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The Body Electric
work I'd done so far into a few minutes before a skeptical audience.
Instead I offered some evidence that Charlie and I had gathered with the
help of psychiatrist Howard Friedman, which showed a possible rela-
tionship between mental disturbances and solar magnetic storms. I'll
discuss this study further in Chapter 14.
The MIT meeting went well. The field of bioelectromagnetism was
still young, and the researchers in it didn't make many converts among
the mainstream biologists. As usual, we found the physicists more in-
clined to listen. However, we drew inspiration from each other. I re-
turned to the lab more determined than ever to elucidate the links that I
knew existed between electromagnetic energy and life.
Charlie, Howard, and I decided to find out how the brain's DC poten-
tials behaved in humans. The electrodes we'd been using on salamanders
couldn't be scaled up for people, but within a week Charlie invented
some that would give us equally precise readings from the human head.
We immediately found that the back-to-front current varied with
changes in consciousness just as in salamanders. It was strongest during
heightened physical or mental activity, it declined during rest, and it
reversed direction in both normal sleep and anesthesia. This knowledge
led directly to the experiments, described in Chapter 13, that taught us
much about how hypnosis and pain perception work.
At this point I received an invitation from Meryl Rose to speak at the
big event in the world of animal science, the International Congress of
Zoology. This is not just a yearly convention; it is convened only when
its directors agree that there has been enough progress to warrant a
meeting. This session, in August 1963, was only the sixteenth since the
first one had been set up in 1889. It was an honor to be there, and the
conference itself was especially important, since it was one of the first
times science formally addressed such ecological emergencies as pesticide
pollution, the protection of vanishing species, overpopulation, and ur-
ban sprawl. The high point tor me came when I gave my paper and saw