You can never be paranoid enough.
We have seen how the meme streams operate, their ravenous swarms seep into the underground drains of awareness. Termite hungry they drive deep into the inventory of thought forms, their own consumption mad with frenzy as they penetrate the firewalls of once effective indifference. Synchronization occurs in the waveform atmosphere where signals get cross(ed) from the inevitable social pressure.
fEYEnman diagram, pen and graphite, 2026, © Johanna Drucker
Does current research in what is known as “general resonance theory” (GRT) explain anything about the machinations of politics?[i] Could making connections from micro to macro levels of cognition and communication shift our understanding of what we understand as “the social medium” and provide a framework for describing how political forces self-organize and replicate? Predictable only within a short time window, these phenomena are non-linear, fundamentally stochastic in their unfolding, and operate outside of deterministic laws. But they are fully present and operational within the sphere of human experience where they are subject (unsuccessfully) to (inadequate) rational analysis. The autopoiesis of affective force fields gives them agency to act on and through the social realm. As for perturbations, they are everywhere. Just look around. How can we understand these phenomena?
An example? Any news story involving current events makes a dramatic case study—-an election cycle, a diplomatic negotiation, ongoing conflict, legal proceedings, celebrity event—-each unfolds in a process with many variables. Did someone look the wrong way? Make a facial expression that turned the tide? Leak a story? Profit from an announcement made late in a day? The “story” has no independent existence. It is an effect of its production, massively massaged by the communicative media, human and technological, as it takes shape through the social sphere.
Individual participation? The ripple of classic “butterfly effects” might have an impact at the cellular level in a single person’s body/brain that within instants changes the course of their immediate actions and impacts their entire history. The connection between communication and cognition unites the frequencies of sound and light with those of neurons and somatic electrical fields. Wearing the tinfoil covered helmet will not prevent this, people. That activity is all happening moment to moment. And do we even know what a moment is? What metric divides the continuum of unfolding events into discrete units such that the branching narrative of possibilities can be leveraged as decision points? My head hurts.
General resonance theory grows out of psychology and brain studies. It is premised on the idea that oscillatory neural activity occurs in living organisms, including human brains, and that these can synchronize to create a shared consciousness. Substantial empirical work has been done to test this theory, and it also correlates with work in microbiology in which electrical signals and electromagnetic waves are determined to play important roles in communication and coordination. The questions of consciousness get raised at every level, with microbiologist Michael Levin proposing his theory of TAME—-the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—-and researchers Jonathan Schooler and Tam Hunt suggesting that GRT solves the “Easy Part of the Hard Problem”—-which is, how “micro-conscious entities” combine “into higher-level macro-consciousness.”[ii] The science involved is fundamental physics—-oscillating waves trend towards synchronization. The extension of this work goes to the fringe rather quickly, with spin-off sites about “resonance” characterized by typography with lots of glowing auras…
But the fundamental premise is easy enough to accept. All living things create electromagnetic fields whose wave forms interact. Anyone who has sat in a room listening to multiple conversations can envision how this works, the noise levels rise past all tolerance as the sound waves clash with each other. By contrast, exuded body heat merges across the varied topology of the space. The drive towards equilibrium works differently with sound than with heat. Maxwell’s little demon wanted nothing to do with body odor, thank you. Let it reach an equilibrium state without help.
Back in the noisy room, pull the soundscape into focus with a tap on a water glass bringing attention towards you. The vibe alters and a vague but definite shared awareness arises. You can hear someone shift in their chair three tables away. Someone coughs. A speaker stands. The mood changes. A few people are looking at their phones. Several are messaging. The contents of the meeting spin out into the network in a ripple effect of waveforms. How does this relate to paranoia? How doesn’t it. Everything is available for surveillance and analysis. You are situated within an elaborate network of cross-hairs, points of connection that escalate more rapidly than your pathetic self-centered analytics can grasp. Every intervention in the info field produces another data derivative and the proliferation of connections is exponential. No matter how crazy hyper-obsessive you are, you cannot manufacture a pattern equivalent to the phenomena that are emerging faster than hot-footed nano flea circus circuits of transactional events. Just that.
New osmotic pollution distorts the very energy fields that emerge spontaneous from the conflict between journalistic rivals. Vortices of cognition, visible from space, swell and shrink in rapid cycles of waxing and waning formations.
Think about those messages. Where are they going and through what systems, filters, and surveillance channels do they pass? Every communication leaves a trace, a trail of data as it is transferred from screen to signal to packet and onward. But it also has a content profile and if the automated systems snag on an inflammatory word or passage, another record is generated, and another series of upload steps push your information into a process of review. No one much cares. We send our messages anyway, knowing our entire online/offline lives are subject to constant passive surveillance. Data analytics is just another way of saying connections are constant and pervasive. No way to stop that without simply disconnecting, and then the absence would register, date stamped, and a follow up through the restructuring of social patterns would occur. Credit card transactions, geo-positioning systems, the gasoline station stops, bank withdrawals/deposits. Not only is everything tracked, it’s all connected to elaborate analytic systems with safeguards but no guardrails. The sheer scale of data derivatives generated on a constant basis is sufficient to induce concern. Ripple effects indeed, and the proliferation of target points in the elaborate nodal network whose coordinate points exist at a nearly infinite number of scales.
Surveillance mechanisms in the overt technical sense are just the obvious part of the multiple systems into which we are integrated. The field of electromagnetic signals generated by living things is much more complicated than any examination focused on our communications technology would suggest, and that is already plenty fraught with frequencies, as we have just seen. The sum total of social energy far exceeds the simple physics of engineered systems. The larger field of communicative frequencies encompasses a massively manifold and multifarious universe of oscillations. I am only one tiny source of resonance within this complex field, even in my confessional mode. As already noted, the microbiologists are onto this as are the brain wave researchers. So are the folks who conjure all sorts of theories from the science. But the implications for paranoia are legion, and not yet fully articulated. Continue.
News feed frenzy primes the hive mind with illusions and phantasmatic inflation follows. More is swallowed whole than should be but the seepage into shared belief sways the opinion polls out of balance. No global maximum is determined before it is reached. Everything tilts and recalibrates at the cost of the control which it is out of… Scale blinds us to our impotence, tiny unit through which affect is transacted.
When William Belcher published Intellectual Electricity in 1798 he drew on the work of Sir Isaac Newton, whom he characterized as a “vibratist,” in order to justify his own theories of the vibratory nature of the universe.[iii] The poetics of Belcher’s text are striking, and anticipate much of the aesthetically tinged vocabulary that shows up in string theory where “magnetic moments” and “perturbation” appear. Earlier, Werner Heisenberg produced a description of “extended objects” to satisfy the need to account for the behavior of some unruly subatomic particles. Such language may or may not tickle your whiskers, depending on your disposition… No matter.
But for certain, Belcher could not have imagined that the “electricity” which exerted so strong a fascination on him would, two and a half centuries later, run as constant current through wires and networks all over the surface of the earth. Or that it would be used for telecommunications of all kinds in addition to providing energy to drive, spin, run, generate, propel, move, activate and process every sort of everything. Nor would he have been likely to conceptualize the workings of electric motors and their relation to the magnetic field of the earth, their dependence on the polarity of the planet.[iv] Every magnet has positive/negative poles that align with the magnetism of the earth. Fundamental. Motors spin because their rotors and stators have opposite charges that repel each other when charged. That is so basic that I never knew it until recently. (What happens to magnets in outer space? Is that where we are free from the bonds of attraction?)
Back to living things, consider this quotation from a 2025 publication in Science Direct: “it is becoming evident that electrical signaling is not limited to the animal kingdom but may be a universal form of cell-cell communication.”[v] The team of authors reporting on their research are microbiologists examining electrical activity at “subcellular, single-cell, and network-level” communication. Pause here just for a moment and recognize that this communication is ubiquitous. To reiterate, electrical fields are generated by every living organism. Going a step further, consider the research that measures EMF (electromagnetic fields) as they extend beyond the physical boundaries of the organism. In humans, the EMF can be measured several millimeters beyond the skull. For those in the aura reading business, this is justification of their practice. For those of use in the speculative theory realm, this is just the first piece in the larger concept of “resonance” as a pervasive feature of social and physical environments.
Enough on the basics. After all, this is fairly intuitive and doesn’t require elaborate detail with regard to the biochemistry/physics of chargers and where/how they are generated. Leave that for the laboratory research where they have the competence to carry it out. My project is to pursue the thesis that the current conditions of global politics are emergent at the level of a complex, non-homogenous, highly volatile, deeply perturbed autopoietic system produced by stochastic-chaotic forces working through the collective/aggregate psychic field of unprecedented energy activity. You know, just that. Consider the truism that never before in the history of humankind have we been so intimately and immediately connected through communication systems that extend us through electrical and electromagnetic fields. These combine the fields produced by the technological instruments we use as well as those we produced in/as ourselves at every level of brain, body, organs, systems, cells, and outward.
The power lines emit their own esoteric discharges creating a non-equilibrium plasma from which streamers of information snake into the surrounding air. Acceleration creates an electron avalanche, a surfeit of releases and responses, but the bright corona recognizes its contributing partners long enough to affirm affiliations. The stars do not align, but we do, comforted by the hum of ions singing in the spaces between us.
fEYEnman diagram modified, pen and graphite, 2026, © Johanna Drucker
In 1845, Baron Carl von Reichenbach, came up with the term “Odic force,” to describe what he believed was the fundamental life force.[vi] Related to electricity and magnetism, as well as heat, the force, he believed, permeated all living things. He didn’t get around to crowd theory, but could have. The science of electromagnetism was sufficiently sophisticated by this point in the 19th century for its principles to be taken seriously, and the idea of bioelectromagnetism merely extended physics into the discussion of life forms, though not swarms. That came later. Reichenbach was discredited. His research was deemed quackery as he could not produce proof of his theories. Reichenbach has been redeemed, at least the basics of his notion of bioelectromagnetic fields has been picked up, independently, by current researchers. (As Belcher’s “vibrations” have been validated by the string theorists.) True, he was more attracted to darkened rooms and individuals with the empathic capacity to read auras than to scientific labs with their neatly calibrated instruments for measuring magnetic fields. Who can blame him? Now the work in biomagnetism and electrical energy, including release of photons by living organisms, has shifted to solid empirical footing. Ultraweak photon emissions can be detected and measured. Corona discharge. Electrified air molecules gain and lose electrons. We all give off small amount of light.[vii]
Radiance intensifies in the supercharged field of high stakes news. Trouble is an aftershock reaction to the anticipation of possibilities that shatter the comfort zone. Nothing imaginable is impossible, and the corruption of the body politic seeps into the individual spirit with pernicious delight, consuming energy, building momentum towards its own dark goals.
In the 1930s, Salvador Dali devised what he called a paranoiac-critical method as part of his artistic practice. This involved voluntarily inducing a paranoid state (fear, irrationality, persecution/surveillance/mind control) and then allowing all possible associations and interpretations to drive production–-and eventually reception–-of the work. The most important feature of the method was that it prompted hallucinatory production through imagery with multiple suggestive qualities, inexhaustible by a single reading, irreducible to a unified meaning. This was meant to produce a delirium of irrational linking.[viii] (Too bad he was also a fascist sympathizer. Maybe that is more than an incidental aspect of his method.) Dali also dallied with quantum mysticism, many tenets of which don’t seem particularly mystical these days.[ix] Statements like “No observer separate from reality […]” or “The body is only perceived as solid matter, in essence, made of energy and information” or “Time is a human perception not a reality” feel commonplace in our century, familiar as it is with quantum physics. The new-age tone of “There is a fundamental consciousness or intelligence that connects everyone” closely resembles Michael Levin’s “mind everywhere” concept.[x]
But Dali’s hyperbolic emphasis on associative excess presents a small scale version of the extreme condition of connections generated in the current technological imagination where paranoia, as already noted, will remain insufficient to the larger scale of the activity. Dali’s desire to hallucinate is a mere trifle in contrast to the hallucinations of the ever-emergent systems with which we are entangled, literally, in an unbounded condition of nonlocality infinitely increasing in density of connections. These are not general or generic, not a everything-to-everything replete condition, but rather, directed vectors that follow intention or its absence, affectively driven, like sniffers in a race towards a kill.
Deepfake schemes harvest fear and express it as vivid nightmare realizations that fulfill the collective anticipation of the worst thing that could happen. Individual propriety is inadequate to resist the shattering effects on what was once proprietary dignity which spirals out in response to the signals purporting to report a fact of being. All wrong and so potent.
What does it mean to invoke the autopoiesis of stochastic systems in contemporary political culture and connect that to paranoia? In Stochastic Poetics (2014), I attempted to lay out a theory of the non-linear development of cultural forms with poetry as the case study.[xi] Do we imagine that the forms of poetic expression emerge over time in a deterministic way? Was Ezra Pound inevitable within the lineage and legacy of William Shakespeare? Was Bernadette Mayer always to be anticipated once Hildegard of Bingen existed? Or was Marcel Proust or even Samuel Pepys the mechanism through which Mayer arrived at Midwinter Day?[xii] Or are the developments through which cultural forms emerge subject to variables that are not predictable? That seems to be the case, even though some transformations feel less predictable than others, and we can track, for instance, the history of Language Poetry through the education of its practitioners or of Postmodern architecture through the tradition of overthrowing precedent and citing historical motifs for new purposes. But what makes these come about? What makes any cultural or social phenomenon emerge? Poetics is a tiny laboratory example of the indeterminism of forms that become highly specific as they are instantiated. How to connect this to current political systems?
The difference between politics and poetics is, first of all, a matter of scale. Poets may exist in abundance, but politics makes many more people feel like stakeholders directly affected by decisions made at every level of public life. What makes people think as they do? Or, more importantly, what makes them not think? Rational discussions of these matters go nowhere because they do not engage with affect and its influence. The pretense of rational thought is the legacy of Enlightenment mythology. Give it up. The models of behavior within the social sphere should be based on the same level of volatility as weather whose fluid dynamics are the most complex system we analyze.[xiii] Subjective meteorology, psychic weather, can be analyzed at every scale. The rates of change vary with location, conditions, circumstances. All components are participatory. Fascism is alignment working through the social medium. Think iron filings on a surface and the force of a magnetic pole. That simple.
A terrifying power resides in the aggregation of systems, the emergence of self-organizing and dis-organizing influences moving through the social medium. The perturbances register unease as well as uplift excitement that generates its own extra forces. The actual conditions far exceed the capacity of our imaginary understanding. We are the medium through which these energies move, have their way. We serve as connecting tissue as well as being oscillators resonating with thought forms not our own. Through how many other minds, mouths, brains have those words passed before going through your own? We are only the pale shadow of the evolving complexity, conjured into being as an afterthought of those dynamic configurations. Connections faster than the speed of synapses, better than light, unfettered by space and time, functioning in fully non-local modes, all occur simultaneously and without end. Where is the record of all this, written in what light, what holographic information space, what field of participatory action, all inclusive?
A cautionary note: The adoption of language from quantum physics tends to go metaphoric very quickly, losing rigor and grounding in actual science. But certain terms supply concepts essential for social analysis—-superposition, entanglement/non-locality, and nondeterminism–-because social situations are complex systems, driven by more variables than can be predicted. Why it matters? Politics are the persuasion and torque zones of the social, the place where drives and distortions twist the rhetorical forces along lines of motivation and self-interest. Emergent phenomena? How could they be otherwise. Who benefits? Ideology 101. The more something appears to be natural, the more it is cultural. The question to ask—-in whose interests is it for something to appear to be “just what is”? Not enough to unmask. The task is as fluid as it is elusive, given the shape-shifting conditions of social life as a massive mutable emergent thought form.
Observing systems permeate the atmosphere they create. The mechanisms of uptake and transmission are the merest trifle in relation to the communication transfers that move through air, earth, mind, and matter. The connections made overtly, even covertly, barely begin to track the scale of exchange generated in each instant across the social spacetime.
To understand such alignments, recall magnetic fields and electromagnetic induction. These take us back again in a quick flyover to the 19th century figures Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Just picture the handsome young Faraday, wrapping an iron bar with a wire coil and sending a current through it. Even the electrons were seduced into lining up. The swarm behavior of the particles is nothing to the effects at a larger scale. The concept of stigmergy invokes a connection between behaviors and agency, with the belief that actions leave a trace in the environment that they help guide further actions. This could be described as the reciprocity of experience and agency within a distributed system. Insect swarms will respond to light perturbations that disturb the group.[xiv] If political events are not a disruption of the social equilibrium, what is? The stochasm is a spastic pulse in the non-linear sequence of events shared by a social network. The pulse travels with the intensity of a wave form but each nodal point it moves through becomes another source from which the signal radiates outward. The signal does not remain intact as it is in play, but gets replaced at a variable refresh rate. But the flood through the system rushes the social mind into collective thought—-not as some weird telepathic merger, but as an ongoing process of aggregation (organizing and disorganizing simultaneously) of individual responses. If the specificity of such thoughtforms gets diluted as they emerge, the affective force intensifies. Back to the heat map image, not as an analogy, but as a model of what is occurring as force fields rise and fall. Psychic weather, again, the dynamics of the social atmosphere. The politics of perturbation and the perturbances of political formations are fully integrated. In some instances, even entangled, so intimately co-dependent (deep-end-ed) they cannot be imagined independently let alone act as autonomous agents. Once the concept of autonomy is off the table the political volatility of the whole assumes a new form.
Magnetic seduction emanates. Charisma wafts through air as if the very light were charged by the enigma of influence. Charms induce a reaction formation and the hesitant others fall into alignment, peas rolling into a trough. Resistance fades as the face mesmerizes the viewership in the wake of a breaking wave of consumption. Some configurations dissipate more rapidly than others as their imprint on the molecular structure of opinion fades.
Another note on our case study: A news briefing from the administration at which the Chief Executive speaks, reporters are present, as are security, staff, communications technicians, assistants through every level of hierarchy, and all of the many attendees as well as the extended networks of audience in their various degrees and temporalities of delay and distance. A common occurrence, we barely stop to consider it as a phenomenon and to reflect on the multiple dimensions of its actualization and infrastructures on which it depends. Rather than take the event apart with a simple description of its many interlocking pieces, let’s reimagine it as a signal field, an accumulation of electrical and electromagnetic actions and interactions. In other words, reduce the whole cultural and social situation to its physical essence and see what happens, watch as the story is not transmitted but transmutated through the mediating systems.
New research in the collective intelligence of cell groups maps onto behaviors of human groups. We aggregate and disaggregate. This work also demonstrates the capacities of single cells to “learn” and anticipate events.[xv] The cell groups “become more coherent in their causal structure after learning.” The suggestion that arises is that agency and cognition are scale free properties of sufficiently organized complex systems—-systems that can integrate information, store learned state, and exert coherent causal control over their future behavior. Again, Levin’s concept of “TAME—-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” includes a notion that information is retained through quantum field dynamics. Whatever that means. He points to biological memory systems that be believes are not “generating information ex nihilo, but rather accessing and interfacing with information already encoded in the quantum structure of space itself.” Okay, sure. With this in mind, he suggests that cognition is the scale free property of organized matter. A group in Australia at the Cortical Labs (CL1), claims that a biological computer of living human neural tissue they built has learned to play Doom (programmed in Python).[xvi] Earlier the same group experimented with an electro-active jelly, a polymer, with no biological parts, and interfaced it with a game of Pong. The substance improved performance accuracy in about 20 minutes (ion migration and distribution become a memory mechanism and connect with sensory-motor feedback loops). If ion migration can encode information through/in spatial distribution patterns then…. “space itself, at quantum scales, might possess intrinsic memory properties.”[xvii] This new theoretical framework of “spacememory” is relevant for describing the processes of stochastic formations that arise in the political sphere where self-reinforcing patterns give rise to forces of persuasion. What takes over takes us over.
Rogue thoughts create a ripple effect in the public atmosphere. The nodes and edges collapse into a system of rapid-fire exchange. The nightmare lights up. The skies are not immune to their attack and the cloud formations scramble messages to preserve their moisture in hope they can produce a cleansing rain. Still, the signals proliferate, gone viral in the headlights of attention on which they feed, sucking energy from its biosources.
Paranoia again. Think about it. No amount of imagining how connections are being made in every instant is sufficient to track where information is made, circulated, stored, distorted, reused, and multiplied. Go back to the “live” newscast of that press briefing. Start with what “live” means and the five to ten second delay that is standard practice and its relation to the femto-seconds of computational processing. The window of possibilities within which the chance to alter content exists is crammed with fact-checking and adherence to regulations. The combination of human scanners and AI monitors buzzes in the newsroom where the number of searches creates a network of moment to moment connections looking for overt and hidden meanings and language with unintended or insidious consequences. Every word might be a clue to some encoded discourse, some heinous semiotics in which thought forms appear just long enough to erase their footprint even as the memes create their own configurations in the aetheric mass of data synapses sparking through the atmosphere. Where do they go, these configured communications? In what universe does the pattern of electrical exchange remain inscribed in the history of electromagnetic waves released from the surface of the earth? Who reads this legend later? Now? In the earth-bound universe those fact-check searches generated by keystroke commands or voice prompts–-where do they go? Data expands exponentially and the networks of connection outstrip production as possibilities proliferate. The truck leaving from CERN with its small canister of antimatter might not reach its destination intact. Will thought remain in its formations long enough to reach anywhere?
The zero point field is where everything happens, Erwin Laszlo asserted, decades ago, thinking holographically. Merging into a hierarchical cognitive system, I alter my state of consciousness through distortion of the electromagnetic field. Slippery as an eel in oil my mind glides into the lowest possible slowest shared resonance state. Jelly brain.
The mechanics of Isaac Newton’s physics and mind-body dualism of René Descartes have long been superseded, useful as they may be in certain applied circumstances. For making a pulley, lifting a load, or building a bridge, or plotting a position on a coordinate graph their methods work. But for understanding space, time, or the psyche? Or, more to the point of the current crises, politics? Straitjacketed within empirical paradigms, the social “scientists” of our times continue their bleak bland analyses of the chaos spreading with the force of black mold into the global psycho-system and wonder at its force. The self-(dis)organizing systems of the autopoietic political sphere feed on meme streams whose viral potency replicates through every transaction. Wake up people. Demographics don’t explain the forces at work, only the substrate through which they operate.
fEYEnman diagram modified further, pen and graphite, 2026, © Johanna Drucker
From radiance to oscillation, from electromagnetism to communication fields, and from the mechanics of transmission to the dynamics of social atmospheres. Politics? The pole of alignment at any given point, location, moment, state. Affective forces drive the emerging alignments. We know the power of pheromones. Now, address the potency of pheromemes, those strategic carriers of meaning and affect. We are not doomed, just dynamically dissipative. The circumstantial situatedness of our condition cancels the myth of autonomy even if it does not obliterate the capacity for individual agency. We are locations in a field, activating our constrained dynamic within its sphere of influence. Or confluence. Induction is seduction, an alignment of specific particulars into a pattern of behavior. Do the systems replicate through us? Can they feed themselves and sustain their existence from an ongoing metabolic exchange? How could it be otherwise. Autopoietic, indeterminate in their behavior, constrained by the constitutive conditions of intra-active codependence the contemporary systems, the phenomena are in constant dynamic flux, unable to be contained in any easy analysis premised on deterministic mechanics. Psycho dynamics are fueled by paranoiac energies that function as a flywheel to the generative system. No end in sight. No insight ends. The charge proliferates. Maxwell’s happy demon gleefully abandons his post, leaving the sorting decisions to random generators of the social atmosphere.
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, contemporary art, and digital humanities. Her recent book publications include Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist (Hopkins, 2022), Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture (The Bridge, 2025). In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is known for her creative artist’s book publications which are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. She had a retrospective exhibit of her visual work, Graphic Animism, in Los Angeles in early 2025. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript, Social Physics, on the topics covered in this article. For more information: www.johannadrucker.net and https://johannadrucker.substack.com/
[i] Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, “The Easy Part of the Hard Problem: A Resonance Theory of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2019 Oct 31:13:378. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31736728/
[ii] Michael Levin, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 2022 Mar 24:16:768201 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8988303/
[iii] William Belcher, Intellectual Electricity: Novum Organum of vision, and grand mystic secret: Being an experimental and practical system of the passions, metaphysics, and religion, really genuine: with appropriate extracts from Sir Isaac Newton. (London: 1798)
[iv] Monolithic Power Systems, Basic Principles of Motor Operation, https://www.monolithicpower.com/en/learning/mpscholar/electric-motors/introduction-to-motors/basic-principles-of-motor-operation
[v] Shivani Shukla, Colin J. Comerci, Gürol M. Süel, and Zeinab Jahed. “Bioelectronic tools for understanding the universal language of electrical signaling across species and kingdoms.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956566324008509
[vi] Baron Karl von Reichenback, Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, Tr. William Gregory, London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1850. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018742130&view=1up&seq=9
[vii] Mike McCrae, 7 January 2026, Health; https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-vanishes-when-we-die-surprising-study-says
[viii] Salvador Dali, ”Paranoia Critical Method.” https://www.salvadordali.com/art-2/ and https://mma.pages.tufts.edu/fah188/clifford/Subsections/Paranoid%20Critical/paranoidcriticalmethod.html
[ix] Tufts University, Museum of Modern Art, “Nuclear Mysticism,” (on Dali): https://mma.pages.tufts.edu/fah188/clifford/Subsections/NuclearMysticism/nuclearmysticism.html
[x] Levin, 2022 op.cit. and also, Michael Levin, “More Mind Everywhere.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-025-00524-5
[xi] Johanna Drucker, Stochastic Poetics (Los Angeles and NY: Druckwerk and Granary, 2012-2014).
[xii] Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (NY: New Directions, 1982).
[xiii] My work Subjective Meteorology (2004) presents a systematic approach to personal/psychic weather based on a template from traditional meteorology, instrumentalizing the metaphors of scientific language towards a different end. Johanna Drucker, Subjective Meteorology (Charlottesville, VA: Druckwerk, 2004)
[xiv] Michael Sinhuber, Kasper van der Vaart, Nicholas T. Ouellett, “Response of insect swarms to dynamic illumination perturbations.” J.R. Soc. Interface. 2019. Jan 9. 16(150):20180739. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6364661/
[xv] Dr. William Brown, “Cognition Without Brains: How Memory Emerges in Brains, Cells, and Spacetime.” 3/20/2026 https://spacefed.com/biology/cognition-without-brains-how-memory-emerges-in-polymers-cells-and-spacetime/
[xvi] Cortical Labs, https://corticallabs.com/cl1.html see also, Andrew Paul, “Computer run on human brain cells learned to play “Doom.” March 2, 2026, Popular Science. https://www.popsci.com/technology/human-brain-cell-computer-plays-doom/
[xvii] Levin, 2022, op.cit.