By the Late John Brockman (4 page)

The static, fixed, linear system is now superseded by one that is operational and
nonlinear. “It is important to observe that if the frequency of an oscillator can
be changed by impulses of a different frequency, the mechanism must be nonlinear.
A linear mechanism acting on an oscillation of a given frequency can produce only
oscillation of the same frequency, generally with some change in phase and amplitude.
This is not true for nonlinear mechanisms, which may produce oscillations of frequencies
which are the sum and differences of different orders, of the frequency of the oscillator
and the frequency of the imposed disturbance.”
³⁵
There is no information in a linear system. The only way to consider such a system
is in terms of the nonexistent past.

Don’t look for beginnings, for endings. Navigate through reality with no pretense
of knowledge. The unity is methodological. The unity is in the activity and will not
lead to any final answer. It is a path. “All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.”
³⁶
Keep moving.

Man was oblivious to the changes taking place as a result of man-made actions. Had
that level been appreciated, television sets might have been viewed in a different
light. Within the linear construct he could not see the information patterns. Deaths
were caused by fits induced by the flicker of faulty television tubes.
³⁷
Scientific institutes warned that sitting within four feet of color television sets
could cause cancer.
³⁸
Yet the same old questions were asked: “Did you like the program?” All the while
the information of the television experience was coding the operation of the brain.

Consider that the experience of television violates innate biological rhythms programmed
into the genetic homeostatic constitution from the earliest evolutionary eras. These
biological rhythms are invisible, yet nevertheless are information in terms of the
experience of the brain. The most obvious and perhaps least recognized rhythm is the
day / night, light / dark flicker. The experience is a constant input of information
for the brain,
³⁹
effecting change without consent or awareness. Note also recent experiments indicating
that “in all animal species gonadal activity is increased by light rays reaching the
retina. . . . As is the case for other biological cycles, interference with the natural
cycles of light exposure can result in physiological disturbances. . . . Until the
last century, man lived in the dark for long hours during the winter months, and this
is still true in many primitive societies. Modern man, in contrast, was exposed to
bright light for sixteen hours a day throughout the year. In view of the fact that
light rays can affect hormonal activities, and that many, if not most physiological
functions are linked to circadian and seasonal cycles, it seems possible that this
change in the ways of life had long range consequences for the human species.”
⁴⁰

Television, as direct experience, can be considered in this instance on two levels.
First, it is a potent source of light. The cathode-ray experience is the only instance
where man looked directly into a light source for any sustained period, possibly averaging
four hours a day. Light is actually projected onto the retina by the cathode-ray tube.
Second, man responded not only to light perceived by the senses but also to factors
of biological rhythms such as the day / night flicker. Television alters this rhythm
violently. Man talked about the violence evident on television programs. In light
of the above considerations he might have developed a “Theory of Neural Programs,
Television, and Violence,” which hypothesized that “due to circumstances beyond our
control, this ‘program’ is out of order,” which is to say that “there may well be
limits beyond which the natural rhythms are not amenable to frequency synchronization
with new environmental periodicities.”
⁴¹
Violence.

“We’re talking.” The direct experience of the brain is communicated. Communicated
through information. Man ceased to exist when nonlinear extension of experience was
comprehended. It always existed, but now, once again, it’s time to say, “We’re talking.”
Thought control? Absolutely. There is one hundred percent thought control. Indeed,
any considerations on this level are beyond man’s morality. It is a question of a
major leap in evolution.

We are beyond space and time; we are beyond good and evil. There is only information.
It is the control, the measure by which the operation of the brain changes. There
is always complete control.

Man was always blind to considerations of the present. In the transactional present,
man’s brain was continually coded through information. This information was of man’s
own devising. Man determined what he would be, what he would think. This ordering
took place in the present. But man, who made the mistake of confusing abstraction
and reality, deluded himself into thinking he was conscious, and then proclaimed that
this consciousness, this delusion, was reality. There are several stumbling blocks
to communication between linear and nonlinear systems. The major one is that linear
systems do not exist. All that exists are the operations of the brain, the direct
experience, a nonlinear oscillation.

Instead of looking to the world of man, to the linear abstractions, to the conscious
motivations, etc., attention must be turned to a universe of control patterns, patterns
of complete control, the nonlinear process of neural activity. The message in this
system is the communication of pattern. “A message need not be the result of a conscious
human effort for the transmission of ideas.”
⁴²
Work on the level of deciphering the patterns that have always existed but that man
hardly even suspected. Consider the notion of power engineering: “The main function
of power engineering is transmission of energy or power from one place to another
with its generation by appropriate generators and its employment by appropriate motors
or lamps or other such apparatus. So long as this is not associated with transmission
of a particular pattern, as for example in processes of automatic control, power engineering
remains a separate entity with its own technique.”
⁴³
Man was a separate entity with its own technique. The unity is methodological. Concentrate
on communication of operant pattern. The only experience that is real is in the operations
of the brain. The individual experience, the private experience, the personal experience:
illusion. The end of the individual.

Man concerned himself with meaning. His books, plays, movies, television programs,
were considered only in terms of what they had to say, what they had to communicate
in ideas. But experience was itself the communication, what the brain did. Man was
oblivious to these changes. A story was a story—complete with plots, morals, points
of view, and ultimate meanings—to fit within preestablished value systems. Considerations
of story on the neural level are another story. Recent research has shown that “the
parts of the brain from which memories are evoked so easily and regularly are those
we find most liable to exaggerated electrical discharge during flicker, and it is
here too that in normal subjects the pattern of incoming stimuli can be seen abstracted
and preserved for some time after the stimulation has ceased.”
⁴⁴

The movie experience is a flicker experience of a frequency of twenty-four times per
second, slightly higher and safer than the level considered dangerous for certain
brains. The reflection of projected light from a treated surface, a surface encompassing
up to eighty percent of the visual field, can have the effect on the neural level
of an electronic brain message. Where is the meaning when we realize the emotional
response is a function of the flicker experience reactivating memory imprints stored
in the operant circuits of the brain? The implications of such a hypothesis are obvious.
How can we merely discuss “I like it / I don’t like it” without reference to questions
about the brain’s activity, a universe without I’s.

Neural energy is not produced by the major receptors for sensory stimuli. The sources
for neural energy are the gravitational receptors, the stretchingtype muscles. “The
visual receptors, bringing in up to two-thirds of the sensory stimuli for the brain,
are useless as a source of neural energy.”
⁴⁵
In this light, look to the transaction between the environmental force and the organism
in terms of the information provided to the brain. The visual receptors tend to pick
up light as motion. “The human eye has economically confined its best form and color
vision to a relatively small fovea, while its perception of motion is better on the
periphery. When peripheral vision has picked up some object conspicuous by brilliancy
or light contrast or color, or above all by motion, there is reflex feedback to bring
it into the fovea. . . . We tend to bring any object that attracts our attention into
a standard position and orientation, so that the visual image which we form of it
varies within as small a range as possible.”
⁴⁶

Consider the motion-picture experience not in terms of the images of the movie, but
the motion of the flickering light, the flashing on and off, twentyfour times per
second. A relationship can be established between the information this experience
provides for the brain and the production of new quanta of neural energy. Unlike the
usual situation where the eye scans one hundred percent of the visual field, picks
up motion, and brings it into the fovea, the light as motion of the movie experience
can encompass up to eighty percent of the visual field. The normal reflex feedback,
bringing the movement into the fovea, is not possible, as the outer muscles are locked
into a pattern of stretching activity quite unlike any other performed in the daily
routine of contemporary life. The information from this experience is measured by
what the brain does to adjust to the change. In this case there is every reason to
speculate that the experience will provide a potent source of neural energy. The source
is not in what the eye sees, but in what the eye is doing: the stretching of the muscles,
the gravitational receptors, providing information for the brain.

These speculations on the relationship of the environmental force and the activity
integrated on the neural level raise an interesting question. Going beyond the nonexistent
linear construct of movie and into the direct experience of the brain, we can easily
see that the very same movie, experienced in two different theaters, can provide the
brain with significantly different information. Sitting to the rear of a theater with
a postage-stamp screen will expose only about five to ten percent of the visual field
to light as motion. Sitting in the first few rows of a seventy mm. theater will expose
up to eighty percent of the visual field to light as motion. It appears obvious that
the latter experience would be more intense on the neural level. But man, the nonexistent
linear construct, could not get past the level of “What did it say?” “Was it good?”
or “Was it bad?” His mind saw a movie; the experience in the present changed the way
the brain worked.

Every movie is the first movie. “Mechanisms for perceiving and responding to stimuli
are at least partly generated by earlier stimulation.”
⁴⁷
“The information received by the brain both determines the manner of response and
inhibits the establishment of new programs.”
⁴⁸
“The ability to apprehend the external world with freshness of perception commonly
decreases as the mind and the senses become conditioned by repeated experiences. Human
beings thus perceive the world, and respond to it, not through the whole spectrum
of their genetic potentialities but only through the areas of this spectrum not blocked
by inhibitory mechanisms and made functional by environmental influences, especially
the early ones.”
⁴⁹
The information received by the brain from the movie experience at once serves to
encode and rigidify operant programs. This encoding and rigidification as information
must be considered in terms of the continuous operations of the brain. “There is reason
to believe that information is stored in the brain by alteration of the storage elements.”
⁵⁰
Once this change is effected, the information provided by the experience of new stimuli
may be to activate the programs stored as alteration of the storage elements, giving
form to extant operational patterns.

Certain programs have been coded into the brain’s operation as species information.
These patterns activate the orthosympathetic systems, part of the autonomic or involuntary,
muscular systems of the body. The orthosympathetic systems supply the energy for “flight
or fight” responses by pumping adrenalin through the system.
⁵¹
The hormonal changes necessary to perform the act are set in motion by the brain
before the performance actually begins.
⁵²
Every movie is the first movie. The brain goes into its stereotyped movie program
even before the ticket is purchased. The information received by the brain from the
experience of purchasing a ticket may be enough to activate the hormonal responses
of the movie experience. Buy your ticket: See the movie.

We can talk about information-patterning for the brain only in the present. There
is no other universe for the brain, only the all-at-once universe of simultaneous
operations. Every action performed is ever present, programmed into the operant patterns
of the brain as information. That’s all there is; there is no more. “What’s here’s
everywhere; what’s not here’s nowhere.”
⁵³
All that is real can be found in the operations of the brain. Time and space are
considerations of the interpretation of the ordering, and not of the transaction.
Causality and sequence are myths. There is no first time. Sequence is simultaneity.