Cogitate This!

'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Tutorial #01: Repetition Repetition Repetition

"The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in 'The Hunting of the Snark': 'What I tell you three times is true.'"

-- Norbert Weiner, from Cybernetics

Excerpt from:
"The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space"
by John C. Lilly, M.D.

pages 64-68: Tape Loops

During the transition period, while I was transferring the dolphin work to others, I pursued a peculiar effect we had noticed when working with the communication systems of the dolphin. In order to study the dolphin humanoid vocalizations we put what the dolphin said onto a repeating tape loop where we could study it. We then had a group of people guess what the dolphin had been saying. We obtained a list of, say, ten different words that they thought the dolphin was saying. To complete our study we then had to take the vocalization of the human, which had just preceded the dolphin vocalization, and put that on a tape loop. We quickly found that listening to a repeating word in clear high-fidelity English generated more alternatives than did the dolphin emission. If one listens to a tape loop of a repeated word for fifteen minutes, one may hear as many as thirty different words other than the one which is on the tape loop. We did an extensive study of the word "cogitate." We exposed something of the order of three hundred subjects to this word for periods of fifteen minutes to six hours. We asked each subject to write down the words that he heard or to report them with a microphone on another channel of the same tape recorder. 

From these three hundred subjects we got on the order of 2,300 different words. Three hundred of these words were in a dictionary; the rest were words that we do not ordinarily use, i.e., nondictionary words was we began to call them. In this work I received the very enthusiastic contributions of Margaret Naesser, a student of linguistics from the University of Wisconsin. Margaret had tremendous energy and initiative and carried out the study using the IBM 360 computer system at the University of Illinois to analyze our results. Dr. Heinz Von Foerster at the biocomputer laboratory was intrigued by our results and arranged for us to use the computer. 

The computer analyses showed that, for each sound slot in the word "cogitate," the human biocomputer on repetition turns over and selects other sounds which one then hears as if coming from the stimulus word outside. Each such sound is called a phon. We found that on the average people tended to make twelve phon slots in the original stimulus word "cogitate." The minimum number of slots was 3 and the maximum number was 26. The number of substitutions of sounds in each of the twelve slots was different. For the first slot, there were 13 substitutions. In the second, 44 different sounds could be brought in, and so on. 

It turned out that this repeating word effect made it possible to demonstrate very rapidly to live audiences their own biocomputer operations. This is the reason that I went on with this work and made the transition from the dolphin to the human through the repeating word effect. It was an extremely convenient way of demonstrating to people their own self-metaprogramming and the various concepts of the biocomputer. 

In addition to hearing alternate words when being exposed to the repeating word stimulus, I found that certain people went through various kinds of trips. In one audience of two hundred people, we found that something like 10 to 12 percent of the people tripped out and did not report anything about the alternatives that they heard. When I was able to quiz two of these people about what had happened, they described trips very much like the ones I had found in the isolation tank. In addition, we found that we could program the alternates a person would hear by various means. 

To see the programmability of the alternates that were heard, the subject would listen to the repeating word for an hour and write down all of the alternates he heard and print them on cards.

Next, the subject would turn on the repeating word and listen to it while looking at the cards one at a time. He relaxed and then, as he turned up a new card, he hear heard the alternate printed on that card. This experiment showed that visual input can program what is heard. 

We also found that peripheral vision, that is, the vision which is off the main axis from where one is looking, could also program what was heard. We printed alternates with very large letters on cards and brought them into the peripheral vision of the subject while he was listening to the repeating word. He then reported out loud what he heard. The word that was being brought in from the periphery, in spite of the fact he could not read it consciously, started programming what he heard. This was a "programming" gradient from the farthest reaches of peripheral vision at 90 degrees to the optic axis in toward the focal center on the optic axis. Just before the subject could read the word consciously, that is, where it was still far enough off the central axis so that he could not read it consciously, the word was programming 90 percent of what he heard. 

This experiment demonstrated that people are constantly being programmed below levels of their awareness by the periphery of their vision. It is probably a good thing that this is true. It allows us to drive a car and to walk and to do various other tasks including reading in a smooth fashion without having to think about everything that happens. 

The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually, simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding environment. 

We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were beyond their immediate conscious control. They would not accept the fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried to they could not read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the word, thus spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effect, of course, we had an observer looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their eyes move were discounted. This kind of upset was easily corrected by continuing the demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and accepted them, he no longer became upset by the unconscious operations of his biocomputer. Later, I was to use this effect to show people some of the projection mechanisms in their own biocomputer in workshops at Esalen Institute. 

From the repeating word effect, I learned something about going with the flow, relaxing and allowing instructions from some place else to run my biocomputer. If one relaxes totally while listening to the repeating word, one can quickly find all of the phenomena that I have described above. However, if one is "up tight" and refuses to really "let go" even though one would like to let go, these phenomena just do not occur as frequently.

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Some related sound works:

...and finally (FINALLY!) a drag queen lop-syncing to Gertrude Stein reading from "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson"