SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
Articles in the Biological Literacy series are fun explorations of how the human body works. See below for a complete listing of articles in the series.
Have you ever had one of those days? Of course you have. I’m talking about the kind of day where you just feel turned off, tuned out, like everything is happening underwater or far away from you, without an obvious explanation like insomnia or a hangover. Sometimes it just happens. And the really weird thing is, it seems like everybody else is like that, too. “Must be something in the air,” they’ll say.
Well, guess what: there is something in the air. The Schumman resonance.
The Schumman resonance is the collective electromagnetic echo of all of the lightning strikes happening on earth at any given moment. The Schumman resonance continuously bounces back and forth between the earth’s crust and the ionosphere. It permeates the atmosphere. Now, the Schumman resonance just happens to have properties which almost exactly match the electromagnetic pacemaker of our brain, a little piece of gray matter that literally makes us tick. It’s like we’re synchronized with the Schumman resonance. In fact, we probably are.
We are probably neurologically synchronized with the Schumman resonance.The brain’s pacemaker works part-time. It sets the beat up and then lets the brain coast on that rhythm for a while. During that coasting period, the brain is susceptible to other electromagnetic influences: such as the Schumman resonance. Normally, the Schumman resonance matches the typical rhythm of an electroenchephalogram quite well. But sometimes — when there’s more lightning than usual, or perhaps less — the Schumman resonance changes. And wouldn’t you know? Automobile accident rates go up around the world every time that happens, along with several other measurable changes in human behaviour.1
We live in an electromagnetically charged environment. It is unthinkable that this would not prove to be important to human physiology. We already know of many ways in which biological systems make use of electromagnetic energy.2 There are probably several more to be discovered. An important part of my work is to point these mysteries out, to stimulate humility and self-awareness: you are more subtle and complex than you think! Vitality and healing are dependent on so much we don’t yet understand. On the bright side, our ignorance keeps us free to experiment playfully with the human experience, and the explanation for the potency of massage therapy and other alternative therapies remains tantalizingly open, their potential unknown.
I once met an aging student of yoga. He was an old hippie, quiet and earnest. “I’ve had one sort of spiritual practice or another for almost thirty years,” he told me. “But you know what? No matter how much you practice, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you feel great, and sometimes you feel like shit. Even after thirty years, it’s still a crap shoot, every morning!”
“Even after thirty years, it’s still a crap shoot, every morning!”If I met him again today, I’d tell him about the Schumman resonance.
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