Building The God Helmet ?

[tepol]

There is helmet being sold called the skati or god helmet .

Theres quite a lot on it and it seems to be gaining use in paranormal circles ( shrug )

ANy way I curious and would like to build one - if any one has any idea about how I could get started Im all ears

thanks

 

[Mr RB]

**broken link removed**

Persinger and the New Brain Sciences of Neurotheology and Magnetic Neurotechnology.

Hmmm. Expose your brain to strong magnetic fields to make it do strange things... Whatever happened to just taking drugs or sniffing gasoline?

 

[Pommie]

I don't know about this device but I read an article some 10 years ago in New Scientist about stimulating the brain with magnetic fields. The system in the article induced random fields and this appeared to make peoples brains more active and better at solving problems. The explanation was that neurons that are close to firing will fire earlier because the random field tipped the neurons over the edge. The above system with a bit of pink floyd would probably produce similar results.

Mike.

 

[Oznog]

I did a bit of reading on that awhile back.
Actually there was supposed to be more "success" with transcutanial electrical- basically skin electrodes placed behind the ears, where the conductivity to the brain was the best. Only low voltages are used, obviously.

IIRC, there was a lot of dispute over whether this effect was truly "verified" at all or simply uncontrolled pseudoscience. If it doesn't work on skeptics, that would be a problem. There's also a false double blind effect- say you sometimes energize it and sometimes you don't, but the magnetic field is mildly detectable anyways. If nothing else, there's probably a vibration in the coil. Or maybe it has some trivial twitch-inducing effect you might notice.

But let's say it doesn't have any actual effect on the brain- yet if you TELL people it's supposed to give a near-death quasi-religious experience, and they feel anything from the magnetic field, the double-blind procedure is now invalid and the placebo effect is free to take them anywhere.