Brazilian-American physicist/neurologist Dr. Sirley Marques Bonham of the Relativity Group, Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas. Sirley holds a PhD in physics and has done post-doctoral research into Relativity and its implications.
But what makes Sirley an intriguing guest is that she is also a qualified neurologist and (most importantly) is fascinated by her own out-of-body experiences, encounters with lucid dreaming and hypnagogia.
first came to the US in 1986 to follow post-doctoral research with the Astrophysics Group at the University of Chicago and the NASA-financed Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia (IL), near Chicago. Her main scientific work was done in an extension of Einstein’s unified field theory, but she has also worked in neuroscience research at the University of Texas at Austin, and in biophysics for the US Air Force in San Antonio, Texas. She has also taught at universities in Brazil, South Africa, and the US.
Dr. Bonham’s involvement with the phenomenon of Consciousness, as viewed by neuroscience, started in 1992 through a group of scientists at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, followed by a brief work with a group for research in neuroscience, specifically in the processes of memory and learning, at the University of Texas at Austin. Though she has learned about the paranormal through her father’s interest in this area, it has been her practice to approach this science strongly rooted in a scientific perspective, which has influenced her personal self-experimentation with the phenomenon of awareness during sleep, represented by the modern approach to the so-called out-of-body experiences, and the recently developed techniques of lucid-dreaming.
Dr. Bonham came to live in Austin, Texas, in 1993. She presently is a visiting scholar at the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a member and scientist of the Institute for Neurosciences and Consciousness Studies (INACS). Her writings can be accessed at inacs.org/sirley-marques-bonham.