Breathing with the Earth
245
years. The relationship was there: Significantly more persons were signed
in to the psychiatric services just after magnetic disturbances than when
the field was stable. Of course, such a finding could only serve as a guide
to further investigation, because so many factors determined whether a
person sought psychiatric help, but we felt that other influences would
even out over such a large number of patients.
Next we looked for the same type of influence in patients already
hospitalized. We selected a dozen schizophrenics who were scheduled to
remain in the VA hospital for the next few months with no changes in
treatment. We asked the ward nurses to fill out a standard evaluation of
their behavior once every eight-hour shift. Then we correlated the results
with cosmic ray measurements taken every two hours from government
measuring stations in Ontario and Colorado. Since magnetic storms were
generally accompanied by a decrease in the cosmic radiation reaching
earth, we thought we might find changes in the patients' actions and
moods during these declines. We decided to use cosmic rays instead of
direct reports of the magnetic field strength because of problems in dis-
tinguishing between magnetic storms and other variations in the earth's
field.
The nurses reported various behavior changes in almost all the sub-
jects one or two days after cosmic ray decreases. This was a revealing
delay, for one type of incoming radiation—low-energy cosmic ray flares
from the sun—was known to produce strong disruptions in the earth's
field one or two days later.
With this encouragement we went on in 1967 to confirm, by experi-
ments described more fully in the next chapter, that abnormal magnetic
fields did produce abnormalities in various human and animal responses.
We found slowed reaction times in humans and a generalized stress re-
sponse in rabbits exposed to fields ten or twenty times the normal
strength of the earth's. Hence we suspected that the earth's normal field
played a major role in keeping the DC system's control of bodily func-
tions within normal bounds. The proof of this idea has come mainly
from the work of two men: Frank Brown at Northwestern and Rutger
Wever, working at the Max Planck Institute in Munich.
Already a respected endocrinologist, Brown became interested in bio-
cycles in the 1950s. It was common knowledge that most organisms had
a circadian rhythm of metabolic activity, which most people assumed
was directly linked to the alternation of night and day or, in the case of
shore life, to the tides. Oysters, for example, would open their shells to
feed whenever the tide came in, covering them
with
water. It was
a
simple, obvious observation, but Brown didn't take it for granted. To