Infrasound
For those of you who have been following the blogs this week, you may have noticed that there has been a discussion of radiation on Brian’s blog.
For my last post on this beautiful friday afternoon I am going to let you know that not only are there gamma-waves, radio-waves and micro-waves, but there are also very low frequency sound waves.
They are completely inaudible (to us), but apparently increase the likelihood that people will have a ‘paranormal experience’.
Proof of beautiful London weather
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I love when the media talks about “the scientists”. :)
The research on the strange feelings that can be caused by LFO waves is not new… The whole area of infra- and ultra-sound perception by means other then the ears is very interesting, it’s only a pity that it is still seen as an “alternative” topic instead of “real science”...
But this is all a sub-subject of the larger research field of human vibration in general. There is a great book about this called Handbook of Human Vibration that mentions a lot of interesting phenomena and researches. The most interesting chapter is the one about motion sickness. It talks about a couple of interesting experiments where subjects were put in different conditions in order to measure their “emetic index” i.e., probability of vomiting!... In some of the measurements the index eventually reaches 100%!!! :D
Firstly, thank you for the link to my article on infrasound at Area51. However, I must take issue with your generalization. I was not saying that “The Scientists” are studying paranormal phenomenon related to infrasound as your quote suggests. If you look at my original post, I link to specific examples of academics pursuing this as an area of interest…much like you do in your post above.
You seem rather dismissive with your statement, “Like this is the focus of our energy.” Are you a scientist, specifically, an infrasound researcher? From what I can tell from your profile, it looks to me like you’re a blog editor. Please enlighten me: what is important to The Scientists if infrasound and the paranormal isn’t it? Or is it only unimportant to blog editors?
Dear Codename Sheba,
Firstly, I would like to apologize for being in any way dismissive of anybody’s research. It was unthinking of me and will be more careful in future. I think that the work on infrasound is indeed interesting, and any good evidence explaining or “proving” the paranormal experience would have profound impact on our lives.
The point I was making, was a throwaway one really; and that was that scientists as a group are defined by statements like “Scientists believe…”, “Scientists found…”, “Leading scientist, James Watson thinks…” etc and sometimes this jars a bit as scientists sometimes think and believe very different things to those heard on, for example, radio shows.
In retrospect, is was remiss of me to use your blogpost as the example, but I had just seen it, and I did not want to use an example that I was actually angry about as I am a coward.
Yours etc.
Bronwen
... and just for the curious, like most of us Nature journal editors, Bronwen has a PhD and worked for some years as a scientist…
Thank you very much for the clarification. I, too, wonder at the colloquial use of “The Scientists” as a catch-all for pseudo-scientific pronouncements. You’ve won me as a reader. I look forward to your future posts.