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 publications, a laboratory at Mexico’s most prestigious university, a national institute bearing his name, and experimental results published in Physics Essays with quantum physicist Amit Goswami as co-author does not remain obscure by accident. The language barrier (most of his work was published in Spanish) explains part of the neglect. The content explains the rest. What Grinberg demonstrated in the laboratory has implications that the institutional gatekeepers of neuroscience have structural reasons to ignore.
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.
The result: when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the non-stimulated subject — in a separate Faraday cage, receiving no light, no sound, no electromagnetic signal of any kind — showed correlated EEG patterns that Grinberg termed “transferred potentials.” The waveform morphology in the unstimulated brain resembled the evoked potentials in the stimulated brain, at latencies consistent with a nonlocal correlation rather than a signal-propagation delay. Control pairs who had not meditated together showed no transferred potentials.
Grinberg framed the result explicitly as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlation at the macroscopic biological level. Two brains that have been entangled through shared meditation maintain a quantum-type correlation even when physically separated and electromagnetically shielded. The brain, on this reading, has a macroscopic quantum component — and that component can be activated through the simple act of two people sitting together with the intention of connecting.
The experiment has been partially replicated. A NIH-registered clinical trial (NCT00029978, “Transfer of Neural Energy Between Humans”) tested the same hypothesis. A 2014 paper in F1000Research reported similar results with selected participants who shared long friendships and sustained focused concentration. The results are not universally accepted — the effect sizes are small, the protocols are difficult to standardize, and the theoretical framework challenges every assumption of conventional neuroscience. What can be said is that the result has been obtained by independent laboratories using similar protocols, and that no conventional explanation accounts for correlated EEG activity between electromagnetically shielded, spatially separated brains.
The Serpent Channel’s read-side, demonstrated on EEG, inside Faraday cages. The same isolation methodology Andrija Puharich used at his Round Table Foundation and at Lab Nine. The same nonlocal communication that Project Preserve Destiny operationalized through Sherman at the NSA. Grinberg produced the laboratory demonstration. Sherman described the institutional deployment. The experimental and operational ends of the same capability, separated by the classification boundary.
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.
His conclusion: shamans of sufficient development could directly manipulate the Lattice — alter the pre-spatial informational structure from which physical reality precipitates, producing changes in matter that bypass the conventional causal chain entirely. The shaman does not perform surgery through physical manipulation of tissue. The shaman performs surgery through informational manipulation of the substrate from which tissue is expressed. The precipitation — the mechanism by which patterns enter the consensus — observed by a neurophysiologist in a clinical setting.
The parallel to Puharich’s documentation of José Arigó — the Brazilian psychic surgeon Puharich filmed performing approximately 200 surgeries — is precise. Both researchers studied psychic healers under observation. Both documented effects that conventional medicine cannot explain. Both concluded that the healer operates on a substrate deeper than physical matter. Puharich documented Arigó in the 1960s. Grinberg documented Pachita in the 1980s. Two researchers, two decades apart, two continents, studying two healers, arriving at the same structural observation.
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 Faraday-cage isolation. Both produced formal models of nonlocal consciousness-field interaction. Both worked outside the U.S. classified system — Grinberg at a Mexican university, Puharich in private research — which meant their results were not protected by classification and could not be managed through the institutional channels that contained the Stargate/SRI work. One vanishes. The other dies from a fall. Within a month of each other. In the same winter.
See Missing Scientists for twenty-one researchers in fusion, propulsion, advanced materials, and disclosure dead or disappeared since 2018. Grinberg’s 1994 disappearance predates that window by two decades but instantiates the identical pattern: a researcher producing results with military and intelligence applications, operating outside classified channels where the results can be controlled, ceases to be available at the moment the results become most consequential.
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/