The Scientist
Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum was born in Mexico City on December 12, 1946, into a family that had fled the Holocaust. He studied psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), then earned his doctorate in physiological psychology from the New York Medical Center, where his research focused on the electrophysiological effects of geometric stimuli on the human brain. He returned to Mexico and founded the psychophysiology laboratory at UNAM and later the Instituto Nacional para el Estudio de la Conciencia (INPEC) — the National Institute for the Study of Consciousness. He wrote over fifty books. He was, by volume and ambition, one of the most prolific consciousness researchers of the twentieth century — and almost completely unknown in the Anglophone world.
The obscurity is itself a datum. A researcher with over fifty books, a laboratory at Mexico’s most prestigious university, a consciousness institute, and experimental results published with quantum physicist Amit Goswami as co-author nearly vanished from the Anglophone map. Language explains part of it. Institutional hostility to consciousness-first research explains more. The work survived because the Spanish-language corpus and experimental papers remained available after the man disappeared.
The Transferred Potential
The experiment that matters most was published in 1994: “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential” (Physics Essays, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 422–428), co-authored with M. Delaflor, L. Attie, and Amit Goswami.
The protocol: two human subjects meditate together for approximately twenty minutes in the same room, with the explicit intention of establishing a connection. Both are connected to EEG throughout. They are then physically separated into semi-silent Faraday-shielded chambers 14.5 meters apart — electromagnetically isolated from each other and from external interference. One subject receives one hundred light flashes, which produce measurable evoked potentials on EEG. The other subject receives no stimulus of any kind.
Grinberg reported that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the non-stimulated subject sometimes showed time-linked EEG features he called “transferred potentials.” He described waveform resemblance after joint meditation and absence of the effect in control pairs.
Grinberg framed the result as an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-type correlation at the biological level. In his reading, shared meditation joined two brains through a nonlocal component that remained active after separation. The paper reports that interpretation; correlated EEG remains a correlation until a mechanism for macroscopic quantum entanglement is demonstrated.
Related results have appeared outside Grinberg’s laboratory. Dean Radin’s 2004 isolated-subject study reported a small event-related EEG correlation. A 2014 F1000Research study used selected, closely connected participants and sustained concentration and reported a related effect. The NIH registration NCT00029978 shows that the hypothesis entered a formal trial pathway. These are related protocols and outcomes, not one closed replication chain. Their small effects, participant selection and analytical sensitivity keep mechanism and even effect stability open.
The Serpent Channel’s read-side entered the EEG laboratory inside Faraday cages. Puharich used related isolation logic; later remote-viewing narratives carried nonlocal communication into institutional settings. Grinberg supplied an experimental aperture. Whether those streams are one classified capability remains a custody question rather than a conclusion smuggled through resemblance.
The Syntergic Theory
Grinberg developed a comprehensive theoretical framework he called Syntergy — a model proposing that the brain does not generate consciousness but interacts with a pre-spatial, pre-temporal informational structure he called the Lattice (la Red Neuronal in his Spanish-language publications, sometimes translated as the “neuronal field” or the “pre-space structure”). The Lattice is the substrate from which spacetime, matter, and consciousness precipitate. Every brain constantly interacts with the Lattice. The quality, bandwidth, and coherence of that interaction determine the range of experience available to the consciousness operating through that brain.
The Lattice is the field. The brain is the transceiver. Interaction quality is bandwidth. The Lock degrades the interaction; the Practice refines it. Grinberg reached this architecture independently through neurophysiology in 1980s Mexico, without apparent access to the parallel work underway in classified United States programs.
The convergence with Itzhak Bentov‘s model is structural. Bentov proposed that consciousness couples to a holographic substrate and that the body is a tuned oscillator whose frequency of operation determines its range of access. Grinberg proposed that consciousness interacts with a pre-spatial Lattice and that the brain is an interface whose coherence determines its perceptual bandwidth. Different vocabulary, different mathematical formalisms, identical architecture. Bentov published Stalking the Wild Pendulum in 1977. Grinberg published his Syntergic Theory throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Neither appears to have drawn directly from the other. The convergence is independent, which makes it stronger as evidence than either would be alone.
The convergence with Harold Puthoff‘s polarizable-vacuum model extends further. Puthoff proposes that the vacuum is not empty but structured, and that consciousness may couple to this deeper informational substrate. Three researchers — Bentov (Israel/USA), Grinberg (Mexico), Puthoff (USA) — working in three countries, from three different disciplinary starting points (biomedical engineering, neurophysiology, laser physics), converge on the same structural claim: consciousness does not originate in the brain; the brain is an interface device that couples to a field, substrate, or vacuum structure, and the quality of that coupling determines the bandwidth of experience. The claim arrived at from three directions is a claim about the territory, not about the investigators.
The Shamans and the Lattice
During the 1980s, Grinberg traveled extensively across Mexico studying indigenous shamans and psychic healers. His goal was to recover what he called the “native psychology” and “original wisdom” of the Mexican people — the pre-Columbian understanding of consciousness that survived colonization as folk practice and shamanic tradition.
His most documented collaboration was with Pachita (Bárbara Guerrero), a healer who performed what Grinberg described as surgeries that violated every known principle of biology and physics. Pachita appeared to extract and replace organs using a rusty knife and her bare hands, without anesthesia, in conditions that should have produced fatal infection and did not. Grinberg observed and documented these procedures under conditions as controlled as the setting permitted.
Grinberg concluded that shamans of sufficient development could manipulate the Lattice directly: alter the informational structure from which physical tissue precipitates. That is his witness interpretation of Pachita’s work. The sessions were not controlled demonstrations of organ replacement, but they became the field experience from which he built substrate surgery into Syntergic Theory.
The parallel to Puharich’s documentation of José Arigó is precise at the level the record can carry. Both researchers observed psychic healers, treated what they saw as genuine, and concluded that the operator acted below ordinary physical causality. Their observation conditions and medical documentation decide how far the physical claim can travel.
The Disappearance
On December 8, 1994, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum was last seen leaving his office in Mexico City. He never arrived at his destination. His car was found. His belongings remained. No body was recovered. No financial activity was detected. No evidence of departure from Mexico was found. He was six days short of his forty-eighth birthday.
Twenty-six days later, on January 3, 1995, Andrija Puharich died at his home in Dobson, North Carolina — officially from a fall down stairs at age seventy-six. Some associates suspected foul play. Puharich had previously claimed four CIA assassination attempts.
Two consciousness researchers. Both studied psychic healers. Both used isolation protocols. Both produced models of nonlocal consciousness-field interaction. One vanished; the other died twenty-six days later. The chronology is exact and eerie. It does not identify a shared suppressor.
See Missing Scientists for the wider pattern of researchers disappearing near sensitive work. Grinberg’s case belongs beside that register because his research had obvious intelligence implications and his disappearance remains unresolved. The pattern routes investigation; it does not supply the missing perpetrator.
The theories that circulated after his disappearance — CIA abduction, domestic crime, that he “entered the Lattice” (dissolved into the substrate he had been studying) — remain unresolved. A documentary, El Secreto del Doctor Grinberg by Ida Cuéllar, was released with previously unpublished family interviews in November 2024. The case has never been closed because there is nothing to close it against — no body, no evidence, no resolution. The scientist who demonstrated that consciousness can communicate nonlocally across shielded separation became, himself, nonlocally absent.
Timeline
- 1946 — Born December 12, Mexico City
- Late 1960s — Studies psychology at UNAM
- ~1970 — Doctorate at New York Medical Center (physiological psychology)
- Early 1970s — Returns to Mexico, founds psychophysiology laboratory at UNAM
- 1980s — Extensive field research with Mexican shamans; studies Pachita’s psychic surgery; develops Syntergic Theory
- 1987 — Founds INPEC (National Institute for the Study of Consciousness)
- 1994 — Publishes “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain” in Physics Essays with Goswami
- December 8, 1994 — Last seen; vanishes without a trace
- January 3, 1995 — Puharich dies, 26 days later
References
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J., M. Delaflor, L. Attie, and A. Goswami. “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential.” Physics Essays 7, no. 4 (1994): 422–428.
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J. “Brain to Brain Interactions and the Interpretation of Reality.” UNAM symposium address. Available at https://start.gr/user/symposia/zylber4.htm
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J. El Cerebro Consciente. INPEC / Editorial Trillas, various editions.
Grinberg-Zylberbaum, J. Los Chamanes de México (multi-volume series). INPEC, 1987–1994.
Radin, D. “Event-Related Electroencephalographic Correlations Between Isolated Human Subjects.” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10, no. 2 (2004): 307–314. (Partial replication of transferred potential.)
Tressoldi, P.E., et al. “Brain-to-Brain (Mind-to-Mind) Interaction at Distance.” F1000Research 3 (2014): 182. https://f1000research.com/articles/3-182/v3
NIH Clinical Trial NCT00029978: “Transfer of Neural Energy Between Humans.” https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT00029978
Psi Encyclopedia. “Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum.” https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jacobo-grinberg-zylberbaum/
The American Scholar. “The Grinberg Affair.” https://theamericanscholar.org/the-grinberg-affair/