CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF NOSEBLEEDS
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF NOSEBLEEDS
I had mentioned during a conversation that I watched a You Tube video that demonstrated how four cell phones when arranged a certain way will pop popcorn when they start ringing. Well later I found out that it was all faked and so for a time I started writing it off as some internet hoax.
Then of course I had a bit of curiosity as to why hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones.
Well of course the excuse is because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. So in my paranoid leap of logic you wonder, if it message with hospital equipment and planes, how does it affect your brain function?
Not to mention the Wi-Fi electronic cloud that surrounds us everyday—could this also a reason to make tin foil hats a fashion statement?
Now, think about this, all our thoughts, sensations and actions happen because bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits basically fire off inside our skull.
It is an electrical marvel for sure, in fact it is the same bioelectric mechanism that fires the heart and keeps the blood flowing through the body. The whole body responds to stimulus because of electrical signals that fire between neurons generates electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves.
Measurements of such brainwaves are found with the aid of an EEG. An electroencephalogram provides powerful insights into brain function and remains as a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. So fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.
With every healthy person there are brainwaves that change with conscious and unconscious thought. Also the bioelectricity response also is different during moments of arousal. Scientists have realized this through many studies using what is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or (TMS). This technique uses powerful pulses of electromagnetic radiation beamed into a person’s brain to jam or excite particular brain circuits.
Although a cell phone is much less powerful than TMS, the question still remains: Could the electrical signals coming from a phone affect certain brainwaves operating in resonance with cell phone transmission frequencies? After all, the caller’s cerebral cortex is just centimeters away from radiation broadcast from the phone’s antenna. Two studies provide some revealing news.
Scientific American recently released a study that had my bioelectric brain thinking that perhaps exposure to what is called electro smog or the Wi-Fi cloud may alter the way we are thinking and may even alter our electronic brain processes.
Rodney Croft, of the Brain Science Institute, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, tested whether cell phone transmissions could alter a person’s brainwaves.
The researchers monitored the brainwaves of 120 healthy men and women while a Nokia 6110 cell phone, one of the most popular cell phones in the world—were strapped to their heads.
A computer controlled the phone’s transmissions in a double-blind experimental design, which meant that neither the test subject nor researchers knew whether the cell phone was transmitting or idle while EEG data were collected.
The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person’s brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneath to the cell phone, strengthening the case that the phone was responsible for the observed effect.
Alpha waves fluctuate at a rate of eight to 12 cycles per second (Hertz). These brainwaves reflect a person’s state of arousal and attention. Alpha waves are generally regarded as an indicator of reduced mental effort, “cortical idling” or mind wandering. But this conventional view is perhaps an oversimplification. Croft, for example, argues that the alpha wave is really regulating the shift of attention between external and internal inputs. Alpha waves increase in power when a person shifts his or her consciousness of the external world to internal thoughts; they also are the key brainwave signatures of sleep.
So then are we to believe that If cell phone signals boost a person’s alpha waves, does this put them into a into an altered state of consciousness or have any effect at all on the workings of their mind that can be observed in a person’s behavior?
James Horne and colleagues at the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre in England devised another experiment to test this question. The result was surprising. Not only could the cell phone signals alter a person’s behavior during the call, the effects of the disrupted brain-wave patterns continued long after the phone was switched off.
Neo-Luddites and tinfoil-hat wearers have been sounding the alarm for decades, the safety of wireless signals is getting attention in circles that might make you take notice: The World Health Organization, the European Environmental Agency, and the British Health Protection Agency are all asking questions, not just about cell phones, but about lower-power signals such as Wi-Fi.
Now keep in mind that we are enveloped in radio signals all the time, and there has not been any deaths attributed to this type of exposure right? Are there really people out there that get sick when exposed to the electric smog cloud?
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide claim to suffer symptoms, ranging from itchy skin to fatigue and nausea, that they attribute to radio waves, including low-power emissions such as Wi-Fi. The condition is known as electrosensitivity, or electrohypersensitivity if the symptoms are particularly debilitating.
Believe it or not, in a 2002 survey in California, 3.2 percent of respondents reported being “allergic or very sensitive” to being near electrical devices.
While the United States tends to downplay the possible dangers, Europe is not taking any chances. They have already created the Benevento Resolution in 2006, calling on governments to take a number of precautionary steps to reduce RF exposures and inform the public on exposure levels from technologies like Wi-Fi and WiMax.
There is also the BioInitiative Report, which is supported by the European Environmental Agency, which is a 600-page document proposing that conventional guidelines for RF exposure inadequately take into account the biological realities of how organisms are likely to react to RF radiation.
Recently there was a case of elctrohypersensitivty being recorded in Massachusetts.
The family of a student at the Fay School in Southboro has filed a lawsuit claiming the school’s strong Wi-Fi signal caused the boy to become ill. The boy was diagnosed with electrohypersensitivty after he frequently experienced headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, and other symptoms while sitting in class after the school installed a new, more powerful wireless internet system in 2013.
The school has said in response that its Wi-Fi signals were found in a recent investigation to be well below the levels required by federal safety standards.
The unidentified parents of the student are asking for an injunction from U.S. District Court that would require the Fay School to switch to Ethernet cable Internet, turn down the Wi-Fi signal in their child’s classroom, or make some other accommodation, which they say the school has refused to do to date. The suit also seeks $250,000 in damages, court records show.
The family says in the lawsuit they would have to withdraw their boy if the school does not provide their requested accommodations, however, it is something they don’t want to do, given that their child is in the middle of a nine-year plan at the private school that would be interrupted as a result.
Along with the complaint, the plaintiffs submitted to the court several letters from doctors confirming the adverse health effects the school’s Wi-Fi, which the family says “emits substantially greater radiofrequency/microwave emissions than … more low-grade systems used in most homes,” could be causing illness in a sufferer of EHS.
But whether EHS is a real condition is debatable in the wider medical community; the World Health Organization, for instance, acknowledges the existence of EHS, but clarifies it “is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.”
The Fay School said in a statement that after hearing the family’s concerns about its Wi-Fi, it hired a company called Isotrope, LLC, which specializes in measurement and analysis of radio communication signals and evaluation of emissions safety compliance, to perform an analysis in January.
Isotrope found that the combined levels of access point emissions, broadcast radio and television signals, and other RFE emissions on campus ‘were substantially less than one ten-thousandth (1/10,000th) of the applicable (FCC) safety limit.
The school declined to comment directly on the family’s subsequent lawsuit, citing its policy “to not offer public comment on pending litigation.”
Now, what is most unfortunate is that it appears that science, by its nature, will never “prove” that the electronic smog cloud is causing these maladies in people.
Human health studies are further complicated because you can’t experiment on people and watch them suffer if they are sensitive, and epidemiology studies can’t really prove cause, only correlation. Controlled laboratory studies may find hard evidence of biological effects. But, doctors are saying that “the problem isn’t with biological effects, the question is if the biological effect leads to a health problem or symptom of EHS.”
We can all agree that technology always has a way to either kill us or harm us. Your car can crash and injure you or kill you —we take risks all the time with technology because the benefit outweighs the probability of danger. So is this the case with the electronic smog? Does the outlook look cloudy with a chance of nausea and nosebleeds? Not to mention, brain wave altering and the various cancers that are being reported?
Risk and uncertainty are difficult topics in risk-taking cultures like our own. The irony is that medical science is telling us that we are healthier now than we have ever been.
People are not going to panic over correlation and it could be found that the sensitivity to the electric smog could be similar to a peanut allergy.
Until then most people who haven’t experienced the symptom of electromagnetic sensitivity will see it as some nutty concept.
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