Psychic Driving Tape Room (Subproject 68)

experimentNo. 0019categoryHistory & trainingrecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly sits in a padded listening chair wearing headphones wired to a reel-to-reel deck, in a period-style tape room that references Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA Subproject 68.

Setup

• A reel-to-reel transport with turning reels, threaded tape and animated VU needles; the headphone lead follows the fly's articulated head.
• Start/Stop tape controls the visual transport only; no audio recording is played.
• Dose with LSD applies an animated color and distortion treatment to the Eye image and Retina previews; Clear LSD effect restores them.
• Tape room, Reel-to-reel and Fly / headphones cameras.

Measurement

• Retinal-only input; no auditory stimulation is submitted.
• The LSD treatment is display-only: submitted luminance columns and measured spikes are unchanged, and no pharmacology is modeled.
• The external readout controls a pre-programmed head-turn endpoint toward a wall cue.

Limitations

• Scene equipment and treatment are illustrative, not a procedural reconstruction of the Allan Memorial experiments.
• No drug-induced neural state is modeled; neural weights remain fixed.

Sources

• Canadian Department of Justice report on the Allan Memorial experiments