Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
flicker evoked responses indistinguishable from those previously regarded as
'diagnostic' of clinical epilepsy. When these responses appeared, the subjects
would exclaim at the 'strange feelings,' the faintness or swimming in the head;
some became unresponsive or unconscious for a few moments; in some the
limbs jerked in rhythm with the flashes of light.” It turned out the optimal
flicker frequency for the induction of such effects was often hard to find, and
at the Burden Harold “Shippy” Shipton built a feedback apparatus (Walter
1953, 99) “in the form of a trigger circuit, the flash being fired by the brain
rhythms themselves. . . . With this instrument the effects of flicker are even
more drastic than when the stimulus rate is fixed by the operator. The most
significant observation is that in more than 50 per cent of young normal adult
subjects, the first exposure to feedback flicker evokes transient paroxysmal
discharges of the type seen so often in epileptics” (fig. 3.12).
To follow the details of this research would take us too far afield, so let
me make a few comments on it before going back to the sixties.
65
First,
Walter's work here exemplifies my earlier remarks about the possibility of
being curious about the performative brain. If our capacity for cognitive
tasks is immediately before us—I already know that I can do crosswords and
sudoku puzzles—the epileptic response to flicker was, in contrast, a surprise,
a discovery about what the performative brain can do. Second, this research
points again to the psychiatric matrix in which Walter's cybernetics devel-
oped. Third, experiments aimed at inducing quasi-epilieptic fits in school-
children should only make us grateful for the controls on human-subjects
experimentation that have since been introduced.
66
Fourth, flicker is a nice
exemplification of my notion of a technology of the self, a material technology
for the production of altered states. If you want a paradigmatic example of a
technology of the nonmodern self, think of flicker. Fifth and finally, Shippy's
feedback circuit deserves some reflection. In the basic flicker setup the brain
was pinned down in a linear relation to the technology. The technology did
something—flickered—and the brain did something in response—exhibited
epileptic symptoms. This counts as a piece of ontological theater inasmuch as
it thematizes the performative brain, the brain that acts rather than thinks.
But it does not thematize the adaptive brain, the key referent of cybernetics
per se: there is no reciprocal back-and-forth between the brain and its envi-
ronment. Feedback flicker, in contrast, staged a vision of the adaptive brain,
albeit in a rather horrifying way. The strobe stimulated the brain, the emer-
gent brainwaves stimulated the feedback circuit, the circuit controlled the
strobe, which stimulated the brain, and so on around the loop. We could say
that the brain explored the performative potential of the material technology
