From: bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (William E. White )
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage,alt.consciousness,alt.dreams,alt.drugs,alt.mindcontrol,alt.psychoactives
Subject: Re: chrysalis by Peter Reich
Date: 8 Sep 92 18:34:55 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: O.U., Harvard on the Hocking, Berkeley in the Boondocks!

In article <1992Sep8.144936.6553@cs.umb.edu> pbreton@cs.umb.edu (Peter Breton) writes:
>  Also curious if anyone's built any orgone boxes, Hieronymous devices, 
>or anything else besides the typical light-and-sound fare. AND, what's 
>the dirt on the various PC mind machines? Is there hardware out there that
>does this kind of thing already? Let's get a little discussion going...

I haven't built one yet; keep intending to.  Most of the devices available
commercially charge you an overwhelming charge for a 555 timer and a
bunch of red LED's (oh yes, I forgot the sunglasses...).  Trouble is,
without a means of monitoring brainwave components, you have very little
way of knowing what's placebo and what's real.

If you're really interested there was an article (I think in an old BYTE
magazine, like 3 years ago) on how to build an EEG card for a PC; it even
included fast fourier transform software so you could watch individual
freq components.  I'd say your best bet would be to couple that with, say,
a special-purpose synth card (a la SoundBlaster for the brain), give three
channels (red,green,blue) per eye, plus two audio channels (left,right)
hooked into an FM synth or something, plus however many direct contact
stimulators you want (again, FM synth on those or equivalent).
Basically you end up with about a gazillion variables, but you can watch your
brain response in realtime.  Call it the BrainBlaster card?  Maybe this is
marketable ....

Anyway, three big safety rules:
    - don't play with this if you've any degree of epilepsy
    - avoid combinations of light and sound that have light flashing near
        alpha rhythm with sound giving alpha rhythm beat frequency (the
        British tried this, I believe, for a method of crowd control.  Had
        limited success.  Tends to induce severe seizures even in non-
		epileptics).
    - make sure you isolate any wires stuck to your skull from actual
        electrical connection with the brain.  Go through an optoisolator
		or something equivalent (IR remote, etc).  (Unless you're looking 
		for that sort of effect).  The chance of anything going wrong is
		slim, but why risk it when you have wires stuck to your head
		with conductive jelly?

Never heard of Heironymous devices.  As for "orgone", the man who postulated
its existence was fairly well known for violent opposition to all facts
disproving it.  Evidently there's a good book about him; I think he also
might be mentioned in _In the Name of Science_.


>  Peter


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