CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

with a microphone on another channel of the same tape recorder.

From these three hundred subjects we got on the order of 2,300 different words. Three hundred of these words were in the dictionary; the rest were words that we do not ordinarily use, i.e., nondictionary words as we began to call tbem. In this work I received the very enthusiastic contributions of Margaret Naesser, a student of linguistics from the University of Wisconsim. Margaret had tremendous energy and initiative and carried out the study using the IBM 360 computer system at the University of Illinois to analyze our results. Dr. Heinz Von Foerster at the biocomputer laboratory was intrigued by our results and arranged for us to use the computer.

The computer analyses showed that, for each sound slot in the word "cogitate," the human biocomputer on repetition turns over and selects other sounds which one tben hears as if coming from tbe stimulus word outside. Each such sommd rs called a phon. We found that on the average people tended to make twelve phon slots in the original stimulus word "cogitate." The minimum number of slots was 3 and the maximum number was 26. The number of substitutions of sounds in each of the twelve slots was different. For the first slot, there were 13 substitutions In the second, 44 different sounds could be brought in, and so on.

It turned out that this repeating word effect made it possible to demonstrate very rapidly to live audiences their own biocomputer operations. This is the reason that I went on with this work and made the transition from the dolphin to the human through the repeating word effect. It was an extremely convenient way of demonstrating to people their own self metaprogramming and the various concepts of the hiocomputer.

In addition to hearing alternate words when being

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