Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

unusual
, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in 
front
of the back of the head, but instead you have it 
behind
the back of the head. 
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and 
would therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams, and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because 
when you're having hallucinations, and things like that, you're not very sharp, so you do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as 
checking that you're not dreaming. So I 
perpetually
was checking that I wasn't dreaming by--since my hands were often behind my head--rubbing my 
thumbs together, back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but I wasn't: I knew it was real. 
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination made them "jump out," or stop happening, I was able to relax and have 
long hallucinations. 
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works compared to how a computing machine works--especially how 
information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many 
directions compared to a machine--you don't have to come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word "rent," for 
example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income, or 
activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to make 
an "imitating machine," which would learn language as a child does: you would talk to the machine. But I couldn't figure out how to store the stuff in 
an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes. 
When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, "It's gotta be 
earlier; it's gotta be earlier"--I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough. When I got a very early memory--let's say from my home 
town of Far Rockaway--then immediately would come a whole sequence of memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of 
something from another city--Cedarhurst, or something--then a whole lot of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized 
that things are stored according to the 
location
where you had the experience. 
I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft 
to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I hadn't 
the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had 
"discovered" had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself. 
In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits, I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that 
things are real does not represent true 
reality
. If you see golden globes, or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination 
and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn't 
mean
they're another intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination. So 
here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are stored, and it's surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I realized the 
error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else. 
One of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like dreams, are influenced by what you already have in your mind--from other 
experiences during the day or before, or from things you are expecting to see. The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we 
were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank. And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the 
brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week. 
I had considerable discussion with the various people there about the reality of experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in 
experimental science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many people see golden globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes 
must be real. My claim was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion previous to going into the tank 
about
the golden globes, so when the 
person hallucinating, with his mind already thinking about golden globes when he went into the tank, sees some approximation of the globes--maybe 
they're blue, or something--he thinks he's reproducing the experience. I felt that I could understand the difference between the type of agreement 
among people whose minds are set to agree, and the kind of agreement that you get in experimental work. It's rather amusing that it's so easy to tell 
the difference-but so hard to define it! 
I believe there's 
nothing
in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who's 
got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences by a lot of people who believe there's reality in hallucinations. The same general 

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idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking 
about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it's not completely impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think that, 
perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you'll have a general, more or less, success at it, especially if 
you discuss it carefully ahead of time. 
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana 
beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me. 
One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming on, what you might describe as "garbage" would come: there were 
simply chaotic images--complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it 
was particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent 
logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of what you're thinking about, you can't remember. As a matter of fact, you 
soon forget what it 
is
that you're trying to remember. I can only remember things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it 
disappears. That kind of stuff all the time. 
Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of different experiments. It didn't seem to make much difference as far as 
hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do is 
sit quietly --why was it necessary that you had to have everything absolutely super duper? 
So when I'd come home I'd turn out the lights and sit in the living room in a comfortable chair, and try and try--it never worked. I've never been 
able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would 
like
to have done it at home, and I don't doubt that you could meditate and 
do
it if 
you practice, but I didn't practice. 

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