The Apparatus and the Claim

Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University in Ontario, applied weak and complex magnetic fields across the temporal region of volunteers in a sound reduced room and recorded what they reported. A substantial proportion described a sensed presence, a feeling that something or someone else was in the room with them, and some described it in religious terms. The equipment acquired the name God helmet in the press, which he did not choose and which fixed the popular understanding of the work.

His interpretation was that the sense of presence is generated by transient instability between the hemispheres, that the right hemisphere sense of self intrudes on the left and is experienced as another, and that religious experience in general has a normal neurological basis of this kind rather than an external cause. He set the hypothesis out in a paper in 1983 and pursued it for decades. It is worth being precise about what such a claim can and cannot establish. Showing that an experience can be produced by stimulating the brain shows that the brain is involved in having it, which no one disputes, and does not by itself settle what the experience is about, any more than producing the taste of salt by stimulation shows that salt does not exist.