Jacobo Grinberg

Biography

Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum was born in Mexico City in 1946. Grinberg decided to study the human mind when he was 12 years old, after his mother died from a brain tumor. He studied psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of UNAM. In 1970, he went to New York City to study psychophysiology at the Brain Research Institute. He earned a Ph.D. at the E. Roy John Laboratory. His doctoral research focused on the electrophysiological effects of geometric stimuli on the human brain.

When he went back to Mexico, he founded a laboratory of psychophysiology at the Universidad Anáhuac. He installed another laboratory of this kind in UNAM in the late 1970s. He founded the Instituto Nacional para el Estudio de la Conciencia (INPEC) in 1987, financed by UNAM and CONACYT. Jacobo published several of his books through INPEC. Grinberg wrote more than 50 books about brain activity, witchcraft, shamanism, telepathy, and meditation.

Grinberg put his reputation as a scientist in danger when he tried to use the scientific method in shamanism studies. He combined the two in his professional work, always trying to understand the “magic world.” Grinberg attempted to change the way that the relationship between science and consciousness is understood. His work was rejected by fellow scientists as "psi assumption", the premise that any deviation from chance represents a case of telepathy.