OT. This sounds like a good idea!

Being Made Hole
Christine Traversi
Are you unable to deal with life's little miseries? Feeling stressed?
Lethargic? Depressed? You could take a vacation. Or you could try
meditation. Or yoga. Or you could try to achieve a permanent high by
drilling a hole into your skull. Trepanation, or the drilling of a hole in
the skull, is one of the oldest surgical procedures, some trepanned skulls
even dating back to 3000 B.C. The oldest skulls have been found in the
Danube Basin, but trepanned skulls have been found in virtually every
country, even in America, with the highest concentration found in Peru and
Bolivia (1). The word trepanation is derived from the Greek, meaning "auger
or borer". More specifically, trepanation means "an opening made by a
circular saw of any type" (1). Trepanation has been performed over the
centuries for various reasons, including a means to liberate the demons or
spirits from the heads possessed. Trepanation was also performed for
therapeutic reasons, such as for epilepsy, headaches, infections, insanity,
and a whole range of maladies. A third reason for trepanning is religious,
where the rondelles, or disks of bone from the skulls, were collected and
used for charms and talismans which were believed to have power to protect
the wearer from illness and accidents. Nowadays the procedure is believed to
help the individual expand his or her consciousness, and initiate a
spiritual awakening that leaves the trepanned individual forever changed.
Devotees of trepanation swear that a hole in their head gives them greater
energy, improved concentration and mental capacity, elimination of
stress-related diseases, and relief from other ailments that "come packaged
with adulthood," leaving them feeling like kids again (2). Can drilling a
hole into your head really hold such miraculous restorative powers that cure
such a host of life's ills? Are solid-skulled humans one hole away from
nirvana (5)?

Those who wish to be trepanned would have difficulty finding a surgeon in
the United States to perform such a procedure; in fact, none will.
Trepanation is performed in America only to relieve acute pressure on the
brain, usually caused by a blow to the head (3). Any legitimate medical
practitioner refuses to perform or recognize trepanning as a therapeutic
practice, although a few international black market neurosurgeons will do so
for the right price. Doctors interested in neurosurgery are required to take
five to seven years of intense training to learn the techniques that make
trepanning safe, and the notion of trepanning for recreational purposes has
been called "quackery," "horseshit," "pseudoscience," and "nonsense" (4).
Risks of drilling a hole into the skull include meningitis, blood clots,
stroke, epilepsy, and the risk of a bone fragment embedding in the brain
during the drilling (7).

However, the desire for a permanent high overrides the risk factors, and
those who wish to be trepanned bypass the medical community and do the
procedure themselves, usually with fellow supporters standing by in case of
an emergency. Almost all of the information available on the procedure is
based on first-hand accounts, including a video entitled "Heartbeat in the
Brain", where devotee Amanda Fielding had her whole self-trepanation
carefully recorded. Ms. Fielding wears old clothes and tapes sunglasses to
her face so the blood will not impair her vision as she works. She starts by
shaving her head and applying a local anesthetic to the spot to be
trepanned, the ideal location being where the skull sutures have ossified,
as there is less of a chance there is a blood vessel in that area. An
incision is made with a scalpel, and then she starts in with the electric
drill (6). In order to have the therapeutic effect, the hole needs to have
between a one-quarter and one-half inch diameter. As soon as the skull is
penetrated, the bleeding is prodigious. The skull piece is removed, the mess
is cleaned, and the hole is bandaged. As the wound heals, skin grows over
it, leaving behind a small indentation (7).

The miraculous restorative powers of trepanation has its origin in an
alleged mechanism called "brainbloodvolume," coined by the founder of modern
trepanning, Bart Hughes, a Dutch librarian. Mr. Hughes was almost a Dr. Bart
Hughes, but was thrown out of medical school in Amsterdam in the 1960s
because he failed part of his medical exams and because of his advocacy for
marijuana use. While in Ibiza, Mr. Hughes was taught that standing on his
head for extended periods of time would get him intoxicated, and at a later
date, after ingesting the drug mescaline, the mechanism of brainbloodvolume
became clear to him. "[I realized] that it was the increase of brainblood
that gave the expanded consciousness. An improvement of function must have
been caused by more blood in the brain which meant there must have been less
of something else. Then I realized that it must be the volume of
cerebrospinal fluid was decreased" (8). Mr. Hughes believes that gravity and
age rob an individual of his or her creativity and energy that was once
possessed during childhood. Babies have high brainbloodvolume because the
soft spot (the fontanel) on the head gives the brain room to pulse. As the
babies grow, the soft spot hardens and the brain does not have the room to
expand. The hardening of the skull, combined with gravity, saps the blood
from the head, making the brainbloodvolume plummet (2). Trepanation
supposedly reverses the blood loss by expanding the blood vessels in the
brain, allowing them to supply more oxygen and glucose to brain tissue as
well as speedily remove toxins (7).

Given the circumstances and conditions in which the mechanism of
brainbloodvolume was conceived, could it hold merit? Two researchers at the
U.S. Health Service conducted a study on cerebral circulation, and concluded
that the mechanism is far too complex to understand at the present time.
However, they also made two tentative conclusions: the first, that the
necessary level of cerebral circulation is maintained by uninterrupted
fluctuations of cerebral spinal fluid (CFS), and the second, the limits of
the speed of CSF volume fluctuations by the physical and neural
characteristics of the brain are fundamental to the protection of the
central nervous system from mechanical injury due to fast and unexpected
shocks (9). The two tentative conclusions indicate that "the mechanisms of
cerebral circulation are maintained by a complex and delicate balance that,
far from deficient, can only operate if left unaltered" (7).

Along with the two researchers, other well-respected medical practitioners
have vehemently opposed trepanation. They state that brain flow, not brain
volume, is related to brain function, and there is no evidence that drilling
a hole into the skull will increase blood flow to the brain. Furthermore,
since trepanation only affects the skull, nothing they are doing will affect
the brain. That is, trepanners do not touch the dura, the compartment that
has cerebrospinal fluid in it, so the changes they are claiming to happen
cannot be anatomically possible. Rather, doctors and scientists believe that
the experienced benefits of the procedure are most likely due to the placebo
effect. While dozens of people around the world are being trepanned, it is
safe to say that trepanation will not become a trend in today's society;
rather, it will appeal only to the radical portion of the population. As the
fields of medicine and psychology learn from their past mistakes, medical
procedures of the past are abandoned and believed to be better off
forgotten. The primitives do not always know best. Perhaps the holes in the
heads might really make trepanned individuals feel good after all - just not
for the reasons they believe.





The People With Holes In Their Heads
Amanda Feilding lives in a charming flat looking over London's river with
her companion, Joey Mellen, and their infant son, Rock. She is a successful
painter, and she and Joey have an art gallery in a fashionable street of the
King's Road. Another of her talents is for politics. At the last two General
Elections she stood for Parliament in Chelsea, more than doubling her vote
on the second occasion from 49 to 139. It does not sound much, but the cause
for which she stands is unfamiliar and lacks obvious appeal. Feilding and
her voters demand that trepanning operations be made freely available on the
National Health. Trepanation means cutting a hole in your skull.

The founder of the trepanation movement is a Dutch savant, Dr Bart Hughes.
In 1962 he made a discovery which his followers proclaim as the most
significant in modern times. One's state and degree of consciousness, he
realized, are related to the volume of blood in the brain. According to his
theory of evolution, the adoption of an upright stance brought certain
benefits to the human race, but it caused the flow of blood through the head
to be limited by gravity, thus reducing the range of human consciousness.
Certain parts of the brain ceased or reduced their functions while others,
particularly those parts relating to speech and reasoning, became emphasized
in compensation. One can redress the balance by a number of methods, such as
standing on one's head, jumping from a hot bath into a cold one, or the use
of drugs; but the wider consciousness thus obtained is only temporary. Bart
Hughes shared the common goal of mystics and poets in all ages: he wanted to
achieve permanently the higher level of vision, which he associated with an
increased volume of blood in the capillaries of the brain.

The higher state of mind he sought was that of childhood. Babies are born
with skulls unsealed, and it is not until one is an adult that the bony
carapace is formed which completely encloses the membranes surrounding the
brain and inhibits their pulsations in repsonse to heart-beats. In
consequence, the adult loses touch with the dreams, imagination and intense
perceptions of the child. His mental balance becomes upset by egoism and
neuroses. To cure these problems, first in himself and then for the whole
world, Dr Huges returned his cranium to something like the condition of
infancy by cutting out a small disc of bone with an electric drill.
Experiencing immediate beneficial effects from this operation, he began
preaching to anyone who would listen to the doctrine of trepanation. By
liberating his brain from its total imprisonment in his skull, he claimed to
have restored its pulsations, increased the volume of blood in it and
acquired a more complete, satisfying state of consciousness than grown-up
people normally enjoy. The medical and legal authorities reacted to Huges's
discovery with horror and rewarded him with a spell in a Dutch lunatic
asylum.

Joseph Mellen met Bart Huges in 1965 in Ibiza and quickly became his
leading, or rather one and only, disciple. Years later he wrote a book
called Bore Hole, the contents of which are summarized in its opening
sentence: 'This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skullto get
permanently high.'

[A few paragraphs that detail Joseph Mellen's early experiments with LSD,
and how he finds out about Bart Huges have been removed for brevity.]

The time came when Joey felt he had preached enough and that he now had to
act. He did not agree with Holingshead that the third eye was merely a
figure of speech, believing in its physical attainment through
self-trepanation. Support for this can be found in archaeology. Skulls of
ancient people all over the world give evidence that their owners were
skillfully trepanned during their lifetimes, and many of these appear to
have been of noble or priestly castes. The medical practice of trepanation
was continued up to the present century in treatment of madness, the hole in
the skull being seen as a way of relieving pressure on the brain or letting
out the devils that possessed it. By his scientific explanation of the
reasons for the operation, Bart Huges had removed it from the area of
superstition, and Joey Mellen proposed to be the second person to perform it
on himself in the interest of enlightenment.

Bart had become a close friend of Amanda Feilding, and they went off to
Amsterdam together while Joey took care of Amanda's flat. This was the
opportunity he had been waiting for to bore a hole in his head.

The most gripping passages in Bore Hole describe his various attempts to
complete the operation. They are also extremely gruesome, and those who lack
medical curiosity would do well to read no further. Yet to those who might
contemplate trepanation for and by themselves, Joey's experiences are a
salutary warning. It should be empahasized that neither he, Bart nor Amanda
has ever recommended people to follow their example by performing their own
operations. For years they have been looking for doctors who would
understand their theories and would agree to trepan volunteer patients as a
form of therapy Strangely enough, not one member of the medical profession
has been converted.

In a surgical store Joey found a trepan instrument, a kind of auger or cork-
screw designed to be worked by hand. It was much cheaper and, Joey felt,
more sensitive than an electric drill. Its main feature was a metal spike,
surrounded by a ring of saw-teeth. The spike was meant to be driven into the
skull, holding the trepan steady until the revolving saw made a groove,
after which it could be retracted. If all went well, the saw-band should
remove a disc of bone and expose the brain.

Joey's first attempt at self-trepanation was a fiasco. He had no previous
medical experience, and the needles he had bought for administering a local
anaesthetic to the crown of his head proved to be too thin and crumpled up
or broke. Next day he obtained some stouted needles, took a tab of LSD to
steady his nerves and set to in earnest. First he made an incision to the
bone, and then applied the trepan to his bared skull. But the first part of
the operation, driving the spike into the bone, was impossible to
accomplish. Joey described it as like trying to uncork a bottle from the
inside. He realized he needed help and telephoned Bart in Amsterdam, who
promised he would come over and assist at the next operation. This plan was
frustrated by the Home Office, which listed Dr Huges as an undesirable
visitor to Britain and barred his entry.

Amanda agreed to take his place. Soon after her return to London she helped
Joey re-open the wound in his head and, by pressing the trepan with all her
might against his skull, managed to get the spike to take hold and the saw-
teeth to bite. Joey then took over at cranking the saw. Once again he had
swallowed some LSD. After a long period of sawing, just as he was about to
break through, he suddenly fainted. Amanda called an ambulance and he was
taken to hospital, where horrified doctors told him that he was lucky to be
alive and that if he had drilled a fraction of an inch further he would have
killed himself.

The psychiatrists took a particular interest in his case, and a group of
them arranged to examine him. Before this could be done, he had to appear in
court on a charge of possessing a small amount of cannabis. The magistrate
demanded another psychiatrist's report and demanded him for a week in
prison.

There followed a period of embarrassment as the rumour went round London
that Joey Mellen had trepanned himself, whereas in fact he had failed to do
so. As soon as possible, therefore, he prepared for a third attempt.
Proceeding as before, but now with the benefit of experience, he soon found
the groove from the previous operation and began to saw through the sliver
of bone separating him from enlightenment or, as the doctors had predicted,
instant death. What followed is best quoted from Bore Hole.

'After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound of
bubbling. I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued. It sounded like
air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out. I looked at
the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it. At last! On closer inspection
I saw that the disc of bone was much deeper on one side than on the other.
Obviously the trepan had not been straight and had gone through at one point
only, then the piece of bone had snapped off and come out. I was reluctant
to start drilling again for fear of damaging the brain membranes with the
deeper part while I was cutting through the rest or of breaking off a
splinter. If only I had an electric drill it would have been so much
simpler. Amanda was sure I was through. There seemed no other explanation
for the schlurping noises I decided to call it a day. At the time I thought
that any hole would do, no matter what size. I bandaged up my head and
cleared away the mess.'
There was still doubt in his mind as to whether he had really broken through
and, if so, whether the hole was big enough to restore pulsation to his
brain. The operation had left him with a feeling of wellbeing, but he
realized that it could simply be from relief at having ended it. To put the
matter beyond doubt, he decided to bore another hole at a new spot just
above the hairline, this time using an electric drill. In the spring of
1970, Amanda was in America and Joey did the operation alone. He applied the
drill to his forehead, but after half and hour's work the electric cable
burnt out. Once again he was frustrated. An engineer in the flat below him
was able to repair the instrument and next day he set out to finish the job.
'This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep
through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill.
In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the
pulsation of the brain.'

The result was all he had hoped for. During the next four hours he felt his
spirits rising higher until he reached a state of freedom and serenity which
he claims, has been with him ever since.

For some time now he had been sharing a flat with Amanda, and when she came
back from America she immediately noticed the change in him. This encouraged
her to join him on the mental plane by doing her own trepanation. The
operation was carefully recorded. She had obtained a cine-camera, and Joey
stood by, filming, as she attacked her head with an electric drill. The film
shows her carefully at work, dressed in a blood-spattered white robe. She
shaves her head, makes an incision in her head with a scalpel and calmly
starts drilling. Blood spurts as she penetrates the skull. She lays aside
the drill and with a triumphant smile advances towards Joey and the camera.

Ever since, Joey and Amanda have lived and worked together in harmony. From
the business of buying old prints to colour and resell, they have progressed
to ownership of the Pigeonhole Gallery and seem reasonably prosperous. They
have also started a family. There is nothing apparently abnormal about them,
and many of their old friends agree in finding them even more pleasant and
contented since their operations. There is plenty of leisure in their lives,
mingled with the kind of activities they most enjoy. These of course include
talking and writing about trepanation. They have lectured widely in Europe
and America to groups of doctors and other interested people, showing the
film of Amanda's self-operation, entitled Heartbeat in the Brain. It is
generally received with awe, the sight of blood often causing people to
faint. At one showing in London a film critic described the audience
'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'. Yet it was not
designed to be gruesome. The soundtrack is of soothing music, and the
surgical scenes alternate with some delightful motion studies of Amanda's
pet pigeon, Birdie, as a symbol of peace and wisdom."