Self-trepanadores: drilling your head to experiment

In 1967 Joe Mellen, a 30-year-old British citizen, he tried to pierce his skull with a manual trephine (resembling a corkscrew) while high on acid. After failing in his first attempt, he repeated the procedure the following year with the same result. Finally, in 1970, he managed to drill a hole in the upper part of his forehead with an electric drill. But the story does not end there.

In that same year, his wife, the artist Amanda Feilding (27 years old), also had her skull drilled, she did it with an electric dental drill. The procedure was recorded by Mellen, resulting in what is now considered a cult video. "Heartbeat in the brain", which is what the tape is called, can be seen on YouTube and is material not suitable for the squeamish. The motive is the supposed potential that this absurd practice has to do with the will to “expand the mind”, in the same way that one usually experiments with certain types of drugs.

This story is one of those many examples of the extent to which the magical thinking

, irrational experimentation and the desire to go through supposedly cathartic experiences can lead to to defend a philosophy of life based on a mixture of suggestion and risk of dying in circumstances foreign.

• Related article: "This is how LSD creates dream states while awake"

The origin of the story: Bart Huges

Both were influenced by the Dutch doctor Bart Huges, an expert in psychoactive substances (mainly LSD), who in 1962 had stated that the volume of blood in the brain determines the state of consciousness of the person. According to Huges's theory, the adoption of the upright posture in the evolution of hominids had a negative impact on a cognitive and even physiological level: when walking upright, the human heart must deal with the force of gravity to carry blood to up, toward the brain, ultimately resulting in reduced blood flow in the mass encephalic Or at least, so Huges thought.

It is for this first reason that Huges advocated trephination: piercing the skull (without reaching through the meninges) to supposedly increase the amount of blood that remains in the brain. The second reason is the sealing of the skull that takes place in humans between the ages of 18 and 21. According to the author, before this period the infant skull is only partially closed, supposedly favoring a greater blood supply to the brain, and the greater irrigation would favor greater consciousness and creativity in the individual by making the brain function with a better performance.

What summarizes Huges's theory is the concept of Ego, which for him was the system that distributes blood throughout the body. Blood is not delivered evenly, and from his point of view, the fact that the part of the brain that receives the most blood is the area of ​​speech and abstract thought means that other regions of the brain receive less.

This has to do with the fact that, evolutionarily, speech is the part that has monopolized the most recent development of the brain in evolutionary terms. Always according to the author, making a hole in the skull would allow a greater entry of flow and a more balanced and homogeneous irrigation throughout the entire brain.

The Mellen and Feilding cases

Going back to our story: Joe Mellen met Bart Huges in 1965 in Ibiza, in the midst of the whirlwind of the Beat movement and the beginnings of acid consumption. At that time, Dr. Huges had already trepanned his own skull. When Mellen learned of his ideas, he was experimenting with LSD and other powerful drugs.

For her part, when Amanda Feilding met Dr. Huges, she came from studying the religions of different countries and historical periods, as well as the mysticisms, the initiation rites of various cultures. It was not until 5 years later that the members of the couple decided to undergo trephination, mixing thus the will to live new altered states of consciousness, and a fascination for moments rituals.

Both Amanda Feilding and Joe Mellen come from well-to-do English families. Feilding was born into a family of English aristocrats and Mellen studied at Oxford and abandoned his postgraduate studies (and a practically settled life) to dedicate himself to living a life free from much of the typical responsibilities of western adults.

The experience

When asked about the experience in interviews in the 1970s, both agreed that it was an operation with satisfactory results; Amanda relates that the whole process did not last more than half an hour. When she finished the job, she wrapped a scarf around her head, ate a steak to recover the lost iron, and went to a party. Literally.

It is precisely Amanda who describes in greater detail what one experiences when the skull is perforated: just when the hole was finished, she experienced it as "the arrival of a tide". She assured that she noticed a sensation of growth, slow and soft.

Joe's experience was a little more bumpy as the drill cable broke during the procedure and he had to go down to get it fixed with a towel over his head. In the course of a few hours, after finishing, he was invaded by a feeling, according to him, of lightness. She tells it all in her memoir book, Bore Hole.

In various interviews, both coincide in pointing out that the ultimate goal of trephination is to open the brain “to the heartbeat”, heartbeat, which is what according to them is deprived of the brain with the sealing of the skull in adolescence.

How do they currently live?

Feilding currently runs an art gallery in London and is also the director of the Beckley Foundation, a dedicated think tank. to the study of consciousness and all those tools to alter it, both psychoactive substances and meditation, among others. The study of physical mechanisms to achieve altered states of consciousness, in short.

Joe Mellen gives conferences in which he contributes the testimony of his youth, collected in Bore Hole, recently updated. Said book is an authentic allegation in favor of the use of psychoactives and the practice of trephination. Although both Feilding and Mellen are outspoken advocates of the practice, they strongly recommend that no one perform this operation on themselves. Feilding herself stood for election to the British Parliament on a promise to guarantee free trepanation for social security on her show. It is not a joke.

What can we learn from all this?

Those who defend trephination as something recommendable argue that it is a practice that has been done since the dawn of civilization and that therefore it must be necessarily beneficial. Experts on the subject place the beginnings of this operation in 5000 BC. c. and even before, and there is archaeological evidence that it was a fairly common practice since the Neolithic. Needless to say, this argument has little history since there are much older traditions such as stoning, animal abuse or domestic violence and should not therefore be maintained. The classic argument of "we must continue doing it because we have always done it that way" is completely ruled out.

Regarding the improvement in health that you may have, the liberation of the mind and consciousness, it should be remembered that not a single verifiable evidence has been found in any scientific study that supports this thesis and that modern neurology affirms that this operation lacks medical foundation, in addition to being obviously a very dangerous, and potentially painful or even fatal, especially taking into account that people who perform self-trepanation do not do so for medical purposes.

The suggestion, the fact that thinking that trepanning makes you change the way you experience things makes you effectively we feel different (in the best of cases, just that), it acts as the engine of a series of totally irrational. That is why it is important not to launch into practices that are contraindicated by medicine with regard to a group of organs as important as the brain.