All Episodes
April 6, 2000 - Art Bell
35:34
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Neil Slade - The Brain (portions of interview)
Participants
Main voices
a
art bell
08:46
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
art bell
Anybody out there remember Mike the headless chicken?
If not, we're going to remind you about Mike here in a minute.
Because coming up is Neil Slade, who is a composer, musician, author, artist, and was assistant to brain and behavior researcher, TDA Lingo, for 11 years at the Dormant Brain Research and Development Laboratory, called by paranormal psychology expert Dr. Jeffrey Mishlov, a shaman in his own right.
Mr. Slade is widely known for teaching easy methods to turn on intelligence, creativity, pleasure, and paranormal ability laying dormant in every human brain, even yours.
Slade also maintains an extensive internet website available a link to our website right now.
All you've got to do is go up and jump across.
All of his books are recommended reading by Bloomsbury Review, a National Book Review magazine.
Now, we're going to now talk with Neil Slade.
And Neil Slade, for those of you who don't recall, is the man who started the cloud-busting thing on the show and the changing of the weather and the beginning of the great experiments that we have done here on the air with millions of people that worked worryingly well, is the way I would put it.
And so we're going to talk about weather modification.
We're going to talk about our human brain.
And we're going to talk about Mike the Headless Chicken and all kinds of stuff.
Neil, welcome back to the program.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
It's a pleasure to be speaking with you again.
art bell
Happy to have you.
It's always hard to know where to begin, but I think...
Okay.
unidentified
And it takes off on something that you reported earlier in your show.
art bell
Which one?
unidentified
It had to, well, one of the things.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things you've covered.
That's great.
There was the mysterious sound, the large...
art bell
Yes.
Yes.
unidentified
I know of a brain phenomenon, which that may have been, that's a very striking phenomenon.
Now, we talk a lot about clicking the amygdala.
art bell
But remember, this was a husband and a wife and children on an Indian reservation.
unidentified
I'm right with you.
I'm right with you.
art bell
All right, so it was more than one brain.
unidentified
Yes, absolutely.
The amygdala being the switch that is like the light switch on your wall.
And when you mentally click this switch forward, it sends energy from the inner part and the lower parts of your brain.
It shunts the energy forward to the forward part of the brain.
art bell
Okay?
Yes.
unidentified
Now, I'll ask you and your listeners this.
Have you ever heard a sound inside your head that sounded real but you knew it was inside your own head?
art bell
Yes.
unidentified
Okay?
When people learn how to click there and make the look forward, a percentage of people actually hear a sound.
Some people hear a click.
art bell
You mean like an actual click?
unidentified
An actual auditory sound.
art bell
I've had head sounds.
Now, Neil, by that I mean an occasional kind of a buzzing sound that you know is internal, not external.
unidentified
I'm not talking about something caused by the inner ear.
I'm talking about a perception of sound that's caused directly by the transmission of neurochemicals over the synapses.
It's an internal electrical chemical stimulus that your brain interprets as a sound.
Okay?
art bell
Yes.
But I cannot say that in trying to concentrate and click my...
Because some people are new and they're not going to even know what we're doing.
unidentified
Each time I'm on your show, I get this down to shorter and quicker.
art bell
Good, okay, go ahead.
We've got to do it.
So go ahead.
unidentified
Okay.
Yeah, your brain has three layers.
The innermost layer, like the seeds of an apple, is called the reptile brain.
It's really just the end of your spinal cord.
It's where your spinal cord comes out of.
And that computes basic survival, keeps your heart going, your breathing rate, your body temperature.
Okay?
That's called the reptile brain.
art bell
All the basic stuff.
That's probably early man.
Well, at some point, he must not have.
In other words, if you believe not in the creation model, but if you believe that evolution is what brought us about finally, then somewhere back there, Neil, we had to be very basic, very basic beings, right?
unidentified
Those were actually our predecessors.
we're talking about reptilian type of animals.
If you look at a snake or a lizard, these animals have...
art bell
That's not a normal jump.
That's not a...
unidentified
Thank you.
art bell
Something or another came along and created that massive change.
That's not a small change from reptile brain to full-function human.
unidentified
No, absolutely not.
But you're talking about something that evolved over millions of years.
So what we did is we retained this reptilian portion of our brain as we developed the primate brain.
art bell
But back there somewhere, there were guys with just reptilian brains, right?
unidentified
Yes.
art bell
Okay.
unidentified
Yes.
art bell
And then comes.
unidentified
And then they came out of the water onto land and grew legs.
And they developed into mammals, okay, as what we recognize as early mammals.
So they added like what we might consider the core of an apple around the seeds.
And so what this added on was basic social behaviors and emotions to that reptilian core brain.
art bell
Happiness, jealousy, rage.
unidentified
Yeah, these are human attributes.
But if you look at your dog or cat, you know, I know my dog when he's happy or when he's scared.
art bell
Oh, I know about my cat.
unidentified
Okay, So you can be just a lower mammal and have these emotions.
You don't have to necessarily be able to put them into English words.
But you do have these basic types of emotions as a mammal does, as a dog or a cat does.
art bell
I let my cat out on the porch.
When I tell him it's time to go in, he gets pissed and he goes, and he hisses at me, and he goes inside, and he sulks for a while.
unidentified
Yes.
art bell
And he's actually, there's no question about it, he's kicked off at me.
unidentified
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's kind of the next step up in brain evolution is to experience these emotions.
And reptiles don't really experience emotions.
They can react in self-defense or counterattack or nothing.
art bell
Fight or flight.
unidentified
Fight or flight, right?
That's reptilian.
But that's not emotion.
Emotions are a much more complex type of thinking and behavior.
It's more subtle kinds of things.
Okay?
So about, well, there's some discussion of when this happened, but between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, or I'm sorry, as far back as a million years ago, some believe the early upright walking primates evolved.
And with this, they added on even more brain tissue to this mammal brain.
So then we have three layers, kind of like the juicy part of an apple and the skin of the apple.
And this is the big wrinkly part that you think of when you see like a brain in a jar, for example.
You're actually looking at this developed primate brain.
Now if you grab on to your forehead with one hand, and your audience can do this as I describe it, just hold on to your whole forehead.
Now everything underneath your hand is the most advanced part of the brain called the frontal lobes.
And that's where you compute all the things that we associate only with humans.
Abstract thought, concepts of time, planning, imagination, those very advanced types of thinking and I have a question for you.
Sure.
art bell
If that's where all the advanced real human stuff is in our frontal lobes, what happened to people who got frontal lobotomies?
unidentified
Well, that was severed.
And we first learned about that from a fellow named Phineas Gage, a railroad worker, back in the 1800s.
And they were using, back then they used explosive charges to set ties in some railroad construction.
And he was setting one of the tie rods into the railroad tracks.
And one of the explosive charges accidentally went off.
And it sent the railroad tie right through his head.
And it entered right at the bridge of the nose.
art bell
Oh, man.
unidentified
And it severed the connection between this advanced frontal lobes portion of the brain and the rest of the brain.
And miraculously enough, they pulled the thing out of his head.
And other than that, he was fine.
He just got up and they sent him home.
art bell
What?
Wait a minute.
They sent him home?
unidentified
They sent him home to recuperate.
Now, the thing was, is he was never the same.
No, no.
He was never the same after that.
art bell
How could he be sent home?
How could you possibly be sent home with a hunk of your brain severed?
unidentified
Well, that's why they were able to get away with these frontal lobotomies during the 40s and the 50s, because you can sever this connection from the brain, and it affects behavior without completely destroying the ability for a human being to function.
So when they observed Phineas Gage, what they found is that he lost the ability to concentrate.
He lost his ability to plan.
He lost his ability to put two and two together.
In other words, he could function, but he only functioned in a moment-to-moment type of existence.
Could he say stuck in the here and now, and he couldn't move beyond that?
art bell
Could he say, hi, Art?
Been a long time since I've seen you.
How have you been?
unidentified
I believe he would recognize people and things.
You know, people that he knew, but he couldn't plan to do things.
art bell
Could he say, hi, Art?
Man, you were always such a jerk.
Have you improved?
unidentified
Well, memory is stored in a different part of the brain.
So if one's frontal lobes are severed, it doesn't destroy memories that are stored in further back.
art bell
Okay, then what specifically goes?
unidentified
What goes, and I call the Cecil behaviors, the frontal lobe Cecil behaviors, C-I-C-I-L.
We'll call this cooperation, imagination, creativity, intuition, and logic.
art bell
That's a lot to lose.
unidentified
Well, it is quite a bit to lose.
The cooperation, the ability to work with other people in combined efforts, you lose that.
Okay?
art bell
Well, then why would they, if you don't mind my asking, medically, when they were doing frontal lobotomies, they were trying to modify frequently violent or psychotic behavior of some sort or another.
Isn't that the reason they would do that?
unidentified
That's one, yes.
That's one of the reasons that they would do that.
They found that when the frontal lobes were severed, a person would become, I'm trying to think of the right word, more of a flat line type of emotion.
In other words, they were not as prone to get excited.
art bell
Took the edge off.
unidentified
They took the edge off.
art bell
The person.
unidentified
Possibly the reason for that is when you lose the ability to reason, you don't see the connection.
You don't see the connection between cause and effect.
You're just faced with what is happening to you from moment to moment.
So you don't get mad at so-and-so because he did this to you.
You're not adding those kinds of things up.
art bell
Were frontal lobotomies, in your opinion, ethically, morally abhorrent to do?
unidentified
I believe so.
I mean, frontal lobotomies were discontinued after a short number of years, primarily because, as it turns out, they were not entirely effective in reducing violent behavior.
art bell
And the answer for that might be that some of the violent behavior is still generated in the primal part of the brain, that first part of the brain you talked about, right?
Yes, yes.
Some sort of malfunction there.
Instead of fight or flight, you just got fight.
unidentified
Yes.
And, you know, pharmaceutical drugs were then developed, beginning to be really developed and explored in the 50s, and they found that they could much more effectively focus on the types of behaviors that they wanted to eliminate through the use of pharmaceutical drugs.
So it was just, it was a short-lived experiment.
But what we did is we learned what happens when you lose your frontal lobes.
And it was very, you know, out of the mistakes that we made, we learned quite a bit about brain and behavior.
art bell
So out of the paranormal experiences we have, the ability to control the weather we have, or a cloud formation, or even control the weather to a greater degree, something we're going to talk about this morning, which I'm very, very interested in, as you know.
All of this and more is possible because of this frontal lobe area.
And you have told us that there is a way to virtually concentrate and turn on a switch or two switches which will click forward, this amygdala, you call it, and activate strongly the frontal lobe area.
Is that roughly accurate?
unidentified
That's very accurate.
And the amygdala is, not only do I call it that, but all neuroscientists around the planet call it that.
So we're talking about a part of the brain that we have some very good ideas of what it does.
And the research done by T. D. Lingo was very important at proving that people can actually control this part of the brain and then turn on all those types of things that you were talking about.
Now, earlier, we were talking about the sound that it makes.
Some people actually hear a sound.
Not everybody.
In fact, just a small percentage of people hear this click sound.
And here I have a letter in front of me by one fellow who had tried to click, and it took him about six weeks to learn how to do it.
And then he writes, and he says, astonished when it finally happened.
I find your description surprisingly accurate, blah, blah, blah.
In my own head, I did experience an audible two-syllable sound which could only be described as kaboom or kabang.
That lasted for more than 20 hours.
Now, this has been reported many times.
When they feel this amygdala clicking forward or when they try to do it, they hear this audible sound happening.
art bell
Now, like somebody threw the old knife switch.
unidentified
Yes.
And the energy itself, I mean, you know, you can look at it on a molecular level and follow the pathway of energy.
So, you know, even on a very small molecular level, we're talking about the transference of energy.
And energy, when it moves, can make an audible sound.
art bell
Can you attach electrodes to a person's brain?
And can you actually see when they have clicked this forward button?
unidentified
Well, yes.
And scientists have done this, not only with the amygdala, but other portions of the brain.
And what you see is instantaneous and dramatic behavioral changes and thinking and in humans.
art bell
But I mean, on an actual graph from electrodes, you can see that electrically something just occurred.
unidentified
Oh, yes.
I mean, more than just that.
One outstanding comes to mind, a woman who was having fits of rage.
And I can think of a lot of instances where these implants were made inside the brain using very fine wires.
And for example, one group of violent criminals were set up with a battery pack and the wire connected inside their brain.
And whenever they felt an urge to lash out and commit either, they would press the little button on the box, and suddenly they would feel fine.
And it overran.
In other words, it was like a seesaw.
The pleasure responses outweighed the pain responses, and they instantaneously lost that killer.
art bell
So in other words, here's a guy ready to raise his fist and bash somebody's head in virtually.
unidentified
Yeah.
art bell
Right?
And instead, he remembers he presses a little.
unidentified
He presses a button.
art bell
He presses a little button and some electricity flows somewhere and he goes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
unidentified
They also did this.
art bell
Neil, Neil, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
Let me find my button here.
What do you think?
Can we do that?
Would that be a good thing, or would that be a bad thing?
Well, the answer is we can do it, but I'm not sure about the question.
I am Ardell.
This is Coast to Coast.
Taking a trip inside tonight.
unidentified
Take a trip inside tonight.
art bell
Sure that that's not dangerous?
unidentified
Well, I think it can be dangerous.
Yeah, so do I. Here's what we know about the amygdala.
When the amygdala is clicked forward and you're sending more energy to the most advanced parts of your brain, your brain gives you feedback.
I mean, the most frequent question I get is, how do I know if I'm clicking my amygdala forward or not, or if I'm clicking it backwards, back in the rectile brain?
Well, the answer is this.
The amygdala gives positive emotion when it's clicked forward.
Now, the reason you feel good.
Clicking your amygdala feels great.
And the more you do it, the greater you feel.
Here's a comment I got from one guy who learned how to click forward.
He said: the best description I can give is to say it was like walking into a pitch dark warehouse, turning on a light switch, and seeing the lights flash on into infinity.
Another guy says, this is truly unbelievable.
My entire world has improved.
So you get this flood of positive, feel-good emotion.
art bell
I know I've had the same emails and taxes from people who have tried what you have suggested.
A lot of other people say it's baloney, but too many people, I mean, really, like 90% of the responses are positive.
unidentified
Yes, and it's because nature wants you to use more of your brain.
See, if you're using the more advanced parts of your brain, if you're using greater potential of your brain, that increases your ability to solve problems, which in turn allows you to survive better.
So it's nature's way of saying, yes, go this way.
Use more of your brain.
I'm going to make you feel good.
art bell
Be more successful.
unidentified
I want you to be more successful.
art bell
Make more money.
Do more positive things.
unidentified
It's the brain's way of rewarding intelligent, advanced, cooperative behavior.
You feel good.
However, if you click your amygdala backward, what that does is then that shuts down your system.
Instead of being an open system, you become a closed system, and that decreases your ability to survive.
art bell
Question for you.
unidentified
Yeah.
art bell
When a person is contemplating or having sex, where is their amygdala?
unidentified
It depends.
You can have sex as a demented, controlling, negative person, and then you're computing your sexual response out of just the dog-eat-dog reptilian portion of your brain.
And your sexual experience will be over in three seconds.
We know with animals that have smaller brain capacity and less of this advanced part of the brain, their sexual experience is extremely brief.
Even chimpanzees with brains that are most similar to ours, they don't have the big frontal lobes, and so their sexual experience is over in three seconds, and it's not intense.
However, people who have learned how to utilize the cooperative, imaginative, creative parts of their brain, and we know this from researchers like Alan Brower of Stanford, when people click into frontal opus behavior, the orgasmic experience and the sexual experience can go on for hours.
Hours of orgasm.
And I mean this literally.
And this has been shown time and again.
art bell
Now that is dangerous.
unidentified
Well, the thing is, in order to have that experience, then you have to be computing loving, giving, caring, cooperative types of behaviors.
So there's a real connection between real cooperative, loving behaviors and the amount of pleasure that you get.
And that contrasts greatly from selfish, controlling, negative behaviors, which makes the sexual experience over in a flash.
So, you know, that's the most dramatic example of the difference between clicking forward and clicking backwards.
art bell
Is it really?
I just happened to pick the most dramatic example, huh?
unidentified
Yeah, I think so.
art bell
Hours of orgasm.
unidentified
Yeah, and T. D. Lingo actually had written about this in the early 70s, and he stumbled upon this.
Now, we know that there has been a lot of more ancient literature like the Kama Sutra, which is a very old text written about sexual experience and sexual pleasure and how to heighten that.
So in the East, it's been kind of buried in myth and folklore.
But the researcher I studied with, he found that when he began teaching brain self-control and specifically amygdala clicking to his students and subjects, they started reporting this tremendous increase in sexual response that he didn't expect and they didn't expect.
It just happened because they were clicking their amygdala forward.
And he finally put all the pieces together.
Now back in 1982, a full decade after Lingo had already found this out at the brain lab, then people like Mantok Chia, who was a Chinese physician, and Alan Drower of Stanford, then they started reporting this hour-long orgasm kind of thing.
But Lingo found that people would experience this without any fancy doing any fancy exercises other than just clicking their amygdala throughout the day.
So, you know, it's that real, the amygdala provides the pleasure connection in the brain.
It's the feel-good connection in the brain.
So that's how you know if you're clicking forward.
If you do something which provides you with long-term, sustained pleasure, that indicates that you are in fact clicking forward.
If you do something that results in very short-term, very quick types of pleasure that's over quickly at the most, normally what you experience when you have your amygdala clicked backwards is negative emotion and pain and frustration and boredom and negative kinds of experiences.
So your amygdala is like the thermostat on your wall.
Not only can you use your amygdala to deliberately turn up the heat in your house or turn up the amount of activity in your frontal lobe, but the little therm thermometer on there is telling you through your emotions if you're clicking forwards or backward.
Pain equals clicking your amygdala backwards.
Pleasure is equal to clicking your amygdala forward.
So nature is incredible that it's devised this.
And once you understand all of this, then it becomes very easy to control the way that the energy is flowing.
art bell
What about people, for example, Neil, that have chronic conditions like arthritis, where they're subject to constant, nearly constant physical pain of one sort or another?
Can they actually control that?
unidentified
Yes, and again, tonight I just read a report from someone who was controlling chronic arthritic pain along with clicking his amygdala forward.
And his doctor remarked to him that he said, well, you know, I don't understand why you're making such progress.
And this fellow said, well, I started clicking my amygdala.
And the doctor kind of looked at him with raised eyebrows.
We know that pain can be controlled in the body with very minute amounts of electrical stimulus.
So if you go into the brain and start directly manipulating through your own internal manipulation of electrical conductivity in the brain, it follows very, very logically that you can control the amount of pain and lessen considerably the amount of pain that you experience from some type of chronic disease.
What typically will happen when a person starts clicking forward, they begin to see the causal effects of any problems that they may have.
In other words, you can directly control the pain that you are experiencing, but then you also see through your increased ability to through your increased analytical ability, you see, well, oh, I'm doing this which is causing this particular disease in my body.
art bell
You are aware, are you not, of the work going on at Princeton that is studying the brain's ability to is actually really PK, in other words, affecting random number generators with your brain.
unidentified
Yes, I've heard of that.
art bell
It's kind of work.
Well, believe me, it's going on, and they're achieving significant results.
And I can only assume that it's a heavy use of the frontal lobe portion of the brain to achieve this.
You go into a sort of a, I've got a program here that I can pull up, and I can just score and score and score on this program.
It's beyond all belief.
And if I walk away from the program, the score goes down.
If I sit here and concentrate, it goes up.
It's an amazing thing, and I can only assume it's called Shape.
And I can only assume that it is that portion of the brain that we are now discussing that works this way.
unidentified
Well, have you ever heard of?
Do you know what a sympathetic string vibration is?
art bell
No.
unidentified
Let me explain that to you.
Since I'm a musician, I'm very familiar with this.
Let's say you have two strings, like two violin strings, or two piano strings, two guitar strings.
art bell
Sure.
unidentified
Both perfectly still, but they're in proximity to each other.
If you strike one of the strings and it starts to vibrate at a certain frequency, what will happen is the string next to it that wasn't struck will start to resonate and vibrate in sympathy with that string.
art bell
Absolutely true.
unidentified
Now, you talked earlier about the chemical magnetite, which you felt was in the brain.
art bell
Yes.
unidentified
We also know that the brain is 80 or 90% water.
Very high water content in the brain.
We know that the brain, there's electrical and chemical activity within the brain.
Now, one explanation that may be responsible for the ability to cause effects in external objects outside of the brain is that these objects respond in the same way that the two strings in sympathetic vibration respond to each other.
See, if you're talking about sitting in front of a computer, which is an electrical device, and you're talking about microcircuits and very, very low voltage.
art bell
That's correct.
It's like affecting a cloud.
unidentified
Well, the electrical activity inside the brain emanates beyond the skull in the same way that magnetic fields are generated, in the same way that electrical fields generate, you know, have effects outside just the wires themselves.
That is one very plausible explanation for why a person's brain can affect microcircuits.
If the brain is 90% water and a person is concentrating on water vapor, okay, a cloud which is water, it seems plausible to me that perhaps there is a sympathetic vibration between the water molecules inside the human brain and the water vapor.
For a long time, I wondered why is it that we are, why is it so easy to manipulate clouds?
But if I try to move a pencil across my table, it's so much more difficult.
Well, our brains are not made of 90% wood and graphite.
However, they are made of 90% water.
So we've got a real strong connection between our brain material and that cloud material.
art bell
And more likely to get a sympathetic vibration.
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
art bell
All right.
Neil, hold on.
When we come back, we're going to open the lines and see if you all have any questions for Neil Slade.
We've given you a lot to digest out there.
So open lines coming up with Neil Slade.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
This is Coast to Coast A.M. Want
to take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222.
Or call the wildcard line at 775-727-1295.
To talk with Art on the full-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and add them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell.
art bell
That's what it is.
Good morning, everybody.
Neil Slade is here, and he's got actually a couple of books you can get now.
There's a link to his website online, and you can learn much more about this.
Export Selection