LAMP LIT BY THOUGHT

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17233, 12 April 1930, Page 6

LAMP LIT BY THOUGHT

DOCTOR’S CLAIM MEASURING BRAIN WAVES NEW YORK, Feb. 14. Tn an effort to bridge the gap between mind and matter, Dr. Edmund Jacobson, of the University of Chicago, has been making interesting experiments, and reports to-day that 2,000,000 people, linked together in mental reaction to the same idea, will generate enough voltage to light ah ordinary incandescent lamp. Apparently he has gone a step farther than the late Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc, the eminent French scientist, whose invention of the biomeire for recording the “vital current” in human beings is known to advanced students of psychology-

Ur. Jacobson has devised a string galvanometer, an instrument so sensitive that it will detect one-millionth of a volt of electricity. He is using it in experiments which tend to prove that mental activity and tho imagination are functions involving the whole body rather than brain action alone. .ACTION IN THOUGHT.

Dr. Jacobson proceeds on the theory that in tho merest of ideas there _is neuro-muscular action, capable of being measured in the amount of voltage produced. Electrodes, capable of detecting tho slightest change in the electrical potential accompanying any muscular tension, are sealed to tho subject’s right biceps, forming a connection with the galvanometer. On tho galvanometer is a quartz string one-hundredth thousandth of an inch thick.

Each subject in the recent test agreed to imagine, at a prearranged signal, that lie was flexing his arm; two-fifths of a second later a motion-picture camera recorded the vibration of the quartz string’s silhouette. The subject was given a signal to stop imagining; a fraction of a second later the shadow of the quartz string lapsed to tho straight lino of quiescence. One of Dr. Jacobson’s subjects, a woman, reports that she was even able to see and hear herself tllink by. watching tlie dancing silhouette and listening through a stethoscope connected with an amplifier. ______