Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)

Erik: For everyone listening, a quick reminder about who we're talking with. Dr. Hardt holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, along with a Master of Science and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. What tends to happen, as I see it, is that when we start looking closely at psychological phenomena, we run into things that feel new and hard to explain inside the frameworks we currently use. Yet people everywhere keep reporting the same experiences, over and over. I want to recognize what you've done, Dr. Hardt, in building out the field of biofeedback. Thirty years ago it amounted to little more than a tone coming through a crude speaker. You've turned it into what may be one of the most sophisticated EEG biofeedback systems anywhere, and I imagine it's the kind of thing people will keep refining across the next hundred or two hundred years.

Since we're gathered here at The Psychology of the Future conference, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If the scientific community genuinely committed to studying these psychological phenomena, and maybe some physical ones too, and worked out the mechanics of how they operate, what might the future of psychology actually look like? Our connection dropped for a second there, but it sounds like we're reconnected. You were in the middle of answering.

James: Of course. The future. Right now Biocybernaut runs training centers in three countries: Canada, the United States, and Germany. The Canadian site is in Victoria, British Columbia. In the U.S. we're in Sedona, Arizona, and the German center sits in Maierhöfen, in Bavaria. We have five chambers each in Canada and Germany, and six in Sedona.

Beyond that, there are groups in other countries taking a serious look at bringing the technology to their own populations. Some of them are thinking on a much larger scale than what we currently operate. One project I find genuinely compelling is unfolding on the Isle of Guernsey. For those who don't know it, Guernsey sits in the English Channel, somewhere between England and France. A man named Marc Winn is leading something he calls The Dandelion Project. His aim is to introduce technologies that would change the lives of everyone on the island, so completely that Guernsey becomes the single best place on Earth to live. The thinking goes that once that happens, substantial funding will follow, and whatever methods proved themselves in Guernsey could then be carried out to the other seven billion people on the planet.