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Is Problem Solving Worth It?
A growing number of people around the world claim to be ‘electro-sensitive’, in other words physically responsive to the electromagnetic fields that surround electronic devices such as mobile phones. In fact, Sweden has recently recognized such sensitivity as a disability, and will pay for the dwellings of sufferers to be screened from the world’s electronic smog.
This is a superb example of a knee jerk reaction rather than the result of an effective problem solving process. It is unfortunate that the kind and caring politicians who sponsored the subsidy in Sweden preferred to throw money at the unknown cause rather than actually investigate it and apply some form of process to identify the most probable cause for the sensitivity.
The issue is that, time and again, studies of those claiming to be electro-sensitive show their ability to determine whether they are being exposed to a real electric field or a fake one is no better than chance. So, unless these sensitive people are lying about their symptoms, the most probable cause for the symptoms must be sought elsewhere.
In Germany at the University of Regensburg, Michael Landgrebe and Ulrich Frick think that the ‘elsewhere’ in question is in the brain and in a paper presented recently to the Royal Society in London, they describe an experiment which, they think, proves their point.
Dr Landgrebe and Dr Frick used a body scanner called a functional magnetic-resonance imager to see how people’s brains react to two different kinds of stimulus. Thirty participants, half of whom described themselves as electro-sensitive, were put in the imager and told that they would undergo a series of trials in which they would be exposed either to an active mobile phone or to a heating device called a thermode, whose temperature would be varied between the trials. The thermode was real. The mobile phone, however, was not.
The type of stimulus, be it the authentic heat source or the fake electromagnetic radiation, was announced before each exposure and the volunteers were asked to rate its unpleasantness on a five-point scale. In the case of heat, the two groups’ descriptions of their experiences were comparable. So, too, was their brain activity. However, when it came to the fake phone exposure, only the electro-sensitives described sensations such as prickling and even pain. Moreover, they showed neural activity to support these perceived sensations. Some of the same bits of their brains lit up as when they were exposed to high temperatures.
This suggests that electro-sensitivity, rather than being a response to electromagnetic stimulus, is akin to well-known psychosomatic disorders such as some sorts of tinnitus and chronic pain. A psychosomatic disorder is one in which the symptoms are real, but are induced by cognitive functions such as attitudes, beliefs and expectations rather than by direct external stimuli.
The paradoxical upshot of Dr Landgrebe’s and Dr Frick’s experiment is that mobile phones do indeed inflict real suffering on some unfortunate individuals. It is just that the electromagnetic radiation they emit has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
If you have a situation where actual results deviate from your expectations and the cause is not known… please do us all a favor and either apply our Problem Solving Methodology directly or contact us to do it for you.