave them all headbands. 

Half of the headgear contained magnets and half contained brass bars that their wearers thought were magnets. As the volunteers leaned back to concentrate, Baker wove a mazelike course through the town's tangled streets, then traveled a straight highway to the southwest. After a few miles the coach stopped while the students wrote on cards an estimate of the compass direction toward the school. Then the driver turned through 135 degrees and continued east to a spot southeast of the school, where the students again estimated their direction. When the cards were analyzed, it turned out that the persons with brass bars by their heads had been able to sense the proper heading quite reliably, while those wearing magnets had not. 

Gould and his Princeton co-worker K. P. Able recently tried to replicate Baker's experiment but failed. However, Baker's review of the attempt suggested that the volunteers' directional sense may have been thrown off by magnetic storms, weak magnetic gradients inside the bus, and/or the greater electromagnetic contamination of Princeton compared with rural England. 

Baker and co-worker Janice Mather have recently devised a simpler test method.In the middle of a specially built, light tight wooden hut free of magnetic interference, the subject is blindfolded, ear muffed, and seated on a friction-free swivel chair. 

After being turned around several times, the subject must estimate his or her compass heading as before. With statistically consistent success in more than 150 persons, Baker believes he has proven the existence of a human magnetic sense. 

Oddly enough, he finds that as long as people can't feel the sun or sense some other obvious cue, they can judge direction better with blind folds on. Otherwise they start rationalizing the process, trying to deduce the right way from too little evidence and becoming confused. He surmises that the magnetic sense serves its purpose best by unconsciously giving a continuous sense of direction without its owner's having to be aware of it all the time, and thus freeing attention for the search for food, a mate, shelter, and so on. 

In 1983, using magnetic measurements in selective-shielding experiments, Baker and his co-workers reported locating magnetic deposits close to the pineal and pituitary glands in the sinuses of the human ethmoid bone, the spongy bone in the center of the head behind the nose and between the eyes. It's interesting to note that selective-shielding studies done in the early 1970s, by Czech emigre biophysicist Zaboj Harvalik, an adviser to the U.S. Army Advanced Material Concepts Agency, pointed to this same spot as one of two areas—the other was the adrenal glands—where the dowsing ability resided. 

In 1984 a group headed by zoologist Michael Walker of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu isolated single-domain magnetite crystals from a sinus of the same bone in the yellowfin tuna and Chinook salmon. The crystals were of a shape normally shown only by magnetite synthesized by living things rather than geological processes. Abundant nerve endings entered the magnetic tissue, and the crystals were organized in chains much like those in magnetotactic bacteria. Each crystal was apparently fixed in place but free to rotate slightly in response to external magnetic forces. Calculations showed that such chains would be able to sense the earth's magnetic field with an accuracy of a few seconds of arc, or a few hundred feet of surface position. This result correlated perfectly with earlier homing studies on live tuna by the same group. This detailed work, along with related earlier research, strongly suggests that all vertebrates have a similar magnetic organ in the ethmoid sinus area, and I suspect that this organ also transmits the biocycle timing cues from the earth field's micropulsations to the pineal gland. 

The Face of the Deep 

DNA pioneer Erwin Chargaff has called the origin of life "a subject for the scientist who has everything," but that hasn't stopped many of us (or even him, for that matter) from speculating about it. There are numerous detailed pictures of that primal scene in print today, but most are variations on one theory - "warm soup and lightning." Life on earth began some 4 billion years ago, or roughly l or 2 billion years after the world itself was born. 

The atmosphere then was completely different, much like Jupiter's today, mostly ammonia and methane. Into that atmosphere some source of energy—lightning, heat, and ultraviolet radiation have all been suggested—led to the spontaneous formation of simple organic compounds. Sifting into the oceans for millions of centuries, these compounds would have coalesced by chance into ever more elaborate patterns. According to the theory, this process culminated in closed "protocells" able to resist the reactivity of other structures while growing through incorporation of similar compounds. [DNA is proving Intelligent design dc]

This idea owes its dominance largely to an important experiment made by S. L. Miller in 1953. Miller pumped a facsimile of the presumed early atmosphere—ammonia, methane, and water vapor—continuously past an electric spark. After several days he had some amino acids. Since these are the bricks of DNA, RNA, and all proteins, the evidence seemed very good. Later runs yielded even more sophisticated molecules. In water they coalesced into globules with a sort of membrane around them—called "coacervates" by A. I. Oparin and "proteinoids" by Sidney Fox, two of the most assiduous students of biogenesis. 

Nothing came close to being alive in any of these spark chambers, however. More important, the experiments raised two difficulties, one theoretical, one practical. The soup theory needed to come up with a very sophisticated entity, a living cell with some genetic system using DNA or RNA, right off the bat. According to our notions of biology, nothing could be alive before that point, yet it seemed incredible that chance associations of the building blocks could form a palace of such complexity without passing through a mud-hut stage. 

When the warm soup theory was first advanced, the mechanistic persuasion was at its height. Living things were complicated machines, but molecular machinery they were. However, the concept of a cell was much simpler than it is today. No longer is it considered a mere baglet of jelly with a few master molecules telling it what to do. Even the membrane of the simplest bacterium responds in intricate ways to information from outside, yet our best electron microscopes haven't yet revealed a complexity of structure adequate to explain its work. 

There was a basic chemical problem as well. All organic compounds exist in two forms, or isomers. Each contains the same number and type of atoms, but in one they're arranged as a mirror image of the other. One is "right-handed" and the other is "left-handed." They're identified by the way they bend light in solution. The dextrorotatory (D) forms rotate it to the right, while levorotatory (L) isomers refract it to the left. All artificial methods of synthesizing organic compounds - including the spark experiments—yield a roughly equal mixture of D and L molecules. However, all living things consist of either D or L forms, depending on the species, but never both. 

We must conceive of the first living things as something unexpected, not just simpler versions of what we see around us. They couldn't have been cells; they couldn't have had a DNA-RNA-protein system, a living membrane, or a nerve impulse network. 

We can try to define the bare minimum, the processes that must be available before an entity can be called living. There must be a way to receive information about external conditions, process it, and store it so that the data change the being's response to the same stimulus in the future. In other words, a sort of crude consciousness and memory must be present from the first. A life-form must also be able to sense damage and repair itself. Third, we can expect that it would show some sort of cyclic activity, perhaps tuned primarily to the circadian rhythm of the lunar day. Self-replication, one of the main requirements in the DNAbased theory, can be dispensed with. An organism that can fully heal its injuries is theoretically immortal. The criteria for life can be summarized as organization, information processing, regeneration, and rhythm. 

The funny thing is that all of these criteria are met by the activities of semiconducting crystals. Semiconductivity occurs naturally in several inorganic crystals, including silicon, one of the most common elements, and the rare earth germanium. Moreover, extremely small amounts of contaminants will change the crystal's electrical properties dramatically in doping. The earth's volcanic mixing would have produced minerals with a wide variety of current-handling abilities to start from. 

Most important, the piezoelectric, pyroelectric, photoelectric, and other responses of semiconducting crystals could have served as an analog method of processing and storing information about pressure, heat, and light. Moreover, repeated passage of current through some semiconductors permanently changes the materials' characteristics so as to make the same electrical responses easier in the future. 

Movement of electrons along the crystal lattices inevitably would have been shaped by geo-celestial cycles in the earth's electromagnetic field, as well as by the fields around other such crystalline organisms nearby—providing a sense of time and information about the neighbors. The currents also would have instantly reflected any loss of material and guided the deposition of replacement atoms to restore the original structure. 

The idea of certain rocks, in the course of a billion years or so, gradually becoming responsive to their surroundings, growing, learning to "hurt" when a lava flow or sulfuric rain ate away part of a vertex, slowly  rebuilding, pulsing with, well, life, even developing to a liquid crystal stage and climbing free of their stony nests like Cadmus' dragon's teeth or the lizards in an M. C. Escher print—all this may seen a bit bizarre. Yet it's really no more strange than imagining the same transformation from droplets of broth. The change happened somehow. 

The biggest hurdle for this theory is accepting the idea that life could develop in the dry state, either out of the oceans or in the rocks underneath them. Since the mid-1960s it has seemed more plausible, for it was then that H. E. Hinton, of the University of Bristol, England, learned that at least one organism spends part of its life completely without liquid water. Certain flies of the Sahara desert lay their eggs in the brief pools formed by the rare rains. The larvae go through several metamorphoses in the water, but they're almost always interrupted by the evaporation of the pool.

Though completely desiccated, in a state Hinton named cryptobiosis, they survive months or years until the next rainstorm, whereupon they take up where they left off. The larvae can be quick-dried and stored in a vacuum bottle for many years. Placed in water, they resurrect in a few minutes. If a larva is cut in two when active, it takes six minutes to die. If it's flash-dried in the first minute, the two pieces can be kept on a shelf for years, but when returned to water they'll live out their remaining five minutes. Contrary to common sense, it appears that in this case life doesn't need water, but death can't occur without it. 

Getting rid of the water-equals-life assumption makes the crystalline theory more believable. Conditions on the young planet favored forests of crystals: It was hot; volcanoes were constantly firing new materials into the dense, dark shell of turbulent gases. However, the crystals would still have needed outside energy to overcome the entropy of nonliving matter. With an organizing principle built into them from the start, it's not too hard to imagine them acquiring other kinds of molecules, including the organics raining from the sky and dissolving in the waters. Then life would have been on its way to developing the biochemistry we now know—the genetic system and the consequent appearance of sexuality—which is the basis of all the creatures now alive or known from the fossil record. Still, we need an energy source for the transition. Lightning won't work in this context. We also need an explanation for the exclusively left- or right-handed molecules. 

In 1974 F. E. Cole and E. R. Graf of New Orleans made a theoretical analysis of the Precambrian earth's electromagnetic field that fulfilled both needs. They reasoned that since the atmosphere was much larger then, it must have pushed the ionosphere much farther out than it is today, into the region of the Van Allen belts. 

The earth would then have had an electromagnetic resonator of two concentric spheres—the upper atmosphere and the surface. Today, as in the past, the earth's pulsing magnetic field combines with the solar wind to induce large currents in the Van Allen belts. 

In the Precambrian era, however, the fluctuations of current in the Van Allen belts in turn would have generated huge currents in the nearby ionosphere. 

Since the earth's metallic core is an excellent conductor, the ionospheric currents would have coupled to it, producing an enormous and constant electrical discharge through the atmosphere and into the earth. 

Moreover, since the distance around the core at that time was roughly equal to 1 wavelength of electromagnetic energy at 10 cycles per second, or about 18,000 miles, this discharge would have pulsed at 10 hertz throughout the resonant cavity, which encompassed the whole atmosphere and surface. 

Besides directly providing electrical energy, this discharge would have produced abundant heat, ultraviolet radiation, and infrasound (or pressure waves), all of which would have fostered varied chemical activity. 

Such a dense and electrically supercharged atmosphere undoubtedly would have produced great quantities of amino acids and peptides. As they came together in the air and water, linking chainwise to form proteins and nucleic acids, the vectors of electromagnetic force would have favored spiral shapes twisting in one direction or the other, depending on whether the reaction occurred in the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere. 

In 1981, W. Thiermann and U. Jarzak found some direct evidence for this theory by synthesizing organic compounds in a steady state magnetic field. Changing the orientation of the field gave them high yields of either D or L forms. 

It may be possible to run a further check on the Cole and Graf hypothesis at one place in the solar system—the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. This permanent hurricane, whose eye could swallow the earth, continually emits prodigious electrical discharges through an atmosphere much like the one proposed for Precambrian times. It may be synthesizing organic compounds and energizing a transition to life even now. 

On earth, all entities formed within the 10-hertz discharge—and all of their descendants—would resonate at the same frequency or show extreme sensitivity to it, even after the original power source had been disconnected. The 10-hertz band would remain supremely important for most life-forms, as indeed it has. As already noted, it's the primary frequency of the EEG in all animals, and it can be used to restore normal circadian rhythms to humans cut off from the normal fields of earth, moon, and sun. 

William Ross Adey of the Loma Linda VA Hospital in California has found that magnetic fields modulated at about the same frequency can be used to change the behavior of monkeys in several important ways, which are described more fully in the next chapter. 

The Cole and Graf theory also suggests how the spark of life turned itself off. The currents driving the discharges would have ceased as the atmosphere gradually became depleted by escape of the lighter gases and by incorporation of the ammonia and methane into organic compounds. As this happened, the ionosphere would have gradually descended, becoming disconnected from the Van Allen belts. The ionospheric currents would have become too small to couple to the earth's core, and the atmospheric cavity too small to resonate at the core's prescribed frequency. At that point, the plug was pulled, but life was well on its way. Aside from competition from more advanced creatures, the loss of the energy source would explain why we see today no remnants of the transitional forms still emerging from inanimate matter. 

This solid-state theory of life's creation is more than an exciting picture of our birth in a shower of sparks. It leads us to another of biology's great mysteries—the evolution of nervous systems—by a sensible sequence of steps. First there would have been a crystalline protocell transmitting information directly through its molecular lattice. 

As the first cells developed, we can envision chains of microcrystals, then chains of organic polymers transmitting information in the form of semiconducting currents. Although the exact mechanism of electron passage through living tissue is far from clear, nearly all organic matter exhibits piezoelectricity and all the other hallmarks of semi-conduction. 

Furthermore, in a series of experiments during the 1970s, Freeman Cope, a Navy biophysicist building on Szent-Gyorgyi's work, has found evidence of super-conduction at room temperature in a variety of living matter. 

Currents briefly induced in superconductors have been known to flow for many years without decay, but the phenomenon has heretofore been attained only near absolute zero. 

Although Cope's work is still preliminary and uncorroborated, he has found electromagnetic data consistent with superconduction in E. coli bacteria, frog and crayfish nerves, yeast, sea urchin eggs, and molecules of RNA, melanin pigment, and the enzyme lysozyme. 

Whatever the exact details of the conducting system, the first multicellular organisms probably had networks of cells that were much like the first single cells. Later, these network cells would have specialized for their DC-carrying duties, linking into syncytia to avoid the high resistance of intercellular junctions. Somewhere along the line a central processing center and information storehouse would have developed. 

At  the same time separate input and output tracts would have appeared, and the DC system would have neared its peak of specialization as its cells evolved into the prototypes of glial, ependymal, and Schwann cells. 

At about this point the high-speed digital impulse system for handling more complex information would have begun to form inside the older one. 

Today all multicellular animals have this kind of hybrid system, whose complexities should provide work for at least a few more generations of neurophysiologists. 

Crossroads of Evolution 

The Cole and Graf theory has one crucial requirement. The polarity of the earth's magnetic field must have stayed the same during the resonant period. Otherwise there would be a mixture of right and left isomers in living tissues. As far as we can tell, the field did remain steady in Precambrian times, but we have ample proof that its poles have reversed many times during the last half-billion years. Each time, the shift has coincided with the extinction of many species. 

The geomagnetic record is written in two places: in igneous rocks bearing magnetic minerals, and in ocean floor sediments. Magnetic particles in molten rock are free to move and align themselves with the prevailing magnetic field. As the rock cools they're frozen in place. In the same way magnetic particles settling onto the ocean floor reflect the orientation of the field at the time of the deposit. Ocean sediments and the rock they eventually become have given us an undisturbed magnetic chronology for many millions of years, while the relatively few strata of igneous rock undisturbed by later upheavals give us occasional glimpses further back. 

The reversals happen very fast, as geologic time goes. The field strength falls to about half its average for a few thousand years. Then during another thousand years the poles change places; then the field regains its normal strength in another few thousand years. All told, the change takes about five thousand years. 

In the early 1960s, when the reversals were first discovered, geophysicists believed the magnetic field disappeared completely during the pole reversal. Thus they thought that the absence of the electromagnetic umbrella that protected life from high energy ultraviolet and cosmic rays would account for large-scale extinctions, These "great dyings" had long puzzled paleontologists . Soon the demise of a species of radiolarian was correlated with a magnetic field reversal. Radiolarians are microscopic  plankton animals with hard calcareous skeletons. 

Each species has a distinct, intricate shape, so their remains form an easily recognizable, continuous record in sediment cores. By 1967 James D. Hayes and Neil D. Opdyke of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory had correlated the disappearance of eight types of radiolarians with the reversals. Each species had been widespread and abundant; each extinction took place abruptly, with no previous decline in population. The "radiation barrage" theory seemed confirmed. 

However, it has since been learned that the field strength drops only by half, not enough to drastically reduce the protective power of the Van Allen belts and ionosphere. Moreover, radiolarian populations extend down into several yards of water, which should protect them from the radiation anyway. Hays has since drawn the less specific outlines of current knowledge thus: As animals grow more specialized in the course of evolution, they become more sensitive to some as yet unknown, lethal effect of the reversals. Long periods without reversals—the quiescent eras sometimes last tens of millions of years—seem to produce a profusion of species especially susceptible to the effect, and they're weeded out at the next shift. 

We know of two especially widespread extinctions. One, at the end of the Permian period, about 225 million years ago, wiped out half the kinds of animals then alive, from protozoa to early reptiles. The same kind of curtain dropped on the age of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago. In both cases frequent magnetic pole reversals had resumed after a long quiescence. Many periods of less extensive extinction have also been documented in the fossil record and correlated with the field reversals. Most recently, J. John Sepkoski, Jr., and David M. Raup of the University of Chicago reported what they believed to be a 26-million-year cycle in the major dyings. If their hypothesis holds up, there may be some solar or galactic influence that interacts with a magnetic reversal for maximum destructive effect. 

We can only surmise that the earth's field was instrumental in life's beginning, but by 1971 we knew virtually for certain that its polarity shifts had shaped life's development by a "pruning" of species. That year I was invited to a private meeting at Lamont to talk about the reversals, the sole M.D. among a score of biologists and geophysicists. At that time we could only speculate as to how the extinction effect came about. We didn't even have a workable theory of what changes inside the earth caused the turnabouts, or how the process affected the micropulsations and other aspects of the field. All we could agree on was that there were probably changes in every aspect of it, and our knowledge hasn't progressed much since then. 

The pole shift happens so slowly that living things may well adapt to it easily; the 50-percent decline in field strength also seems rather unimportant. However, since we know the micropulsations control biocycles, including the timing of the mitotic rhythm, a major change in their frequency could be catastrophic. Experiments with artificial extremely low frequency fields (see Chapter 15) have shown that vibrational rates near normal but slightly above, from about 30 to 100 hertz, cause dramatic changes in the cell cycle time. This interferes with normal growth of the embryo and may tend to foster abnormal, malignant growth as well. If a geomagnetic reversal raises the micropulsation frequencies into this range, the accumulation of growth errors over many generations could well mean extinction. 

We have no way of making a forecast, however. Reversals seem to happen at widely varied intervals, as often as every fifty thousand years during some periods, many millions of years apart during other times. The last one seems to have occurred about seven hundred thirty thousand years ago. Several scientists have interpreted data from NASA's MAGSAT orbiter, and from measurements of magnetic particles in lake sediments, as indicating that the earth's magnetic field strength is steadily declining, and has been for the last few thousand years. If so, we may already be entering the next reversal, but it's also possible we're merely experiencing one of the field's many short-term variations. 

Nor can we be sure how serious a reversal would be for us. Hominids have weathered them in the past, but we have an extra reason for being uneasy this time. If we're entering a reversal now, it will be the first one in which the normal field is contaminated with our own electromagnetic effluvia, and the most powerful of these, at 50 and 60 hertz, fall right in the middle of the "danger band" in which interference with growth controls can be expected. 

The field giveth as well as taketh away, however. If we can hang on until the next peak of its strength, we may benefit from a subtle infusion of electromagnetic wisdom. An ingenious theory recently proposed by Francis Ivanhoe, a pharmacologist and anthropologist at two universities in San Francisco, suggests how important it may have been to our own development. 

Ivanhoe made a statistical survey of the braincase volume of all known Paleolithic human skulls, and correlated the increase with the magnetic field strength and major advances in human culture during the same period. Ivanhoe found bursts of brain-size evolution at about 380,000 to 340,000 years ago, and again at 55,000 to 30,000 years ago. Both periods corresponded to major ice ages, the Mindel and Wurm, respectively, and they were also eras when great cultural advances were made— the widespread domestication of fire by Homo erectus in the early Mindel, and the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon peoples) and gradual decline of Neanderthals (Homo sapiens) during the Wurm. Two other glaciations in the same time span—the Ganz of about 1,200,000 to 1,050,000 years ago and the Riss of about 150,000 to 100,000 years ago—didn't call forth such obvious advancements in human evolution. They also differed from the other two in that the average geomagnetic field intensity was much lower. 

Ivanhoe has proposed a direct link from the magnetic field through the growth-hormone regulator pathways in the brain to account for the sharp evolutionary gains. He suggests that part of the hippocampus, a section of the brain's temporal lobe, acts as a transducer of electromagnetic energy. A part of the hippocampus called Ammon's horn, an arch with one-way nerve traffic directed by a strong current flow, may read out variations in the field strength, feeding them by a bundle of well documented pathways called the fornix to the hypothalamus and thence to the anterior pituitary, where growth hormone is produced. 

It's known that larger amounts of this hormone in pregnancy increase the size of the cerebral cortex and the number of its nerve cells in the offspring, as compared with other parts of the brain. Ivanhoe also notes that the hippocampus and its connections with the hypothalamus are among the parts of the brain that are much larger in humans than other primates. 

The idea gains further support from the fact that neural activity in the hippocampus increases with electrical stimulation and reaches a maximum at 10 to 15 cycles per second, at or slightly above the dominant micro pulsation frequency of today's field. The most powerful shaper of our development may turn out to be the subtlest, a force that's completely invisible to us. 

Hearing Without Ears 

We've considered how the electromagnetic fields of earth, moon, and sun affect life. In the next chapter, we'll ponder the effects of artificial fields from our machines. There's probably another interaction, however, of which we know much less: the effects produced on living things by the biomagnetic fields of other creatures. If one nervous system could sense the field of another, it would go a long way toward explaining extrasensory perception. 

Following the curious dogma that what we don't understand can't exist, mainstream science has dismissed psychic phenomena as delusions or hoaxes simply because they're rarer than sleep, dreams, memory, growth, pain, or consciousness, which are all inexplicable in traditional terms but are too common to be denied. Fifty years ago, when J. B. Rhine of Duke University first published results of his card-guessing experiments, scientists eagerly debated and tested the subject for a few years. Then, although at least 60 percent of the attempts to confirm Rhine's work also got better-than-chance results (a replication rate better than that in most other areas of psychology), the openness somehow disappeared. 

Ever since World War II, serious parapsychologists have been hounded out of the forum of science. In the 1950s, for example, Science and Nature both published attacks on certain results of Rhine and S. G. Soal, an early psi researcher at London University. Today this attitude may be waning. G. R. Price, the author of one of the diatribes, apologized in Science in 1972, and both journals have begun accepting occasional reports on psychic research, although still confining themselves mainly to negative findings. As the climate has begun to change, a few researchers have looked for electromagnetic fields as a possible basis for extrasensory perception.

The results so far have been as inconclusive as those from any other approach. In 1978 E. Balanovski and J. G. Taylor used a variety of antennae, skin electrodes, and magnetometers to monitor a number of people claiming paranormal powers. They found no electric or magnetic fields associated with successes in telepathy experiments. In 1982, Robert G. Jahn, dean of engineering at Princeton, assembled the most impressive battery of electronic equipment ever brought to bear on the subject. He found definite effects by mental forces on interferometer displays and strain-gauge readings, along with positive results in remote-viewing experiments. The tests couldn't be reliably repeated, however, and seemed to vary with the moods of researcher and subject, and perhaps with other immeasurable environmental factors. The same dependence on attitude—experiments seem to work more often for believers than doubters—has bedeviled psychic research from its beginning. Although Jahn came up with no clear-cut findings on electromagnetic factors, he was forced to the sublimely understated conclusion that ". . . once the illegitimate research and invalid criticism have been set aside, the remaining accumulated evidence of psychic phenomena comprises an array of experimental observations . . . which compound to a philosophical dilemma." 

We must remember that our study of biofields is still in its infancy. It's only a decade since the SQUID first enabled us to find the magnetic field around our heads at all. Pigeons have a magnetic detector thousands of times more sensitive than the latest instruments. We also know that the interaction of semiconducting currents with external magnetic fields is thousands of times greater than that of currents in a wire, and engineers have built microscopic devices that enhance this sensitivity by a factor of another thousand or more. 

The electron microscope has shown us crystal like structures of previously unsuspected complexity in all living cells, whose functions we can only guess at. There's now some evidence that psychic intent can influence the flow of current in solid-state devices, so we may be nearing the energy levels at which extrasensory factors work. Since all living things generate weak electromagnetic fields, and since many, if not all, can sense those of the earth, communication by this medium remains a strong possibility. Recent disclosure of a multimillion-dollar research effort in this area by the hardheaded weapons planners at the Department of Defense is one more reason why those scientists who work in public shouldn't dismiss the idea.

We must always be careful to place more weight on observation than current theory. We must remember that we don't yet fully understand magnetism. It now appears that the single domain with both magnetic poles may not be the smallest unit of magnetism after all. Physicists now posit the existence of magnetic monopoles, particles having the characteristics of just one pole, north or south. In fact there's some experimental evidence for them. Some theoreticians go even further, envisioning a hitherto unsuspected kind of magnetism, a composite of waves and monopole particles, like light. Living things may interact with such a now immeasurable energy. 

Any such message system would have at least two major difficulties to overcome in the course of evolution. Our own electrical-engineering experience, however, suggests workable approaches life may have taken. One problem is that the strength of biofields is far below that of the earth's field. Hence any input from other creatures would be embedded in noise. This is a common obstacle to telecommunications, and there are several ways around it. The easiest is for sender and receiver both to be frequency locked, that is, tuned to one frequency and insensitive to others. Such a lock-in system might explain why spontaneous ESP experiences most often happen between relatives or close friends. The sensitivity of our instruments may someday develop to the point where we can tune in to biomagnetic fields on select frequencies, thus experimenting as directly with ESP as we now do with radio. 

Another theoretical difficulty is the fact that psychic transmission doesn't seem to fade with distance. The electromagnetic field around an animal's nervous system, on the other hand, starts out unimaginably small and then diminishes rapidly. However, extremely low frequency (ELF) transmissions have a peculiar property. Because of their interaction with the ionosphere, even weak signals in this frequency range (from 0.1 to 100 cycles per second) travel all the way around the world without dying out. If an innate frequency selector is operating within this band, reception should be the same anywhere on earth. 

At this time the DC perineural system and its electromagnetic fields provide the only theory of parapsychology that's amenable to direct experiment. And it yields hypotheses for almost all such phenomena except precognition. Telepathy may be transmission and reception via a biologically programmed channel of ELF vibrations in the perineural system's electromagnetic field. Dowsing may involve an unconscious sense of the electromagnetic fields of underground water or minerals, an idea given some support by Russian experiments in the 1960s. Nikolai N. Sochevanov, now with the USSR's Ministry of Geology, found that the accuracy of forty professional dowsers diminished by at least three fourths when he wound a current-carrying wire around their wrists or brought a horseshoe magnet near their heads. 

Biological semiconductors even offer a possible basis for the aura often reported around living things by "sensitives." There has long been speculation that this "halo" might be some manifestation of an electromagnetic biofield. The ability of high-voltage (Kirlian) photography to produce an image very much like descriptions of the aura has aroused hope that the technique might render some aspect of psychic phenomena visible in a way that would be conducive to experiment. Because of this possibility, our lab investigated Kirlian photography during the mid-1970s. 

We obtained beautiful pictures that seemed to vary in response to changes in the health of the test organism. However, the method failed one crucial test. If the Kirlian halo actually reflected the biofield or some other basic aspect of life, it should have disappeared when the organism being photographed died. Alas, it did not. The image remained the same as long as the water content of the corpse remained constant. We found the images were entirely due to a simple physical event, a corona discharge. This occurred when a high-voltage electric field broke down the air molecules between the two condenser plates of the Kirlian apparatus. The amount of water vapor in the air changed the voltage at which this happened, and on color film produced coronas in different colors and sizes. We found no evidence that the Kirlian image was related to the living state. Nor did we find that it could serve as a "screen" on which might be reflected some invisible field or aura, another possibility that had been suggested. 

This is not to say that the aura occasionally perceived by some people around other organisms is imaginary. Things that appear so often in folklore often turn out to have a basis in fact. However, the body's magnetic field is far too weak to account for it. Our biofields, even if they were many times stronger, couldn't possibly emit light, but an appropriately sensitive magnetic detector in the brain, if it had nerve connections to the visual cortex, might "see" the magnetic field, in a manner of speaking. In a similar way astronauts in space "see" Cerenkov radiation—flashes of light that have been traced to the passage of high energy cosmic rays through the retina. 

On the other hand, the aura could literally be a form of light, perhaps at frequencies invisible to all but a few of us. The discovery of light emitting diodes is still fairly recent. As you will recall, we found that bone happens to have such properties. The point of that experiment was its evidence that bone contains semiconducting PN junction diodes. There may well be other diodes in living things. The relationship between the nerve endings and the skin is an interesting one in this context. The skin-nerve interface—the closest normal equivalent to the neuro epidermal junction that triggers regeneration—may well be a diode. If so, the proper level of current could cause emission of light from the skin. It's even possible that such an array of diodes with very large currents might produce a holographic image of the body on an organic screen, such as the reputed image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin. 

If extrasensory communication really is a function of the DC system, why isn't it more common and widely accepted? We may never know how well distributed it is among animals, although the number of pets who have returned to their owners over long distances suggests that many dogs and cats can find specific people by an unknown sense. The Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory has authenticated more than fifty such cases, many involving travel of hundreds or thousands of miles. We can expect that some species would be better at it than others, just as pigeons navigate by the earth's magnetic field far better than most other creatures. Among humans, some may simply be more gifted than others through genetic chance or some facet of their upbringing. Then again, the psychic sense may be a universal ability that was forgotten or suppressed as we came to depend more and more on language to get our messages across.

If they do depend on the same system, psychic ability and regeneration may go together; they may generally be better among simple animals. As the digital impulse system grew more efficient, its information may have overwhelmed the senses operating through the earlier mode. In fact, this may be part of the digital system's purpose. The ever present hum of electromagnetic information from other creatures may have become an intolerable burden. Think how confused you would feel if you could simultaneously hear what everyone else in the world was thinking. After all, mediums, sorcerers, and psi experimenters all agree that some sort of trance or mental quietude—a reduction of nerve impulse activity—is needed for best results. According to Elmer Green, yogis of some Tibetan traditions teach clairvoyance to novices by having them meditate seated on a glass plate, facing north toward a sheet of polished copper in a dark, windowless room, with a bar magnet suspended over their heads, its north pole pointing up to the zenith. 

The biofield also lends itself to theories of psychokinesis and object imprinting. All matter, living and nonliving, is ultimately an electromagnetic phenomenon. The material world, at least as far as physics has penetrated, is an atomic structure held together by electromagnetic forces. If some people can detect fields from other organisms, why shouldn't some people be able to affect other beings by means of their linked fields? Since the cellular functions of our bodies are controlled by our own DC fields, there's reason to believe that gifted healers generate supportive electromagnetic effects, which they convey to their patients or manipulate to change the sufferer's internal currents directly, without limiting themselves to the placebo effect of trust and hope. 

Once we admit the idea of this kind of influence, then the same kind of willed action of biofields on the electromagnetic structure of inanimate matter becomes a possibility. This encompasses all forms of psychokinesis, from metal-bending experiments in which trickery has been excluded to more rigidly controlled tests with interferometers, strain gauges, and random number generators. At present, it's the only hypothesis that offers much hope of testability. On a less spectacular level, we must ask whether the biofield can project the individual signature of a person's thoughts onto his or her surroundings, changing the electromagnetic characteristics of these objects so that the person can be sensed by others even though absent. This may well be the commonest of all paranormal experiences, and the number of crimes solved by psychics reacting to the mere scene of the crime should entitle scientists to investigate the idea without fear of ridicule from their colleagues. 

Over and over again biology has found that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We should expect that the same is true of bioelectromagnetic fields. All life on earth can be considered a unit, a glaze of sentience spread thinly over the crust. In toto, its field would be a hollow, invisible sphere inscribed with a tracery of all the thoughts and emotions of all creatures. The Jesuit priest and paleontologist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin postulated the same thing, a noosphere, or ocean of mind, arising from the biosphere like a spume. Given a biological communications channel that can circle the whole earth in an instant, possibly based on life's very mode of origin, it would be a wonder if each creature had not retained a link with some such aggregate mind. If so, the perineural DC system could lead us to the great reservoir of image and dream variously called the collective unconscious, intuition, the pool of archetypes, higher intelligences deific or satanic, the Muse herself.

next

Maxwell's Silver Hammer 253s