pages 64-68: Tape Loops

 During the transition period, while I was transferring the dolphin work to
 others, I pursued a peculiar effect we had noticed when working with the
 communication systems of the dolphin. In order to study the dolphin humanoid
 vocalizations we put what the dolphin said onto a repeating tape loop where
 we could study it. We then had a group of people guess what the dolphin had
 been saying. We obtained a list of, say, ten different words that they
 thought the dolphin was saying. To complete our study we then had to take the
 vocalization of the human, which had just preceded the dolphin vocalization,
 and put that on a tape loop. We quickly found that listening to a repeating
 word in clear high-fidelity English generated more alternatives than did the
 dolphin emission. If one listens to a tape loop of a repeated word for
 fifteen minutes, one may hear as many as thirty different words other than
 the one which is on the tape loop. We did an extensive study of the word
 "cogitate." We exposed something of the order of three hundred subjects to
 this word for periods of fifteen minutes to six hours. We asked each subject
 to write down the words that he heard or to report them with a microphone on
 another channel of the same tape recorder.

 From these three hundred subjects we got on the order of 2,300 different
 words. Three hundred of these words were in a dictionary; the rest were words
 that we do not ordinarily use, i.e., nondictionary words was we began to call
 them. In this work I received the very enthusiastic contributions of Margaret
 Naesser, a student of linguistics from the University of Wisconsin. Margaret
 had tremendous energy and initiative and carried out the study using the IBM
 360 computer system at the University of Illinois to analyze our results. Dr.
 Heinz Von Foerster at the biocomputer laboratory was intrigued by our results
 and arranged for us to use the computer.

 The computer analyses showed that, for each sound slot in the word
 "cogitate," the human biocomputer on repetition turns over and selects other
 sounds which one then hears as if coming from the stimulus word outside. Each
 such sound is called a phon. We found that on the average people tended to
 make twelve phon slots in the original stimulus word "cogitate." The minimum
 number of slots was 3 and the maximum number was 26. The number of
 substitutions of sounds in each of the twelve slots was different. For the
 first slot, there were 13 substitutions. In the second, 44 different sounds
 could be brought in, and so on.

 It turned out that this repeating word effect made it possible to demonstrate
 very rapidly to live audiences their own biocomputer operations. This is the
 reason that I went on with this work and made the transition from the dolphin
 to the human through the repeating word effect. It was an extremely
 convenient way of demonstrating to people their own self-metaprogramming and
 the various concepts of the biocomputer. 

 In addition to hearing alternate words when being exposed to the repeating
 word stimulus, I found that certain people went through various kinds of
 trips. In one audience of two hundred people, we found that something like 10
 to 12 percent of the people tripped out and did not report anything about the
 alternatives that they heard. When I was able to quiz two of these people
 about what had happened, they described trips very much like the ones I had
 found in the isolation tank. In addition, we found that we could program the
 alternates a person would hear by various means.

 To see the programmability of the alternates that were heard, the subject
 would listen to the repeating word for an hour and write down all of the
 alternates he heard and print them on cards. 

 Next, the subject would turn on the repeating word and listen to it while
 looking at the cards one at a time. He relaxed and then, as he turned up a
 new card, he hear heard the alternate printed on that card. This experiment
 showed that visual input can program what is heard.

 We also found that peripheral vision, that is, the vision which is off the
 main axis from where one is looking, could also program what was heard. We
 printed alternates with very large letters on cards and brought them into the
 peripheral vision of the subject while he was listening to the repeating
 word. He then reported out loud what he heard. The word that was being
 brought in from the periphery, in spite of the fact he could not read it
 consciously, started programming what he heard. This was a "programming"
 gradient from the farthest reaches of peripheral vision at 90 degrees to the
 optic axis in toward the focal center on the optic axis. Just before the
 subject could read the word consciously, that is, where it was still far
 enough off the central axis so that he could not read it consciously, the
 word was programming 90 percent of what he heard.

 This experiment demonstrated that people are constantly being programmed
 below levels of their awareness by the periphery of their vision. It is
 probably a good thing that this is true. It allows us to drive a car and to
 walk and to do various other tasks including reading in a smooth fashion
 without having to think about everything that happens. 

 The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually, simply and
 naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding environment.

 We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were
 beyond their immediate conscious control. They would not accept the fact that
 their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below
 their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried to they could not
 read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the word, thus
 spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effect, of course, we had an observer
 looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their eyes move were
 discounted. This kind of upset was easily corrected by continuing the
 demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and accepted them, he
 no longer became upset by the unconscious operations of his biocomputer.
 Later, I was to use this effect to show people some of the projection
 mechanisms in their own biocomputer in workshops at Esalen Institute. 

 From the repeating word effect, I learned something about going with the
 flow, relaxing and allowing instructions from some place else to run my
 biocomputer. If one relaxes totally while listening to the repeating word,
 one can quickly find all of the phenomena that I have described above.
 However, if one is "up tight" and refuses to really "let go" even though one
 would like to let go, these phenomena just do not occur as frequently.

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Item from "Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman?"

REPETITION TAPES

 These are loop tapes that repeat the same sound, word, or phrase endlessly,
 like a mantra. Ed Rosenfeld [author of "The Book of Highs: 250 Methods for
 Altering Your Consciousness Without Drugs" [Quadrangle/New York Times Books)]
 was introduced to one by scientist John Lilly, the noted dolphin man and
 inner-space explorer. Lilly played a tape with the word COGITATE repeated
 over and over to a roomful of a hundred people. "After a few minutes I became
 tense and nervous," recalls Ed, "I was tired of listening to the same word
 over and over. Suddenly the tape changed. It said, "MELT INTO IT." After the
 tape was over, Ed turned to a friend to compare notes. "Tape changed, didn't
 it?" he said. "It sure did," said his friend, "It changed from saying
 'COGITATE' to 'COUNT TO TEN.'"  It turned out that everyone in the room heard
 the tape change to a different word or phrase, and all were convinced that
 the change was actually on the tape and not in their brains. However, the
 tape had never actually said anything other than "COGITATE." These auditory
 hallucinations are the brain's natural response to a boring, repetitive
 stimulus, according to Lilly.

 Access:  The Cogitate Tape by John Lilly is available for $9.98 plus shipping
 from: Gateways, P.O. Box 370, Nevada City, CA 95959. Phone ((16)477-1116.
 Or make your own repetiton tape.

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