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bright colours. At certain frequencies—around 10 per second—some subjects
see whirling spirals, whirlpools, explosions, Catherine wheels.” Again we can
understand these observations as a discovery about the performative brain,
continuing a longer tradition of research into such effects in experimental
psychology. Walter (1953, 107-13) in fact conjectured that the moving pat-
terns were related to the scanning function of the alpha waves (as material-
ized in the tortoise): since there is no motion in the strobe light, perhaps the
pulsation and whirling in the visual effects comes from the scanning mecha-
nism itself, somehow traveling around the brain. But the language itself is
interesting. This passage continues: “A vivid description is given by Margiad
Evans in 'A Ray of Darkness': 'I lay there holding the green thumbless hand of
the leaf. . . . Lights like comets dangled before me, slow at first and then gain-
ing a fury of speed and change, whirling colour into colour, angle into angle.
They were all pure unearthly colours, mental colours, not deep visual ones.
There was no glow in them but only activity and revolution.' ”
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What should
we make of a passage like that? The word that came to my mind when I first
read it was “psychedelic.” And I immediately thought of some key texts that
were required reading in the sixties, especially Huxley's
The Doors of Percep-
tion
. Then I was fortunate enough to obtain a copy of a wonderful recent topic
by John Geiger called
Chapel of Extreme Experience
(2003).
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Geiger traces out
beautifully how Walter's work on flicker entered into sixties culture. I have
little substance to add to Geiger's account, but I want to review his story, since
it adds importantly to our topic.
We need to think of three lines of development. First and most conven-
tionally, Walter's observations on flicker fed into a distinctive branch of work
in experimental psychology aimed at elucidating its properties, exploring,
for example, the kinds of images and visions that flicker produced, and into
philosophical reflections on the same. Interestingly, these explorations of
flicker were typically entwined with explorations of the effects of psychoac-
tive drugs such as mescaline and LSD. It turned out that the hallucinogenic
effects of these drugs are intensified by flicker and vice versa. These fascinat-
ing branches of psychological and philosophical research on the performative
brain flourished in the 1950s and 1960s but seem since to have been largely
forgotten—no doubt due to the criminalization of the drugs.
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Of more di-
rect interest to the student of popular culture is that Aldous Huxley indeed
appears in this story. His 1956 topic
Heaven and Hell
indeed includes flicker,
experienced on its own or in conjunction with LSD, in its catalog of technolo-
gies of the nonmodern self (A. Huxley 1956, 113-14).
