|
| |
info
page home
kirlian photography
description
 In
1961, Semyon Davidovitch Kirlian and Valentina Kirliana
published a paper in the Russian Journal of Scientific and
Applied Photography in which they described for the first time
the process now known as Kirlian Photography. The method
consists of placing an object or body part directly onto a piece
of photographic paper and then passing a high voltage across the
object (part of what makes the apparatus complicated, especially
when using a human subject, is ensuring a high voltage with a
low current). What the Kirlians discovered is that the
photographic paper will become exposed and will show a glowing
‘aura’ around the object.
 Experimenters
with Kirlian photography have created many colorful and
beautiful images. The images are often associated with the
objects’ ‘aura’, which is supposed to be a product of
‘bioenergy’ or ‘bioplasma.’ Kirlian photographers claim
that different moods and levels of psychic power will show up in
these photos. There are several examples of leaves from which a
piece has been removed showing the ‘aura’ of the full leaf
in a Kirlian photograph (the so-called phantom leaf effect). A
great deal of research has been done by Dr. Thelma Moss of
UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, and her former student,
Kendall Johnson. Their conclusions are that Kirlian photography
is a window onto the world of ‘bioenergy’, and they and
others have linked Kirlian Photography to telepathy, orgone
energy, N-rays, acupuncture, ancient eastern religions, and
other paranormal phenomena. They also tout the possibility that
Kirlian photography can provide early medical diagnoses of a
variety of ailments. Moss and Johnson believe that the Kirlian
photography actually depicts a heretofore invisible ‘astral
body,’ while others believe that it is a merely an electrical
effect that is somehow sensitive to psychic states.
history
Bio-Electrography,
or Kirlian photography, has its roots in observations on
star-like patterns produced in resin dust by electrical
discharges made by the German physicist and philosopher Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) in 1777. Lichtenberg was also
the first to observe a corona discharge from a human hand. After
the introduction of photography, the Czech physicist Batholomew
Navratil (1848-1927) and the Polish-Russian electrotherapist,
engineer and physician Yakov Narkiewicz-Yodko (1848-1904) were
the first to use the new medium to record electric discharges
from animate and inanimate objects and to systematically
investigate the effect. The term "electrography" was
coined by Navratil in 1888. Other early observations of the
effect around the turn of the century were by by Nikola Tesla.
 In
1939 the Armenian electrician Semyon Davidovich Kirlian
(1900-1980) in the North-Caucasian town of Krasnodar by chance
rediscovered the effect which now bears his name. Together with
his wife Valentina he improved on the basic apparatus and
developed the new method for a number of applications, mainly
for plant research. The physicist Viktor G.Adamenko who as a
student conducted numerous experiments together with the
Kirlians, defended the first doctoral thesis on the subject at
the Minsk Polytechnic (Belorussia), about the physical mechanism
of image formation by the corona discharge process. While he
considers the basic mechanism to be the cold emission of
electrons from the specimen provoked by the high-voltage pulse,
another prominent one of the many Russian researchers who took
up research in this field, Victor M. Inyushin, Professor of
Biophysics at Kazakh State University, Alma Ata, Kazakhstan,
together with Polish physicist Wlodzimierz Sedlak developed the
"bioplasma hypothesis" to explain the Kirlian effect
in bioelectrography.
 With
the publication of Ostrander and Schroeder’s "Psychic
Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain" (1970) and Krippner
and Rubin’s "The Kirlian Aura" (1974), Bio-Electrography
came to the West and stimulated a flurry of activities. After a
visit with Adamenko at Moscow and Inyushin at Alma-Ata in 1970,
medical psychologist Thelma Moss of the Neuropsychiatric
Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles became
the first Western scientist using to work in the field.
Important Western contributions were made by Gary K.Poock,
Professor of Operations Research and Man-Machine Systems at the
U.S.Navy Postgraduate School at Monterey, California. In 1975,
he developed the first bioelectrographic motion picture method
outside the Soviet Union. It included the use of a light
intensifier for improving brightness, and was able to reveal the
dramatic dynamics of the discharge process which are invisible
at the long exposure times of still photography. In 1976, Pook
made a first step to the quantification of the electrographic
picture by introducing an image-analytic technique. A
paradigmatic investigation of electrography, published in 1976
and 1978 and partly sponsored by the U.S.Department of Defense,
was conducted for 6 years by a multidisciplinary team headed by
William Eidson, Professor of Physics at Drexel University,
Philadelphia (Pehek et al., 1976; Eidson et al., 1978). It
considerably raised the quality of the debate which at that time
was quite lively. Among other things, the study points to the
typical instability of the equipment used in most investigations
and and the wide range of parameters that have to be controlled
for the successful operation of the method. It also gives
recommendations for optimum discharge technology and recordings
systems, such as transparent electrodes and image-intensified
film or video recording systems which allow for contactless
image recording without interference between the
specimen/electrode circuit and the recording medium, and the use
of image analysis and the spectral analysis of the discharge
process. The study concluded that electrography was able to
image electrical parameters of a specimen in real time, making
it a possible field mapping tool for the energy fields
surrounding living organisms which possibly were able to
modulate „space impedance". The important task of
carefully analysing all the parameters influencing the
bioelectrographic image which the Drexel team had started and
many since then have called for, was undertaken by Mark de
Payrebrune, then graduate student of Electrical Engineering at
McGill University at Montreal, Canada, for his master’s thesis
in 1984 (de Payrebrune, 1984). Much work in bio-electrography
research has been done in Russia and other countries of the
former Soviet Union, but is less accessible because of language
and communication problems.
A more
intuitive, but very successful and now widely used method of
interpreting the bioelectrographic image for medical diagnosis,
based on the analysis of the corona of fingertips in relation to
their function as endpoints of the meridians of Traditional
Chinese Medicine and German neo-acupuncture according to Voll,
has been developed by German naturopathic doctor Peter Mandel
(Mandel, 1986).
However,
seen in retrospect, the unhelpful association with unfounded
speculations on the aura and with parapsychology has very much
dominated the image of Bio-electrography and made it difficult
for the field to be scrutinized objectively. While about every
New Age fair displays Kirlian pictures as a "proof"
for the existence of the "aura", the scientific study
of the field, after some initial activities in the 1970’s, has
been rather stagnating in the last two decades, in spite of the
ongoing work of a number of researchers in different countries.
the
skeptical viewpoint
 There
is no doubt that Kirlian photographs themselves are not fakes;
they are photographing something, the question is exactly what
are they capturing. The most likely explanation, one that is
accepted even by many psychic believers, is that the effect is a
kind of ‘Corona Discharge.’ Corona discharge is responsible
for regular lightning, the sparks that come off your fingers
after you walk on a carpet, and St. Elmo’s fire, among other
effects. Nikola Tesla used to introduce new discoveries at
presentations at which his body would glow and sparks would fly
from his fingertips, using a similar technique.
 A
team of physicists and psychologists at Drexel University has
spent some years studying the Kirlian effect, and has concluded
that the major determinant in a Kirlian photograph is the amount
of moisture present on the object or skin. It is certainly
plausible that different moods and stresses might create
different amounts of moisture on the fingertips (for instance).
This is the basis of the lie detector. Phantom leaf effects, on
the other hand, are very rare – the Drexel team has never
produced one, but they theorize a number of possibilities,
including residue on the photographic plate and coincidence, not
to mention the possibility of outright fraud in some cases.
Overall,
although Kirlian photography is not perfectly understood, there
is no evidence that variations in Kirlian photographs are due to
any paranormal effects. The Drexel team has created a list of 25
factors that can effect a Kirlian photograph, including
attributes of the skin, recent physical activity, and, yes,
mental stress. All of them effect the amount of moisture on the
skin. As for the medical possibilities of Kirlian photography,
they are often overestimated. Variations have many causes, but
it is very difficult to determine those causes from looking at a
photograph – many of the known causes create exactly the same
Kirlian variations.
References:
Davis, Mikol, and Lane, Earle, Rainbows of Life (Harper
Colophon, 1978)
Moss, Dr. Thelma, The Probability of the Impossible (Plume,
1974)
Science and the Paranormal, edited by Barry Singer and George O.
Abell, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981)
The Skeptic Dictionary
info
page home
|
|
