the timboucher experience

Table of Contents

1. Experimenting With The Ganzfeld Effect
2. White Noise Patterns
3. Telepathy Research
4. EVP
5. Theoretical Explanations
6. Personal Experiences & Experimentation
7. Synaesthetic Experiences
8. Experimental Conclusions
9. Metaprogramming & Self-Mastery
10. Consciousness As Interface
11. Towards Ontological Computing Services

Experimenting With The Ganzfeld Effect

A couple of days ago, I first heard about the Ganzfeld Effect: a simple sensory experiment you can perform at home with minimal equipment to experience a light state of sensory deprivation which has connections both to the movement known as Gestalt Psychology and parapsychology, the sub-branch of psychology which some see as a pseudoscience whose focus tends to be the paranormal and “out there” experiences which we as humans sometimes find ourselves in.

From readings on Wikipedia, I found out that the Ganzfeld experiment was devised in the 1930’s by a Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Metzger. “Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies…” The word Ganzfeld comes from the German for “entire field” and the technique consists of halving a ping-pong ball and placing one half over each eye - along with static or white noise playing on head phones. The participant lays down or sits back in a comfortable chair, keeps their eyes open and lets their mind wander. Reports vary as to the effects of the technique: everything from mild yet interesting altered sensory states to full-fledged waking hallucinations of what seem to be a distinctly Jungian-subconscious nature.

White Noise Patterns

White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye’s three color receptors (cones) are approximately equally stimulated.

Telepathy Research

Telepathy research has been done using the Ganzfeld effect, where there is both a receiver (the person attempting to sublimate their ordinary perceptions in white noise) and a “sender” who telepathically tries to transmit images to the receiver, who notes their visual and other sensory perceptions on an audio recorder.

EVP

White noise, incidentally, is quite similar to a popular ghost-hunting technique, known among paranormal circles as EVP or electronic voice phenomena.

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are sections of static noise on the radio or electronic recording that some listeners believe sound like voices speaking words; paranormal investigators sometimes interpret these noises as the voices of ghosts or spirits. [...]

Skeptics of the paranormal attribute the voice-like aspect of the sounds to apophenia (finding of significance or connections between insignificant or unrelated phenomena), auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds into voices in their own language which might otherwise sound like random noise to a foreign speaker), artifacts due to low-quality equipment, and simple hoaxes. Likewise some reported EVP can be attributed to radio interference or other well-documented phenomena.

Theoretical Explanations

Whatever your beliefs or experience regarding the paranormal, the prevailing theory as to how the Ganzfeld experiment and similar sensory deprivation techniques seem to work has to do with the brain’s constant attempts at pattern discovery and interpretation & classification of those discoveries. To remove, limit or sublimate elements of one’s sensory perception seems to have the effect of causing the brain to, not exactly misfire, but to start inventing or extrapolating information to fill up the void. This may be the origin of visions which people report having while undergoing the procedure.

Personal Experiences & Experimentation

So far, I have attempted to duplicate the results of the Ganzfeld technique twice with varying results. Lacking someplace to buy ping-pong balls, I decided to crack white eggs and clean out their innards to use as replacements. I laid on my back and tuned the radio to FM static. The first session I used headphones and the next I did not. Also during the second section, I pulled up two thick blankets over myself on the bed. I have found that having a heaviness, a weight on your body has a sort of damping effect on your perception of your own physical body, and makes it easier to slip into altered perceptual states. I also recommend the use of sage, incense or other sacred herbs to facilitate this experience.

[For an interesting and freaky take on television static or "snow" check out this startling interview between director Steven Spielberg, Andy Warhol & Bianca Jagger]

Findings for my first session did not amount to much. Some swirling entoptic open-eye light dancing patterns. It did, however, enable me to enter into a very calmed, almost meditative or trance-like state after about fifteen minutes of subjecting myself to the white noise barrage.

My second session was a bit more interesting, included some inner symbolic image perceptions which began meshing over the swirling pulsing light patterns my eyes perceived, so that at one point it seemed as though I was perceiving (I wouldn’t call it either sight or imagination - somewhere in between) a big hammer driving a nail into a pulsating heart.

Synaesthetic Experiences

From there, *something* happened, although I don’t quite know what to call it aside from a synaesthetic experience. It seemed as though the audio noise which I was hearing became laminated against the visuals I was perceiving and all enmeshed over inner imagery I was perceiving in my mind’s eye, along with a whirling stream of thoughts, bits of prose and conversational scraps wafting through my sensorium, almost like a passing datastream overheard in some digital otherworld. Synaesthesia is a perceptual field state in which your distinct sensory organs seem to be awash with one another’s feedback, interlaced with corresponding vibrations across the various modalities of sensing; you may see sound or smell colors, etc.

I’m no longer able to recall or to quite put into a narrative sequence the stream of perceptual field states which I experienced during my synaesthetic experiment with the Ganzfeld technique. But I considered the results to be highly favorable, exciting and worthy of follow-up. I concluded the experiment once my alarm clock passed the thirty minute mark which I had set at the begining of my experiment.

Experimental Conclusions

Though I’m currently only working with a very small pool of experiential data, I feel that the experience itself is a worthwhile one for anyone interested in exploring the nature of consciousness and perception and how they may be applied within a technological setting, especially as applied to the field of telecommunications.

The future of telecommunications is unmistakeably tied up with the development of seamlessly immersive rich experiential environments where users can dial-into and modulate perceptual field states at will. Manifestations of this technology will be many and varied: everything from augmented reality techniques, to ubiquitous computing, everyware & ambient intelligent environments, to super-learning and advanced mnemonics, to graphical user interface design, technical theatre & experience design, event planning and coordination, to human-computer interactions, artificial intelligence research, electronics, programming, gaming and entertainment. The list goes on and on, but the centrality of this type of research can simply not be over-stated. In short the future of world business cannot be unraveled from the questions of what is human consciousness and how does it work?

Metaprogramming & Self-Mastery

Asking oneself those root questions about what our consciousness is, what our mind is, what our experiences are made up with challenges us to find tools, methods and technologies for predictably and reliably invoking, maintaining and ending at will altered states of consciousness. These need not be related to psychedelics, or anything paranormal, but fields such as these - which are not ordinarily considered acceptable forums of discourse or research among “civilized professionals” - I believe will be of pivotal importance in the understanding of how to create user-centered business services and products which deal so intimately with what the nature of human experience really even is in the first place.

In my own limited experience with the subject of consciousness manipulation - which range across many modalities, contexts, traditions and technologies over many years - I have found that *any* experimentation whatsoever in these fields leads to improvement. That is, if you experiment with meditating, you’ll get better at meditating and with controlling the perceptual field states which it allows you to tune into. If your experimentation leads you in other directions, I’ve seen enough to know that you will undoubtedly see some improvement in your own mastery of these states, and your ability to “dial them in” at will.

Counter-culture heroes, researchers and intellectuals in the 1960’s and 1970’s, people like Timothy Leary, John Lilly and later Terence McKenna, showed that there is a rich field of experience which may be mined within the field of consciousness studies. Of special interest to us now is the subject of metaprogramming, which is a computer science metaphor which has been coopted and applied to the field of consciousness studies.

Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data, or that do part of the work at runtime that would otherwise be done at compile time. In many cases, this allows programmers to get more done in the same amount of time as they would take to write all the code manually, or it gives programs greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation.

The language in which the metaprogram is written is called the metalanguage. The language of the programs that are manipulated is called the object language. The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is called reflection or reflexivity.

Metaprogramming, I think, is an extremely important and reliable paradigm, guide or psychopomp (to be Jungian about it) to apply within the emerging field of consciouness-studies meeting next generation telecommunications and entertainment technology, whether it be through something like augmented geospatial reality systems or with designing ubiquitous computing environments with ambient intelligent agents, or even with using cloud computing p2p technologies to create and coordinate mobile ad hoc networks of actual humans performing some activity within the real world. It could be anything: buying a particular type of product, re-building a decayed urban center from the inside out, or with uses which have yet to be dreamed up.

Consciousness As Interface

Current paradigms guiding human computer interactions focus on allowing computation technology to act as bridges and tools for humans to actualize their intentions within the realm of forms, and to communicate within the ever-evolving electronic media surrounding the World of Ideas, or what De Chardin termed the Noosphere.

I propose that to make the really far-out products and services which will really knock people’s socks off that we even need to transcend the above paradigm - or at least place it within a large holonic context. Human computer interactions problems, at root, are about neither human bodies (per se) or even computers. You’ll have to bear with me for a second here…

What I’m proposing is devising more effective means whereby as fully conscious perceiving centers with volitional agency or “Free Will” we can work co-creatively with our human bodies and technologies applied as extensions of our natural human body and “ordinary” human nervous system.

What this means is that human computer interactions becomes instead consciousness mediated through the body and extensions of the body. It’s a whole other ball game which allows us to take a more gestalt approach to asking just what it is experience really even consists of at root, and how we can manipulate it using our own Free Will to create win-win situations for other perceiving centers, and whatever other ecologic, holonic, bionomic, hylozoic or other systems with which our own perceptions and actions intepenetrate.

Towards Ontological Computing Services

Any technological operating system which will allow humans to move forward individually and collectively will have to address at a fundamental level ontological, cosmological, phenomenological and what have heretofore been highly philosophic or even religious or spiritual subjects. Human kind, without any aid of or resorting to special electronic or artificial devices, has such an extraordinarily rich history with consciousness study, research and experimentation that it would be foolish and a downright waste of resources to neglect the vast wealth of riches and tradition available at our finger-tips. Any successful future telecommunications technology will found itself first and foremost on those things - because they reveal a universal set of functional techniques across many contexts, symbol sets & narratological systems.

I bid all fellow-travelers down this path welcome, and invite you to enter into creative discussion, collaboration, observation, inspiration and dreamwork here and at this domain which has been and continues to be dedicated to the Public Domain and its advancement. Cheers and good tidings to all, whatever brought you here! Have a rest, look around and enjoy your stay!

Possibly Relevant Images Gathered from my Datawake (And interspersed througout)

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