Michael A. Persinger was an American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University, a position he had held from 1971 until his death in 2018. His best-known hypotheses include the temporal lobes of the human brain as the central correlate for mystical experiences, subtle changes in geomagnetic activity as mediators of parapsychological phenomena, the tectonic strain within the Earth's crust as the source of luminous phenomena attributed to unidentified aerial objects, and the importance of specific quantifications for energy, photon flux density, and small shifts in magnetic field intensities for integrating cellular activity as well as human thought with universal phenomena.

Laurentian University, officially Laurentian University of Sudbury, is a mid-sized bilingual public university in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, incorporated on March 28, 1960. Laurentian offers a variety of undergraduate, graduate-level, and doctorate degrees. Laurentian is the largest bilingual provider of distance education in Canada.