A Tale of Self Discovery: Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)
I rode my motorcycle back across the country to Pittsburgh and enrolled in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, in psychology. Once I'd done that, I wanted to talk through what I'd gone through, these adventures in consciousness, with a professor over at Duquesne University. He worked as a social psychological phenomenologist. He'd also been a graduate student at Harvard under Timothy Leary, had taken a great deal of LSD, and understood altered states about as well as anyone I could think of. If anybody could make sense of what I'd just lived through, I figured it was Rolf. Rolf von Eckartsberg.
So I went to find him. He was living close to campus in one of those enormous rented houses left over from the robber baron years, the kind of place so large that the maids' quarters up on the top floor had once held eleven maids when the house was at its peak. Rambling, spacious, all of it. I walked into his office and he looked me over, waved me toward the chair at his desk, and then took one arm and swept everything on the desk onto the floor. "Okay," he said. "Tell me what happened."
For the next three hours or so, I went through all of it in detail, everything I later set down in the article called "A Tale of Self Discovery." When I was finished he folded his arms, rested his elbows on the desk, and said, "Well, we can do that here." Something clicked in that moment. I'd had this extraordinary experience, and now, suddenly, I had a vocation.
My first aim grew out of what I had on hand. The psychology department had a soundproof chamber and a heap of old equipment sitting around. With my background in physics, I knew I could piece it together into a lab that measured brain wave feedback. So I got going, and I kept it organized. I'd run personality tests on roughly a hundred people, pull out the most anxious and the least anxious from the group, and then train them in alpha using a method I was steadily refining to work better.
The surprise came almost immediately. In that very first study, I found that when people who scored high in anxiety raised their alpha, they turned into low-anxiety people. That cut directly against what psychology and psychiatry held at the time. The accepted view was that personality traits were fixed, more or less permanent. If you wanted to nudge a few of your core traits at the edges, and you were prepared to spend ten or twenty years in psychotherapy, you might manage some small changes. Shifting the central dimensions of personality, though, wasn't something anyone even considered possible back then.