Alternate Perceptions Magazine online, #78, April 2004

Interview with Todd Murphy

by

Brent Raynes

Todd Murphy is a Researching Behavioral Scientist associated with Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University. Murphy’s main interest is in understanding how the brain contributes to mystic, religious, and spiritual experiences. Murphy is also the developer and distributor of shakti neural stimulation technology that is based on Dr. Persinger’s pioneering work. Murphy’s web site contains a wealth of information and can be viewed at: http://www.spiritualbrain.com

Editor: To begin with, I think our readers will essentially be interested in what led you to this area of research and investigation that you’re now pursuing.

Todd Murphy: It started when I was seven years old and I had temporal lobe pediatric epilepsy, which is a kind that usually goes away at the onset of puberty, which is what happened to me. But somewhere along the age of 7—perhaps a little later than that—I began to have some very compelling experiences. One night, at dinner, with my brothers and my father, I had an out-of-body experience. I found myself floating under the ceiling, looking down at all of us gathered around dinner. The experience was actually very frightening and I really wanted to get back into my body. Not because there was anything frightening about out-of-body experiences but because out-of-body experiences and fear both seem to have their primary basis in the right hemisphere. So when the one was happening there was probably very much more than the usual amount of activity going on and it spilled over into the emotional structures. So the experience was colored with a negative emotion.

I have talked to people who have had out-of-body experiences and just loved them. In fact, usually they are pleasant, but not all of the time.

The other experience that I had, that was really germane—there were many experiences—but one of the most crucial for me was the experience of waking up in the middle of the night—this happened quite often—and finding that everything in the room seemed to be larger and farther away. The illusion is called macropsia and it is well known in the literature of temporal lobe epilepsy.

So in this illusion, if you were sitting ten feet from me and you were three feet from the soles of your feet to the top of your head, you would seem to be a 100 feet from me and 30 feet from foot to head.

Editor: Right. You wrote that it was kind of like an Alice in Wonderland type of effect.

Todd Murphy: Yes. It is an effect that Lewis Carroll seems to have experienced, but what Lewis Carroll left behind was a metaphorical treatment of it in Alice in Wonderland, and what I am trying to convey is the literal experience, and it really was quite something.

When I closed my eyes I saw an infinite black space—this larger space that I was in created through the illusion of macropsia turned into an experience of literally infinite space, and in the middle of this infinite space was a tiny point of light.

Almost 20 years later I saw Dr. Persinger on the TV and he was using his equipment, and the documentary had a film clip of someone sitting in the acoustic chamber, wearing the motor cycle helmet with the magnetic coils over the temporal lobe, and he said he was in an infinite black space with a tiny point of light.

Now I recognized that experience, of course, because I had it, and in the intervening period I had read about it in books about near-death experiences many times. So I knew that I wasn’t the only one who had had it. But, also in the intervening years, and previous to studying near-death experiences, I had studied history and philosophy of science, and I knew that in order for this professor to be able to induce this experience in a laboratory setting he had to have a theory that was guiding his experiment. I just knew it. I said, “Whatever that man is doing that’s what I want to do. That’s the career I want.” So I started studying some of Dr. Persinger’s papers and I had some small credentials as a Buddhist theologian—specific to reincarnation—or as the Buddhists like to call it “rebirth.” So I called Dr. Persinger up, told him that I was a Buddhist theologian and wanted to ask him a few questions, and I think to his surprise the questions that I asked were in the vocabulary of his published works. They were not using Buddhist terms. Of course, I knew better.

Science is largely a matter of vocabulary. The theory that is dominant in a field of science, at any given time, imposes a vocabulary on it, and pretty much only the questions that can be asked using that vocabulary will be regarded as legitimate questions—within that field. So I knew that in order for my questions to be legitimate I had to learn his vocabulary. It took some doing. It wasn’t tremendously difficult. Certainly it was no more difficult than learning Buddhist theory had been.

The other thing that I should mention now is the book that describes how a theory works, how its extrapolations lead to experiments, and the carrying out of those experiments is normal science, and what constitutes a field and what doesn’t was a very important work in my earlier studies, and that was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T. S. Kuhn of the University of Chicago. I don’t think there’s any one book on science that can better prepare a person to actually enter its mindset and take it on its own terms.

Editor: So you evolved from Buddhist theologian to a neuroscientist, right?

Todd Murphy: Yeah. Researching behavioral scientist is the exact name.

Editor: You work closely now with Dr. Persinger?

Todd Murphy: No, I work independently and I call him whenever I get stuck on something, or whenever an interesting observation appears. Once and awhile we exchange emails over points of theory and of course I keep him abreast on all of my hardware and technological developments. He’s very supportive of the effort to move the technology that he works with over to a simple PC basis. That’s an important component in developing it and getting it ready to eventually spread throughout the world as new technologies eventually do.

So we’re in regular touch. Occasionally there’s a critique or debate going on that I need his advice about. The relationship remains cordial, healthy, and in tact, and in spite of my having worked with him for ten years or so, he’s still the teacher and I’m still the student.

Editor: I know that he’s got you listed on his web site. Even has a picture of you there and so I know that he thinks very highly of you.

Todd Murphy: I think very highly of him too.

Editor: You’ve produced affordable technology that other people can use based on Dr. Persinger’s magnetic helmet which is for sale on your web site so that others may purchase and experiment with this phenomenon themselves. I think you stated on your web site that there are a little over a hundred people now who are actually doing this, and it’s not just a purchase of technology­they’re also a part of a study?

Todd Murphy: Well, the technology is referred to as experimental and it isn’t experimental in so far as we cannot predict the full range of its effects. It is not experimental as far as avoiding negative effects are concerned, but when you start looking at how each individual brain with its own individual neural history achieves and experiences the technology there’s a lot that we don’t know, so I think the word experimental is still justified. We don’t have any formal studies going on. Rather people report their experiences and when they’re interesting I forward them on to Dr. Persinger quite quickly. Otherwise I simply file them, try to remember whatever it was in the report, and eventually draw conclusions, one at a time. So we don’t have a formal study going on. But their reports are definitely added to the pool of knowledge.

Editor: Now unlike many of your colleagues you keep an open mind as to where the experience is more than just a psychological effect or illusion. You feel that people should be listened to—that there may be the possibility of something else that perhaps they’re missing? Is that a correct interpretation?

Todd Murphy: Well I suppose so, but when you phrase it like that it could be taken that I believe my colleagues are missing some profound truth, that they’re failing to see God or that they’re not recognizing karma, or the quantum mechanical character of consciousness, and so forth. What I think my colleagues are missing, that holds them back from embracing spiritual phenomena within the realm of normal, ordinary human behavior is that our propensity for spiritual experience is the result of natural selection. The mechanism whereby we became a species is capable of spiritual experiences and sentiment and belief, and has to do with our evolutionary strategy as a species. I think that what is happening is that overall there’s a kind of rough homosapiens morality going on, and that a great deal of our spirituality is intended to get us to act in ways that are good and avoid ways that are bad. Now from the point of view of our evolutionary strategy getting killed by a tiger is, well, almost a sin. Any information we have, however, we hold it, that allows us to behave well is going to increase our chances for survival, and many of our religious ideas and beliefs are just codification of these imperatives in a way that our cultures can preserve. At the same time good behavior is sanctified and bad behavior, in one way or another, is considered sinful or course, or something like that. And ultimately the behaviors that facilitate our survival as a species and our success within our cultures, as individuals, those are going to be things that need to be preserved in our culture­in our intellectual sphere­in one way or another. They have to be put into words, and religion is one of the tools that does this.

In addition to that there’s something that is even more compelling, which I probably should have spoken of first, and that is the idea that we are a weak species. We don’t have powerful claws, long jagged teeth. We don’t sprint as fast as lions. We are really at a disadvantage as individuals for survival in the wild, so one of the ways that our intelligence allows us to overcome these obstacles is by anticipating dangers so that we can avoid them. A lot of our intelligence is used to avoid trouble—avoid social trouble. Don’t get drafted. Don’t get arrested. Don’t get divorced. Don’t get beaten up by the other kids on the playground. It’s also about not getting killed. Don’t stand underneath falling grand pianos on 42nd Street in New York City. If you hear the characteristic sound of a predator breathing or one of their growls, as quiet as you possibly can you get away from that.

Above all there is the threat of death, and in order for us to avoid death in our early evolutionary history we had to be able to anticipate it. If you’re anticipating death all the time, if that’s all you’re worried about, death strikes around you every moment so always be vigilant, you’re going to be a little bit nuts. This is the kind of psychological dilemma that creates such things as post traumatic stress disorders, battle fatigue, being shell shocked, and so forth.

So we had to have a mechanism that would attenuate or reduce death anxiety, and that mechanism is spirituality—both in the actual spiritual experience that can touch a person in the moment of their deepest terror, and through spiritual belief that all across the board tell us that in fact there really isn’t any such thing as death. Death is the transition between worlds. Death is going into the bosom of Jesus. Death is reincarnation back to the planet. Death is going to the underworld. Death is meeting the ancestors. “Do dogs go to heaven, mommy?” And so on and so forth. Every culture is willing to offer the belief that really death doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion.

And that may be very true from the spiritual perspective, but if we’re dealing in science we have to acknowledge that personal death of the individual is not only possible but inevitable, and when we look at that straight in the face not only do we get that uncomfortable chill but we also find a powerful motivation for any belief or experiences that can make that fear stop, so that in spite of our early tribes—yes, say a period of our early evolutionary origin 100,000 years ago, and even though we were always on the look out for things that could hurt us it didn’t foul our moods so badly. So when we did actually have a brush with death and they were left in a state of terror, it was usually possible for the shamen to do something to help that person come out of it. So the appearance of spirituality follows the same roles as the appearance of any of our other primary behaviors, integrated with our evolutionary strategy, and the whole thing appears as a result of our reliance on culture as our evolutionary strategy. It all comes back to Darwin, and that’s what my colleagues are missing.

Editor: You’ve embarked on a scientific study of reincarnation that the Dalai Lama has actually reviewed and written favorably of?

Todd Murphy: He stated his impressions to the envoy who brought him the paper.

Editor: Oh, okay.

Todd Murphy: But yeah, the Dalai Lama in fact liked it very much. In the very first draft of the paper there was an idea that was at odds with Buddhist teaching, and as I developed it further on I found that concept didn’t work, so I threw it out and replaced it with another, and that should have taken care of all of His Holiness’s objections. I forwarded a copy of the paper to His Holiness after it was published in the Journal for Near Death Studies, but I never got a response. The Dalai Lama is the head of state....of Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, the guy has a lot to do.

Editor: He’s very busy, right.

Todd Murphy: I don’t bother about it too much. If that hypothesis on reincarnation stands up under criticism and stands the test of time I don’t need to worry about it. The Dalai Lama will come to me. If it doesn’t stand up then there really isn’t going to be anything for us to talk about anyway.

Editor: So that’s the scientific road to follow then?

Todd Murphy: Yes. Well, he’s a monk, so let him do his monastic things which I find not only to be worthwhile but actually possessed of a certain beauty.

Editor: Okay. Now with the intense psychic experiences you had beginning at age 7, when puberty hit they stopped. That seems interesting as parapsychologists have noted that often poltergeist activity is often associated with someone at the age of puberty. Do you think there’s a connection there?

Todd Murphy: I don’t know. Honestly. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was, but without seeing the specific causal path from one to another it’s hard to say that there’s a connection. Probably there are some mechanisms at work in both cases, but I don’t know what they are. My experiences were entirely endogenous, they were happening inside my brain. I knew that they happened through introspection. Poltergeists are known through extra-spection­they’re happening outside the person. So it’s hard to say.

Editor: Now with your situation there was, was there not, some kind of extrasensory element like you could locate missing objects?

Todd Murphy: Yeah. That actually became prominent toward the end of that period, which I think goes roughly from 7 to maybe 10. Towards the end, if an object were missing, I could simply divide the house or the room in half and I would know which half it was on. Then I could divide that in half and I would know which half it was on. And divide that in half, and so on, until the space that was left was so small that it couldn’t get any smaller and still contain the object, and then I’d walk over to whatever it was and get it.

Editor: Would this be some object that you would have no way of knowing, even in your unconscious, where it was? Or that someone else had misplaced?

Todd Murphy: It is hard to know what I could know in my unconscious when I was all of nine years old. But these were all things that had legitimately gone lost.

Editor: I thought it was also interesting when you wrote about people sensing the presence and the associations with left side and right side. There was a woman in Florida years ago who had a close encounter and afterwards there was poltergeist activity and she would often hear a voice, and it was always over to her left side, and I have since heard of other people who would hear voices just on their left side and I wondered what maybe you thought of this in terms of the right and left brain hemispheres.

Todd Murphy: Well the simplest explanation for these is that they are hallucinations that were dominated by activity on one side of the brain or the other. Most commonly, if the voice is appearing on the left side, it’s following a hallucination on the right side.

Editor: With her case there was a lot of psychic activity and then she said she’d hear a male voice on her left side and she’d turn to see who it was and there would be nobody there.

Todd Murphy: That part there sounds like almost a textbook sensed presence experience, except that usually the sensed presence experience does not contain auditory hallucination.

Editor: You’ve stated that the truths of today are the discarded myths of tomorrow.

Todd Murphy: Well, that’s kind of an almost banner waving statement, but yes, all of our dominant scientific theories are basically slated for replacement. All of the dominant scientific theories of a century ago are gone. Most of the important ones from even as little as 50 years ago are either gone or have been superceded. For example, the simple quantum mechanics of the turn of the last century has been replaced by­well, it’s still quantum mechanics but now there’s the addition of chaos theory, for example. It has gone well past simple quantum mechanics. Even Hawking’s superstring theory shows every sign of replacing general relativity. General relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian mechanics largely replaced the mechanics of Johannes Kepler, and his significant advance over those of Galileo. Galileo was a significant advance over Aristotle. And so forth and so on.

I don’t think we’ll ever get a theory that will supercede the idea of the human heart as a pump, even though in the 16th century it was a brand new theory and it was really all the rage. Not everyone was convinced of it. So yes, our beliefs have a lifetime.

The truly endearing beliefs are the ones for which there is no evidence. Believing in an impersonal God, or even a personal God who created the universe. There’s no evidence for that whatsoever, and the idea endures. But as soon as we offer precedence or preference to our ideas that are based on evidence then we allow the possibility that new and relevant evidence can appear that will force the theory either to be radically adjusted or replaced. Again this is very well described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T.S. Kuhn.

But, on the other hand, it is a futile act to get on a soap box and say that everything that we believe today will be nonsense tomorrow. There may be some truth to that, but then what. So all the beliefs we believe in now are going to be discarded eventually. Okay, so what do we do? Stop work with our present theories, while they’re still being productive? No, we carry on. We act as though they are right, knowing that they will be proven wrong until that proof emerges. Because if we don’t do that we won’t have any action at all.

Editor: Right. It will be changed and modified in the future. Astrology becomes astronomy and so on.

Todd Murphy: How about this one. The world epidemic of HIV infection is an imperative to develop all of the new medications that we can. I guess about seven years ago proteus inhibitors were introduced and these are very effective in stopping the spread of HIV, within an individual body that has it. But on the other hand there are an awful lot of physicians and neuropsychologists who believe that what’s really decisive in the pathology is the person’s emotional style­their cognitive style­whether or not they allow themselves to feel any happiness in spite of their disease. Whether they’re optimistic and forward looking. If they turn pessimistic and negative they’re not going to last very long. So is the cure for HIV going to actually turn out to be psychological intervention?

Well maybe, but if that is so do we stop working on better proteus inhibitors? Of course not. We continue doing everything we can. We continue to act with the tools that are available­in front of us right now, in order to do the best job we can. The idea that better tools might be available later on, so lets not do anything now, is an attitude that would have cost us World War II and put Hitler as world dictator. We acted with what we had. We developed the atom bomb not knowing whether it would work, as we went along. So the idea that there is an intellectual courage to be had in rejecting the body of scientific theories because they’re all slated for obsoleteness is just nonsense. It’s true they’re on their way out, but that truth doesn’t mean anything in any practical way.

Editor: On the magnetic field experiments that you did on yourself early on you had visualizations of aliens. You even visited Harbin Hot Springs, California, in Southern Lake County, a hot spot for UFO reports, stories of strange beings and other anomalous experiences, and much seismic activity­all of which goes along with Dr. Persinger’s theories. You even want to return to that area someday, better funded and ready to conduct a full scale scientific investigation of the site. What’s your own personal take on all of this UFO/alien activity that’s being reported?

Todd Murphy: Well, the fact that they are reported in that area regularly tends to collaborate Dr. Persinger’s interpretation of them, and his interpretation is that they are hallucinatory phenomena brought on by the perturbation of our brain’s electrical and magnetic activity through the geomagnetic field, which is expressed differently and more turbulently in such areas.

Editor: So pretty much the same processes down through history would have generated the same kind of experiences­just a variation of aliens would have been angels or ghosts in previous cultures.

Todd Murphy: Or devils actually. Many, many reports of people seeing the devil in medieval times. It’s very possible that any and all hallucinations that occurred in medieval Europe that felt good were confabulated into angels and any that felt bad were confabulated into devils or demons. Incubi and succubus, hordes of Satan. They had a lot of different kinds of angels and a lot of kinds of devils.

Editor: On your web site you actually have a link to a solar flare and geomagnetic readings, so that if anybody wants to follow along their own experiences or with activity reported in the press they could just go to your site and check these readings.

Todd Murphy: They could. I don’t get a lot of reports of people doing that, but because that kind of information is so important in Dr. Persinger’s work I think it is a good idea to make it available. And then of course it’s the Internet. People go on there to find what they want to find, and what they usually don’t want to do is write a report on what they found. It’s an awful lot of work to report and interact with the webmaster of every site. So I don’t take it badly that I don’t hear much from it, but I do believe that it has a place being there. And certainly it is useful to people who are using the technology, because geomagnetic activity, solar flare storms can have an impact for the very, very sensitive on the outcome of the session. Mostly in retrospect. If they do a session that is very, very powerful and they’re wondering what on earth happened that time that didn’t happen the time before, the information is there for them to go and check and see that there was some kind of elevated geomagnetic or solar activity, so that their experience is interpreted within the realm of the normal. Something is not wrong with them or off or different about them because that moment was special and may have something to do with the environment that they are in. People tend to take their personal experiences very personally you know.

Editor: With Dr. Persinger’s studies has he ever tried like a Faraday cage, copper shielding to keep the outside environment from coming in?

Todd Murphy: I know of a researcher at U.C.L.A. who does that. It isn’t Dr. Persinger. Apparently to really eliminate the effects of geomagnetic activity you need first of all to dig a hole very deep in the ground, because you get an awful lot of stuff that sort of dances on the surface. You need some kind of special shielding in there. I’m not entirely sure what it consists of, but I know that it is a very large undertaking to build such shielding and it costs a huge amount of money. UCLA has it, Laurentian University doesn’t, but on the other hand I think that if it were left to Dr. Persinger to make a choice between an environment that would shield from geomagnetic influences and an environment that would purify so that no influences were there except the native geomagnetic ones then he would go for the latter. Dr. Persinger’s work progresses much better when he accounts for geomagnetic activity rather than shielding it out. I’m sure that if such equipment were to suddenly arrive at his doorstep he would make good use of it, but I don’t think that there’s any lack in his work for the lack of such equipment.

Editor: I was just reading in the April issue of the Scientific American about some researchers in Massachusetts who were using a type of MRI to study people with bipolar disorders. They were monitoring the effect some pharmaceuticals were having on them and they found right after the sessions that the people had a much happier mood afterwards. They began to study this and in 30 people they found 23 of them their mood was affected positively, whereas normal, healthy non-bipolar people were not, and they felt that in some way the electromagnetic field of the MRI going across the corpus callosum at the pulse that it was right about the same frequency as the neurons and it was also shooting across from right to left. They’re trying to study it further and maybe find relief for people with bipolar conditions and suffering depression.

It seems like more and more studies are coming up with the importance of magnetic fields.

Todd Murphy: Well it’s a very long question, and the only answer I can give to it the way you stated it is yes! (laughs)

Editor: Well it wasn’t just a question. I had just read it and I thought you might be interested in it. You may already know about it.

Todd Murphy: I think that the mechanism at work there is that if a bipolar brain at any given time is going to have an unbalanced left/right pattern of activation, the left or the right will always be more active than its counterpart.

Editor: The article did mention about brain hemisphere imbalance and they felt that the MRI helped to balance or correct it.

Todd Murphy: I think they’re on the right track. I think their illusion­what they’re going to drop­this is just a prediction­though I certainly wouldn’t want them to go and research my ideas more than their own­what they’re going to drop is the idea of working with specific frequencies that match the frequencies of cortical activation, because in fact it is really much more complicated than frequency. The real brain patterns can be expressed as a frequency, but when they’re actually examined in real time they’re far too irregular and complicated to be expressed that way. A number like 30 hertz means that something is going up and down 30 times per second. But if it’s doing it twice every two milliseconds and it’s happening 15 times that adds up to 30. But you don’t have a 30 hertz output in such a case. Do you follow me?

Editor: I’m trying.

Todd Murphy: Okay we’ll use 100 because the math is easier. 100 hertz means the cycle is going positive and negative 100 times per second. Now that’s a 100 hertz. If you take an average of that the average will be 100 hertz, but if you have 50 instances of 200 hertz it’s going to amount to 100 hertz on average, so that even though they may both average out to 100 hertz, one of them is going to be a very irregular, choppy signal, and the other is going to be smooth and regular. They won’t be the same beat. So what I think is happening is that the high intensity magnetic fields that are used in MRIs, and they are in order of magnitude more intense­actually a couple of orders of magnitude more intense­than the ones that Dr. Persinger uses in his experiments and that I employ with my technology.

They are strong enough to actually activate the brain not through sympathetic resonance, where the magnetic fields have the same shape as the electrical activity so they kind of resonant, but to actually force current induction­get the magnetic field going strong enough and it’s going to force electrical activity into happening. It’s going to force electrical activity to happen.

So the mechanism whereby MRI attenuated the symptoms of bipolar­I’m not questioning the legitimacy of these things­a legitimate potential as a treatment for depression is through a very different mechanism than through the one we’re working with. I think in the long run it will come out that our methods are every bit as good as theirs primarily because in targeting the specific patterns that are absent in a given hemisphere. With depression we should be able to selectively activate the brain parts that are not working hard enough in depression and activate those, and only those. So that in the long run our methods should prove slightly more exacting and less likely to have secondary effects.

However, I would be the first one to also say that this is an empirical matter and it should be tested in clinical and laboratory trials. There’s just enough unknown going on that I could be dead wrong, but certainly they each deserve their own independent shot at it.

Editor: Would you like to talk about the Shakti technology that you offer? Is Shakti a Hindu word?

Todd Murphy: Yes. It’s a Sanskrit word. Shakti can be rendered many different ways, the most common of which is energy, but I don’t like to use that word because in the sciences the term energy belongs to physics and they have a very precise definition for it. A better definition would be the presence of a state of consciousness. There’s another word which is shaktipat, which means the direct transmission of a state of consciousness from guru to disciple. The Pentecost of Christian tradition would be an example of a shaktipat.

We started out with EEG signatures­specific traces that emerge on EEG, that’s electro- encephalogram when a given structure is activated. One structure, one signature. Then we take that EEG trace and we plot a set of values which is then used to create an audio file­a computer audio file. When we play that file what we get is the sound of an EEG trace, a little burst of activity, but instead of listening to them we plug magnetic coils into the computer sound card and those coils then create magnetic equivalents to the electrical activity that’s coming out of the sound card which ultimately was derived from electrical activity that was sampled from a human brain, an active human brain. So that when we apply the signal to the head the target structure is activated, at the expense of all the ones around it. There can be some spill over of activity from the target structure to nearby structures, but for the most part only the target structure responds, and the specific feeling that is elicited in this way changes according to which part of the surface of the head­so that if you have a structure that belongs to the amygdala, an emotional structure, you get one set of effects from the left and another from the right. On the right they are most commonly very unpleasant, fearful, anxious, and depressing. On the left they’re the opposite. They’re elated, a sense of joy, happiness, of even being a little bit energized. If you put it into the temporal lobes you get a very clean, emotional response. If you put that same signal into the parietal lobe, the parts of the brain that mediate the control of our bodies as well as our perceptions of what our bodies are doing then you get a much more somatic component to the feeling, so that instead of just feeling good you might feel primed and­well­physically energized. Even up to the point of being a little edgy perhaps. If you put it into the frontal lobes then you’re not going to have so strong an emotional response. But rather you’re more likely to elicit a sense that everything is fine­everything is going to be fine. Everything is just all right, because frontal lobes deal with extrapolations into the future, with anticipation and planning and anything that has to do with guessing what the next moment is going to be like. And when you fill those thoughts with positive emotions then you have a different perception of what the world is going to be like. So that people who do this can report and have reported that they really felt like they had been given a new lease on life. That they were a different person after using the technology.

Another signal is derived from the hippocampus. Now the hippocampus is a cognitive structure. It seems to be very deeply involved in inner imaging, whether it’s emotional or hallucinatory. Any kind of inner imaging. Any pictures in your mind. Pictorial memories involves activation of the hippocampus. It also deals in spacial perception and has a lot to do with our ability to mark the passage of time. On the left side the hippocampus is kind of on the irritable side and deals very extensively with words. On the right side the hippocampus is on the depressive side, but it’s also quite positive on the right side. It tends to deal with positive anticipations of the future. When it gets very active you can get a little bit of a phenomenon of depression, because the emotional center for negative emotions like fear is also on the right. And again it depends on which part of the head you apply the signals to. Temporal lobes give you one set of effects, frontal lobes another, parietal lobes another still so that even though we’re dealing with just a few basic signals that activate just a few structures, most of these structures are limbic, in the mid-level of our brain’s grosser structure. We get a wide range of effects through their activations on different sides of the head and different areas on each side. So we actually get a lot of control over not what experiences can come up but rather what the overall direction of the experiences will be. Now this is talking about a shorter session in which the after effects are taken as primary. That’s the way most people use the technology, and that’s the way I use it myself. In another application, the sessions go on much longer. Up to an hour. They need to be done in sensory deprivation. That means total silence and absolute blackness. A large amount of the temporal lobes ongoing activity is simply to monitor the background for ambient sound, and in order to turn off that task and make the temporal lobes available for some of the more spiritual things it is capable of coming up with we need absolute silence. Dr. Persinger uses an acoustic chamber in his work. Most people who try this using Shakti just draw the line at a good pair of ear plugs. And, in that case, what you can get are actual striking, spiritual experiences. You can get an artificial induction of the sensed presence. That involves right hemispheric stimulation, which ordinarily I encourage people to stay away. There have been reports of visions of light, visions of cities ­ kind of crystalline, magical looking...There have been reports of crowds ­ either crowds of angels­beings of light­or crowds of lifeless, forlorn staring eyes....crowds of suffering people. It was in a context like where I myself saw an alien­only once. I haven’t had visions of aliens. I only saw an alien once. I’ve seen simple phosphenes coalesce into well formed visions. In one case, a dragon that seemed to be made of fire that spiraled its way towards me and disappeared as it approached me, opening its mouth as though to eat me, and then the vision stopped. I kind of went into a burst of fear, seeing this monster approach me, but as soon as the fear was strong enough the amygdala was activated, and when the amygdala was sufficiently activated the hippocampus could no longer dominate the activity and when that happened the vision stopped.

Editor: It’s kind of like a built in safety valve?

Todd Murphy: Yes. Have you ever wondered why so many people wake up from nightmares just at the moment when something horrible is about to happen, and never during the moment when it is happening?

Editor: I had never thought of it in terms of the hippocampus and the amygdala.

Todd Murphy: (Chuckles) Well I assure you that never having thought of it in terms of hippocampal and amygdala interplay is no cause for shame.

Editor: Okay. That’s good.

Todd Murphy: In fact, I lived most of my life without knowing that and I did fine.

Editor: That’s good. (We both laughed) I had read somewhere, this was a few years back, that people who had suffered intensely from I think it was post traumatic stress disorder of some form or another had found that their amygdala was greatly increased in size from the normal person. The stimulation of recurrent fear­chronic fear or whatever­had caused it to be

Todd Murphy: Permanently enlarged on the right side.

Editor: Well permanently enlarged on one side or the other. I just remember reading that it was enlarged.

Todd Murphy: Well actually an enlargement with both would be consistent. The right side would be working more actively, but the left side’s continual attempts to attenuate the anxiety, to shut it down would also force it into an elevated level of activity.

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