GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 76

Hell is isomorphous with The Living Brain in the respects now under discus-
sion. It, too, offers a long catalog of altered states running from madness to
ecstasy and enlightenment, coupled both with an exegesis in terms of Eastern
spirituality (specifically Buddhism) and with scientific explanations of the
origins of such states. This isomorphism between Walter and Huxley points,
I think, to a commonality between cybernetics and the sixties, precisely in
a shared interest in the performative brain, a curiosity about what it can do,
and, in general, a fascination with nonmodern selves. 63 We can return to the
sixties in a moment, but first we need to examine another aspect of Walter's
technical EEG research.
Flicker
“Flicker” is a long-standing term of art in experimental psychology, referring
to visual effects induced by flickering lights (Geiger 2003, 12-15). A spinning
top with black and white bands induces perceptions of color, for example.
Walter became interested in flicker and incorporated it into his EEG research
in 1945, when he came across a new piece of technology that had become
available during the war, an electronic stroboscope. Staring at the machine
through closed eyelids, he reported, “I remember vividly the peculiar sensa-
tion of light-headedness I felt at flash rates between 6 and 20 [per second]
and I thought at once 'Is this how one feels in a petit mal attack?—Of course
this could be how one can induce a petit mal attack” (Walter 1966, 8). 64 And,
indeed, when he experimented with a strobe on an epileptic patient, “within
a few seconds a typical wave-&-spike discharge developed as predicted.” The
quotation continues: “This was enormously exciting because I think it was the
first time that a little theory [in EEG research] based on empirical observation
had actually been confirmed by experiment. This meant that there might be
some hope of reinstating the EEG as a scientific rather than merely utilitar-
ian pursuit. . . . This was one of the critical turning points in our history.” The
scientific import of flicker in EEG research was thus that it offered a new
purchase on the performative brain, and a new neurophysiological and clini-
cal research program opened up here, pursuing the effects of “photic driving”
at different frequencies with different subjects. Walter and his colleagues at
the Burden, including his wife, Vivian Dovey, experimented on nonepilep-
tic as well as epileptic subjects and found that (Walter 1953, 97) “epileptic
seizures are not the exclusive property of the clinically epileptic brain. . . .
We examined several hundred 'control' subjects—schoolchildren, students,
various groups of adults. In three or four percent of these, carefully adjusted