the most lasting benefits from their session. Don Allen told me that most
clients emerged with “notable and fairly sustainable changes in beliefs,
attitudes, and behavior, way above statistical probability.” Specifically,
they became “much less judgmental, much less rigid, more open, and less
defended.” But it wasn’t all sweetness and light: several clients abruptly
broke off marriages after their sessions, now believing they were
mismatched or trapped in destructive patterns of behavior.
The foundation also conducted studies to determine if LSD could in
fact enhance creativity and problem solving. “This wasn’t at all obvious,”
James Fadiman points out, “since the experience is so powerful, you
might just wander off and lose track of what you were trying to
accomplish.” So to test their hypothesis, Fadiman and his colleagues
started with themselves, seeing if they could design a credible creativity
experiment while on a relatively light dose of LSD—a hundred
micrograms. Perhaps not surprisingly, they determined that they could.
Working in groups of four, James Fadiman and Willis Harman
administered the same dose of LSD to artists, engineers, architects, and
scientists, all of whom were somehow “stuck” in their work on a
particular project. “We used every manipulation of set and setting in the
book,” Fadiman recalled, telling subjects “they would be fascinated by
their intellectual capacities and would solve problems as never before.”
Subjects reported much greater fluidity in their thinking, as well as an
enhanced ability to both visualize a problem and recontextualize it. “We
were amazed, as were our participants, at how many novel and effective
solutions came out of our sessions,” Fadiman wrote. Among their
subjects were some of the visionaries who in the next few years would
revolutionize computers, including William English and Doug
Engelbart.* There are all sorts of problems with this study—it was not
controlled, it relied on the subjects’ own assessments of their success, and
it was halted before it could be completed—but it does at least point to a
promising avenue for research.
The foundation had closed up shop by 1966, but Hubbard’s work in
Silicon Valley was not quite over. In one of the more mysterious episodes
of his career, Hubbard was called out of semiretirement by Willis
Harman in 1968. After IFAS disbanded, Harman had gone to work at the
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a prestigious think tank affiliated with
Stanford University and a recipient of contracts from several branches of
frankie
(Frankie)
#1