Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum: The Transferred Potential and the Vanished Scientist

How a Mexican Neuroscientist Proved Brain-to-Brain Connection and Then Disappeared Forever

On December 14, 1994, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum — one of Mexico’s most brilliant and prolific neuroscientists, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the author of more than fifty books, and the man who had produced some of the most provocative experimental evidence for direct consciousness-to-consciousness communication ever recorded — vanished without a trace.

He has never been found.

His disappearance remains one of Mexico’s most enduring mysteries, the subject of documentaries, books, and investigative journalism that has produced theories ranging from murder to voluntary retreat to the most exotic possibility of all: that a man who spent his life studying the boundaries of consciousness may have found a way to step beyond those boundaries entirely.

But before the mystery of his disappearance, there is the mystery of his science — experimental findings so provocative, so carefully controlled, and so disturbing to the materialist paradigm that they have been systematically marginalized by mainstream neuroscience for three decades.

The experiment that made his name — the transferred potential experiment — is one of the most important and least known experiments in the history of consciousness research.

The Man: A Mind Between Worlds

Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum was born in 1946 in Mexico City to a Jewish family that had emigrated from Eastern Europe. His early life was marked by tragedy — his mother’s death when he was a teenager left a wound that, by his own account, drove his lifelong search for the deeper nature of consciousness and reality.

He earned his doctorate in physiological psychology from the New York Medical Center and returned to Mexico to establish the psychophysiology laboratory at UNAM, where he would conduct research for over two decades. His academic output was prodigious: more than fifty published books, hundreds of papers, and a research program that spanned conventional neuroscience, psychophysiology, shamanic states of consciousness, and the most radical experiments in consciousness transfer ever designed.

Grinberg was not a fringe figure. He held one of the most prestigious research positions in Mexican academia. He was supported by UNAM, by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), and by international collaborators. His conventional neuroscience work — on perception, brain mapping, and the neural correlates of attention — was solid and well-regarded.

But Grinberg was not content with conventional neuroscience. His personal experience — which included extensive study with Mexican curanderos (traditional healers), shamans, and psychics — had convinced him that consciousness was not confined to the brain. He had witnessed phenomena — in shamanic ceremonies, in healing sessions, in meditation — that his neuroscience training could not explain. And unlike most scientists who encounter such phenomena, he decided to bring them into the laboratory.

The Neuronal Field Theory

Before the transferred potential experiment, Grinberg developed a theoretical framework that he called the Syntergic Theory or, more commonly, the Neuronal Field Theory.

The core idea: the brain does not produce consciousness. Instead, the brain interacts with a pre-existing field of consciousness — the “neuronal field” — that permeates and surrounds the organism. This field is not electromagnetic (Grinberg distinguished it from the bioelectric fields measured by Burr and Becker). It is a field of a fundamentally different type — what Grinberg called a “lattice” or “matrix” of interacting neural events that, at a sufficient level of coherence, creates a unified field of awareness.

In Grinberg’s model, individual brains are like tuning forks vibrating in a shared medium. Each brain generates a specific pattern of activity that creates a distortion or “pocket” in the neuronal field. When two brains achieve coherence — when their patterns of neural activity become synchronized — they interact through the neuronal field directly, without any physical signal passing between them.

This theory predicted a specific, testable phenomenon: if two people achieve sufficient brain coherence (through meditation, emotional bonding, or other means of synchronization), then a stimulus applied to one brain should produce a measurable effect in the other brain — even if the two brains are completely isolated from each other by distance and shielding.

This prediction is what Grinberg tested in the transferred potential experiment.

The Transferred Potential Experiment

The experimental protocol was elegantly designed and rigorously controlled.

Procedure

1. Two participants are selected. In the initial experiments, they are people who have a strong emotional bond — couples, close friends, or people who have meditated together extensively.

2. The pair meditates together for approximately 20 minutes in the same room. The purpose is to establish neural coherence — to synchronize their brain activity. During this period, both participants are connected to EEG (electroencephalogram) recording equipment.

3. After the meditation period, the two participants are separated into different rooms. The rooms are electromagnetically shielded (Faraday cages) to prevent any conventional electromagnetic communication between them. There is no sensory contact between the rooms — no sound, no light, no physical connection.

4. One participant (the “stimulated” subject) receives a series of light flashes — brief, bright flashes delivered to the eyes at random intervals. These flashes produce a well-characterized brain response called an “evoked potential” — a specific voltage pattern in the visual cortex that is time-locked to the flash. Evoked potentials are a standard measurement in clinical neuroscience.

5. The other participant (the “non-stimulated” subject) sits in the shielded room with no stimulation of any kind. Their EEG is recorded continuously.

6. The critical comparison: the EEG of the non-stimulated subject is analyzed for the presence of a signal that is correlated with the light flashes delivered to the stimulated subject. If the non-stimulated subject shows a brain response time-locked to the flashes that they could not have seen, heard, or otherwise detected through any known physical channel, this constitutes evidence of direct brain-to-brain transfer — what Grinberg called the “transferred potential.”

Results

Grinberg’s findings, first published in 1994 in the journal Physics Essays, were clear and reproducible:

The transferred potential was detected. The non-stimulated subject’s EEG showed a voltage pattern correlated with the light flashes delivered to the stimulated subject. The pattern was not identical to the evoked potential of the stimulated subject but was clearly time-locked to the same stimulus.

The effect was present in pairs who had meditated together and established coherence. It was absent or greatly reduced in control pairs who had not meditated together.

The effect persisted even with electromagnetic shielding (Faraday cages) that would block any conventional electromagnetic signal.

The effect was not explained by any known artifact: electrical leakage was eliminated by the shielding; acoustic leakage was eliminated by the room construction; and the randomization of the flash timing eliminated any predictability.

Replications

The transferred potential experiment has been replicated independently, most notably by:

• Leanna Standish and colleagues at the Bastyr University Research Institute (Seattle, Washington), who in 2004 published an fMRI-based replication in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. Their protocol was similar to Grinberg’s, but they used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) instead of EEG to detect the transferred potential. They found statistically significant activation in the visual cortex of the non-stimulated subject when the stimulated subject was shown a visual stimulus — corroborating Grinberg’s EEG findings with a completely different neuroimaging technology.

• Jiri Wackermann and colleagues at the University of Freiburg (Germany), who published a series of studies in the 2000s using EEG methodology and found evidence for correlated brain activity in separated pairs, though with smaller effect sizes than Grinberg’s original studies.

• Todd Richards and colleagues, also at Bastyr/University of Washington, who found evidence for the transferred potential using EEG in a 2005 study published in Explore.

These replications, conducted by independent laboratories using different imaging technologies and different participant populations, strengthen the case that the transferred potential is a genuine phenomenon — not an artifact of Grinberg’s specific laboratory or methodology.

The Shamanic Connection: Pachita and the Curanderos

Grinberg’s consciousness research was deeply informed by his extensive fieldwork with traditional Mexican healers — curanderos, shamans, and folk psychics. He documented these encounters in a series of books, the most famous of which deals with Pachita, a legendary Mexican curandera who practiced in Mexico City.

Pachita (Barbara Guerrero) was known for performing what appeared to be psychic surgeries — healings involving apparent manipulation of the body that defied medical explanation. Grinberg spent years observing and documenting Pachita’s work, approaching it with the same empirical rigor he applied to his laboratory research.

His accounts of Pachita’s healings are extraordinary. He describes sessions in which Pachita appeared to insert her hands into patients’ bodies without incisions, to remove diseased tissue, and to replace organs — all without anesthesia, without sterile conditions, and without the patients showing the expected physiological responses to what would have been, in conventional surgical terms, major operations.

Grinberg did not claim to understand how these healings worked. He documented them carefully, photographed them, recorded physiological measurements when possible, and presented them as data — phenomena that his science could not explain but that he had observed repeatedly and could not dismiss.

His fieldwork with curanderos and shamans convinced him that certain individuals could achieve levels of consciousness coherence that allowed them to interact directly with the neuronal field — to perceive information not available through normal sensory channels and to influence physical reality through consciousness alone. This conviction drove his laboratory research: if shamans could do these things in the field, perhaps the underlying mechanism could be detected and measured in the laboratory.

The transferred potential experiment was, in essence, a laboratory analog of what shamans do routinely: connecting consciousness to consciousness, transmitting information or influence without a physical medium.

The Disappearance

On December 14, 1994, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum was last seen at his home in Mexico City. He was 48 years old, in the prime of his career, with active research programs, upcoming publications, and international collaborations.

He simply vanished.

His car was found parked normally. His personal effects were undisturbed. There were no signs of violence. No body was ever recovered. No ransom demand was ever made. No credible sighting was ever reported.

The investigation — conducted by Mexican authorities and later by private investigators hired by his family — produced no definitive conclusions. Several theories emerged:

The murder theory. Some investigators believe Grinberg was killed, possibly in connection with his personal relationships (he was going through a difficult separation from his second wife at the time of his disappearance) or in connection with criminal elements. Mexico in 1994 was experiencing significant political instability and violence (it was the year of the Zapatista uprising and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio). However, no evidence of murder has ever been found.

The voluntary disappearance theory. Some who knew Grinberg suggest he may have chosen to disappear — to withdraw from his public life and pursue his consciousness research in private, perhaps in a remote location. His lifelong study of shamanism and altered states had given him knowledge of communities and practices far from the mainstream. However, it seems improbable that a man with deep ties to his family, his students, and his research program would simply walk away without a word to anyone.

The consciousness theory. The most exotic theory — and the one that has captured public imagination — is that Grinberg’s consciousness research somehow led to his disappearance. Some have speculated that his deep engagement with shamanic practices and consciousness exploration led to a state from which he did not return — a literal dissolution of physical boundaries. This theory is unprovable and perhaps unfalsifiable, but it reflects the sense of awe and unease that Grinberg’s work evokes.

The most likely explanation, given the context of Mexico in the 1990s, is probably the most mundane: a victim of violence in a violent time and place. But the absence of any evidence, any body, any resolution — after thirty years — keeps the mystery alive.

The Work’s Significance: What the Transferred Potential Means

Setting aside the mystery of his disappearance, what does Grinberg’s transferred potential experiment mean for consciousness research?

If the findings are valid — and the independent replications suggest they are — the implications are profound:

Consciousness is non-local. The transferred potential cannot be explained by any known physical mechanism. Electromagnetic signals are blocked by the Faraday cages. Acoustic signals are blocked by the room construction. No particle or wave traveling through space could carry the information. The transfer of neural activity from one brain to another, without a physical medium, implies that consciousness operates non-locally — that it is not confined to the physical brain.

Coherence enables connection. The transferred potential appears only in pairs who have achieved neural coherence through meditation or emotional bonding. Random pairs do not show the effect. This suggests that the connection between consciousnesses is not automatic or universal but depends on the degree of coherence between them. Coherence — achieved through meditation, love, or shared practice — opens a channel.

The neuronal field may be real. Grinberg’s theoretical framework — the neuronal field as a pre-existing consciousness medium that individual brains interact with — provides a parsimonious explanation for the transferred potential. The field model explains both the non-locality (the field is everywhere, not confined to physical locations) and the coherence requirement (only brains vibrating in phase can interact through the field).

Shamanic practices have a scientific basis. Grinberg’s fieldwork and laboratory work converge: the consciousness-to-consciousness connection that shamans describe and practice is measurable, reproducible, and real. The transferred potential is the laboratory evidence for what shamans call “merging” or “journeying” — the direct connection of one consciousness to another without physical intermediation.

Critics and Challenges

The transferred potential experiment faces significant criticisms:

Small sample sizes. Grinberg’s original studies involved relatively few participants. The effects, while statistically significant, are based on limited data. Larger, pre-registered replication attempts are needed.

The expectation problem. Participants who meditate together before the experiment know they are part of a consciousness experiment. Their expectations could influence their brain activity in ways that produce apparent correlations without genuine transfer. However, the fMRI replications (where brain activity is measured directly and is less susceptible to demand characteristics) partially address this concern.

Publication bias. Like all parapsychological research, the transferred potential studies may suffer from publication bias — negative results may go unpublished, inflating the apparent effect. The independent replications mitigate this concern but do not eliminate it.

The mechanism problem. No known physical mechanism can account for the transferred potential. Grinberg’s neuronal field theory is a hypothesis, not an established physical theory, and it does not specify the nature of the field or how it mediates brain-to-brain transfer. Without a mechanism, the finding remains anomalous — a fact in search of a theory.

Grinberg in the Digital Dharma Framework: The Network Protocol

Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum’s work reveals the most radical capability of the consciousness operating system: networked awareness. Direct brain-to-brain communication without a physical channel.

If the body is wetware, the transferred potential experiment shows that the wetware has built-in networking capability — the ability to connect to other wetware units without going through any physical medium. This is not Wi-Fi (electromagnetic radiation); it is something more fundamental — a networking protocol that operates through what Grinberg called the neuronal field and what other frameworks might call the quantum vacuum, the implicate order, or the unified field.

If DNA is source code, Grinberg’s work suggests the code includes networking protocols that are activated by specific conditions — coherence, meditation, emotional bonding. The transferred potential does not occur between random brains; it occurs between brains that have been “paired” through coherence practice. This is analogous to device pairing in Bluetooth technology: the devices must go through a synchronization protocol before they can communicate.

If consciousness is the operating system, the transferred potential demonstrates that the OS is fundamentally networked — that individual consciousness is not an isolated process but a node in a larger consciousness network. This is precisely the yogic concept of shared consciousness (the idea that all individual consciousnesses are expressions of a single universal consciousness, Brahman) and the shamanic concept of the web of life (the idea that all consciousnesses are connected through a living field).

Grinberg’s neuronal field theory maps directly onto the shamanic concept of the “dream” or “field” that connects all beings. The shamanic practice of “merging” with another consciousness — whether a plant spirit, an animal ally, or another human — is the practical application of what Grinberg measured in his laboratory: the transferred potential, the direct coupling of two consciousness systems through a shared field.

The meditation prerequisite for the transferred potential is particularly significant. It suggests that the consciousness network is always there — like the internet, it is always on — but that individual consciousnesses must be in a specific state (coherent, quiet, open) to access it. Meditation is the boot sequence that activates the network interface. Without it, the connection exists but is not utilized.

Key Works

• “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential” (Physics Essays, 1994) — The foundational paper on the transferred potential experiment
• La Consciencia (multiple volumes) — Grinberg’s comprehensive series on consciousness
• Pachita: Del Mundo de los Curanderos al Laboratorio de Psicofisiologia — Documentation of the curandera Pachita
• Creation of Experience — Theoretical framework for the neuronal field theory
• Over fifty books published in Spanish, covering neuroscience, consciousness, shamanism, and meditation

The Bottom Line

Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum produced some of the most important experimental evidence in the history of consciousness research: direct, measurable evidence that one brain can affect another brain without any physical connection, that this transfer depends on coherence between the two brains, and that meditation and emotional bonding create the conditions for this transfer.

Then he disappeared.

His transferred potential experiment has been independently replicated using different technologies in different countries by different research teams. The phenomenon appears to be real. And it implies something that materialist neuroscience cannot accommodate: that consciousness is not confined to the skull, that brains can communicate directly through a field that transcends physical space, and that coherence — the state achieved through meditation and love — is the key that opens this channel.

Whether Grinberg is alive or dead, his science remains — stubborn, replicated, unexplained by any materialist framework, and pointing toward a reality in which the boundaries between minds are far more permeable than the walls between Faraday cages.