266
The Body Electric
field around our heads at all. Pigeons have a magnetic detector thou-
sands of times more sensitive than the latest instruments. We also know
that the interaction of semiconducting currents with external magnetic
fields is thousands of times greater than that of currents in a wire, and
engineers have built microscopic devices that enhance this sensitivity by
a factor of another thousand or more. The electron microscope has shown
us crystallike structures of previously unsuspected complexity in all liv-
ing cells, whose functions we can only guess at. There's now some evi-
dence that psychic intent can influence the flow of current in solid-state
devices, so we may be nearing the energy levels at which extrasensory
factors work. Since all living things generate weak electromagnetic
fields, and since many, if not all, can sense those of the earth, communi-
cation by this medium remains a strong possibility. Recent disclosure of
a multimillion-dollar research effort in this area by the hardheaded
weapons planners at the Department of Defense is one more reason why
those scientists who work in public shouldn't dismiss the idea.
We must always be careful to place more weight on observation than
current theory. We must remember that we don't yet fully understand
magnetism. It now appears that the single domain with both magnetic
poles may not be the smallest unit of magnetism after all. Physicists
now posit the existence of magnetic monopoles, particles having the
characteristics of just one pole, north or south. In fact there's some ex-
perimental evidence for them. Some theoreticians go even further, envi-
sioning a hitherto unsuspected kind of magnetism, a composite of waves
and monopole particles, like light. Living things may interact with such
a now immeasurable energy.
Any such message system would have at least two major difficulties to
overcome in the course of evolution. Our own electrical-engineering ex-
perience, however, suggests workable approaches life may have taken.
One problem is that the strength of biofields is far below that of the
earth's field. Hence any input from other creatures would be embedded
in noise. This is a common obstacle to telecommunications, and there
are several ways around it. The easiest is for sender and receiver both to
be frequency locked, that is, tuned to one frequency and insensitive to
others. Such a lock-in system might explain why spontaneous ESP expe-
riences most often happen between relatives or close friends. The sen-
sitivity of our instruments may someday develop to the point where we
can tune in to biomagnetic fields on select frequencies, thus experiment-
ing as directly with ESP as we now do with radio.
Another theoretical difficulty is the fact thatl psychic transmission
doesn't seem to fade with distance. The electromagnetic field around an
animal's nervous system, on the other hand, starts out unimaginably