Edmond M. Dewan
Motivated by a desire to gain philosophical insight into the nature of Consciousness, Dewan trained himself and members of his research staff to modulate the brain's alpha rhythms.
Edmond M. Dewan was a physicist at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, Massachusetts. In the early 1960s, he pioneered the work on Synthetic Telepathy, a technology that allows the brain to receive a message that it perceives to be a voice transmission, but is actually a microwave beam1.
Motivated by a desire to gain philosophical insight into the nature of Consciousness, Dewan trained himself and members of his research staff to modulate the brain's alpha rhythms. They practiced until they could control their own brain waves at will, and filmed the results of their experiments. After advanced training, Dewan was able to imagine individual letters of the alphabet in Morse code and then send these coded signals to machinery1.
Dewan's first Morse code message, "I can talk," took twenty-five seconds per letter to transmit and record. The authentication of this seminal laboratory experiment in 1964 led to a Washington Post article titled, "Man’s Brain Waves Can ‘Talk’ Overcoming Speech Barriers"1.
His work laid the foundation for modern Brain-Computer Interface technology, which aims to enable soldiers to communicate by thought alone1.
Sources
- Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩
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