/i> Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was
pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a
wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be
mistaken for this man.)
So the fella who'd been talking to me was just checking at the last
minute -- husbands always like to prove their wives wrong -- and he found
out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.
I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had
parties. I didn't know what I was doing; I just made rhythms -- and I got a
reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.
When the war was over, and we were going back to "civilization," the
people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn't be able to play drums
any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become
a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime
during my stay at Los Alamos.
The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some
report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn't stand it. I bought myself
another drum, and thought, "I'll just bring it back with me this time so I
can look at it."
That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I
had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn't quite resist:
I said, "Well, I'll just be very quiet..."
I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my
fingers a little bit: hup, bup, bup, huddle hup. Then a little bit louder --
after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM! -- the
telephone rang.
"Hello?"
"This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?"
"Yes; I'm sor --"
"It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more
directly?"
So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I'd start
to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on,
beating the drums.
Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some
ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum
music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the
Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them -- not
very accurately, but just to sound something like them -- and I developed a
larger number of rhythms as a result of that.
One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there
weren't many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the
back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and
said, "Hey! You play drums!" It turned out he really knew how to play drums,
and he taught me how to play bongos.
There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of
African music, and I'd come to his house and play drums. He'd make
recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called
"Africa or Ithaca?" in which he'd play some recordings of drum music, and
the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the
continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at
imitating African music by that time.
When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot.
One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria
called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music -- just percussion -- at one
of the nightclubs. The second-in-command, who was especially nice to me,
invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up
there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a
little while.
I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So
I used to go down to Ukonu's place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts
riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren't very
efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted
by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I
learned a lot from him.
At dances near Ukonu's place, there would be only a few whites, but it
was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming
contest, and I didn't do very well: They said my drumming was "too
intellectual"; theirs was much more pulsing.
One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
"This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School." The
Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street
diagonally from Caltech. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: "I
have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you."
"OK."
"Hello, Dick!" It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the
Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and
had a great sense of humor. Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the
kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play
along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in
my office) against his big tumba drum.
Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about
the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a
terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was
just sensational on the drums -- he had records out -- and was here studying
medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there -- or
before the war -- and I don't know what happened to him.
After Ukonu left I didn't do very much drumming, except at parties once
in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at
the Leightons' house, and Bob's son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted
to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then
they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn't resist: I
grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden
tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.
Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began
meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These
two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Tom played the cello.
All I had done was rhythms, and I didn't know anything about music, which,
as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a
lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to
entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local
college -- something I learned was fun to do when I was working at
Brookhaven for a while -- and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can
figure out when that was.
One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they
had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The
band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they
encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their
music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment -- you
can't screw it up) I really got hot.
After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that
the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the
cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way,
that big shot this party was supposed to be for -- you know, he never came
down here; I never did see who it was!"
Anyhow, at Caltech there's a group that puts on plays. Some of the
actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there's a
small part, such as a policeman who's supposed to arrest somebody, they get
one of the professors to do it. It's always a big joke -- the professor
comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.
A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a
scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they're in a
nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo
player on the stage in the nightclub be me.
I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed
to the orchestra conductor and said, "Jack will show you the music."
Well, that petrified me. I don't know how to read music; I thought all
I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.
Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said,
"OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk,
plonk" -- he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. "Then you
play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here" -- and he
turned some more pages and said, "Finally, you play this."
He showed me this "music" that was written in some kind of crazy
pattern of little x's in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this
stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to
remember any of it.
Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn't come to the next
rehearsal. I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he's a musician,
he should know what it's all about. Ralph came back and said, "It's not so
bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right
because you're starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which
will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it's a matter of
ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but
I think we'll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra
conductor gives."
In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the
two of us would be on the stage. He'd play the tumba and I'd play the bongos
-- so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.
So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about
twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I'd never had to play
anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would
patiently explain, "left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then
right..." I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the
rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time -- many days -- to get it.
A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer
there -- the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else -- and
we introduced ourselves to him:
"Hi. We're the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene."
"Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here..." and he turned to the page where
our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, "Oh, you start off the
scene with..." and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing,
bong, bang-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was
looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four
days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and
played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see
the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn't so bad; but
that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort
of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife
of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time
for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our
drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to
drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
"WHAT?"
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet
for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in
which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come
over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we
knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this
adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was
a professor of physics, Nobel-Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn't
want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said,
If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it's not so much that he does it
well, as that he does it at all. I didn't want to do it if I was a physics
professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los
Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had
composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked
out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this
story cooked up in her mind and said, "OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of
this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that..."
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph's house. We
played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and
splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a
copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers
with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of
this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and
spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own
damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that
because he's a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The
"playing department" in our minds was also the "talking department" for
counting -- we couldn't play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that
by watching the dancers we didn't have to count because the dancers went
through certain motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were
supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn't. For example, one of the
scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean
beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the
ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this
scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather
amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck
in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other
on chairs and put this "crazy drum" between us on our knees, with one guy
beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers,
constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with
his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go
booda-booda-booda-bidda-beeda-beeda-beeda-bidda-booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda,
creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls
to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this
scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: "First,
I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the
sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way." I knew damn
well I couldn't keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
"Just go ahead and do the dance, and I'll play along."
"But don't you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I've
finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way." It
was no use; I couldn't remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her
again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real
musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, "Mr. Feynman
has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop
the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let's try it
once that way, and if you're not satisfied, we can correct it."
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she
was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready
to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was
rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my
hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied
with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren't many people in
the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very
much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the
performances, we weren't sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the
choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second,
that we're good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was
surely crazy! For me, who had never had any "culture," to end up as a
professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it
were.
We didn't think that she'd be able to find ballet dancers who would be
willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one
prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it
was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it
very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time
in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really
sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette
recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they
reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had
come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the
following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of
some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I
talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to
sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I
practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first
got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to make
elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of
papier mache were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance
in front of them.
We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would
happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I
arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some
conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening
to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a
sudden I was hypnotized.
"What's the matter?" he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "Tusks!" Behind him, on the floor,
were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great
relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner
Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean
ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for
choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or
second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this
time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a
high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers
there in France to do a small section of the ballet -- that's how she
entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only
two left -- a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their
regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America,
with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a
ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity
contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the
judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle
enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..."
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured
people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
--------
Altered States
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft
Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting
around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came
in -- a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The
man said, "Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?"
"This is the place," the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
"I don't think you'd like 'em much," I say. "They're kind of
technical."
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: "I bet
you're Professor Feynman!"
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work
with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense
deprivation, and had built some tanks.
"Isn't it true that you're supposed to get hallucinations under those
circumstances?" I asked, excitedly.
"That is true indeed."
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other
images that come to the mind that haven't got a direct sensory source, and
how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once
thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think,
and I don't want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just
lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, so I
was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys' invitation to use the tanks, a very kind
invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their
group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me
to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of
bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the
Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds
of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get
ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your
nose up against it -- all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I
didn't pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted
to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations
might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything
according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was
choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to
be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that
comes down. It's completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick,
there's no sound. There's a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out
you don't need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large,
and you're only in there for two or three hours, and you don't really
consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the
pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it's just
psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little
bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than
normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at
body temperature, or 94, or something -- he had it all figured out. There
wasn't supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no
nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly,
or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might
fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and
a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn't get any hallucinations,
but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed
as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was
used as an anesthetic. I've always been interested in questions related to
what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out,
so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one
tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I've never been able to figure
out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the
drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn't see clearly. But
when I'd look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you
didn't care to look at things; you're sloppily doing this and that, feeling
kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for
a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry
and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was
able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other
from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I
had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do
practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn't do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn't get any
hallucinations, and the second time I didn't get any hallucinations. But the
Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They
often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a
different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other
people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me
it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn't afraid because I knew what
it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting -- I met many interesting
people there -- who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from
Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here
Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an "out-of-body
experience" (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board):
Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you
breathe.
I figured I'd try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the
tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that -- it's hard to
explain -- I'm an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is
going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a
little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: "Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the
seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?" I knew already
from reading things that it wasn't so obvious to people before a lot of
psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was
in the liver, for instance. I wondered, "Is it possible that where the ego
is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to
their head when they say, 'Let me think'? Therefore the idea that the ego is
located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!" I figured that if
I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was
the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into
the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the
shoulder, I felt it "up there," above where "I" was. Every time a drop came
I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck
to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it
took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was
able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was
about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could
move myself to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my
body. So I was able to "sit to one side." It's hard to explain -- I'd move
my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn't see them, I knew where
they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part
way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and
everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting
outside, "observing" all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to
move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would
move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going
up and down -- they weren't flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still
able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the
motion, but I also had this feeling of "he is that." "I" even got out of the
room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where
things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example,
I could "see" the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I
moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I
saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn't right; it was a hallucination. But
the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly
consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The
entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are
doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching
something (and you don't know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear
what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it's
unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located
in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of
the head.
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while
I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would
therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams,
and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you're
having hallucinations, and things like that, you're not very sharp, so you
do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that
you're not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn't dreaming by
-- since my hands were often behind my head -- rubbing my thumbs together,
back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but
I wasn't: I knew it was real.
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination
made them "jump out," or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long
hallucinations.
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain
works compared to how a computing machine works -- especially how
information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how
memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many
directions compared to a machine -- you don't have to come directly with the
correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word "rent," for
example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter
word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income,
or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all
sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to
make an "imitating machine," which would learn language as a child does: you
would talk to the machine. But I couldn't figure out how to store the stuff
in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes.
When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried
to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, "It's gotta be
earlier; it's gotta be earlier" -- I was never satisfied that the memories
were early enough. When I got a very early memory -- let's say from my home
town of Far Rockaway -- then immediately would come a whole sequence of
memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of
something from another city -- Cedarhurst, or something -- then a whole lot
of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized
that things are stored according to the location where you had the
experience.
I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had
a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft
to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I
came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I
hadn't the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had
was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had
"discovered" had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the
brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.
In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits,
I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that
things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes,
or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination
and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn't mean they're another
intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination.
So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are
stored, and it's surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I
realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.
One of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like
dreams, are influenced by what you already have in your mind -- from other
experiences during the day or before, or from things you are expecting to
see. The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we
were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank.
And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the
brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week.
I had considerable discussion with the various people there about the
reality of experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in
experimental science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many
people see golden globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes must
be real. My claim was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion
previous to going into the tank about the golden globes, so when the person
hallucinating, with his mind already thinking about golden globes when he
went into the tank, sees some approximation of the globes -- maybe they're
blue, or something -- he thinks he's reproducing the experience. I felt that
I could understand the difference between the type of agreement among people
whose minds are set to agree, and the kind of agreement that you get in
experimental work. It's rather amusing that it's so easy to tell the
difference -- but so hard to define it!
I believe there's nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do
with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person
who's got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences
by a lot of people who believe there's reality in hallucinations. The same
general idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters
of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking
about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it's not completely
impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think
that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a
self-propagating process: you'll have a general, more or less, success at
it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a
hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana
beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for
me.
One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming
on, what you might describe as "garbage" would come: there were simply
chaotic images -- complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the
items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was
particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind
of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent
logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of
what you're thinking about, you can't remember. As a matter of fact, you
soon forget what it is that you're trying to remember. I can only remember
things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it
disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.
Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of
different experiments. It didn't seem to make much difference as far as
hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was
unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do
is sit quietly -- why was it necessary that you had to have everything
absolutely super duper?
So when I'd come home I'd turn out the lights and sit in the living
room in a comfortable chair, and try and try -- it never worked. I've never
been able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would
like to have done it at home, and I don't doubt that you could meditate and
do it if you practice, but I didn't practice.
--------
Cargo Cult Science*
* Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as
that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was
discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it
worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became
organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we
are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we
have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed,
when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it
did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a
conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded
consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded
that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to
investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for
investigation has landed me in a diffi