Beatniks & Flickering Light

I guess it is no secret that I am a bit older than many people involved with the NeuroVIZR. So much of what has shaped my journey into the invention of the device is rooted back some decades. I thought it would be both fun and fascinating to peek into some of the surprising earlier cultural history of the use of intermittent photic stimulation (aka “flickering light”) and the exploration of Consciousness. And, yes, it is really about Beatniks.

In America, the 1950’s were years of explosive cultural change.

World War 2 was past and USA soldiers were at it again, this time against the Communists in the Korean War. The Cold War between America and the USSR was ramping up as school children were being taught to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack.
American soldiers fighting in Korea were given their R&R breaks in Japan where just 10 years earlier the USA had dropped two atom bombs. It was a decade of bold economic growth and high anxiety. Soldiers returning from the Far East brought back with them stories of Japanese Zen and “contemplate your navel” (a phrase which became famous for engaging in an absurd and useless endeavor). At the same time, one of the greatest American cultural gifts to the world was bursting into its second and most prolific phase of creation – jazz music was maturing and opening up entirely new vistas of creative expression.

And so (to make a long story very short), a new class of Americans began to emerge. They were absorbed by the “crazy” rhythms of jazz and saturated by the sustained anxiety of the constant and very real threat of nuclear war. To quote one of the strongest new voices, Jack Kerouac, “It was the BEAT. The ‘beat’ like we are all beat down. Hopeless. And ‘beat’ is like the rhythms of jazz.”

It was a BEAT Generation. Remember the Cold War and the “Race for Space”. The Soviets won the first round with their stunning first ever launch of an orbiting satellite called Sputnik. It was a terrifying achievement because the thinking was that whoever controlled space could control the world.

No one knows for sure, but urban legend has it that it was a Philadelphia radio DJ that first coined the famous term “BEATNIK” – the conjoining of the BEAT of a Beat Generation and NIK as in Sputnik. And so, the BEATNIK was born.

OK. Let’s take just a few steps backwards in time to create a bit of context here before we join the Beatniks. In our modern era, it was the invention of the EEG in the 1920’s (Berger) that set the stage for a new phase of physiology related technology. It was quickly noted that a flashing light could have some relationship to the electrical patterns of activity in the brain. By 1934, researchers (Adrian and Matthews) used an automobile headlight shining through a rotating wheel with spokes to generate a coordinated beat of 8-12 Hz and higher. A person would sit in front of the wheel with eyes closed and the EEG would produce increases in the range of brainwaves corresponding to the flashes from the rotating wheel. The problem was that the faster the wheel turned to create higher frequencies, the shorter the period of the flash and weaker the response.

It wasn’t until after World War 2 that electric “stroboscopes” were invented and the visual experiences generated by flashing lights made its way back into the laboratory. In 1953, a researcher W.G Walter published his book entitled The Living Brain. He described: “…whirling spirals, whirlpools, explosions…In testing a device to study epilepsy we had stumbled on one of those natural paradoxes which are the surest sign of a hidden truth.”
The chapter in the book describing these effects from the stroboscopic light was called “Revelation by Flicker”. One of the subjects involved with Walter was Margiad Evans who was quoted by Walter in the book. Evans says: “Lights like comets dangling before me, slow at first and then gaining a fury of speed and change, whirling color into color, angle into angle. They were all pure ultra-unearthly colors, mental colors, not deep visual ones. There was no glow in them but only activity and revolution.”

Around the same time (1953) a researcher A.M. Costa published in the Italian journal Arch Psicol Neurol Psichiatr an article in which he described three categories of visual phenomena: 1) autoscopic, 2) geometric and 3) hallucinatory. In the UK (1959), JR Smythies at the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge performed several large-scale studies in which he divided the stroboscopic images into dark phase and bright phase. The bright phase was characterized by geometric patterns with crosses, diamonds and triangles or circles, vortices or fingerprint like patterns. He dubbed the recurrent geometric figures as “form constants” which other later researchers (Kluver, 1966) found to occur related to sleep (hypnagogia), near death experiences and also elicited by means of psychedelic drugs such as mescaline (Kluver’s main research tool), LSD and 4 psilocybin.

Synthesis dark phase had several categories:

Amorphous, featuring two colors, usually red and green, swirling around like oil on water.
Mall objects moving rather than colors (like heaps of ants), stationary patterns like ink blots or leaves.
Watery patterns,
Design patterns resembling wall paper,
Animate patterns like a movie,
Scenes and landscapes such as fish in an aquarium or grass and forests.

OK. OK. What about the Beatniks? Well hopefully this super quick review helps to give you some better appreciation of the time and perspectives that influenced “the Beats”. The 1960’s and early 1970’s surge of academic, medical and scientific research into EEG/Brain Entrainment did not emerge on a blank canvas. There was plenty of earlier scientific interest as well as popular intrigue helping to create the atmosphere…as we will now see.

The book by Walter, The Living Brain, was meant for a broad audience. One of its curious readers was the inimitable William Burroughs (1914 – 1997), an absolute legend of his time as well as a heroin addict. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". It is likely he came across the book in Paris.

Apparently the “flicker phenomenon” described in the book reminded Burroughs of a story he had been recently told by Brion Gysin (1916 – 1986, described often as the soul mate of Burroughs). At the time they were both living in a cheap hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris (the little hotel has ever since been called the Beat Hotel). Gysin told Burroughs of an unexpected experience he had recently had. He was on a bus traveling in Southern France on a sunny day. He fell asleep with his head against the window. As he slowly awoke on passing a long row of regularly spaced trees, the sunlight came flickering through causing Gysin to be begin to hallucinate: “…an overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns of supernatural colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out though space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees.”

Burroughs was able to offer Gysin a theoretical explanation based on the Walter book, The Living Brain. Their next step was to create their own stroboscope. Gysin had a mathematician friend (Ian Sommerville) to help them design such a device. He came up with a cheap and rather simple approach. He made a vertical cardboard cylinder with a number of spaces and slits. The cylinder was placed upright on a 78-rpm record turntable and had a light bulb hanging in its center.
When the turntable was set to spin, the result was the “Holy Grail” frequency (of its time) – the 8 – 12 Hz Alpha set. Gysin named it the Dream Machine. It wasn’t long that various beatniks heard about the Dream Machine and made their way over to Burroughs for a try. Burroughs wrote about it all and his personal accounts in The Ticket That Exploded. Even the infamous Allen Ginsberg (THE Beat poet), wrote about the Dream Machine: “ÍI looked into it – it sets up optical fields as religious and mandalic as the hallucinogenic drugs – it’s like being able to have jeweled biblical designs and landscapes without taking chemicals”.

Turns out the Beats preferred the Dream Machine PLUS drugs. Not a surprise. Gysin believed there was a great future for his device (which was renamed The Dreamachine for marketing purposes). He saw it replacing television and proceeded to get a patent for his future applications. He even managed to get the Phillips Corporation (a giant in the new industry at the time) to come visit his hotel in an attempt to strike a deal – which never happened.

The Dreamachine never went into mass production. Gysin later evaporated into anonymity in the 1980’s and died little known except within a small circle where he strongly influenced artists such as Iggy Pop and singer Marianne Faithfull.
So, as you can see, the “flicker phenomenon” has modern roots in the 1950’s commencing in an exciting new area in medical science and quickly fueling a fascination in the very heart of Beatnik counterculture. It set the stage for the next leap forward into the Human Potential movement of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Brain Entrainment and Biofeedback were the darling subjects of research departments in the best universities from M.I.T to Stanford. And, of course, made its way into hippie apartments and university dorms with folks like me! Heh, check out this strobe light.