Infrasound Affects the Brain
High Sensitivity Persons, HSP. Approximately 30% of a population, and that’s quite a lot, a third of Denmark’s or Sweden’s population, belongs to the group that is a little more sensitive than the other part of the population. So it’s not a small part that we’re talking about.
And when we describe these people who are a little more sensitive than others, it’s people who have special characteristics. They’re skilled people, they’re driven people, they’re ambitious people who like order and order, careful people. And they’re also more sensitive.
They have a nervous system that is faster and better functioning than other people’s nervous systems. And that means that they’re also more light-sensitive, more sound-sensitive. Often they’re more deaf-sensitive.
Actually, all mental organs are a little more on the toes with these people. We’re talking about infrasound, and I want to briefly present infrasound. It’s a sound that you can’t hear, right? But it’s also a sound that’s very penetrating.
It doesn’t meet any obstacles. With the walls here, it goes straight through the walls here, and it goes straight through our bodies. It goes through the skull.
Strange, isn’t it? And it has a long spread. It spreads far and wide. Enough about that.
How He Got Hooked Onto Infrasound
Who am I, then? Otoneurologist.1 It’s a special type of education where you start as an ear doctor, and then you add an education in neurology. I’ve worked for several years in a neurophysiological laboratory before I got this specialization.
I’ve also done research for several years in Lund, Örebro and Helsingfors, among others. I wrote a paper about 30 years ago about how all our sensory organs and brain work together to control the balance, the postural control. It’s strange that we humans can stand on two legs, right? We could walk like all other animals on four, but we have a very good postural control, and that’s the function I studied a long time ago.
History. What does an otoneurologist do, which is different from a neurologist? I work with the nervous system that sits in the topmost part of the spine, what’s called the brainstem, what’s under the brain. From that area, the 12 brain nerves are connected to the face.
These are the nerves that control hearing, balance, sight, smell, taste, but also swallowing function, feeling in the oral cavity, feeling in the face. All the nerves in this area are my area as an otoneurolog. My workroom is a laboratory at a regional hospital or university hospital, where we examine and study the functions of these different nerves.
But why am I here today? I don’t really deal with infrasound. It’s a long story, but about 20 years ago, maybe 15, I was going to try a new technique to treat tinnitus in people who were hearing-sensitive, HSB, High Sensitive Persons. Tinnitus is usually caused by hearing loss.
Hearing loss causes tinnitus, so you tend to get used to it after a year or two, or put it in the background and forget about it. But this group with HSB have a more sensitive nervous system and find it difficult to get used to a tinnitus tone. They can also get tinnitus without hearing loss.
That’s what makes this group different. I’m going to try to try a new form of treatment. The natural treatment for common tinnitus is that you wait and see if they don’t get used to it after a year or so.
If you think it’s too difficult with tinnitus, you try to reduce the activity of the nerves in some way, like medication for anxiety or depression or medicine for epilepsy. These have the ability to reduce the activity of the nervous system. It’s not a fun medicine to take, especially if it’s children who have tinnitus.
Many children can get tinnitus. It’s not fun to give side effects to children with medicine. These highly sensitive people are not only sensitive to light and sound, they are also sensitive to medicine.
It’s a dilemma, because then they get easier side effects. I wanted to start this new technique in a place that was quiet and without disturbance. At the university, there was a lot of traffic, noise and other things.
We had a place in the countryside, a bit outside of Lund, where we thought we would have this method. But it turned out that just 500-800 meters from that place, we were going to build a wind power plant. That didn’t really work out.
That’s where it started. I had to think about whether we should stay here or move. I read about it in the literature and realized that we didn’t manage to stay here, so we had to move.
But anyway, the articles that existed at the time were not very many. The articles that were written were mostly written because people thought they saw a connection, but without a good scientific basis. It started with Nina Pierpoint, and later we have Jeffrey’s article, with several articles that showed that many people around the wind power plant got sick in some way.
But there were many other articles, where they examined the effect of wind power and couldn’t find any damage or impact, even though the studies that Professor Mattsson said perhaps didn’t have such high quality. Anyway, I wrote an article in Läkartidningen 2013 and wrote that this group of highly sensitive people is a risk group. Even though other people suffer from inflammation from the wind power plant, in the studies that are done, there is still a group of people, perhaps 30% of the population, who have increased sensitivity, and we should take note of that.
But we didn’t. We neglected this article, and I forgot about it and did something else. Until a few years ago, when Professor Mattsson contacted me, he had read the article and thought that we might be able to take it up.
Now the old rusty horses are getting in the way again. I’ve been going through the literature over the past year, and you can find a lot of gold coins. If you look at the yellow markings, you can see that in the last ten years there have been a lot of new articles about the influence of infrared light on humans.
The Brain and Nervous System
That’s what I’m going to summarize and present today. To make it exciting, I’m going to start by teaching you about the nervous system. Welcome! The nervous system is driven by the brain cells of the body.
If we didn’t have brain cells, everything would be black and empty. We wouldn’t function. Zero.
Nothing. So basically, all of our brain cells, vision, hearing, balance, feeling, proprioception, everything, is a motor for us to live. A motor for the nervous system.
All of the information from our brain cells goes up through the spinal cord, up to the brainstem, and further up to the brain. In the brain, the information is processed. We think, we create our imaginations, our memories.
From that information, a reaction occurs, in the form of a movement, or speech, an activity. We’re talking about a new area in the brainstem, which I usually call the reptile brain. I say reptile brain because it’s actually the most original part of the nervous system.
Even the dinosaurs, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of years ago, had a reptile brain. There are many vital basic functions here. Breathing function, blood pressure regulation, an awareness center, formatio reticularis, which is incredibly important for our degree of activity, appetite, sexuality, and many basic reflexes.
Reflexes that allow us to stand, reflexes that allow us to walk, neck reflexes, eye reflexes, reflexes that allow us to look sideways and at the same time fix our gaze on an object, like the hunter who hunts a wild boar. In this area, we have the big brain. In the big brain, there’s another area called the emotional brain, or the limbic brain, the limbic system.
This is the area where we form our emotions. Lust, anger, anxiety, discomfort, love, joy. It’s an emotional center, you could say.
The Impacts of Infrasound
And a part of this center, the little mosquito net down here, is an area that is particularly affected by infrasound, if you can call it that. And this area is an area where you experience anxiety or fear or discomfort if you activate this area. Infrasound, as I said earlier, is a sound that humans can’t hear, so it doesn’t matter.
But even if you can’t hear it, the infrasound […] comes into the brain and activates different centers, such as the amygdala. And they can either come in through the skull bone directly, these slow waves, and affect the brain’s own waves. You may know that in EEG, you put an electrode on the skull bone and measure the brain’s waves.
These are the ones that are emanated from the upper part of the cerebellum, the cortex. But these waves in their turn are controlled by brain waves that are generated from the cerebellum and the medial brain, especially the thalamus. And these waves are much, much slower.
And they are similar in their frequency, these infrasounds. And here there is a possibility that they can interfere with each other. The only way that infrasound can affect is through sensory cells in the inner ear.
Not the normal cells, but the ones that belong to the other cells in the auditory organ can be affected. And they can activate the amygdala, above all. A very recent study, from this year, has studied the damage effects of infrasound on test animals, not on humans.
And we see there, 120 decibel and 140 decibel. These are levels where you can start talking about damage to cells in the brain. And these are actually levels that also arise from wind turbines, but significantly closer.
And the question is, what is the limit there? And that is the limit that one should try to find when building wind turbines. On the other hand, infrasound can cause other effects without damage. I mean, you can get irritated, you can get stressed, and that is a significant function impact without being damaged.
And then you have increased activity in the brain as a result of a very increased input of sensory activity. The first thing you notice is sleep disturbance. You get it from increased activity in the brain in the formatio reticularis.
Symptoms from Infrasound
And that sleep disturbance is usually caused by sleeping a lot more, so that you wake up from almost nothing and have a hard time falling asleep. The impact on the transmitter system, depression and anxiety, are among the disorders that quickly occur if you are exposed to infrasound. And the extension of amygdala, which I talked about earlier, creates anxiety.
So anxiety is something that is easily affected if you are exposed to infrasound. And a fluctuating infrasound is a very strong trigger for migraine. And do you know what this picture was? It’s actually quite a pleasant light, but when it’s pulsating like this, it creates a quality that is very unpleasant.
And it’s this pulsating quality in the infrasound from wind turbines that is what is so-called annoying and what creates discomfort in many people. As I said, everyone can be affected by infrasound. It’s not like that.
Is the infrasound high enough? It’s dangerous. But it’s especially this group of highly sensitive people who are in the “risk group” to get discomfort. And the discomfort that usually appears first is what is called annoyance, i.e. irritation, sleep disturbance, i.e. insomnia, anxiety, depression and the risk of developing headaches.
Migraine. And, as we’ll come to later, migraine-related diseases.
Those With Increased Sensitivity
About 30% of the population is born with an increased sensitivity.
It’s genetic. It’s these people who have an increased sensory sensitivity that can be affected by migraine. But not everyone is affected by migraine.
Many who have this genetic disposition with sensory sensitivity and so on, they spend their whole lives without ever getting migraine headaches. But if they had ended up in an extreme situation, for example, sudden nausea, migraine, and exhausting mental conditions, then they could get eye migraine or migraine headaches. As a result of this suddenly increased sensory tension.
So you are born with an extra-sensitive nervous system. And you are born with extra-sensitive brain cells. The motor to the nervous system is more sensitive.
And this increased sensitivity affects all brain cells. It’s not just vision and hearing. It’s also feelings.
It’s also proprioception. That is, the sensors in all body muscles that recognize how we stand and walk. It’s sensory cells for pain, cold and heat.
Chemical receptors. Yes. Everyone has an increased sensitivity.
And this means, of course, that relatively less rectification creates a signal compared to a normal person who does not have this nervous system. So it means that a person who has an increased sensory sensitivity will always have a certain increased flow in the nervous system from all sensory organs up to the brain stem. So the brain stem and brain will always be exposed to increased pressure, one might say, from nerve signals.
read the rest at www.windconcerns.com