Early experiments to catch the waves of thought.

“What we need to accomplish is to capture a thought that goes up towards the sky” P.P Lazarev the Russian Scientist had said some time ago. At the time of this observation, tools to do it were not available and in this particular case they are not available still... He thought that the Ionic Theory of Stimulation would provide a platform to achieve this. The idea was that if we could determine that the thoughts are transmitted through space, the theory and practice of hypnosis would be easily verifiable. He assumed waves emitted by the human mind would have a range of 6000 to 30,000 KM. As was stated there was no equipment capable of detecting these lower frequency waves.
However experiments were conducted by several others to prove that the waves emitted by the brain could be detected by electronic equipments not attached to the human body. One such early experiment was that of Cazzamalli an Italian Professor. The experiment was not devoid of interest. This is how it went. This was published in “Pheneomenes telepsychiques et radiations cerebreless”. Revue Metapsychique No.4. I do not know Italian and has only seen an excerpt of it. The original reference is given so that it might prove useful to some.
To conduct these experiments He used a room similar in construction to that of a Faraday Cage. Walls of the room were covered with black lead plates of 1.5 inch in thickness to stop the entry of electromagnetic pulses from out side of the room. His subjects were people who were highly susceptible to hypnosis. A radio valve receiver was positioned at approximately 50 cm from the head of the subject to detect if any are waves being emitted from his brain during the experiment. The observer who was outside the room was given an ear phone which had the capacity to detect short wave radio signal coming within the ranges of 10 to 100 and 0.7 to 10m. After examining the equipments to make sure that there were no glitches the subject was asked to enter the room and lie down on the table provided for the purpose.
The radio valves emitted no signals As long as the subject was awake and not under hypnosis. Yet within seconds of being hypnotized the ear phone began to make audible noises. The sounds seemed like whistling or a violin being played. These increased in volume with the deepening of the hypnotic trance and became less as the effects of hypnosis began to wear of. The moment the subject was fully awake the sounds stopped.
The experiment was severely criticized by some because of its unreliability. The equipments used were capable of recording very subtle currents hence the movement of the hypnotizer’s hand near it or wear of the batteries could produce such effects. Also the radio valve could be producing electromagnetic waves which was being reflected back by the walls of the room into the instrument or is acting through the body of the subject which has become a conductor of such waves by being in the room.
But Cazzamalli was not deterred by these criticisms. He duplicated the experiments by substituting ear phones with a galvanometer in his further experiments. Also an electromagnetic oscillogram was added to the monitoring equipments. It was found that whenever the subject was stimulated after calming him with hypnosis the oscillograph would start to react. Cazzamalli, also interested in the paranormal, called it the psychic radiation reflex.
It is reported that he also used radio frequencies to induce hallucinations in his subjects and some of the subjects were so disturbed that they wanted to bite the hands off of the experimenters.