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One day in January 1993, while researching a book on religious conversions and the evangelical revival, I was leafing through a back number of Numinus, the journal put out by the Alister Hardy Centre in Oxford (which collects and analyzes case histories of religious experience). In a footnote, I read the following:
Members will be interested in a report from Canada that scientist Michael Persinger of Laurentian University has invented a helmet that he claims induces mystical experiences by stimulating the temporal lobe with magnetic forces. After a few sessions under the helmet many of Persinger's subjects found that the presence of a cross or background music could send them into a mystical state. Persinger states that all human brains can be found on a scale going from the most sensitive temporal lobes to the least, and people who are "temporal lobe sensitives" are most likely to have mystical experiences as well as epileptic seizures. He claims that his theory still holds good if the supernatural exists, since there must a physical mechanism for the transmission of supernatural experiences.
Michael Persinger, I discovered, was indeed performing such experiments. They involved entering a sound-proofed chamber and putting on something like a motorcycle helmet with electrodes, and having electric charges targeted to specific areas of the brain, with the results described. One subject, indeed, reckoned that he had seen God; another fled the chamber declaring that it should be exorcised because the Devil was in there.
So anyone ought to be able to have a mystical experience, courtesy of Dr. Persinger, at the flip of a switch. And as mystical experience was the starting point of so many of the conversionary case-histories with which my book dealt, I felt bound to try the equipment myself. I called Persinger and asked him whether he would like to tell me about his work, and even give me a ride on his machine. Sure, he said, but had I considered how this might go down with the Evangelicals? He had himself, apparently, had a bunch of them demonstrating outside his office at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario-they'd claimed that both he and his equipment were demonic.
Nevertheless, we fixed a date.
And so, two months later, under a brilliant blue...