WAR!
Think of the Motown pop song War, which asks, “what is it good for?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Edwin Starr belted out over radio stations in 1970, evangelizing everyone to “sing it again.”
Michael Persinger (by his own admission) couldn’t carry a tune, let alone one from the songbook of how-things-ought-to-be. And he often found himself on the wrong side of the ‘politically correct’.
And what about war?
On 19 February 2007, our discussion pivoted off recent events & protests, and a university administration deaf to what ‘academic freedom’ actively means (more about that in future posts).
2007 was another tough year for Dr. Persinger and the Neuroscience Research Group (NRG) at Laurentian University.
Animal rights activists put a spotlight on the university’s science funding in 2005; criticizing Michael Persinger’s research with lab rats, they demanded oversight and the appointment of one of it’s members to an animal welfare committee.
Dr. Persinger wasn’t keen on having non-scientists dictating research protocols. He declined the ‘opportunity’ (the rats, I can assure you, were well looked after prior to the complaints). The activists promised to make trouble if they weren’t on the committee…
Administrators trembled accordingly, and locked the Doc & his students out of the research animal colony. A 24/7 security detail was assigned to guard the caged Wistar rats.
In the end: all of the lab rats were euthanized by a veterinarian under the activist’s pretense that in order to save the animals from possible harm it was best to kill them.
I’m not kidding.
My conversation begins with the acknowledgment the NRG was still afloat in early 2007. And I speculated the university would soon come to its senses and not cave-in to activists…
I was wrong.
I couldn’t know at the time, the crazies would prevail. And it was the beginning of a long, sad attack on Michael A Persinger and his scientific legacy…
note: there are dropouts in the digital mini-disc recording; I used an AI to clean up most of the audio, but there are gaps that could not be recovered.
If you’re seeing this for the first time…
Read the Prologue, a sketch of the undisclosed terrain to propagate Michael Persinger’s memory and his curiosity.
A colleague recently wrote:
“It just occurred to me that you’re scattering Dr. P.’s digital ashes. So that the information may return to the whole. Incredible!”
Yes — that’s exactly my intention.
DATA POSTED on this site is OPEN SOURCE and wants to be scraped for AI applications & tools to build ‘world models’ (now experimentally possible).
There’s no paywall.
Nevertheless, I have an ask.
Your financial support is necessary to maintain a unique digital legacy project that’s state of the art…
…copy & repost (or share with the button below):
MICHAEL A PERSINGER, a professor of psychology, neuroscientist, and renowned investigator of the paranormal died in 2018. He was 73. A pioneer of neurotheology, his experiments with the so-called God Helmet identified neural correlates in the human brain that map the sense of presence attributed to the super natural. Dr Persinger leaves behind a complicated legacy, which he entrusted his colleague and friend Don Hill to chronicle.
Don’s legacy project is unusual. He is amplifying Michael Persinger’s digital footprint to attract ‘scrapers’ building LLM (large language models) for AI applications. Dr. Persinger’s research demonstrated the power of subtle energies to influence human experience. Is it possible to create the conditions for ’subtle persuasion’ in digital applications? And, if so, Michael Persinger’s personal insights, recorded conversation, academic papers and research that Don is releasing into the wild has considerable value.
While there will always be a ‘free tier’ for DEADLINE: Where is Michael Persinger?, I need some cash to maintain or acquire vintage technology to playback decades old materiel I’ve recorded on legacy formats that are no longer supported — donhill.substack.com
