There's a few things I didn't ever tell the others about the invention of the cyber-mining device.
The most obvious one is the way that I was boosting my thought processes. Those that know me will understand. Writers and other artists sometimes use substances to boost their creativity.
Native American Indians said that peyote took them to heaven, but white missionaries would say, with equal assurance, that it offered them only a glimpse of hell.
Jean-Paul Sartre tried mescaline, and according to his companion Simone de Beauvoir, had a very bad trip: ‘The objects he looked at changed their appearance in the most horrifying manner: umbrellas had become vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces acquired monstrous characteristics…’
By the 1950s, Aldous Huxley was writing Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell under the influence of mescaline, the synthesised version of peyote. Then he moved to LSD, which became available to adventurous writers, intellectuals and therapists.
William Burroughs and the Beat writers of the 1950s and 60s reconfigured the psychedelic landscape by moving hallucinogens out of the drawing room and into the streets, pursuing their organic roots in the third world.
Burroughs wrote portions of Naked Lunch under the influence of yage, or ayahuasca, the DMT-containing hallucinogenic brew concocted in South America: ‘New races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realised pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains... The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market’.
Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, took peyote in Mexico and yage in South America. His poem Junky describes Burroughs’s peyote experiences, and portions of Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl were also written under the influence of peyote.
And we shouldn't forget Earnest Hemingway, who first coined the phrase 'Write Drunk, Edit Sober.'
My approach whilst trying out new ideas had some similarities, although I used electronic instead of chemical stimulation. I'd seen several brain booster devices on eBay and in Wired magazine and decided 'How difficult can it be?' to make one.
The technical term is transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves hooking up electrodes to the skull and then turning on a small electric current, typically powered by a 9-volt battery.
There's a small community citing this as its inspiration. Some studies that have found tentative promise for tDCS to enhance memory, alertness, and the ability to learn new tasks, and to decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression. Anecdotally, users report that tDCS also helps them ease into a flow state (i.e., being “in the zone”), where they can get many tasks done without distraction. Others will do this by listening to Mozart.
Of course, I'd read the literature. The jury was divided. Some said it would boost thinking, others said it would create limits. There were further warnings about the voltages. It wasn't like overclocking a cpu. The desired maximum voltage seemed to be 9 volts or the equivalent output of a single PP3 battery. That's oblong battery you find in the old-fashioned smoke detectors. Then it would be at around 1 or 2-milli-Amperes and to run it for about 10 minutes.
I priced up some components and ordered them from a couple of electronic specialists. The electro-pads were hardest to get, and suppliers wanted to prove they were medically certified, which added cost. I improvised instead with some Medium Wave ribbon antenna and a few Band-Aids. The entire system, including power transistors and some veroboard, cost me less than £20.
I'll be honest. At the time I didn't want the others in the flat to see me wired up, so I hid everything around the back of a chest of drawers, which was conveniently in the middle of the floor in my room. And I had the whirring clicking machinery of the cyber coin miner on the other cupboard which made a great distraction.
Now I could fulfil my dream to play Tom Waits and attempt to jack my brainpower at the same time. Maybe listening to "What's he building in there?"
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