The Delpasse-Effect

- 29 - 2. 6 The DELPASSE-EFFECT On the occasion of a cybernetic symposium, William Jongh van Amsynck presented his work to the public for the first time. When he lectured about his experiments before a group of information theoretics, Jean Jacques Delpasse was amongst his listeners. Biofeedback as a form of medical therapy for hypertonic patients was of little interest to Delpasse; But he was fascinated by the laboratory conditions Amsynck was able to work under. Delpasse immediately recognised that the described feedback exercises were in principle very similar to the Grey-Walter television-set experiments. But there was an important peculiarity with the training program of the neurology professor: All the subjects van Amsynck worked with suffered from the same ailment: namely hypertension, something that under certain circumstances could lead to a stroke or sometimes even death. And when one of van Amsynck’s patient actually died, a person who had undergone intensive brain training passed away. A human being that actually presented the experiment conditions that Delpasse required and whose realisation he had thought impossible. When van Amsynck’s patients were also trained within the Grey-Walter-Experiment next to their normal feedback training, the most prominent hurdle that Delpasse had feared no longer existed. He no longer required terminally ill patients to work with. He no longer required the consent shocked relatives had to give. Not one terminally ill person was trained, because a trained person could possibly die. Delpasse presented his idea to van Amsynck, namely suggesting leaving a mark on the brain with the help of the Grey-Walter-experiment. Such a message can be rather simple, but it can also be of a very complex nature. The meaning of a single word has for instance a simple memory content. A travel experience as a memory on the other hand is complex and extensive. There is the fact of the trip itself that one remembers, there are the people one encountered, the cities visited and the meals one consumed. Even the preparations for the trip might be part of the memory, the decision to undertake a journey and so on. A whole hodgepodge of memories is listed here. There is no possibility to separate individual memories from one another. But this is exactly what Delpasse wanted to do. He wanted to create a virtually pure memory impulse with the help of the Grey-Walter-Experiment that only carried one single memory item - namely the order to switch on the monitor. Delpasse thereby found a method to mark the tiniest sector in the enormous spectrum of our memory - similar to the way one marks a specific substance in order to track its path with chemical compounds. The purpose - here and there - is the same. Marking is supposed to expose the path memory impulses take. An example: We are familiar with the electro-magnetic gates installed at airports that passengers have to walk through the check them for weaponry. Textiles and leather items pass through these gates without anything happening. The electronics is not geared to register them. But the tiniest piece of metal that we have on us triggers an acoustic signal the moment we cross the threshold. The system is programmed to detect metal or put in other words: Only metal is marked in a way that the system can detect it. If a blind person were to stand guard next to the gate - he would never know what kind of clothes the people wear that walk through the gate and which suitcases they carry across. But the blind person would be able to recognise every cigarette lighter, every metal fastener and ever belt buckle by the audible signal these items trigger. Death represents nothing else but this gate. Death is a GATE our consciousness must pass through. Provided of course that it survives the

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