Lawrence was an exception. He had adopted at least the trappings of a bohemian. While the era of free love was alien to most of those who worked in the Defense Department, the newly divorced Lawrence embraced it, showcasing a revolving door of girlfriends. Lawrence, at least by ARPA standards, was “out there,” not just in his clothing and his freewheeling lifestyle, but also in his choice of research, which drew heavily on popular cultural notions of “mind over body.”
He was not your typical antiestablishment hippie, however. In the late 1960s, when many men were looking for a way to get out of going to Vietnam, Lawrence was looking for a way to get in. He was offered a job at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which, like ARPA, was interested in counterinsurgency and was hiring psychologists to go to Vietnam to study the effects of stress on Special Forces advisers. Lawrence, then a PhD psychologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was offered a government position for about $12,000 a year. The money was not great, but it sounded like an adventure. Just as he was packing his bags, the counterinsurgency campaign in Southeast Asia turned into a conventional war, and Walter Reed closed down its research program in Vietnam. A colleague of Lawrence’s told him about a possible job at ARPA.
In the fall of 1968, Lawrence joined ARPA as deputy director for the Behavioral Sciences Office. For Lawrence, the ARPA job was a dream come true: he could propose almost any sort of research program, write up a brief proposal with some nominal military justification, and get it funded. He also had a blanket travel authorization that allowed him to plan trips “to such places at such times in such frequency as may be necessary in the performance of your official duties either within or outside the continental limits of the United States and return to Washington, D.C.”
Lawrence had a penchant for research that captured the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1960s, when explorations of mind-body interactions and consciousness research combined science and spiritualism. He was also, like J. C. R. Licklider, part of a small but growing number of psychologists fascinated by computers, particularly human interaction with computers. Lawrence was initially interested in research helping people deal with stress and pain. His first major program, started in 1970, was in biofeedback, a relatively new area of investigation that involved training people to control physiological functions, such as breathing and heart rate, by providing subjects with real-time information from sensors.
In the 1960s, biofeedback still had the stigma of New Age mysticism, because the idea was that a person could essentially will his or her way to a different physical state. It melded biology and Eastern philosophy and evoked comparisons to Timothy Leary’s promotion of LSD. It was also starting to attract interest from scientists, who thought biofeedback might allow people in a stressful situation to slow their heart rates or lower their blood pressure purely through mental concentration. Researchers like Joe Kamiya at the University of California, San Francisco, studied the brain’s alpha and theta waves to see if subjects could alter their state of consciousness with the help of real-time electronic monitoring. “The image of electronic equipment guiding human beings to a greater awareness and control over their own physiology and consciousness appealed to both white-coated experimental scientists and the white-robed gurus of the higher-consciousness movement,” the psychologist Donald Moss wrote in a retrospective of the field.
The justification for ARPA’s interest in this field was to help troops in combat; biofeedback could in theory allow soldiers to shoot more accurately, or even to slow their bleeding after being shot by allowing them to control their own heart rate. Researchers hypothesized that pilots of damaged aircraft could be taught to lower their own heart rate and blood pressure, allowing them to carry out emergency procedures without panicking. There was little in the way of documented experiments, however, and Lawrence considered biofeedback an area ripe for examination. His ARPA program was the first systematic exploration of the field, bringing the scientific method to an area that had previously been dominated by anecdotes. Among the people he recruited to work on the project was a future director of ARPA, Craig Fields, then a young Harvard professor and a colleague of Licklider’s. He submitted a proposal on “autonomic conditioning under computer control,” which had people monitor their heart rate with EKG feedback. Soon, Harvard students were running up and down stairs with cardiovascular electrodes attached to their chests. Lawrence brought hippie counterculture to scientists, and scientific rigor to hippies.
When Lawrence tried to take the work from the lab to the battlefield, he ran into resistance. Lawrence wanted the researchers to travel to Vietnam to test biofeedback on Special Forces in the field, but the response was overwhelmingly negative. No one wanted to go. “Someone wrote to a congressman and said I was trying to coerce university professors into going into the jungles in Vietnam,” he said. “It was asinine. It was completely misperceived. I thought they would look at it as an interesting adventure the way that I did.”
It probably did not matter in the end, because Lawrence concluded that the more ambitious applications for biofeedback, such as soldiers’ ability to slow down their heart rate enough to prevent them from bleeding out, were probably too ambitious. “Biofeedback offers much less powerful and robust self-control over certain internal physiological events than many researchers anticipated on the strength of early anecdotal evidence,” a report concluded. “Clearly, from the work which has taken place in many laboratories, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to train subjects to regulate nervous system events to a level contrary to the best interests of their own physiology.” On the flip side, Lawrence wrote, at least no one was going to die by consciously willing their heart rate to stop, a concern expressed at one point by some researchers.
While biofeedback was not necessarily successful, it cemented Lawrence’s reputation at ARPA as the go-to guy for counterculture ideas, particularly mind-over-matter research. So it was not a total surprise when Lawrence was assigned to look at the CIA’s parapsychology research to see if it was something that ARPA should fund.
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By today’s standards, the idea of ARPA, a technical agency, investigating spoon bending and ESP might sound outlandish, but even some of the conservative elements of the Defense Department and intelligence community were being swept up in popular enthusiasm for psychic investigations. Best-selling books like The Secret Life of Plants combined botany with New Age ideas to argue that plants were sentient beings, while The Tao of Physics merged quantum theory with mysticism. A cover of Time magazine was dedicated to the nation’s “booming interest” in psychics. Interest in ESP and psychic phenomena went lockstep with popularization of counterculture in mainstream America.
When ARPA launched its investigation into parapsychology, it was hard to tell how seriously anyone, even Lawrence, really took the investigation. At least at face value, Lawrence embraced the assignment. He played around with Kirlian photography to see if it could really capture “auras,” attended a parapsychology conference in Scotland, and traveled around the country meeting witches, psychics, and other purveyors of the paranormal. He liked the witches most of all. But Lawrence’s most famous psychic investigation—and one that ended up attracting national attention when it was picked up by the press—involved a trip he made in December 1972 to the Stanford Research Institute, where the physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff were being funded by Gottlieb’s CIA office to investigate psychic phenomena. Lawrence’s boss, Austin Kibler, had made an initial trip out and was apparently impressed at least with the seriousness of the institute, which received ARPA funding for a variety of projects.
At the time Lawrence visited, the Stanford Research Institute work was focused largely on testing the skills of Uri Geller, a charismatic Israeli entertainer turned paranormalist. Geller’s most well-known spectacle was bending spoons, purportedly with his mind. He also claimed a host of other psychic abilities, such as thought projection and “remote viewing,” the term given to the ability t
o describe objects in far-off, or at least unseen, locations. The last ability was of particular interest to the national security community, because it would in theory enable spying on foreign bases and technology.
According to Puthoff, one of the CIA officials in charge of the Stanford Research Institute contract suggested that Lawrence visit in the hopes that ARPA might agree to fund the institute’s parapsychology work. Puthoff and Targ, who were eager to get mainstream recognition, agreed to host Lawrence for an informal demonstration but told him he could not observe their controlled experiments. “At the time we were concerned that it might be a setup in which Lawrence and Geller could have set up a collaboration, i.e., could have colluded in advance,” Puthoff said. So deep was this paranoia that after each day of testing he and Targ would check the ceiling tiles in the lab to look for possible listening bugs or hidden cameras.
Lawrence invited two other scientists to accompany him: Ray Hyman, an amateur magician and university psychologist, and Robert Van de Castle, a professor of sleep studies who believed in psychic premonitions, including his own. Van de Castle, whom Lawrence knew from graduate school, studied the ability of people to predict the future and receive thoughts while dreaming. “He and Hyman and I made this trip to the Stanford Research Institute where Geller was going to convince me that his stuff was valid and I was going to pump a lot of money into it,” Lawrence said.
The trip got off to an inauspicious start: Van de Castle and Lawrence met up the evening before in San Francisco and went out for Chinese food. Lawrence was drinking heavily and playing the part of the raconteur, telling Van de Castle that what he really wanted was to find a female psychic he could have sex with and test her powers. Van de Castle, a proponent of parapsychology, was upset by Lawrence’s cavalier attitude. The next morning did not start off much better: Hyman and Van de Castle showed up at the institute to meet with Puthoff, Targ, and Geller. Lawrence swaggered in late, looking a mess, according to Van de Castle. Lawrence fell back into a chair, put his feet up on the conference table, looked around the room, and pronounced, “Okay, show me a fucking miracle.”
And so the day started with one hungover military scientist, one amateur magician turned psychologist, a professor who studied psychic dreams, two seemingly credulous physicists, and Uri Geller, the would-be psychic superweapon. It went downhill from there. Geller began his repertoire demonstrating his ability to mind read numbers. The Israeli performer dramatically covered his eyes with his hand and had Lawrence write down a number on a piece of paper. Hyman, sitting to the side, later recalled that he could clearly see that Geller was peeking, watching the motion of Lawrence’s hand write out the number ten. Geller also wrote down ten.
In another demonstration, described later in a letter by Hyman to the head of the Stanford Research Institute, Geller wanted to show his psychic ability to receive someone’s thoughts, so he took Van de Castle aside into a separate room. Geller asked Van de Castle to choose a cartoon from a magazine and draw it by hand, because magazine pictures were harder to “receive.” Both pictures—the original and the hand-drawn duplicate—were placed in separate envelopes. Van de Castle placed the envelope with the original picture in his breast pocket and the one with the hand-drawn image under his elbow. Geller then instructed the professor to close his eyes, and stood directly behind him—close enough to touch him—and prepared to receive Van de Castle’s thoughts. Geller soon emerged triumphant: he had drawn a stick figure facsimile of the image, a feat no one observed because only Van de Castle was in the room and he had his eyes closed the entire time.
Hyman was perplexed: What were the conditions of the experiment? Why did no one observe Geller drawing the image to ensure Van de Castle had not coached him? The answers were evasive at best. And so it went with the rest of the demonstrations. Either Geller, on close examination by outsiders, could not or would not perform, or when he did seem to get results, there was little credible examination. “Targ and Puthoff, from the way I have encountered them by day in their laboratory, seem to emerge as bumbling idiots rather than as respected, accomplished physicists,” Hyman wrote.
None of the demonstrations involved any scientific controls. Puthoff countered that the experiments were not supposed to be controlled—it was only a demonstration. Even so, Hyman asked why the scientific duo did not search Geller prior to an experiment where it was claimed he could erase a single frame from a film using only his mind? Perhaps Geller had used a device to alter the film. The answer, Puthoff told Hyman, was that such a device sounded improbable. Hyman was astounded that Targ and Puthoff found it more believable that Geller had psychic powers that allowed him to erase film than that he possessed a device capable of doing the same thing. Hyman believed Geller’s work had all the classic hallmarks of a trained magician: befriend, distract, and dazzle.
If Hyman was doubtful of Geller’s psychic capabilities, Lawrence was outraged. In one demonstration, Geller moved a compass needle by five degrees. Lawrence, after stomping his foot to imitate what he believed Geller had done, moved the needle forty-five degrees. And so it went for most of the visit. By the time Lawrence and his crew left, it was clear that Puthoff and Targ were not going to get ARPA funding for psychics.
On one of the West Coast trips to investigate the paranormal, Lawrence was invited to a party in the hills above Westwood, on Sunset Boulevard. The woman hosting the party had been a private donor to psychic work. At one point Lawrence ended up seated next to Ed Mitchell, an astronaut who had come to believe in his own telepathic powers. A wealthy woman at the party described a recent trip to India, where a mystic had produced a ring, seemingly out of thin air, and gave it to her as a parting gift. She turned to the astronaut and asked, “Colonel Mitchell, what do you think? I never really understood it. Did he materialize it out of the elements, or do you think he teleported it from somewhere else?”
What a lunatic question, Lawrence thought. But Mitchell replied, “I think it was probably teleported,” and then provided an explanation for how that might happen. The woman turned to Lawrence.
“Dr. Lawrence, what do you think? Do you think it was teleported here?”
Lawrence found himself starting to answer the question with what might be a scientific explanation. “Then I thought, I’ve been sucked into this just sitting here listening to it, and I’m taking it seriously. What the hell is the matter with me?”
If Lawrence at some point had taken parapsychology seriously, that time was long gone. “The whole thing,” he concluded, “was just garbage.”
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Though Uri Geller’s demonstration in California had failed to impress Lawrence, the idea of reading people’s minds captured his imagination. That same year he visited the Stanford Research Institute, Lawrence launched a different sort of mind-reading project: instead of relying on the paranormal, researchers would use measurable brain signals to control a computer. From his exploration of parapsychology, Lawrence found science.
The brain-driven computer dreamed up by Lawrence drew heavily on, and referenced, Licklider’s idea of “man-computer symbiosis.” If Licklider’s vision of a man-computer symbiosis was futuristic, Lawrence’s program, which he named biocybernetics, was outright audacious. In biocybernetics, the machine would not just be a part of man’s decision-making process through inputs provided by a keyboard or joystick, as envisioned by Licklider; it would interact directly with the human mind, using sensors that monitor brain activity. Lawrence funded researchers looking at neural signals like the P300, a brain wave that can be detected by electroencephalography and that occurs approximately three hundred milliseconds after the brain recognizes an object. In practical terms, such work might free a quadriplegic to think messages or words or to control a machine by wearing an EEG cap, or what ARPA officials called “the intelligent yarmulke.”
ARPA under the auspices of biocybernetics funded a raft of researchers tapping brain signals, such as Jacques Vidal, a UCLA researcher who coined the term “b
rain-computer interface” for the work. “Can these observable electrical brain signals be put to work as carriers of information in man-computer communication or for the purpose of controlling such external apparatus as prosthetic devices or spaceships?” Vidal wrote in a seminal paper in 1973. Within a few years, Vidal’s research yielded promising results: in one experiment, test subjects were able to move an electronic object through a maze on a computer screen just by thinking about it.
Those were fantastic times, according to Emanuel Donchin, a professor at the University of Illinois who was funded by Lawrence. It was not that ARPA was the only agency funding such work, but it was at the time the most important for developing the field. Donchin, who was looking at cortical slow waves, described how ARPA was able to turn cartwheels around other government funding agencies. Donchin recalled sitting in on a National Institutes of Health study group to review a $5,000 grant proposal for Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize. The scientists were debating the funding for hours. At one point, Donchin excused himself to make a brief phone call to Lawrence about his ARPA grant. Donchin needed $15,000 for some equipment, and Lawrence’s response was “You got it.” When Donchin returned to the room, the scientists were still debating the $5,000 for Kandel. That, according to Donchin, best illustrated the difference between ARPA and other science agencies.
On the other hand, ARPA programs, like biocybernetics, were often outrageously optimistic on military applications. “Soon, for example, a computer monitoring electrical brain activity of an aircraft pilot (or any other individual engaged in a task where continuous vigilance is required) should be able to determine whether a warning signal not only had been seen but that the pilot understood its significance and intended to respond appropriately,” one early program description read. Lawrence knew full well that such applications were years away. “I made it up,” he recalled of some of the more fantastical applications.
The Imagineers of War Page 27