The Circuit of Awareness
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I allowed as humbly as I could that there just might be something
there, and told him about the latest experiments. There was a long
pause filled with disdain. Then I added that Professor Bachman had been
working with me. That changed the tone dramatically; this man also
knew Charlie through work on the electron microscope during the war.
He asked if I would organize the session and arrange for additional
speakers.
There weren't too many investigators to choose from, and some of
them were doing very slipshod work. I invited Frank Brown and selected
a few others on the basis of published work. I'd just about finished when
I got another call. A man with a thick German accent introduced him-
self as Dietrich Beischer.
"I have read your paper on the Hall effect," he began, "and I think
we have much common interest." He explained that he was studying
magnetic field bioeffects for the Navy and had done much work that
wasn't published openly. At the time he was conducting a large experi-
ment on human volunteers to check for effects from a null field, a com-
plete absence of magnetism. When I wondered how he produced such a
state, he invited me to have a look and perhaps offer suggestions. So off
I went to Maryland.
Beischer was using the compass calibration building in the Naval Sur-
face Weapons Center at Silver Spring. The building was huge. Electrical
cables in all the walls, floor, and roof were "servo-connected" (directly
cued) to the three axes of the earth's magnetic field, so that the field was
canceled out in a sphere about 20 feet across in the center of the struc-
ture. Several men were living and being tested in this area. I was im-
pressed by the resources at Beischer's command, and I had a good time,
but I wondered what use any discoveries made there might ultimately be
put to. My only contribution was to point out that the enclosure had
been built before anyone knew about the earth field's low-frequency
components, micropulsations ranging from less than 1 to about 25 cy-
cles per second, that were far weaker than the planet's electromagnetic
field as a whole. Consequently Beischer's subjects were still exposed to a
very weak magnetic field pulsing at these frequencies, and I suspected
that that component might be one of the most important for life, be-
cause all brain waves were in exactly the same range. Perhaps as a result
of this factor, the null-field experiment was turning out to be in-
conclusive, but I asked Beischer to attend the MIT meeting and present
some
previous data suggesting that electromagnetic fields could affect
embryonic development.
For my own presentation I decided against trying to compress all the