When you consider people controllingelectricity with their mind a couple of things come to mind. The first would be science fiction and the second would be Magneto from X-Men and his purple helmet. However, stuff like this is starting to appear in the real world. Debbie Wolf who lives near Brighton is one of the growing number of ‘SLIders’. An SLIder is a person who believes that they have the ability to interefere with electical appliances, anything from fridges to panel heaters.
The ability Debbie claims to have is called Street Light Interference syndrome (SLI) and she has become quite famous because of it. In Japan she has been compared to comic book heroines and even characters from the BBC show ‘Heroes’. For a person who believes they have SLI, the profession Debbie has gone for is a little risky. She works in the Royal Susses Country Hospital, fortunately, no electrical equipment has gone wrong so far.
Although it’s always fun to believe that someone can yield that sort of power, it needs to be questioned. Does SLI exist or is it simply coincidences that lead people to believe they have a power. As with most things, there is a possible explanation.
One of the aspects of maintaining a good room climate is the moisture in the air. The majority of homes these days have double glazed windows and central heating. This combination alongside heaters and oil filled radiators often leads to the room’s air getting very dry. Having dry air at home can result in lots of health issues, however, it can also increase levels of static electricity within your home.
A home could be compared to that of a computer data centre. At large data centres a huge amount of heat is created, this causes the air to get very dry which causes a large amount of static electrcity. This static can cause great deals of damage to the circuits within the computers. To combat this, humidifiers are used to increase the humidity and reducing the static electricity. This can be the same in your home, a normal level of humidity would reduce the amount of staticelectricity. So really what Debbie needs is a humidifier. The reason why she doesn’t damage all the equipment at the Hospital is most likely due to them already have humidifiers within the hospital to ensure equipment like industrial heaters aren’t damaged.