A Tale of Self Discovery: Dr. James Hardt on His First Brainwave Feedback Sessions
The whole thing began after I heard Dr. Kamiya speak. I went up to him afterward, got to talking, and learned he was based in San Francisco running research there. Every summer I made a trip out to the city anyway, so that year I pointed my motorcycle west and stayed the season. I signed on as a volunteer subject in his lab.
I did three sessions, roughly an hour apiece. The setup was about as bare-bones as you can imagine. A single electrode sat at the middle of the back of my head. The feedback came as one tone from a torn speaker balanced on a cardboard box in the corner of a closet, which opened off a bedroom. In that bedroom was an EPV 15 minicomputer, which was no small thing to have in those years. My score showed up as three digits. And I loved it. I mean I truly loved it. Nothing I had ever done with my own mind came close to being that interesting.
When day four rolled around I came back hungry for more of that strange pleasure, and found out there were no studies scheduled. By then I'd picked up a little about how the place ran. So I tracked down Joe's girlfriend, Joanne Gardner, and talked her into hooking me up: a few electrodes on my scalp, me parked in the closet off the bedroom that served as the training chamber, free to play.
Joanne did it without fuss, then went upstairs and got absorbed in her own work. Lunch came around and she headed out with nine other staff members. It was hours later, somewhere around the eleventh course of a twelve-course Chinese meal, that she suddenly gasped. She had remembered there was still a person wired up in the chamber. The whole group crammed into a VW camper bus, raced back across town, burst into the building, yanked open the chamber door, and cut short the final stages of what had been an extraordinary experience. I wrote the details of it elsewhere, going through moment by moment how my brain worked against the sound feedback and the scores.
Here is the part that still strikes me. Walking into that chamber I was a Protestant fundamentalist out of a conservative Lutheran church. I had never touched an altered state of consciousness. I didn't even know what meditation was. And inside that closet I went through an out-of-body experience, ego dissolution, astral projection, contact with what felt like collective entities. Pretty wild stuff. The strange part was that none of it frightened me, because it all arrived through my own experience, and I stayed in the flow of events as they came.
That session left such a deep mark that for about three days afterward my feet barely seemed to meet the ground when I walked. All I wanted was to find people and tell them what had happened, to hand the experience over somehow. Then the summer ended. Even so, something in me understood that this would be part of whatever came next for me.