Tool of the Trade Read Online Free PDF Page A

output was to make it easier to use the biofeedback “talent,” which works best with the eyes closed, as does hypnosis. But human beings aren’t able to hear sounds pitched above about15,000 to 20,000 hertz. (I didn’t remember the exact numbers at the time, though I did know that I was myself deaf to any sound above 4,000 hertz, because of ear damage in childhood, the first winter of the Nazi siege.)
    That she was exactly controlling a sound she couldn’t possibly hear was enough of a mystery. The mystery was doubled by an astounding change in her trance behavior.
    Everybody knows that people under hypnosis can’t be compelled to do things that are morally repugnant to them, or liable to cause harm. They will either ignore the command or come out of the trance. Valerie and I were occasionally playful with this, or experimental, using an absurd command to create a sort of “half-in/half-out” semitrance. While your brain wrestled with the unexecutable command, you were neither quite hypnotized nor quite normal, a curious feeling.
    After a minute of not being able to get a reasonable response from her, I said, “Why don’t you strip off all your clothes and go running down Memorial Drive”—and she raised her eyes up at me, apparently out of trance.
    “What did you say?” she asked me slowly. I repeated the command, smiling, but she didn’t seem amused. She shook her head, brow knit, then stood and stepped out of her sandals, unsnapped her halter and let it fall, and proceeded to roll down her tight jeans and underwear. I thought she was joking, though it was uncharacteristically bold behavior, since the corridor was well populated and the door to the lab had a small window at eye level.
    When she’d unrolled the jeans as far as her knees, I laughed and said, “Okay, stop it.”
    She gasped and stood bolt upright, and then crouched in a reflex posture of modesty, her right hand covering her pubic triangle while her left tried to pull up the jeans, without much success. Finally she duckwalked to behind a lab table, where she couldn’t be seen from the outside, and finished the job, blushing and angry. She asked me what the hell was going on.
    I described what had happened without attempting to interpret it. She gave me a lighthearted scolding and then puzzled it out: She did have a streak of sexual exhibitionism that she normally kept in check; my suggestion that she flaunt her charms to a few thousand strangers gave her permission to do what her subconscious had desired since puberty. Plus wanting to hurt her prudish father and other such traditional stuff.
    I’m no Freudian now and I wasn’t one then. To be fair, Valerie might have come up with an explanation closer to the truth if I had not withheld one bit of information—that her behavior had returned to normal as soon as I’d said “Stop it.” Secrecy is of course a reflex with me, and this looked like something that was worth hiding.
    Our researches wandered into other, not especially productive, directions, and eventually fizzled out when her course of study and legitimate research, in pursuit of her doctorate, became too demanding. But I held on to the signal generator and pursued my own little project. I kept no written records. I never advertised for subjects, but instead used as guinea pigs the students who’d been hired as subjects for my research about resistance to language acquisition. Sometime in the course of each session I would turn on the sound generator, and ask them to do somethingabsurd. If they were puzzled by the request, I would laugh and correct myself.
    It turns out that 28,430 hertz is some sort of “characteristic frequency” for most of the population. I could legitimately ask all of my subjects to take a hearing exam, and indeed most of the people for whom the ultrasonic whine was ineffective turned out to have hearing loss in the high frequencies, as I did. The two who seemed to have normal hearing may have been