O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
capitalists eager to get in on the ground floor of the new. That was
how he was ultimately funded, and hired, by Gareth Schlechtmann.
He bid the university a temporary goodbye and set to work in the real
world, a world that differed from the academic in that it was heavily
saddled with consequence.
There were still many kinks Harvey had to work out. One of the
main problems he had to solve was how to account for varieties of
individual temperament, the “pliability” of the brain and mind.
Human brain patterns varied between individuals on so many axes
that it was difficult to dissect or manipulate them in any standardized
way, and this made Harvey’s job extraordinarily confounding. So
confounding, in fact, that in that last year he worked on the project
he suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and ultimately relapsed
into alcoholism.
In the end, much to the elation of his employers, he pulled
through and emerged from the dark swamp, the convoluted maze of
the grey matter. After Herculean years of toil, he had established a
model on which, it could be said, the essence of what it meant to be
human was couched inside lushly branching cascades of ones and
zeroes.
In the course of his experiments, Harvey had recorded many
things: people eating different kinds of foods, crying, laughing,
feeling angry or scared, and even clearing their minds completely.
Playing the recording back would induce a weak echo of the recorded
experience, akin to a daydream. To solve this, Harvey outfitted the
machine with a sort of amplifier that was designed to bring the
experience up to a convincing intensity. But rather than risk
amplified playback on humans, tests were done on chimpanzees to
assess the appropriate parameters. As many a war veteran could
attest, too much experience could be disastrous to the mind.
Indeed, after exposure to an excess of focused electromagnetic
amplitudes, some of the monkeys exhibited signs of paranoia,
temporary catatonia and even full-blown schizophrenia. He had
every reason to believe that the same result would occur with
humans, so he modified the strength of the signal accordingly.
In the course of his experiments, he found that one group of
chimps stood out markedly from the others he tested. In contrast
with the others, these chimps exhibited startling indications that the
increased amplitudes were in fact enhancing their cognitive
capacities. Indeed, after only a few hours of exposure these monkeys
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