268
The Body Electric
around other organisms is imaginary. Things that appear so often in
folklore often turn out to have a basis in fact. However, the body's
magnetic field is far too weak to account for it. Our biofields, even if
they were many times stronger, couldn't possibly emit light, but an
appropriately sensitive magnetic detector in the brain, if it had nerve
connections to the visual cortex, might "see" the magnetic field, in a
manner of speaking. In a similar way astronauts in space "see" Cerenkov
radiation—flashes of light that have been traced to the passage of high-
energy cosmic rays through the retina.
On the other hand, the aura could literally be a form of light, perhaps
at frequencies invisible to all but a few of us. The discovery of light-
emitting diodes is still fairly recent. As you will recall, we found that
bone happens to have such properties. The point of that experiment was
its evidence that bone contains semiconducting PN junction diodes.
There may well be other diodes in living things. The relationship be-
tween the nerve endings and the skin is an interesting one in this con-
text. The skin-nerve interface—the closest normal equivalent to the
neuroepidermal junction that triggers regeneration—may well be a di-
ode. If so, the proper level of current could cause emission of light from
the skin. It's even possible that such an array of diodes with very large
currents might produce a holographic image of the body on an organic
screen, such as the reputed image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin.
If extrasensory communication really is a function of the DC system,
why isn't it more common and widely accepted? We may never know
how well distributed it is among animals, although the number of pets
who have returned to their owners over long distances suggests that
many dogs and cats can find specific people by an unknown sense. The
Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory has authenticated more than
fifty such cases, many involving travel of hundreds or thousands of
miles. We can expect that some species would be better at it than oth-
ers, just as pigeons navigate by the earth's magnetic field far better than
most other creatures. Among humans, some may simply be more gifted
than others through genetic chance or some facet of their upbringing.
Then again, the psychic sense may be a universal ability that was forgot-
ten or suppressed as we came to depend more and more on language to
get our messages across.
If they do depend on the same system, psychic ability and regenera-
tion may go together; they may generally be better among simple ani-
mals. As the digital impulse system grew more efficient, its information
may have overwhelmed the senses operating through the earlier mode.
In
fact,
this
may be part of
the digital system's purpose. The ever-