PROTO: Turn On, Tune In, Bliss Out

Dr. James Hardt hopes his DIY neurofeedback tech will fire up the global brain.

By David Pescovitz Photography by Howard Cao

BLUE. THE COLOR OVERWHELMS ME AS I STEP inside a nondescript office park building across the street from the San Jose airport. There’s blue everywhere. Blue carpet. Blue walls. Blue fabric draped here and there. Even the wall art, cosmic fantasy framed prints that are the New Age equivalent of black light posters, is heavy on the azure.

The cracked geodes decorating the conference table are bluish-purple. This is the Biocybernaut Institute, home to neurofeedback technology that the inventor believes could someday be used to awaken the global brain. Enter the mind-machine maker himself, Dr. James Hardt, sporting what else but a blue fleece jacket. “You apparently like blue?” I ask him.

“It’s not about liking blue,” Hardt says. “It’s about the fact the blue enhances the brain’s alpha state.”

Hardt should know. Over three decades he’s trained hundreds of people to use a neurofeedback system of his own design to control their own brain waves and spend more time in an alpha state.

For those who may not have lived in California during the 1970s, the alpha state is a brainwave pattern with a frequency of 8-13Hz that’s commonly associated with relaxation and meditation. Increased alpha wave activity has also been shown to help alleviate ADHD and depression, boost creativity and alertness, and facilitate out-of-body experiences and other psychic phenomena, depending on who you ask.

Hardt claims that one week of alpha training can yield changes in brain waves comparable to 21 to 40 years of Zen meditation training. All for the low, low price of $15,000 per person. That’s how much a weeklong training session of roughly 12-hour days at the Biocybernaut Institute runs. Bliss doesn’t come cheap.

“Alpha power, when it’s high, is like being in heaven,” Hardt says. “You’re filled with joy, enthusiasm, and a sense of wonder.”

Neurofeedback was born during the psychedelic 1960s out of earlier experiments to detect the current in our heads. The core technology is the electroencephalograph (EEG), a device used to record electrical activity in the brain by sticking electrodes to the scalp. The field began in 1908 when Hans Berger wired his son up to a galvanometer and recorded his brain waves. Berger named the signals alpha waves because they were the first ones discovered.

But the real biofeedback breakthrough occurred in the 1960s, when UC San Francisco psychologist Joe Kamiya closed the loop by providing subjects with real-time data of their brainwave activity in the form of audio tones. Kamiya hooked up all kinds of people to his machine, from Zen monks who exhibited heightened alpha states, to Summer of Love seekers eager for a new trip, to a curious physics graduate named James Hardt.

One day, a lab technician left for lunch, forgetting that Hardt was in the chamber. Over the next several hours, Hardt says he went on a transcendental “adventure” in the alpha state, complete with “ego dissolution,” that hooked him for life. Learning to control your mind from the inside out, he believes, is the first step to manifesting a human super-consciousness.

“If you’ve got a mess in your mind, you’re not going to be as good a candidate for a linkup,” he explains. “You usually take a shower before making love, right? This is the mental equivalent of that.”

“In physical fitness, the goals are strength, flexibility, and endurance,” Hardt says. “In mind fitness, the goals are the same. You want to learn to increase and decrease the strength of your alpha waves and then build up the endurance to do that for long periods of time. It’s literally pumping neurons.”

From 1971 to 1977, Hardt worked closely with Kamiya to see how neurofeedback might push the limits of human potential. Meanwhile, he rolled his own belief system from a smorgasbord of spiritual traditions and philosophers.

Two decades later, the Biocybernaut Institute apparently has no shortage of students. Hardt says he’s trained everyone from Silicon Valley big shots to pro football players to U.S. Army Green Berets. The latter group signed up during the 1980s at the bequest of Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, onetime head of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, better known for his involvement in recently declassified psychic spying programs.

Every weeklong training at the Biocybernaut Institute begins in the conference center, where Hardt gives a PowerPoint-powered rap to orient the participants. Next, his staff applies a half-dozen scalp electrodes to each trainee’s head. After the trainees are wired up, each moves into one of four soundproof chambers (blue, of course) where the neurofeedback session actually takes place. Every chamber contains a surround sound system, a computer on a desk, and a task chair. (If you’re doing theta training, you get to kick back in a La-Z-Boy. Theta brain waves are associated with deep relaxation and light sleep.) Baseline EEG measurements are taken, and then a symphony of electronic tones reminiscent of a minimalist techno album signals that the long, strange trip is about to begin.

“When you go to the theater, you have to practice suspension of disbelief,” he says. “To participate in this training, you need to have a suspension of belief and go in only with what you discover. With that mindset, you have the openness of a baby and of an advanced mystic.”

Rip off its New Age wrapper and the real magic of the Biocybernaut training lies in the technology behind the blue curtain. An array of amplifiers and filters extract the brain’s electrical signals collected by the scalp electrodes. That data is then analyzed by PCs that generate the feedback tones heard in the chambers. All of the neurofeedback gear — except two hulking polygraphs that print out the raw EEG data — is Hardt’s own design. No commercial product was ever good enough, Hardt says, so he assembled and patented his own. One former student posting online describes the Biocybernaut facility as “having an ‘I built a rocket ship in my garage’ kind of feel.” Indeed, a fair bit of, er, unconventional engineering went into the system.

“This advanced technology allows scientists to talk the language of mystics, and mystics to talk the language of scientists. I look at what we’re doing as creating the science of spirituality.”

Early on, Hardt explains, he had a quality control problem with components on the filter boards. Some of the resistors and capacitors behaved erratically at the boards’ operating temperature of 104 degrees. Hardt’s solution was to heat a room to 104 degrees and test each component individually.

“Once the room was hot enough, my staff and I went in wearing bathing suits and metered each part,” Hardt recalls. “We put them into labeled bins so we had known values.”

Next, Hardt wrote software to specify how those resistors and capacitors with slightly different values could be combined into circuits that would operate within his strict tolerances. Only then could his circuit board assembly line begin.

“This advanced technology allows scientists to talk the language of mystics, and mystics to talk the language of scientists,” Hardt says. “I look at what we’re doing as creating the science of spirituality.”

Back in the chamber, the trainees hear various synthesized tones that change according to how their alpha states increase or decrease. The tones, he explains, “are like an auditory mirror for your mind.” The trainee is taken through a series of survey questions and alpha suppression and enhancement exercises. Numbered scores appear on the computer display, providing more feedback to the trainee. Hardt won’t tell me how much “objective time” each trainee spends in the chamber. Wristwatches are confiscated at the door.

Hardt sits, wired with eight scalp electrodes, in one of the Biocybernaut Institutes’s four brain wave training chambers. Multiple speakers deliver separate feedback tones in response to activity in four parts of the brain.

After each session in the chamber, the trainees retire to the “canopy room,” a lounge that reminds me of a cheaply decorated chill-out room at a rave. Here, Hardt or his staff debrief with the trainees about their time in the chamber.

The cycle repeats every day for a week per training, with various levels of training offered. (Prepay for 12 trainings and you get a 30% discount!) It’s not until the more advanced trainings, though, that Hardt’s vision for a global brain comes into play. Shared alpha biofeedback trainings involve two students pairing up in one chamber to synch their own alpha states and “jam together,” Hardt explains, “with one playing the (psychic) oboe and the other the violin.”

Those shared sessions are practice for the mental orchestra Hardt hopes to help conduct in the future. He believes that with 5 to 10 billion Biocybernaut students all linked up, a self-reflexive human superconsciousness may emerge. When I ask him how that could possibly work at a cost of $15,000 a head just for the basic training, he explains that economies of scale could cut the cost in half. As a step in that direction, he’s planning to open new centers in Canada and two in Austria this year. Then it would just be a matter of getting, say, the U.S. military to subsidize the training cost with a percentage of the annual defense budget.

“After we were done, there’d be so much mind power that they wouldn’t need a defense budget.”

MAKE Editor-at-Large David Pescovitz is co-editor of boingboing.net and a research affiliate of the Institute for the Future.