Just about any police officer will tell you that the craziness in people comes out with the full moon. But it is true that magnetic fields impact our personalities? Is there any scientific basis to it? The answer is yes and no, depending on whom you want to believe.
First a primer on frequencies. All brains emit waves. You’ve probably heard about this: delta waves are for sleep, alpha and beta waves are for activity. These brain waves measure below 70Hz and are mostly below 8Hz. Radio waves, cell phone waves, telephone waves, air traffic control waves, TV, microwave, radar, GPS, wireless LANs, heart rate monitors, etc. all measure at frequencies higher than that, in the KHz to MHz to GHz – kilohertz to megahertz to gigahertz – frequency ranges.
If you are conservative and want to believe the university researchers, the answer is that no harm comes from all of the invisible electromagnetic fields from cell phones, computers, electrical devices that are in our world today. There has been one Dutch study that has measured well-being and exposure at the 2100 MHz level and found a small effect. However, another study could not replicate the findings.
The only studies I know of have measured immediate effects from exposure. No study I’ve seen has been able to measure the long-term effects and here’s why. Good study design requires at least two groups of subjects to be tested: the test group and a control group. The test group gets exposed to whatever is being tested, while the control group doesn’t. If there’s a difference between the two groups, you have an experimental effect. Now how can we design a study where people have no long-term access to electromagnetism, given it is all around us. We could have people live in a Faraday cage – a special environment designed to keep out electricity – but that is impractical. Who would volunteer for that? There is also another type of box that keeps out magnetism. But to ask people to live there would be impossible. So there is no simple way to study the long term effects of electromagnetism on people.
But that hasn’t stopped a couple of scientists, whose work has not been widely accepted by the scientific community. Robert Becker, MD has written a book called The Body Electric that delves into this subject. Dr. Becker feels that the proliferation of electromagnetic devices has contributed to many of our current diseases: leukemia, attention deficit disorder, and cancer, to name a few. Valerie Hunt, PhD, explores the subject in her self-published book, Infinite Mind. She gets into the realm of psychic development, which she links to magnetic fields but not electric fields.
One of the problems I see in humans is we tend to ignore what we can’t see through our five senses. If it’s not there it does not exist. The extreme skepticism is a personality trait a regular scientist needs to succeed – this is good in drug trials so people don’t die needlessly, for example -- but is also a setback in having new discoveries become widely accepted. Take brain plasticity – the brain’s ability to learn and change -- as the perfect example. We all know we can learn and change; science had clear proof of it for 100 years. But it wasn’t until 1998 that most of the mainstream scientists finally accepted plasticity as the predominant view.
Another problem that is bigger is that to truly understand how humans are affected by our world requires deep expert knowledge in at least four different disciplines: neuroscience and all things medical, geology to understand the earth’s magnetic field, quantum physics to understand the observer’s contribution, and electrical engineering to understand the electrical impulses in and around the body.
Lynn McTaggert is one person who has attempted to blend research from all of these fields. Lynne is a reporter who does an exceptional job is distilling complicated scientific information into language most of us can understand. Her books, The Field and The Intention Experiment, are well-written and researched and contain a heavy quantum component; however, some of the research she quotes have been rejected by mainstream scientists.
So I’ll leave it up to you. What are you like when the full moon comes out?
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3 comments:
Try asking anyone who has worked in either the maternity ward (where my mother worked most of her life) or in the psych ward -- the full moon is "special".
My mother worked in the nursery at the hospital. Full moon meant a full house. Nobody ever asked the personal question required to determine to what extent the full moon contributed to the timing of babymaking and to what extent the full moon contributed to the baby wanting to leave the womb. That would be an interesting study that probably would not cost a lot to undertake. :-)
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