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EdgeScienceSpecial New Energy Section:A Demon, a Law,and the Questfor VirtuallyFree Energy

Cold Fusion:Is Vindicationat Hand?

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Number 2 JanuaryMarch 2010Current Research and Insights

Breakthrough:Clues to Healing with Intention

Extreme Adventuresof Super Athletes

A pbcat te Scet Scetc Expat


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CONTENTS

3

4

10

Ce mage James Ste

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14

15

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EdgeScience #2JanuaryMarch 2010

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THE OBSERVATORYTypes of Anomalies: OK, Not-Ok, and Sleeping

An Editorial by Peter Sturroc

LETTERSSome Further Thoughts on Premonitions

Feature

Breakthrough: Clues to Healing with IntentionBy William Bengston

SPeCIaL NeW eNerGY SeCtION

A Demon, a Law, and the Quest forVirtually Free EnergyBy Garret Moddel

NEWS NOTEBOOkCold Fusion: Is Vindication at Hand?

REFERENCE POINTThe Extreme Adventures of Super Athletes

and an Unwilling Neuroanatomist

A review of Maria Coffeys Explorers o the Infnite

by Michael Schmicer and a review of Jill Bolte Taylors

My Stroke o Insight by Michael Grosso

BACk SCATTERDemons On Mars


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{THE OBSERVATORY|

EDGE SCIENCE 3

Anomalies should be the lie-blood o science. Niels Bohronce said that progress in science is impossible withouta paradox, and Richard Feynman has remarked that Thething that doesnt t is the thing that is most interesting.

The crucial point to note about anomaly is that it is arelative concept, not an absolute concept. A result is an anom-aly only with respect to a given theory or hypothesis. In scien-tic research, it would typically be an experimental or observa-tional result that is not in accord with current theory. Thereinlies its importance: An anomaly provides a test o a theory. As Feynmans remark implies, it ismuch more important to search or

acts that do not agree with currenttheory than to nd urther acts thatdo agree with that theory. I a certainact, which is incompatible with a giventheory, can be rmly established, then thattheory must be modied or abandoned.

Dierent anomalies evoke very dier-ent responses rom the sci-entic community. To clar-iy matters, I suggest that we may distinguish threecategories that we may reerto as OK Anomalies, Not-OK Anomalies, and Sleeping

Anomalies. An OK Anomaly is one that has been discovered by

an established scientist, preerably using expensive equipment,and which appears to be an anomaly that scientists can cope with. Examples o OK Anomalies include the discovery oquasars and pulsars. Claims or both o these astronomical dis-coveries were made by established astronomers using power-ul (and expensive) optical or radio telescopes. Both anomalieswere viewed as due more to limitations in our astronomicalknowledge than to errors in our understanding o physics.

A Not-OK Anomaly is one that is not obviously re-solvable and presents an unwelcome challenge to establishedscientists, possibly (but not necessarily) because it has been

discovered by a non-scientist. A classical example o a Not-OKAnomaly is the case o meteorites. These objects all rom thesky and may be discovered by any citizen (with or without acollege degree), and no specialized equipment is required. In1772, French Academicians had ruled that these objects couldnot have allen rom the sky, since there are no stones in the skyto all. The authenticity o meteorite alls was nally and in-controvertibly established by the distinguished scientist Jean-Batiste Biot, who was sent by the President o the NationalInstitute to investigate a particularly large meteorite all (over3,000 stony meteorites) that occurred at LAigle, in Normandy,on April 25, 1803. A list o current Not-OK anomalies wouldcontain many topics that are generally dismissed as bogus by

the scientic community, such as UFOs and psi phenomena,as well as cold usion and anomalous healing, two subjectstouched upon in this issue.

A Sleeping Anomaly is one that has not yet been gen-erally recognized as an anomaly. A historical example o aSleeping Anomaly is the close geometrical match betweenthe west coast o Arica and the east coast o South America.This act had been noted by Francis Bacon and others, but it was not generally recognized as a challenge to understand-ing until Alred Wegener drew new attention to it early in the20th Century. Wegener attributed the correspondence to thebreakup o one large continent (reerred to as Pangea) and

the progressive separation o the parts by a process he calledcontinental drit. This proposal was ridiculed or many

years, especially by geophysicists.The tide turned when geophysi-cists ound that the magneticsignatures on the two sides othe Mid-Atlantic Ridge were e-ectively mirror-imaged, showing

this ridge to be a spreading center, aconcept that plays a key role in what isknown as plate tectonics.

We now know that the scienticcommunity was in error in its response to the challenge o

meteorites and to that o continental congurations. Can webe sure that we, scientists o the 21st Century, are not makingsimilar errors in our response to some current anomalies? A lit-tle doubt may be good medicine or ones intellectual health.

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4 EDGE SCIENCE

Some Further Thoughtson Premonitions

I teach a class at Utah Valley University in a TechnologyManagement Program entitled Reliability Engineering and

Saety. One o the chapters in this course is Situational Aware-ness. The denition o this concept is short and sweet; Know-ing What is Going On Around You. In this class we discusshow to have Situational Awareness and how to recognize whenyou have lost it. There are 11 clues that can be observed inones operating vocations that tell you that you are losing yourSituational Awareness.

This research work was done in part at the Universityo Texas in their Psychology Department under grants romNASA some years ago. The principle researcher at that timewas Robert Helmrich. The concept has been widely adoptedin the commercial aviation industry and has become part oinstructional eorts in many other saety critical industries.

One o the results o their research was the observationthat i 4 or 5 o these clues are observed in a given activity,there is a very high probability that a serious incident is im-minent. The instruction is that the activity should be put inan idle or sae situation unti l the reason or the presence o theclues can be ascertained and resolved. Another observation othe research that became one o the clues was that i someonein the activity had a Gut Feeling that something was wrong,it should be careully considered because the research showedthat nearly 100% o the time, something bad happened.

The 11 clues are;(1) Failure to meet Targets.(2) Use o an Undocumented Procedure

(3) Departure rom a Standard Operating Procedure.(4) Violating Maximums or other Limitations.(5) No One Flying the Plane or No One in Control(6) No One Looking Out the Window or observing what

is going on.(7) Communications Breakdowns(8) Presence o an Ambiguity or Anomalous data(9) Unresolved Discrepancies(10) Preoccupation or Distraction (atigue or emotional

situations(11) Conusion o Apprehensive Feeling or the Gut Feeling

that something is wrong.

Regarding clue 11, many dismiss various explanations as

the subconscious observing a bad developing situation or see-ing several o the clues by the subconscious. Personally, al-though some o these other explanations may be valid, I amwondering i precognition may be operable in these situationsthat are generally lie threatening.

An incident several years ago occurred with a FlyingTigers Airlines 747 on approach to Kuala Lumpur in Indone-sia in the middle o a very dark night. From the direction theywere on approach, the Instrument Landing System was out oservice and they would have had to go another hundred milesto come in rom the other direction where it was in service.While several o the clues to losing Awareness were eventuallypresent (7, 8, 9 and 10), the rst ocer tried to get the captain

to do the fy around, saying on three occasions, Captain, Ireally dont eel good about this, lets go around and use theinstrument system. These protestations occurred beore anyo the other clues were observable. Because o the ultimatepresence o several o the clues, unrecognized, they few into a

mountain. The other 4 clues were observable only just prior tothe crash. From the data I observed in this incident, it appearsthe rst ocers comments were begun at least 1520 minutesprior to the other our clues being observable.

The ino you supplied in your article (Straight From theGut, EdgeScienceNo.1) will be valuable in my class when wediscuss Situational Awareness. I cant put my nger on it pre-cisely, but I have a eeling the ideas on precognition may beinteracting somehow in the other 10 clues. Something to con-tinue to ponder. Great article.

John MacLean

First IssueBravoor a great job on the rst issue o EdgeScience. . .

I especially enjoyed Roger Nelsons summary o GCP/REGresearch, and the inclusion o a review o one o my avoritebooks, Robert Beckers The Body Electric, a review that notso incidentally also served as a tribute to the author, a trueEdgeScientist i ever Ive met one. EWK

Congratulations or such a nice, inormative, and attractiverst issue oEdgeScience. A publication like this was needed.CSA

I really enjoyed the rst issue o EdgeSciencemagazine . . .JR

Love your new magazine . . .JM

Excellent rst issue . . .RW

Absolutely ascinating . . .CJ

{LETTERS|


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EDGE SCIENCE 5

Bkhogh:

Clues to Healing with Intention

William F. Bengston

A very long time ago, soon ater I graduated with a B.A.in sociology rom Niagara University, I met a man whoclaimed he had only recently discovered his own psychic abili-ties. At the time, in 1971, Bennett Mayrick was a house clean-er. He had held a variety o jobs beore I met him, includingfoor installer, proessional singer, etc. Basically, he was a jack-o-all trades. Since I dont naturally deault to belie, I askedhim i I could test his claim. He not only agreed but also ac-tually welcomed the opportunity as he proclaimed himsel a

skeptic. And so a partnership was born.I began in the usual way, by giving him objects that be-

longed to various people and had him describe their character,surroundings, and events in their lives. I admit to having beenimpressed by his readings, even as I wondered i there mightbe an element o sel-delusion in all o it. And so I draggedhim around to people who claimed to be experts in such mat-ters. We went to the American Society or Psychical Researchin Manhattan, to the dream lab at Maimonides Hospital inBrooklyn, and such. I ound these experiences to be quite rus-trating, as the experts didnt seem to have their methodologi-cal acts in order. And so I, a fedgling researcher in the earlystages o graduate training, began to design double blind tests

that were ar more rigorous than anything the experts hadprepared or us. In short, Bennett passed these tests with fy-ing colors, and I wondered what to do next.

That problem didnt last long, as one day while we sat in akitchen talking about this and that, I had a fair up o chroniclower back pain that had made me give up a swimming schol-arship. O the cu, I asked him to put his hands on my backand take away the pain. He thought I was crazy but tried any-way. About ten minutes ater he put his hands on me, the painwent away. And decades later, it still hasnt returned. I thiswas hysterical suppression o symptoms, Ill take it!

All o this was beore the new age boom, whenalternative-healing practices became widespread even i not ac-

cepted by the medical community. I watched Bennett put hishands on person ater person and saw much that I mysel wouldnever believe had I not witnessed it. Some ailments respondedpoorly or not at all. Warts, or instance. There was no eect atall on warts, and to this day I consider that to be a clue evenas I continue to be fummoxed by what it means. On the otherhand, cancer responded almost immediately, and the more ag-gressive the cancer the aster it seemed to respond. The onlyailures with cancer were with those who had had radiationor chemotherapy. I suspect this is another clue, which mightmean that healing does not mix well with therapies that kill.

Ater watching many dozens o healings, I began to getrustrated. Sure, the cures were amazing, but the complexities

involved in clinical cases made them too uzzy or my sensi-bilities. Did a cure result rom the hands-on treatment, theextra vitamin C that the patient took, their personality type,or something else? I needed to know.

And so with a r iend named David Krinsley, we decided totake the healing phenomenon into the lab. At the time Davidwas chair o the geology department at Queens College o theCity University o New York, and I was a fedgling instructorat St. Josephs College in New York, doing graduate work in

sociology, specializing in criminology, the sociology o reli-gion, and statistical modeling. David was in a position to callin some avors so he solicited the head o the biology depart-ment to devise a test that would be airtight. One o the chairsdepartment members had been doing mice studies on a par-ticular orm o mammary adenocarcinoma that is 100 percentatal within 27 days o injection. The model itsel was so wellunderstood that statistical studies o liespan were routinelydone, even as no mouse had ever lived past 27 days. I wecould even get our mice to live closer to the 27 day mark, thatwould be strong evidence o a healing eect. I a mouse wereto live to day 28, well, then wed own the world record.

Our original intent was to have Bennett do the treat-

ments, but circumstance had him back out at the last minute. We were then let with cancer-inected mice and no healer.Rather than cancel the experiment, David convinced me toact as substitute healer. By that time I had spent a great dealo time watching, testing, and also assisting Bennett in somehealing cases. And so, seeing no alternative, I reluctantly (andwithout much condence) agreed.

A Skeptic as HealerI used healing techniques that Bennett and I developedthrough introspection, trial and error, and simple intuition.The techniques are completely belie-ree and involve a process

o extremely ast visualization o a series o personal imagesdone in conjunction with the laying-on o hands, in which theperson tries, with as little eort as possible, to eel an energyfowing out rom the palms o his or her hands. The imageseach person uses are generated by a personal list, prepared pri-or to the experiment, o 20 outcomes wanted in his or her lie,specic goals that involve their own health, ideal jobs, materialaspirations, or other people. Each item on the list is trans-lated into an image that represents the achievement o thatparticular goal. These personal images are then memorizedand the prospective healer practices cycling through them ina kind o mental lmstrip loop. This technique, rather thanslowing down brain activity through some sort o meditative


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technique, actually speeds up brain unctioning and activitythrough the rapid visualization. At the same time the hands-on technique is done in a very detached manner on the as-sumption that ocus or belie would only get in the way. Wecan carry on normal conversations and even read while doing

the hands-on techniques.For an hour a day I placed my hands around the cage o

six mice, wondering how in the world I had come to this. HereI was, a skeptical researcher suddenly saddled with the task otreating a cancer that is always atal.

Since neither David nor I had any precedent in what wewere doing, we naively suspected that i the treatment was tohave any success then either the mice wouldnt develop tumorsor the tumors would be slow to grow. To our initial conster-nation, neither scenario occurred. Within a ew days, palpabletumors developed on the mice, and I was discouraged to saythe least. My initial reaction was to cancel the experiment,put the mice out o their suering, and call it a day. David

urged otherwise, especial ly since he had gone to a great deal otrouble to set up the experiment. And so I continued the dailytreatments even as the tumors grew larger.

Any remaining hope I had disappeared as the tumors de-veloped blackened areas on them. I saw this as the beginningo the end. Then, the blackened areas ulcerated and the tumorssplit open. Again I urged that we do the ethical thing and endthe experiment. But the biology chair noticed that the micestill had smooth coats and their eyes remained clear, and hewondered why they were acting as though perectly healthy.

Then, in the nal stages, the mice tumors simply implod-ed without any discharge or inection o any sort; it was a ullliespan cure. We were stunned. Here was a skeptical healer

and a presumably non-believing group o mice that had gonethrough a novel pattern o remission to ull cure in a mousemodel without precedent o a cure.

Lets Try That AgainWhat to do next? Obviously replication. Even then it occurredto me that i this healing phenomenon were to have any prac-tical use, it needed to be independent o any individual. Plus,I was pretty burned out rom the emotional rollercoaster o

the experiment. And so I insisted that David, the biologychair, and two non-believing student volunteers submit to be-ing trained in the healing techniques. The only requirementor inclusion in the experiment was that the volunteer healersnot believe that healing was possible. I actually went throughseveral students in my screening process to nd the strongestlevels o skepticism. Clearly I am not into aith healing.

In act, Im quite sure that positive attitude isnt neces-sary to do healing. Certainly belie isnt either. Speculatively, Ithink there is a possibility that belie can hinder healing eects,as believers have a tendency to insert themselves into the pro-cess because they have a stake in the outcome (the same reasonhealers cant generally heal themselves). Healing is eective to

the extent that the ego is removed. I also think that ritual (allritual, really) destroys the thing that it is trying to reproduce.In healing, ritual blocks the fow o healing. People get verymad at me when I say this. And so in speculative hindsight, Iunintentionally may have loaded the deck in my experimentsby working only with non-believing clean slates.

The our skeptical volunteers then replicated what Idid, and we got essentially the same results. All o the micewere cured. I then moved the operat ion to St. Josephs Collegewhere I was working, and with the chair o the biology depart-ment there did experiments three and our with other skepti-cal volunteers. In those experiments we also tried injecting themice with twice the dosage necessary to produce a atal cancer,

tried multiple injections, and even tried re-injecting them aterthe experiment was over. But the mice remained immune touture injections throughout their two-year liespan.

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aecacma.

da 22: A backee aea begs t eep te tm.


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EDGE SCIENCE 7

We have now done ten experiments on mice at ve dier-ent institutions, including two medical schools. Eight o thoseexperiments involved the same mammary adenocarcinoma,and two o them used methylcholanthrene-induced sarcomas,which are not quite as aggressive. Though these experiments

achieved healing across the board, the intricacies o the resultsare complex and, rankly, quite puzzling.

Control Group CuresAmong the more interesting complications is that under cer-tain conditions, our untreated control group mice also remit-ted. I the control mice were housed in a dierent buildingthan the experimental mice, they always died on schedule.But i anyone who knew the healing techniques came into aroom where the control mice were housed, the inected micewho were still living went through the process o remission oblackened area to ulceration to tumor implosion to ull lies-

pan cure. At rst this was extremely annoying, as conventionalscientic analysis takes success to mean that there was a greatereect in treated verses untreated groups. But i the untreatedcontrol mice also got cured, then there were no dierences orus to report! At rst we simply relied on the act that the micewe were working with always died when injected with cancers,and so we already knew what should have happened with ourmice. All o them should have died. But since mice rom bothgroups were getting cured, we knew we had another clue. Itwas just a very dicult clue to interpret.

I worked on this problem or a long time until I real-ized that perhaps one o the basic assumptions o experimen-tal methods might just be incomplete: that separate groups

are independent. I that assumption o independence betweengroups can be violated, then perhaps I could account or theremitting control mice. Perhaps all the mice were somehow

resonantly bonded with each other. Our colleagues in physicsare certainly used to entanglement, or what Einstein amouslycalled spooky action at a distance, but only on a microscopiclevel. As ar as I know, entanglement has only been shownto about 100 or so atoms, certainly ewer than the number

o atoms in a mouse. Yet we were getting similar eects incomplete biological organisms. I wonder how many other labsmight have experienced resonant bonding between their ex-perimental and control groups, and mistakenly concluded thattheir experiments were not successul and dismissed their nd-ings? (This is called a type II error thinking that nothingsignicant happened when in act it did.)

Placebo EectsA ew years back I was giving a talk on this possibility at the2003 Paris meeting o the Society or Scientic Explorationwhen a group rom a lab in Freiburg, Germany, jumped up

excitedly and said that I may have solved the placebo problem.I expressed gratitude to them or saying that, but I also saidthat I didnt know what the problem was. Like many people, Iassumed that the placebo phenomenon was simply the powero suggestion, and that doctors, or example, might prescribean inert pil l that could produce real eects in a patient becauseo that suggestion.

But ater the conerence, I began to look into placebosa bit more, and what I ound astonished me. The idea that aplacebo could produce real physiological eects was unthink-able in medicine 50 years ago, but by now medicine recognizesthat placebos do work, even as the mechanism by which theywork and the circumstances under which they work remain a

mystery. Yet, in act, it turns out that placebo eects increaseover time to the point where up to 80 percent o the eectso drugs can be mirrored in placebos. The strength o this

da 28: Tm ceat begs. da 35: Tm ceat.


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8 EDGE SCIENCE

eect has made it dicult or drug companies to prove thattheir new drugs work, as the gold standard o double-blind,placebo-controlled trials oten end up mimicking the eects othe real drug in the control groups that only get placebo.

I began to speculate that perhaps this was happening to

my mice. While they were not technically getting a placebo,the act that the untreated mice kept getting cured was obvi-ously suggestive. Perhaps the same process was at work. Per-haps experimental and control groups arent as independentas we once thought, and just as people taking an inert pillrespond as i getting an active substance, my control groupmice were responding as i getting an actual healing. Could itall be connected? I so, we have to do some serious re-thinkingo the assumptions o classical experimental design. Perhapsa treatment given to one group is also a treatment given toall groups? Ive designed a sequential series o experiments totease out what percentage o the placebo eect is due to sug-gestion and what percentage is due to resonant bonding, but

Ive yet to get unding or a lab to carry out the work.The placebo/resonant bonding problem has also given

me pause about whether healing can indeed be taught. I oncethought that since I taught non-believers my healing tech-niques and they then went on to cure mice that otherwisewould have surely died that I had demonstrated that my tech-niques were learned and eective. Now Im not so sure. Thinkabout it: i we have an experiment where ve volunteers aretrying to remit their cage o mice, even i only one person isable to do it then perhaps all the mice will be cured anywayand each volunteer will assume that he or she is the one whoproduced the cure. This is a daunting problem. In one ex-periment I was treating numerous cages o mice or dierent

lengths o time trying to gure out what is the minimum dosenecessary to produce a healing, and in one o the cages I neversaw the mice but only held water that was ed to them. At theend o the experiment all o the mice were cured. Should Iconclude that treated water can cure cancerous mice, or wasit perhaps due to resonant bonding o all o the mice so that atreatment given to one is a treatment given to all? Im still notsure o the answer.

Where Should We Go From Here?All o this work is in the early and preliminary stages, but atthis point there are some conclusions that can be made with

relative certainty, and some conclusions that are a bit moretricky. The largest category, o course, is the enormous listo things we dont know. There is certainly plenty o researchthat needs to be done.

The most unambiguous conclusion is that cancer can becured in experimental animals. Even a doubter such as myselhas to throw in the skeptical towel ater ten experiments. Atthis point we have only tested two types o cancers, and it re-mains to be seen whether dierent cancers respond dierentlyto healing techniques.

All o the cured mice lived their normal liespan o two years. Ater the initial cure, subsequent re-injections sim-ply had no eect on the mice. This strongly suggests that an

immune response is somehow being stimulated in the animals.I that is the case, perhaps the stimulated immune response cansomehow be transerred to an animal that has not received thehealing treatments. In act, ater one experiment was over andI was no longer involved in the day-to-day business o the ani-

mal labs, some cells were taken without my knowledge romremitting mice and transplanted to ully inected mice just tosee what would happen; the transplanted cells seem to have inturn cured the ully inected mice. This suggests we mighthave the potential or either a literal or metaphorical vaccinethat could reproduce the healing without the healer. Is therean immunologist who would be willing to take on this work?

What are the correlates o healing, in the healer, the healee,and the surrounding environment? We have undertaken otherexperiments to nd answers to such questions.

Margaret Moga and I have done three mice experimentson mammary cancer at her lab at Indiana University MedicalSchool, and while going through the usual routine o hands-

on healing, also strategically placed geomagnetic probes totest whether there might be some interesting environmentalcorrelates to the healing. And so we examined DC magneticeld activity during hands-on healing and distant healing omice with experimentally induced tumors. And, in act, dur-ing the healing sessions we observed distinct magnetic eldoscillations adjacent to the mice cages beginning as 20-30 Hzoscillations, slowing to 8-9 Hz, and then to less than 1 Hz,at which point the oscillations reversed and increased in re-quency, with an overall symmetrical appearance resembling achirp wave. The waves ranged rom 1-8 milligauss peak-to-peak in strength and 60-120 seconds in duration. We specu-late that this evidence may suggest that bioenergy healing may

be detectable with DC gauss meters.About three years ago, independent researcher Luke Hen-

dricks contacted me about my research with the mice. Luke isinterested in both brain research and the practical applicationso healing. Ater a ew conversations about research possibili-ties, he in turn approached Jay Gunkelman o Q-Pro World-wide, a leading authority on EEGs, about carrying out someexperiments on brain correlates o my healing techniques. Andso we all met at one o Jays labs in Phoenix to look at interper-sonal coupling or connectivity between healer and healee pairsusing advanced signal processing approaches and instanta-neous EEG phase coupling. Our results showed harmonic re-quency coupling across the spectra, ollowed by EEG entrain-

ment eects between individuals, and then by instantaneousEEG phase locking. These results suggest the presence o aconnection between the healer and healee through a patterno harmonics consistent with Schumann Resonances. I thesedata hold in subsequent tests, we may have isolated at least oneconnectivity mechanisms underlying healing.

But the questions go on and on. What happens when heal-ing occurs? Do dierent healing techniques produce dierentresults? Can healing be stored? Are placebo eects instanceso resonant bonding? At this point, rankly, were not sure yeto the proper questions to ask.

And mainstream science and medicine has not exactlybeen supportive. My history o research has generally ollowed


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EDGE SCIENCE 9

a two-step process. Each new lab expresses disbelie at my dataobtained at other labs, and the researchers there take on aoh yeah, well you couldnt get those results here approach.When the mice get cured in the rst experiment at any lab, itis usually taken as a gauntlet by lab personnel that they can

thwart uture positive results. Then, when the second experi-ment also produces ull liespan cures, it is oten ollowed byhead shaking and proclamations to the eect that this is themost amazing thing they have ever seen. But when I suggesturther research, there is always some reason that the workcannot continue at that institution. When I suggest that it ismy goal to reproduce the remissions without the healing tech-niques by using either the blood o cured animals or somecorrelate to the healing, my suggestion is usually met withintense skepticism that such a thing might be possible. I will,nonetheless, persevere.

Healing HumansThe eight hundred pound gorilla in the middle o the roomis the question o whether any o this works on people. It isunambiguously the case that increasing numbers o peoplearound the country are seeking out alternative and comple-mentary medicine, which at this point in time must be clas-sied as a growth industry. There are any number o schoolso healing, workshops on healing, and practitioners o thevarious alternative-healing arts. But do they work? Surely thepractitioners will swear by whatever it is that they do. But mynon-systematic experience is that very ew practices are rootedin rigorous data. That is not to say that they dont work; it isonly to say that there are too many anecdotes out there not

matched with empirical testing.As I noted at the beginning, my experimental work grew

out o clinical observations and my rustrations at not beingable to isolate what works and why through clinical observa-tion. Certainly people have been taught my techniques and ap-plied them to people with some interesting anecdotal results.But to a researcher anecdotes are simply not enough.

At what point will there be enough evidence to do a con-trolled study on people? I dont think the question has a clearanswer. While my passion is in the lab, I would certainly beopen to some clinical trials. But in my experience watchinghuman cancers being treated decades ago, my anecdotal clini-cal observation was that the most successul remissions were

all associated with a lack o conventional treatments whosepurpose was to kill cancer cells. When people speak o com-plementary medicine, perhaps the methods I am aware o arenot really complementary to the current crop o conventionaltreatments. I that turns out to be so, then the diculties ocarrying out successul clinical trials a re greatly compounded.I dont yet know how to solve this problem. I do know that itis a problem worth pursuing.

For Further Reading:Luke Hendricks, William F. Bengston, Jay Gunkelman, TheHealing Connection: EEG Harmonics, Entrainment, andSchumanns Resonances, Journal o Scientifc Exploration,submitted.

Margaret M. Moga, William F. Bengston, Anomalous DCMagnetic Field Activity during a Bioenergy Healing Experi-ment,Journal o Scientifc Exploration, submitted.

William F. Bengston, Donald G. Murphy, Can Healing BeTaught? Explore, vol 4(3), pp. 197200, May/June 2008.

William F. Bengston, Margaret M. Moga, Resonance, Place-bo Eects, and Type II Errors: Some Implications rom Heal-ing research or Experimental Methods, Journal o Alterna-tive and Complementary Medicine, vol. 13(3), pp. 317327,May 2007.

William F. Bengston, A Method Used to Train Skeptical Vol-unteers to Heal in an Experimental Setting,Journal o Alter-native and Complementary Medicine, vol 13(3), May 2007.

William F. Bengston, Methodological Diculties InvolvingControl Groups in Healing Research, The Journal o Alter-native and Complementary Medicine, vol. 10(2), April 2004.

William F. Bengston, Some Implications o the Bengston/Krinsley Healing Experiments, Monterey Institute or theStudy o Alternative Healing Arts, vol. 30-31, December 2000,pp. 1215.

William F. Bengston, David Krinsley, The Eect o theLaying-On o Hands on Transplanted Breast Cancer inMice,Journal o Scientifc Exploration, vol. 14(3), Fall 2000,pp. 353364.

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10 EDGE SCIENCE

law o thermodynamics. One othe ways to state this law, as in-

troduced by Rudol Clausius in 1865,is that heat cant fow spontaneously rom a

cool region to a warm region. To understandthis on a microscopic level, picture twochambers lled with gas, one hot and the

other cold, connected by a small hole. Ener-getic, hot air molecules diuse rom the hot chamber

to the cold, and lethargic, cold molecules fow in the

opposite direction. The eect is that heat fows roma hot region to a cold one, and not the other way around. Isthere a way to reverse this process?

Lets imagine, as Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwelldid in 1867, that theres a little ellow who can. His nameis Maxwells demon and his sole mission in lie is to violatethe second law o thermodynamics. The demon guards a doorblocking the hole between the chambers. Every time he seesan energetic molecule coming towards the hole rom the hotchamber he closes the door. He does the same thing when hesees a lethargic air molecule approaching rom the cold side.His devious nature emerges when he sees the occasional en-ergetic molecule approaching rom the cold side or the oc-

casional lethargic molecule coming rom the hot side. Out ospite or Clausius he lets them through. In this way the hotregion becomes hotter by taking energy rom the cold region,which becomes colder. The demon is the embodiment o aone-way valve or heat fow.

Can a real process exist that is represented by this demonsactions? Ater more than a century o creative proposals orMaxwells demons, none has been ound to exist. There reallyis no way to make heat fow spontaneously rom a cold regionto a hot one, or to provide useul energy by orming hot spotso gathered heat rom a uniorm temperature background.You cant get around the second law, so this little demon justcant exist.

But even proposals that claim not to be based on Max-wells demon to extract energy rom the vacuum actually dodepend on the little deviland thereore ail.

No Way or One-Way ValvesIn a talk presented at the 2009 Workshop on Future En-ergy Sources with proceedings published by the AmericanInstitute o Physics, an investigator proposed using a diode,a one-way valve or electrical current, to harvest ZPE becausethese electromagnetic waves not only ll all o space, theyalso produce electrical oscillations in electronic components.The idea is that the uniorm background ZPE would cause

I you believe what you read on the internet, new sourceso energy now exist that can provide limitless, non-polluting, virtually ree power. Supposedly thesenew sources have been patented and proven byscientists, but they arent generally available be-cause power companies or government agencies aresuppressing inormation about them. The most tantalizingo these purported energy sources is the vacuum, specicallyzero-point energy in the orm o ubiquitous electromagneticwaves. The great thing about zero point energy is that, unlike

many other sources o energy, it doesnt have to be extractedrom the ground because its literally everywhere around us.

What is zero-point energy? ZPE, or short, can be viewedas a consequence o the uncertainty principle in quantummechanics. According to this principle, we cannot know boththe position and speed (or more precisely, the momentum) oa particle to absolute precision. I a particle were at rest, we would know both. Thereore no particle is ever completelyat rest, even at absolute zero temperature. Hence zero-pointenergy. Not only does ZPE make all matter vibrate, but evenempty space cant escape its eects. All space is lled withthis quantum vacuum energy, resulting in a huge quantity oelectromagnetic waves that tantalize us, saying Take me . . . i

you can.The question is: Can we? Can we extract this energy rom

the vacuum?

The Demon is in the DetailsLets step back rom the hype and take a look at the undamen-tal underpinnings o vacuum energy extraction to see whetherit makes sense. To do so, we must rst understand the second

a Dmon, Lw, nd h Qs fo

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Garret Moddel Illustrations by Benjamin Kessler


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EDGE SCIENCE 11

oscillationselectrical charge moving back and orthin adiode. And since a diode allows fow preerentially in one di-rection, electrical charge would build up on one side. Thisbuild-up could then be used to charge a battery.

Can this really be done? Or does this require Maxwells

demon and is thereore really impossible? Ater all, a diode isjust a one-way valve, the demons area o expertise. ZPE existsin a state o true equilibrium, which means that its energy isas evenly distributed as i it were at a uniorm temperature.But Clausius already told us that there is no way to harvest anyenergy rom a uniorm distribution. So this conceptcannot work.

How can we be so sure that one-way valvescannot harvest energy rom equilibrium? MaybeClausius got it wrong and someone will comealong someday to correct his version o thesecond law, just as Einstein came along andcorrected Newtons law o gravitation. Un-

ortunately, these are two very dierent typeso situations.Newtons law was based on ob-servation and abstraction. I Newton had beenobserving the eects o gravitational orces withsucient precision and at cosmic scales, he might havecome up with Einsteins more accurate picture instead. Thesecond law o thermodynamics is dierent. Although it mayhave originated rom observations, it has been re-developedusing statistical mechanics, an application o probability andpure logic, and it is now supported by a oundation stron-ger and more accurate than any observation. Einstein wrotethat classical thermodynamics is the only physical theory ouniversal content which I am convinced will never be over-

thrown . . .

What Goes Down Must Come UpOne o the problems with extracting zero-point energy romthe vacuum is that the vast majority o this energy is in the ormo extremely high-requency electromagnetic waves. Thereis not much energy at radio and television-wave requencies(around 100 million cycles per second) or even at microwaverequencies (around 10 billion cycles per second). Only whenyou get up to the requencies o visible light (around 1 millionbillion cycles per second) is there enough energy to be useulas a power source. The problem is that todays electronics cant

work at those high requencies. For that reason, two U.S. AirForce researchers proposed a system intended to down-convertthe high-requency ZPE waves to lower requencies, wherethey could be harvested or use in electronics. The researchersreceived a patent or this in 1996 (U.S. # 5,590,031).

Frequency down-conversion, like the use o diodes toconvert electrical oscillations into direct current, makes useo what is called a nonlinear substance or device. Many miner-als and all living material are nonlinear to some extent. I anonlinear substance were sucient to down-convert electro-magnetic waves o ZPE then we would see hot spots whereverthere was such a material. This is because the low-requencyoscillations that resulted rom the down-converting o these

elds would end up as heat. Max-wells demon would have a hey-day producing these hot spotsrom the background energy.But we dont see such hot spots,

once again because the energy inthe vacuum is uniormly distrib-

uted; its in equilibrium. Based onthis, Einstein developed a detailedbalance description o emission andabsorption in 1916. According to

this balance, there is in act down-conversion o vacuum energy into heat,

but there is an exactly equal amount oup-conversion o the heat into vacuumenergy. So there is no net fow o energyrom the vacuum. The proposed down-conversion cant work, unortunately.

One-Trick Casimir Cavities Another attractive approach to harvest

ing vacuum energy involves Casimir cavities. In 1947, theDutch physicist Hendrik Casimir was developing a theory thatpredicted the existence o previously unknown orces betweentwo closely spaced objects. He described his ndings to NielsBohr, the grandather o quantum mechanics, as they tooka walk together. In response to Casimirs description, Bohrmumbled something about zero-point energy. Casimir hadthe answer he needed.

The two plates on either side o a Casimir cavity are like

two ships at sea. Waves pushing against the starboard sides oeach ship are balanced by waves pushing against the port sides.But when the two ships move too closely alongside each other,they block the waves between them. Waves on the open-seasides o the ships are no longer balanced by waves on the othersides, with the result that the ships are pushed together. Sim-ilarly, ZPE electromagnetic waves push against the Casimirplates. When the plates are spaced closely enough they blocksome o the long wavelength waves rom orming betweenthem, with the result that the plates are pushed together. Thiseect becomes noticeable only or spacings that are less thanone mill ionth o a meter.


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12 EDGE SCIENCE

In 1999 and the early 2000s, a physicist published a pa-per in Physical Review B, received several patents (includingU.S. # 6,665,167), and started a company, all dealing withthe extraction o energy rom the vacuum using the attractiveorce between the plates o Casimir cavities. According to the

invention, he allows the plates to come together and extractsenergy in the process. But i he then simply pulls the platesapart to repeat the process, the pulling apart would use allthe energy gained in allowing the plates to come together and

there would be no net energy gain. So, instead, he turns oone o the plates ater they come together, then pulls themapart, turns on the plate, and repeats the process.

This process is like allowing a bucket o water to drop tothe ground while it pulls a rope attached to a generator. You

extract energy rom the bucket on its way down. But to raise itup again would require as much energy as you obtained by let-ting it drop, and so you pour out the water to make it lighter.You then raise the empty bucket, ll it with water, and repeatthe process. The problem, o course, is that any energy thatyou extract rom the dropping bucket is lost in liting up thewater to ll the raised bucket. The process provides net energyonly once, during the initial drop. This is because gravity is aconservative orce.

The Casimir orce resulting rom zero-point energy is alsoconservative. Pulling the plates apart uses the energy that wasobtained by letting them come together. Without expendingenergy there is no way to turn o the ZPE to allow the plates

to separate without having to pull them apart. Casimir cav-ity attraction works once, but cant be used to obtain cyclicpower.

Have we been let on the Casimir sea without a paddle? Isthere any hope let or extracting energy rom the vacuum?

Go with the FlowThere is one strange quirk o vacuum energy that opens up apossibility. In a thermal system at rest, the temperature is uni-orm. There are no dierences in temperature that would allowenergy extraction. But vacuum energy is dierent: it dependsupon localstructures and boundaries. Both in open space and

inside a Casimir cavity, the state o lowest available energy isthe zero-point energy state. As described earlier, however, thecavity rejects some o the ZPE, and so there is a dierence be-tween the energy levels inside and outside the plates. Its as isea level were constant, except in some locations. On a real sea,the water would spill rom the higher level to the lower, but ora Casimir cavity the local dierence in sea levels is stable.


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EDGE SCIENCE 13

There may be a way to take advantage o this natural stepin the lowest available energy. Gas fowing into the cavity romoutside experiences this drop in ZPE. The gas atoms may dropinto a lower-energy state inside the cavity. On the way in, theycould emit the dierence in energy in the orm o electro-

magnetic waves, according to a patent that was issued in 2008(U.S. # 7,379,286). Ater fowing through the Casimir cavityand exiting on the other side, the atoms would be re-energizedto their initial state by the ambient ZPE eld. The gas could bepumped through the Casimir cavity many times, so that theemitted energy would provide a continuous power source.

This is not like the contracting Casimir cavity describedpreviously, which required the energy gained to separate theplates again. The unction o pumping the gas is only to moveit through the system, and is not directly related to the energyobtained rom the vacuum. The pumping energy required ismuch less than what could be extracted rom the gas emission.The overall unction o the system would be to transer ZPE

rom the environment and deposit it locally, where it couldbe used. This approach o using gas fowing through Casimircavities circumvents the violations o thermodynamics thatblocked the earlier approaches.

Can this work, or is there a hidden Maxwells demonsomewhere, meaning that a undamental law has been violat-ed? Standard quantum electrodynamics is consistent with the

step in ZPE at the entrance to Casimir cavities, but no one hasused it to predict a big change in the atomic energies o atomsfowing past the step. An alternative theory, called stochasticelectrodynamics, does predict such a change. Does the con-cept work? My laboratory is now carrying out experiments to

test the idea.Whether this technique or others that have been proposed

will work is an open question. What is not in question is theabsence o Maxwells demon.A successul zero-point ener-gy extraction technique can-not rely on the little ellow tocircumvent the second law othermodynamics. Sleep, lit-tle demon, sleep.

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14 EDGE SCIENCE

A Stamp o Approval

The title o an unclassied, eight-page,Deense Analysis Report produced by theU.S. Deense Intelligence Agency (DIA)and released on November 13, 2009 saysit all: Worldwide Research on ColdFusion Increasing and Gaining Accep-tance. Only the report didnt call it coldusion but Low-Energy Nuclear Reac-tions, one o the terms under which thiswork has continued since Martin Fleis-chmann and Stanley Pons announced tothe world in 1989 that their eletrochem-ical experiments had produced excess

energy, which they thought could benuclear in origin, at room temperature.But when most researchers attemptingto replicate their results ailed, the phys-ics community dismissed their work,which the press labeled cold usion, aslacking credibility.

Since then, according to this DIA Technology Forecast, Sci-entists worldwide have been quietly investigating low-energynuclear reactions (LENR) or the past 20 years. Researchersin this controversial eld are now claiming paradigm-shitingresults, including generation o large amounts o excess heat,nuclear activity and transmutation o elements. Although no

current theory exists to explain all the reported phenomena,some scientists now believe quantum-level nuclear reactionsmay be occurring. DIA assesses with high condence that iLENR can produce nuclear-origin energy at room tempera-tures, this disruptive technology could revolutionize energyproduction and storage, since nuclear reactions release mil-lions o times more energy per unit mass than do any knownchemical uel.

Although much skepticism remains, these once unconven-tional research programs are now receiving increased supportworldwide, including state sponsorship and unding rom ma-jor corporations. DIA assesses that Japan and Italy are leadersin the eld, although Russia, China, Israel, and India are de-

voting signicant resources to this work in the hope o ndinga new clean energy source.

A variety o theories have been advanced to explain the ob-served LENR phenomena. Some scientists, states the report,now believe these nuclear reactions may be small-scale deu-terium usion occurring in a palladium metal lattice. Someothers stil l believe the heat evolution can be explained by non-nuclear means. Another possibility is that LENR may involvean intricate combination o usion and ssion triggered byunique chemical and physical congurations on a nanoscalelevel. Regardless o theory, however, This body o researchhas produced evidence that nuclear reactions may be occurringunder conditions not previously believed possible.

The DIA analysts are well aware o the

enormous implications o this work: Inuclear reactions in LENR experimentsare real and controllable, DIA assessesthat whoever produces the rst commer-cialized LENR power source could revo-lutionize energy production and storageor the uture. The potential applicationso this phenomenon, i commercialized,are unlimited.

The report ends by citing a number ospecic practical applications o cold u-sion technology, which was once dubbedBad Science. LENR could serve as a

power source or batteries that could lastor decades, providing power or electric-ity, sensors, military operations, and oth-er applications in remote areas, includingspace. LENR could also have medicalapplications or disease treatment, pace-makers, or other equipment.

And, o course, the military applications do not go unno-ticed. Because nuclear usion releases 10 million times moreenergy per unit mass than does liquid transportation uel, themilitary potential o such high-energy-density power sourcesis enormous. And since the U.S. military is the largest usero liquid uel or transportation, LENR power sources could

produce the greatest transormation o the battleeld orU.S. orces since the transition rom horsepower to gasolinepower.

Cold Fusion Is Hot AgainIt became obvious that thetide was turning on the subject when the CBS NewsMagazine program 60 Min-utes did a segment on coldusion, produced by DeniseSchrier Cetta, in April o

2009. The tagline or thesegment was Once Consid-ered Junk Science, Cold Fu-sion Gets A Second Look By Researchers.

To nd out whether cold usion was more than a tempestin a teapot, 60 Minutes asked an independent scientist, RobDuncan, who is vice chancellor o research at the Universityo Missouri and an expert in measuring energy, to accompanycorrespondent Scott Pelley to Israel, where a lab called Ener-getics Technologies had reported some large energy gains intheir experiments. Duncan, who thought cold usion had beendebunked, nonetheless agreed and spent two days examiningthe Israeli labs cold usion experiments to determine whether

{NEWS NOTEBOOk|

Cold Fusion: Is Vindicion Hnd?


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EDGE SCIENCE 15

their measurements were accurate. Aterwards Duncan toldPelley, I thought, Wow. Theyve done something very in-teresting here. Then ater searching or an explanation otherthan a nuclear eect to explain the results, Duncan admitted:I ound that the work done was careully done, and that the

excess heat, as I see it now, is quite real. Those are words henever thought he would ever say, he told Pelley.

60 Minutesound that the Pentagon was uttering those verysame words. DARPA, the Deense Advanced Research Proj-ects Agency, did its own analysis o cold usion experimentsand 60 Minutes managed to obtain an internal memo thatconcludes there is no doubt that anomalous excess heat isproduced in these experiments.

While cold usion researchers are now beginning to eel vindicated, Martin Fleischmann, the man who announcedcold usion to the world and who was discredited in the pro-cess, thought back on the past 20 years and told Pelley that heviewed them as a wasted opportunity. But he seemed will-

ing, despite being hindered by years, diabetes, Parkinsonsdisease and maybe a little bitterness, to have another go at it.

60 Minutesdeserves a lot o credit or stepping out-o-the-box and ollowing a story that was decidedly out o the main-stream.

Does Size Matter?The basic scientic issue at the center o cold usion researchis how low-energy chemical energies can trigger high-energynuclear reactions. Indeed there are now numerous publishedexperiments, in which deuterons have been inserted or loadedinto a solid, that have produced energies ar beyond what can

be explained chemically.But not always reliably. Most people believe that materials

issues are at the heart o current inabilities to ully reproduceand control LENR experiments, wrote David Nagel, adjunctproessor o engineering and applied sciences o The GeorgeWashington University in Washington, D.C, in a scientic re-view o the 15th International Conerence on Cold Fusion inRome originally published in Infnite EnergyMagazine.

Could nanostructured materials be the solution to this vex-ing problem? There has been a recent breakthrough in whichexcess heat in nanostructured materials was conrmed by ourlabs, starting with the work o Dr. Yoshiaki Arata, and Yue-Chang Zhang o Osaka University in Japan. Arata and Zhang

ound that excess energy can be reliably generated at roomtemperatures by exposing nely divided palladium powder todeuterium gas. The material used by Arata and Zhang had aninitial particle size near 5 nanometers. (To put this in perspec-tive a nanometer is a billionth o a meter, or about 50,000 timesner than the average human hair.) The researchers ound thatsurace area plays an important role in obtaining a solid-statenuclear reaction. But while there is good agreement that it iscrucial to have small particles, there is little understandingabout why the eect occurs and what role surace area plays.

Has a method nally been ound to control excess powerproduction so that a xed and predictable amount can beobtained?

Fair and BalancedLong beore the DIA reportwas released, theJournal o Sci-entifc Explorationhad planneda special issue to highlight

the work being done on thisimportant phenomenon with-out mainstream recognition.The winter 2009 issue con-tains a balanced presentationo cold usion research resultsand discussion o theoreticalissues, ree o the stridencyand dogmatism that has o-ten characterized the debates.Marissa and Scott Little, romEarthTech International at the Institute or Advanced Studiesat Austin, Texas, contribute two papers. Cold Fusion: Fact or

Fantasy? is an introductory survey and discussion o the repli-cability problem in cold usion research. The Littles have triedunsuccessully or years to obtain conclusive evidence o thephenomenon, but they remain admirably open-minded on thetopic. Their second contribution, Extraordinary EvidenceReplication Eort, is an experimental paper in which theyprovide reasons or thinking that a result they successully rep-licated, and which some consider to be o nuclear origin, is ochemical origin instead.

For balance, physician and electrical engineer MitchellSwartz contributes a long and detailed report on successulexperimental work, titled Survey o the Observed Excess En-ergy and Emissions in Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions.

These journal articles are ollowed by 16 long, previouslyunpublished abstracts on cold usion rom the Proceedings othe Symposium on New Energy Technology at the AmericanChemical Society meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, held onMarch 2226, 2009. These papers oer a eel both or the variety o cold usion research currently underway and alsoor the diversity o ostensibly positive results achieved over thelast 19 years.

The study o so-called cold usion, or LENR, deservesclose attention or several reasons, says Dr. Stephen Braude,the editor the Journal o Scientifc Exploration. For onething, a number o responsible and competent scientists seemrepeatedly to get intriguing results which received scientic

wisdom says should not occur. On the other hand, those re-sults have not been replicated by other responsible and com-petent scientists. Not only is there much material here or so-ciologists o science, but one can only wonder to what extentexperimenter expectancy might account or the biurcation ocold usion researchers into either successul or unsuccessulexperimenters. It may well be that the psychodynamics o coldusion research are ar more complex and messy than either itsproponents or opponents like to think. In act, although mostLENR researchers would probably resist the suggestion, itsworth considering whetheror to what extenttheir resultsare a psychokinetic eect.


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16 EDGE SCIENCE

The rst and last time I jumped out o an airplane, I was 17years old. It was my mom who nearly died o right. Shehad to sign a waiver that listed in gruesome detail all the waysher underage, unlucky son could die or sustain serious injuryrom skydiving. True to the odds, nothing went wrong. Aterour hours o training, the actual skydive, rom Geronimo!to hard landing, lasted just a ew minutes. My weekend para-chute was an adrenaline rush, but hardly death-deying or liechanging.

Maria Coeys extreme adventurers, in contrast, push them-selves physically and psychologically to the breaking point.

Skydiver Cheryl Stems jumped rom an airplane 352 times in24 hours, setting a Guinness World Record. Tanya Streeterree dove without oxygen to a depth o 525 eet below theoceans surace holding her breath or almost 3.5 minutes, herheart rate plummeting to ve beats a minute, beore resurac-ing. Cyclist Jure Robic pedaled or 3042 miles across the con-tinental U.S. in 8 days, 19 hours and 33 minutes.

Such super-athletes suer mind-numbing exhaustion, un-bearable pain, intense solitude, sudden terror, and narrow es-capes rom near-death conditions that parapsychologists knowcan generate paranormal experiences. And the heroes o thisbook have a journals worth, experiencing time distortions,altered states o consciousness, telepathic communications,

out-o-body experiences, precognition, premonitions o death,and visions o the dead.

The reading pleasure or me came less rom the garden-vari-ety paranormal experiences these crazies report than rom thegod-awul, insane exploits which trigger them. Fity-ve-year-old ultra-marathoner Marshall Ulrich had a classic out-o-bodyexperience running the Badwater, a 135-mile, non-stop ootrace across Death Valley in July when daytime temperaturescan hit 129 degrees Fahrenheit. Hes done it 13 times andwon it our times. Insanely, he once did it our times back andorth, non-stop, or over 77 hours, while pulling a modiedbaby jogger loaded with 200 pounds o water, ice, and spareclothes. In 1993, while trying to break his own record, he sud-

denly stepped out o his body. From above, he watched him-sel running along, like watching mysel on a movie screen.He remained out o body all night, until the next morningwhen he realized that dawn was coming, the sun was aboutto rise. I knew it was time to go back into my body. (SkydiverSterns experienced a similar, extended OBE during her non-stop jumping.)

Many mountaineers have sensed unexplainable presencesin the high mountains, notes Coey. American climber LouWhittaker in 1989 was guiding the rst American assault on28,169-oot-high Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, the thirdtallest mountain in the world. At his base camp, he kept sensingthe presence o a middle-aged, riendly Tibetan woman spirit

who communicated with him mentally,telling him everything would go OK. Hiswie Ingrid arrived atthe base camp shortlyater Lou had depart-ed or the summit, buther ascent to 16,000eet was so ast she su-ered severe altitude

sickness. She spentthree days in agony inLous tent, ministeredto by the same Ti-betan spirit. She was wearing a headscarand a long dress. Shewas shadowy and two-dimensional, like asilhouette. The spirit would put her handon Ingrids orehead, very comorting, and

help her to roll over.She didnt speak; thetwo women commu-nicated telepathically.Two months later, a-ter they had returnedto the States, Ingrid nally told Lou about her strange helper.Stunned, he admitted seeing her too. Theyre convinced itwasnt a hallucination, since both sensed the same apparition.Coee notes similar spirit riends assisted and comortedmany well-known adventurers in their perils, including Ant-arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton during his desperate 36-hour trek across rigid South Georgia Island; aviator Charles

Lucky Lindbergh on his record-breaking, non-stop transat-lantic fight to Europe in 1927; and mariner Joshua Slocum,the rst man to sail solo around the globe.

In 1997, Tony Bullimore was attempting to duplicate Slo-cums eat, competing in the around-the-world Vendee Globesingle-handed yacht race. Two months into the race, a ercestorm in the Southern Ocean rolled his boat, trapping himupsidedown in his watertight cabin or almost ve days. Raceocials inormed his wie, Lalel, that his upturned boat hadbeen spotted in huge seas; he was presumed dead. That night,kneeling by her bed, she received a telepathic message romhim.He was alive, he had ood and water, but he was exhaustedand had to sleep. The ollowing day, he mentally spoke to her

{REFERENCE POINT|

The Extreme Adventures

o Super Athletes and an Unwilling Neuroanatomist

Book Reviews by Michael Schmicker and Michael Grosso

Explorers o the Infnite: TheSecret Spiritual Lives of ExtremeAthletes and What They Reveal

About Near-Death Experiences,Psychic Communication, andTouching the Beyondby MariaCoffey. Tarcher Penguin, 2008.


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EDGE SCIENCE 17

again. Oh Lal, Im in a mess. Its wet. The boat wont stoprolling. Im cold. She told him to keep ghting. Back in hiswatery tomb, shivering and staring into darkness, he suddenlyhad a vision. He saw an Australian warship steaming or him,a boat was lowered, sailors started banging on the hull, and

he watched himsel swim to the surace where he was rescued.Twenty-our hours later, everything happened exactly as hisvision had oretold.

Coey presents dozens o such puzzling experiences whilepondering their reality and meaning. For an outdoor adven-ture writer, she demonstrates a surprising amiliarity withparapsychological literature, reerencing among others RupertSheldrakes ESP research; Montague Ullmans dream lab in- vestigations; NDE studies by Raymond Moody and SamParnia; plus conventional counter-explanations rom popularskeptics like Susan Blackmore and Robert Persinger. Her reer-ences are understandably brie and occasionally incorrectorexample, her assertion that scientists know very little about

the out-o-body phenomenon. Psychologists, physicians, andinvestigators such as Charles Tart, Stuart Twemlow, and D.Scott Rogo mapped the phenomenon several decades ago, andrecent NDE research has advanced our understanding. Weknow a lot about them; its just that, like so many other para-normal phenomena, we cant agree on where they t in ourcurrent model o reality.

But Coey can be orgiven or not penning a dry parapsy-chology book ew would read. She oers enough science toground her stories, but wisely ocuses on the sense o surpriseand wonder her eclectic community o daredevils nd in theirunexpected brushes with the innite. As British BASE jump-er Shaun Ellison puts it, Theres so much out there that we

dont understand.

Michael Schmicker

In 1996, at the age o 37, Harvard-trained neuroanatomistJill Bolte Taylor suered a major stroke on the let side oher brain. The stroke produced a lie-transorming experience,which is the subject o her memoir. The eature o interest herelies in its special combination o acts. The rst was the char-acter o the authors hemorrhage, which aected her motorand sensory cortex, her ability to speak (Brocas area) and tounderstand speech (Wernickes area), and the part o the cor-tex that mediates the subjects orientation in space and time.

The second was that the subject was a neuroscientist able toobserve, remember, and describe (brilliantly) the stages o herneuro-unctional disintegration as well as her experience. Thethird act concerns the nature o the experience, which hadall the earmarks o proound mysticism. By the time Taylorrealized she was having a stroke, nding the phone number oher colleague and dialing it, pleading or help had become atask o immense diculties; the parts o her brain that enabledher to negotiate the external world were rapidly alling apart.In the midst o her struggle and growing atigue, however,she also noticed a remarkable change taking place: . . . I wasconsistently distracted by an enveloping sense o being at onewith the universe . . . She could no longer distinguish writing

as writing or symbols as symbols; memories o her empiricalsel were washed away, the sense o her physical boundariesvanished, along with her internal clock; she ceased eeling likea solid being but perceived hersel as something fuid and di-use. Enguled by a growing bliss, she still clung to the ves-

tiges o her let-brain idea o who she was. As the let-brainchatter involuntarily died down, ear and pain retired to thebackground o her consciousness.

Once she could discriminate between her traumatizedlet-brain sel and the vast right-brain consciousness that wasunolding, she elt despair at having survived her stroke, andyearned to cut loose rom her shattered body. (This reactionis reminiscent o near-death experiencers.) I elt like a genieliberated rom its bottle, she writes. The energy o my spiritseemed to fow like a great whale gliding through a sea osilent euphoria . . . . As my consciousness dwelled in a fow osweet tranquility, it was obvious to me that I would never beable to squeeze the enormousness o my spirit back inside this

tiny cellular matrix.Dr. Taylors cerebral accident (due to a genetic arteriovenous

malormation), achieved what mystics the world over try toachieve by means o asting, sensory and conceptual reduction,and countless other techniques practiced rom time immemo-rial to induce higher states o consciousness.

Her insight? This is how she put it: My stroke o insightis that at the core o my right hemisphere consciousness is acharacter that is directly connected to my eeling o deep innerpeace. It is completely committed to the expression o peace,love, joy, and compassion in the world. She describes variouspractical consequences o her experience, and sketches a new worldview, based on

her personal discov-ery o the hemisphericduality o the brain.

Taylor, beore herstroke, was an advo-cate or people diag-nosed as mentally ill.This concern tookon new meaning inlight o her experi-ence. She speaks to acertain mindset, pre-dominantly let-brain

in character, that canbe more toxic thantherapeutic or trau-matized or mentallydisturbed patients. Al-though a wreck in herstricken condition tothe outward eye, herreceptive mechanismshad sprung into highgear. During her near vegetative state sheexperienced height-

My Stroke o Insight: A Brain

Scientists Personal JourneybyJill Bolte Taylor. Viking, 2009.


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ened empathy, which sharpened her insight into the value otherapeutic kindness and compassion. Dr. Taylor argues or amore holistic education o medical proessionals. Caregiversshould train their right-brain circuits and ree up their capacityor love while moderating the more abstract and less sensitive

let-brain unctions. As testimony to the power o this stroke-induced experi-

ence, Dr. Taylor thinks the right brain should be the basiso a general re-education o humanity. Her premise or thisspectacular claim: For me, hell existed inside the pain o thiswounded body as it ailed miserably in any attempt to com-municate with the external world, while heaven existed in aconsciousness that soared in eternal bliss. Her idea o how tobring this blissul orm o awareness into the center o our liveswould entail a paradigm change in the conduct o daily lie.

In order to grasp rom within the values and qualities oright-brain enlightenment, she recommends that we shit romover-reliance on rationalistic mental chatter to more estheticand contemplative modes o thought. Everyday lie is the greateld o experiment; we need merely to pay attention to the

fow o the now to wean ourselves rom the debilitating excess-es o the let brain. The more we are present to the world, thegreater the infux rom the right hemisphere o consciousness.The arts, moreover, are tools toward this end, and the greatspiritual teachings o the world are there or us to draw upon.

Dr. Taylors call or the re-education o humanity aroundthe premise o right-brain consciousness is visionary, with atouch o the messianic. But i her conception is soundherexperience is one piece o testimony or itwe should listencareully. The idea o a science o enlightenment may seem vi-sionary; but or all we know it may be the wave o the uture.

Michael Grosso

simply phenomenalAnomalist Books

atBk.cavb fr az, Br & nb, r ur c bktr.


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