Did Jacobo Grinberg Dip Into Another Reality? His Vanishing Still Freaks Us Out

The tale of Jacobo Grinberg, born in Mexico, and his disappearance has perplexed people for decades. He was a scientist and had dedicated his academic career to studying the human brain after his mother’s death of a brain tumor when he was 12 years old. Eventually, his area of study and practice grew to merge his psychophysiology work with his shamanism. His sudden disappearance in 1994 has given way to conspiracy theories and speculation.

Jacobo Grinberg started his science career with a psychology degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Grinberg received his psychology degree from the Faculty of Psychology at UNAM. In 1970, he pursued higher education and traveled to New York City to study psychophysiology at the Brain Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. there, which focused on the electrophysiological effects of geometric stimuli on the human brain.

With this education, Grinberg returned to Mexico and founded his own laboratory at the Universidad Anáhuac to focus on psychophysiology. In the 1980s, he founded the Instituto Nacional para el Estudio de la Conciencia (INPEC), which was funded by his alma mater, UNAM, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).

He was a prolific writer covering the topic of psychophysiology, but many in the community were skeptical

Over the years, Grinberg wrote more than 50 books on the topics of his extensive studies. However, most of his writings were rejected by his peers in the scientific community because of how he would weave in shamanism.

Grinberg wanted to change how people perceived the connection between science and consciousness. The work was an exploration of the “magic world,” and that kind of work didn’t sit right with the scientific community.

According to an essay in The American Scholar, someone claiming to be his relative had similar doubts about his work in the field.

“In my opinion, his use of neurobiological terminology to explain such phenomena as psychokinesis, telepathy, levitation, and retrocausality—as he did in the research papers published early in his career—was highly dubious,” writes Ilan Stavans.

Stavans continues by saying: “He experimented with children in ways that seem suspect, not to say frightening. And he surrounded himself with groupies who, instead of testing his ideas, bowed to his charismatic personality.”

His disappearance is still a mystery 30 years later

Shortly before his 48th birthday in 1994, Grinberg vanished. His work in the psychophysiological field and his attachment to shamanism had given fodder to several conspiracy theories around his disappearance.

One of the most popular theories is that he believed we were living in a simulated reality and that, with enough focus, people would interact with perceptual reality. Based on this understanding, people believe he found a way to move to another plane and simply disappeared into a different realm entirely.

Another theory is that the CIA kidnapped him for knowing too much about the human consciousness. Tbh, people love to suspect that governments are in the business of disappearing people who are thought to be crossing some kind of line.

While there is no real answer to his disappearance, it is fun to speculate what might have happened as he investigated the human brain. There is so much to explore, and his ability to truly dig into the study and discover more might have been enough to make him disappear.