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that's it!' ” (quoted in Geiger 2003, 49). Although not evident in the story of
the Walter-Brooks connection in robotics, a corollary of the chancy mode in
which cybernetics was transmitted was, as I said earlier, the opportunity for
wild mutation—the transmutation of brain science into art objects and psy-
chedelic replacements for the TV.
Biofeedback and new music
THE SOuNdS THAT ARE “AllOwEd TO BE THEmSElvES” IN luCIER'S wORk HAvE
AlwAYS HAd A mYSTERIOuSlY “ExPRESSIvE” quAlITY. SOmETImES I THINk IT
IS INARTICulATE NATuRE SPEAkINg TO uS HERE.
JameS tenney,
“THE ElOquENT vOICE Of NATuRE” (1995)
“Biofeedback” refers to another set of technologies of the nonmodern self,
techniques for reading out “autonomous” bodily parameters such as brain
rhythms and displaying them to subjects, thus making them potentially
subject to purposeful intervention. Shipton's flicker-feedback circuit might
be described as such a device, except that there was no choice in the matter:
the circuit locked onto the subject's brainwaves and fed them back as flicker
whether the subject liked it or not. Walter describes a more voluntary biofeed-
back arrangement in
The Living Brain
(1953, 240). The onset of sleep and an-
ger is marked by an increase in low-frequency theta rhythms in the brain, and
Walter imagines an EEG setup in which this increase flashes a light or rings
a bell: “Worn by hard-driving motorists, theta warning-sets would probably
save more lives than do motor horns, and they might assist self-knowledge
and self-control.”
79
In the 1960s, biofeedback came to refer to a species of self-
training, in which subjects learned to control aspects of their EEG spectrum
(without ever being able to articulate how they did it).
80
We could follow the history of biofeedback in several directions. Going
back to our earlier clinical concerns, Jim Robbins (2000) offers a popular
account of the history of biofeedback in psychiatry and of present-day uses
in the treatment of a whole range of disorders including epilepsy, learning
disabilities, autism, and PTSD.
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He notes, however, that biofeedback was also
taken up by the sixties counterculture in pursuit of alpha-wave-dominated
states that had become identified with transcendental experiences (fig. 3.14).
The first meeting of biofeedback professionals took place at Snowmass, Colo-
rado, in 1968, and the attendees were “a mixture of uptight scientific types . . .
and people barefooted, wearing white robes, with long hair. It attracted the
