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love, right? This is the mental equivalent of that.”
From 1971 to 1977, Hardt worked closely with
Kamiya to see how neurofeedback might push the
limits of human potential. Meanwhile, he rolled his
own belief system from a smorgasbord of spiritual
traditions and philosophers.
Two decades later, the Biocybernaut Institute
apparently has no shortage of students. Hardt says
he’s trained everyone from Silicon Valley big shots
to pro football players to U.S. Army Green Berets.
The latter group signed up
during the 1980s at the bequest of Maj. Gen. Albert “This advanced technology
Stubblebine, onetime head of the United States Army allows scientists to talk the
Intelligence and Security Command, better known language of mystics, and
for his involvement in recently declassified psy- mystics to talk the language
chic spying programs. Every weeklong train- of scientists. I look at what
ing at the Biocybernaut Institute begins in the we’re doing as creating the
conference center, where Hardt gives a PowerPoint- science of spirituality.”
powered rap to orient the
participants. Next, his
staff applies a half-dozen scalp electrodes to each
trainee’s head. After the trainees are wired up,
each moves into one of four soundproof chambers
(blue, of course) where the neurofeedback session
actually takes place. Every chamber contains a surround sound system, a computer on a desk, and a
task chair. (If you’re doing theta training, you get
to kick back in a La-Z-Boy. Theta brain waves are
associated with deep relaxation and light sleep.)
Baseline EEG measurements are taken, and then a
symphony of electronic tones reminiscent of a minimalist techno album signals that the long, strange
trip is about to begin.
“When you go to the theater, you have to practice
suspension of disbelief,” he says. “To participate
in this training, you need to have a suspension of
belief and go in only with what you discover. With
that mindset, you have the openness of a baby
and of an advanced mystic.”
Rip off its New Age wrapper and the real magic
of the Biocybernaut training lies in the technology
behind the blue curtain. An array of amplifiers and
filters extract the brain’s electrical signals collected
by the scalp electrodes. That data is then analyzed
by PCs that generate the feedback tones heard
in the chambers. All of the neurofeedback gear
— except two hulking polygraphs that print out the
raw EEG data — is Hardt’s own design. No commercial product was ever good enough, Hardt says,
so he assembled and patented his own. One former
student posting online describes the Biocybernaut
facility as “having an ‘I built a rocket ship in my
garage’ kind of feel.” Indeed, a fair bit of, er, uncon-
ventional engineering went into the system.
Early on, Hardt explains, he had a quality control
problem with components on the filter boards.
Some of the resistors and capacitors behaved
erratically at the boards’ operating temperature of
104 degrees. Hardt’s solution was to heat a room to
104 degrees and test each component individually.
“Once the room was hot enough, my staff and
I went in wearing bathing suits and metered each
part,” Hardt recalls. “We put them into labeled bins
so we had known values.”
Next, Hardt wrote software to specify how those
resistors and capacitors with slightly different
values could be combined into circuits that would
operate within his strict tolerances. Only then could
his circuit board assembly line begin.
“This advanced technology allows scientists to
talk the language of mystics, and mystics to talk the
language of scientists,” Hardt says. “I look at what
we’re doing as creating the science of spirituality.”
Back in the chamber, the trainees hear various
synthesized tones that change according to how
their alpha states increase or decrease. The tones,
44 Make: Volume 09
