Late the other night, just as I was dozing off in bed, I heard a noise from the bathroom - a prolonged cascade of shattering, as though a pyramid of crystal wineglasses had collapsed in my bathtub. I didn’t bother panicking for two reasons:
1) I don’t own any wineglasses, and if I did, I certainly have better uses for them than building pyramids in the bathtub.
2) This happens to me all the time.
I've heard these noises my entire adult life, everything from thunderclaps in the basement to slide whistles under the bed. At first, they terrified me. But no physical cause ever materialized and it didn’t take long to realize no matter how loud and real the noises seemed, they came from inside my head. Of course I never told anyone, under the assumption hearing imaginary noises was the same as seeing imaginary people, a symptom of insanity.
Today, I am finally able to come out of the imaginary noise closet thanks to the brilliant Mary Roach and her hilarious book, SPOOK. Those of you who are cowering in the imaginary people closet can come out as well. (Those of you who are receiving instructions to kill things – stay inside.) It turns out there could be a scientific explanation for these phenomena: electromagnetic fields. I am not a scientist, and respectfully request readers who are to bear with the following, highly remedial, explanation.
EMF’s are fields produced by electrically charged objects. They’re nothing new. They’ve existed since the Big Bang. On earth, until recently, EMFs generation was limited to objects struck by lightning and the occasional cat whose fur had been rubbed the wrong way. Then we harnessed electricity and nowadays just about everything generates EMFs: the wiring in our houses and all the appliances connected to it, cell phone transmission towers, you name it, it’s generating. Some scientists believe EMFs propagate in waves. Other scientists, mostly quantum physicists, believe they propagate via virtual photons. (Virtual photons? And I thought I was crazy.) I just threw that in because it came up in my research. You didn’t really need to know it, because all wave/particle systems move in ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs’, which means they create patterns when they intersect.
Research has shown a correlation between certain EMF patterns and reduction of melatonin production in rats and cows. Melatonin is one of those uber-hormones released by the pineal gland. Aside from inducing sleepiness, it plays a role in preventing microseizures, which have a strong correlation to hallucinations.
At Laurentian University in Sudbury Ontario, Professor Michael Persinger put all this together and devised an experiment to generate special effects in the human brain by bombarding test subjects’ heads with EMF patterns to create microseizures. Amazingly, over a thousand people guinea-pigged up to be seizured. Over eighty percent of them reported ghostly phenomena; everything from sensing a presence, to seeing an apparition to – that’s right – hearing noises. Mary Roach tried it herself and heard a police siren.
William of Occam (1288 – 1348?) was a proponent of lex parsimoniae – a scientific principle that states when competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, one should select the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions. If he were alive today, he would tell me the simplest explanation for my head noise is a mild form of epilepsy. But I also have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, so I am attracted to the EMF/reduced melatonin theory. I think the wiring in my house is trying to fry my brain.
Does this make me paranoid?
No comments:
Post a Comment