PROTO

Turn On, Tune In, Bliss Out

Dr. James Hardt hopes his DIY neurofeedback tech will fire up the global brain.

By David Pescovitz Photography by Howard Cao

BLUE. THE COLOR OVERWHELMS ME AS I STEP

inside a nondescript office park building across the street from the San Jose airport. There’s blue everywhere. Blue carpet. Blue walls. Blue fabric draped here and there. Even the wall art, cosmic fantasy framed prints that are the New Age equivalent of black light posters, is heavy on the azure.

The cracked geodes decorating the conference table are bluish-purple. This is the Biocybernaut Institute, home to neurofeedback technology that the inventor believes could someday be used to awaken the global brain. Enter the mind-machine maker himself, Dr. James Hardt, sporting what else but a blue fleece jacket. “You apparently like blue?” I ask him.

“It’s not about liking blue,” Hardt says. “It’s about the fact the blue enhances the brain’s alpha state.”

Hardt should know. Over three decades he’s trained hundreds of people to use a neurofeedback system of his own design to control their own brain waves and spend more time in an alpha state.

For those who may not have lived in California during the 1970s, the alpha state is a brainwave pattern with a frequency of 8-13Hz that’s commonly associated with relaxation and meditation. Increased alpha wave activity has also been shown to help alleviate ADHD and depression, boost creativity and alertness, and facilitate out-of-body experiences and other psychic phenomena, depending on who you ask.

Hardt claims that one week of alpha training can yield changes in brain waves comparable to 21 to 40 years of Zen meditation training. All for the low, low price of $15,000 per person. That’s how much a weeklong training session of roughly 12-hour days

42 Make: Volume 09

at the Biocybernaut Institute runs. Bliss doesn’t come cheap.

“Alpha power, when it’s high, is like being in heaven,” Hardt says. “You’re filled with joy, enthusiasm, and a sense of wonder.”

Neurofeedback was born during the psychedelic 1960s out of earlier experiments to detect the current in our heads. The core technology is the electroencephalograph (EEG), a device used to record electrical activity in the brain by sticking electrodes to the scalp. The field began in 1908 when Hans Berger wired his son up to a galvanometer and recorded his brain waves. Berger named the signals alpha waves because they were the first ones discovered.

But the real biofeedback breakthrough occurred in the 1960s, when UC San Francisco psychologist Joe Kamiya closed the loop by providing subjects with real-time data of their brainwave activity in the form of audio tones. Kamiya hooked up all kinds of people to his machine, from Zen monks who exhibited heightened alpha states, to Summer of Love seekers eager for a new trip, to a curious physics graduate named James Hardt.

One day, a lab technician left for lunch, forgetting that Hardt was in the chamber. Over the next several hours, Hardt says he went on a transcendental “adventure” in the alpha state, complete with “ego dissolution,” that hooked him for life. Learning to control your mind from the inside out, he believes, is the first step to manifesting a human superconsciousness.

“If you’ve got a mess in your mind, you’re not going to be as good a candidate for a linkup,” he explains. “You usually take a shower before making