Free Elephants on Acid by Alex Boese

the research of Charles Lebo, Kenward Oliphant, and John Garrett would be of more use. During the 1960s these three doctors investigated acoustic trauma from rock-and-roll music by measuring sound levels at “typical San Francisco Bay Area rock-and-roll establishments frequented almost exclusively by teenagers and young adults, of whom many fall into a group popularly designated as ‘hippies.’” They discovered sound levels far in excess of those considered safe. They made the following suggestion to the hippies:

Attenuation of the amplification to safe levels would substantially reduce the risk of ear injury in the audience and performers and, in the opinion of the authors, would still permit enjoyment of the musical material.

    The hippies would have heeded the warning—really, they would have—but the music was too loud to hear what the doctors were saying.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Total Recall
    Memory, the theme of this chapter, is an ancient obsession. For millennia people have tried to find ways to increase it, delete it, or hold on to what they have. In the sixteenth century, an Italian inventor named Giulio Camillo claimed to have designed a Theater of Memory that enabled scholars to memorize all forms of knowledge, in their entirety. The Memory Theater was supposed to be a physical structure, although whether it was ever built or merely existed as plans on paper is not known. A scholar would stand inside the theater and see arrayed before him tiers of wooden shelves bearing cryptic images, each of which represented a form of knowledge. Studying the location and meaning of these images, Camillo claimed, would allow vast amounts of information to somehow, magically, flow into the savant’s brain. Needless to say, there is no evidence this worked. In the modern world, Hollywood has envisioned equally fantastic memory-altering technologies. For instance, there was the Neuralizer, carried by the government agents in the Men in Black films, that erased the memory of anyone who stared into its flash; or the Rekall mind-device machine, from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall , that allowed people to take imaginary adventures by implanting false memories of what they had done. In real life, scientific researchers have not yet achieved the kind of total memory control artists have dreamed of, but not for lack of trying.

Electric Recall

    Wilder Penfield is poking around in your head—literally. You lie in an operating room. The top of your skull has been cut away, revealing your brain. But you are still awake. If there was a mirror on the ceiling, you could see the Canadian neurosurgeon moving behind you. Penfield lifts up an instrument, a monopolar silver-ball electrode, and touches it to your brain. You cannot feel this, because there are no nerve endings in the brain. But suddenly a memory flashes before your eyes, something you hadn’t thought of in years. You see your mother and father standing in the living room of the house you grew up in, and they’re singing. You listen closely. It’s a Christmas carol. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-lala, la-la-la-la.” The tune is so clear you can hum along with it. You start to do this, but just then Dr. Penfield removes the electrode, and the memory vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

    The phenomenon you have just experienced is electric recall. While performing brain surgery on epileptic patients during the 1930s and 1940s at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Penfield discovered that sometimes, when he touched an electrode to their brains, random memories would intrude into their conscious thoughts. It was as though he had found the mind’s videotape archive. When he pushed the magic button, zap , scenes from the patients’ pasts would start playing. Penfield himself used this analogy: “Applying the stimulus was like pressing the start button on a tape recorder. Memories would start playing before the patient’s eyes, in real