Lehal Library

Aside from visiting participants from out of town, we had a local volunteer group consisting of several M.D.s, a physicist, an electronic engineer, several psychiatric and social service workers, plus assorted friends and family. Most research and experiments took place at night or on weekends, as all of us were employed in other occupations. In retrospect, the immense contribution that this group gave freely was a major factor in helping the whole process get started under these new conditions, and for this I will be forever grateful. It took much patience and dedication to paste up with electrodes, then lie hour after hour in a darkened booth and report subjective results of various tests—results that could be correlated with instrument readouts in the control room to the point where a consensus could be achieved. Our first studies were a continuation of the sleep research begun in New York. The demand for a solution to a problem brought one of our early results of significance. Because so much of the reported outof-body states, including many of my own, revolved around the sleep state, we still believed some answers would be found in this area. However, most of our subjects arrived at night after dinner, and with long, boring periods of being wired up with electrodes, they were either too tired to stay awake in the booth or too restless to be able to relax enough to report any subtle and subjective responses. It defeated our purpose to use any types of medication or drugs to control these states, so we looked for a method within our own frame of reference. The old truism held. Necessity is the mother. It was through this need to help our subjects stay awake, get into a borderland sleep state, that we began to try utilizing sound. This resulted in the discovery of Frequency-Following Response (FFR), which permitted us to hold the subject in a certain state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep for extended periods of time. By introducing certain sound patterns in the subject’s ear, we determined that there was a similar electrical response in the brain waves of the subject. By controlling that brain-wave frequency, we were able to help the subject relax, keep him awake, or put him to sleep. One of our engineering participants suggested that we patent this unusual