Go Figure! (TPOD 12-17-2010)

[popster1]

Seemingly charged with religious significance, these ‘cosmic fingerprints’, in which many strove to read omens for the future, could have prompted human spectators to record their observations for posterity.

Today we are aware that electrical activity is fundamental to the functioning of the brain. In the cases of these extreme aurorae, could the energy that creates them have direct effect on human thought? Could a religious experience be induced not only by the spectacle in the sky but by something akin to shock therapy?

[MrAmsterdam]

Seemingly charged with religious significance, these ‘cosmic fingerprints’, in which many strove to read omens for the future, could have prompted human spectators to record their observations for posterity.

Today we are aware that electrical activity is fundamental to the functioning of the brain. In the cases of these extreme aurorae, could the energy that creates them have direct effect on human thought? Could a religious experience be induced not only by the spectacle in the sky but by something akin to shock therapy?

There are a diverse amount of therapies that are based on electric and magnetic pulses and microcurrents. Magnetic pulse therapies have been used to combat depressions.
If you read about the canadian researcher Persinger and his 'God Helmet' you will see the relationship between magnetic pulses and resonance and brain activity.

Simpler said, it is no coincidence that the Schumann resonance (7.8 hz magnetic resonance) resembles the relaxed beta-state of the human brain (+/- 7.8 hz).

One can easily imagine the result of a CME or other magnetic resonance phenomena of the ionosphere will have an impact on the functioning of the brain.

Ofcourse this partly speculation based on correlated magnetic phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Persinger

Research in neurotheology

During the 1980s he stimulated people's temporal lobes artificially with a weak magnetic field to see if he could induce a religious state (see God helmet). He claimed that the field could produce the sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room". The only serious attempt to replicate these effects failed to do so and concluded that subjects' reports correlated with their personality characteristics and suggestibility.[4]

btw, what an excellent TPOD of Rens Van Der Sluijs. If it was only for the following statement.

This view is endorsed by members of NASA’s THEMIS team, who concluded from this type of rock art that aurorae “have influenced the course of history, religion, and art” from prehistoric times. Other specialists on the polar lights have also speculated “that a great deal of the very ancient engravings which have been found in several grottos along the Mediterranean Sea are in fact pictorial representations of the northern light.”