Dr. Michael Persinger (born June 26, 1945)is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Laurentian University, Canada since 1971.
Persinger was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but primarily grew up in Virginia, Maryland and Wisconsin. He attended Carroll College from 1963-1964, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1967. He then obtained an M.A. in Physiological Psychology from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba in 1971.
During the 1980s Dr. Persinger simulated people's temporal lobes artificially with a weak magnetic field to see if he could induce a religious state. He found it to create the sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room." In some circles Persinger's findings have been widely heralded and regarded as a landmark study.
Dr. Persinger focuses much of his work on the commonalities that exist between the sciences and to integrate the fundamental concepts. He organized the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University. This program was one of the first to integrate Chemistry, Biology and Psychology.
In 2005 Pehr Granqvist, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, questioned Persinger's findings in a paper published in Neuroscience Letters. Dr. Granqvist believes Dr. Persinger's work was not "double blind." Those conducting Persinger's trials, who were often graduate students, knew what sort of results to expect, with the risk that the knowledge would be transmitted to experimental subjects by unconscious cues. They were also frequently given an idea of what was happening by being asked to fill in questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences before the trials were conducted. Dr. Granqvist set about conducting the experiment double blinded and found that the presence or absence of the field had no relationship with any religious or spiritual experience reported by the participants.
Dr. Persinger still stands by his findings. He argues that "Dr Granqvist and his colleagues failed to generate a 'biologically effective signal' in their subjets because of a failure to use the equipment properly."