Encefalus

Neurophilosophy has an interview with Heather Perry: Lunch with Heather Perry. In case you don’t know her, she is an individual who decided to trepan herself. Trepanation is a procedure in which you open a hole in the skull. It was mainly used in ancient times to release the bad spirits, but it is also used in modern medicine to relieve pressure.

Of course, it is a dangerous procedure since it can cause infection or disease. However, many people, starting with Bart Huges, believe trepanation to be the road to enlightment, through increased blood flow. Of course, there hasn’t been any medical proofs of that. This theory also postulates that children have a higher state of consciousness because their skulls aren’t yet fully closed, and with trepanation, we can return to that child-like state. However, all this smells a lot like pseudoscience to me.

Heather Perry described the experience as "acid mixed with some kind of opiate". Still, we have to take into account the unfathomable ability of the human mind to trick the body, so we can’t really be sure whether this is the result of trepanation or wishful thinking.

Comments in the post ranged from critical to comical like "OK. This is fucking ridiculous." or "I’ve trepanned myself 83 times. My wife often puts ground pepper in my head and suspends me from the ceiling as a novelty shaker for when we have guests." As it seems, the whole procedure has been received negatively by most people.

Anyway, I post here a part of the interview, along with a further reading section below, so you can form your own opinions.  (Note, any pictures, except for the picture of Heather Perry are additions of mine to give the article an Encefalus-like touch and make a little more pleasant reading through this interview )

Heather Perry

Neurophilosopher: Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

M: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?

HP: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn’t think Lennon’s cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought "Wow! That’s a bit freaky" and didn’t think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn’t dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.

M: Didn’t Bart Huges decide to trepan himself after taking acid, because he believed that trepanation was the next step in expanding his consciousness?

HP: Yeah…certainly the first self-trepanners in the 60s and 70s – they all knew Bart – and me, we’d all done a lot of acid. I once found a website that theorized that taking too much acid encouraged people to trepan, which is just ridiculous. I just think that the kind of people who take acid are more experimental, so might be more likely to try that kind of thing if they’re really into consciousness expansion. I never thought "Why don’t I trepan myself?" while I was tripping. But actually, Amanda Fielding was tripping when she first did hers. She knows Pete, and had her first trepanation around the same time as Pete, in the early 70s. She paid a doctor to do it back then, and found another to re-do it a few years ago because the bone had grown back. I spoke to her on the phone just after I was trepanned. Bart’s theory about trepanation wasn’t as a result of a ‘trip’ though, he’d studied medicine.

M: So do you subscribe to Huges’ theory that trepanation can lead to a higher level of consciousness by increasing the blood brain volume?

HP: Yes and no. It certainly does initially when you’re trepanned. In fact, Pete now has doctors down in Mexico who will do the operation, and they take MRI scans pre- and post-trepanation. After the operation the ratio of brain blood volume to cerebrospinal fluid is increased. I’m not sure if that’s true for everyone. Maybe it depends on the size of the hole. It’s probably variable from person to person, depending on the person’s unique physiology, and on whether the bone grows back. What Huges was saying was that it allows the heart b………………

Now kids can play it, too!

So that was it! Visit neurophilosophy for the whole interview! I hope that you’ll form your own opinions on the subject. I personally, think that all this is more like new-age fiction, rather than science. However, if you have a different opinion, feel free to express it. And remember kids, DON’T try this at home

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 3:17 am and is filed under General, Neuro-biological. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.