By deliberately focusing mental energy and activity- a simple thought process- on the anterior amygdala, this causes an increase in frontal lobes processes, which instantly causes increased and measurable levels of intelligence, creativity, pleasure, and often various "normal-paranormal" experiences. The method can be as simple as "imaging" a feather tickling the amygdala, which automatically shunts neurochemical activity forward into the previously "dormant" frontal lobes. The amygdala can be seen as a gateway click switch, somewhat like the light switch on your wall. But in your brain, you "click" on the big light bulb in your frontal lobes.

Russian neurosurgeon Alexandre Luria, along with many other distinguished researchers have repeatedly shown us that the frontal lobes are at least 90% dormant, "untapped", unused. Although some may object to this description of the brain, it is one effective way of describing the infinite potential of the human brain. We normally don't live up to even a fraction of what is available or possible. It is the great cosmic joke.

In this day and age, when 6-year-old kids are learning to use complex computers- nearly all of us have failed to properly learn about the most complex machine in the universe- our own brain. We are taught how to drive sophisticated cars, operate complicated tools and appliances, but nobody ever taught us how our own brain works. We are driving blind.

Never the less, when an individual learns some very basic things about their brain, and thus learns some basic brain self-control and amygdala/frontal lobes control, then one begins to access radical and overwhelmingly positive changes in function, behavior, and activity. We start to access more and more of that enormous untapped infinite potential. We give our brain wings. As one subject stated "This feels like flying."

In a 1998 national radio broadcast on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio show, Slade guided exercise elicited thousands of responses from persons "tickling" their amygdala forward as brain basics and directions were given over the air, including the simple "feather tickling" visualization. For many, this caused immediate dramatic auditory, visual, and physical sensations.

Mind Music Metamorphosis

In 1987, Slade wrote-

"A wild mountain man screaming.......he started me on this brain stuff.

I write this sitting at an old weather beaten redwood desk looking out a large picture window facing east. I am 10,200 feet up in a mountain log cabin, aspen and spruce trees everywhere as far as the eye can see. I look down on gray and white clouds enveloping the tall rolling green valley in front of me.

To one side of the cabin is a huge 300-foot tall granite cliff. Across the valley, off in the distance, looms 14,000-foot high Mount Evans. One hundred miles downrange, Pikes Peak.

The scenery from this vantage point in the Colorado Rockies, is stupendous! I am at the Colorado Brain Research and Development Laboratory near Blackhawk, Colorado. My journey here began in 1981. I was watching TV late one Saturday night in Denver, half-asleep and flipping through the channels. On a local progressive educational PBS channel, I stopped to watch a group of people talking about their brain(s) and their experiences while in the mountains at a unique wilderness laboratory.

The leader of the group was a wild looking guy wearing faded blue jeans, with long hair and a beard. Only later would I learn that he had had attended four universities, and was anything but a "hippie". What especially got my immediate attention, and what woke me up, was the frank and logical manner in which they described some fairly outrageous and unusual experiences they were having. They described fantastic and intensely pleasurable daily events. They found creativity and invention pouring from them effortlessly, like water from a faucet.

They all agreed that the key to all of this was having learned how to turn on previously "uncharted" regions of their brain. If what they were saying was true, my own brain must have been on hold for most of my life. After the show ended, the leader of the group appeared with an interviewer from the station for a live segment. This time the "brain man" wore a conventional city suit. He spoke with a great deal of enthusiasm and animation, joking more than occasionally.

Being intrigued by this combination of science, nature, and non-convention I wrote in and received typewritten information about the "Brain In Nature" course held every summer in the pristine wilderness forest forty miles west of Denver. I also learned that, according to the latest neurological opinion, the human brain's potential was infinite- and in a manner, our potential is vastly unused. After all, what is any percentage of infinity?! The main purpose of the program was to discover exactly why human neurons remained so unused, and what methods would additionally activate them.

Directions were enclosed for visiting, and so the next weekend I drove up. It sounded like fun, and an adventure. My first experience at the lab was unforgettable. Mainly, because the first thing that happened was that I was scolded severely by the director, like some dumb kid, for not reading the directions carefully. I expected to be welcomed with open arms and instead had the director yelling at me for coming up on the wrong day.

"You didn't read the instructions," he insisted. "Visitors are allowed on Sunday, NOT SATURDAY. The first thing you'll learn up here is to read the instructions."

Embarrassed, and maybe insulted, I was none-the-less encouraged to stay put. As long as I was already there, I might as well see what the place was all about. The history and the evolution of the facility turned out to be quite amazing, and like nothing I imagined it would be.

The story unfolds with the "DAT Stingo" as a spearhead infantry scout for General Patton's army in World War II. He experienced the horrors of war from the front lines, and was one of the soldiers to first to arrive at Hitler's death camps to liberate the remaining survivors. On his return home after the end of the war, the director attended the University of Chicago earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in behavioral science and nearing completion of his Ph.D. His horrific experiences during the war drove him to ask but one question: "Why must I kill my brother?"

To this his school and his professors had no answer. But one professor's advice was "If there is an answer to this question, it's up here," pointing to his own gray head. "The answer has got to be in human brain.......but the research hasn't been done yet in academe. If you want to go slow, work here. If you want to go fast, you're going to have to build your own research center to solve that riddle."

So, Stingo dropped out of his Ph.D. program, and started to scheme how to put together his own research facility. Unfortunately to do that, one had to have money, and he had none. But he could tell a good story! He decided if there was a fortune to be made in a hurry, he might just be able to do it in show business. Twenty five years later he would wink "Yep, I bought this mountain and built this place with just a guitar, three chords, and nine folk songs." And he was right.

He started out playing the local joints around Denver and eventually landed a spot on Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life" television show from Hollywood. He wore buckskins and played the part of a back woods mountain man to perfection. It was during that appearance on the Marx show that a New York City producer spotted him. "I know a good phony when I see one," the mogul observed, "And that son of a bitch is a great one!"

So, Stingo was quickly summoned out to New York City and was immediately signed to do a summer replacement show on NBC network television. He hosted a weekly program in which the "new" fad of folk singing (back in 1955) was featured. People like Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie made guest appearances and performed with him. The network paid him $2,000 an hour for this lucrative play. On the last show, he looked right into the camera an asked the million viewers watching "If anybody out there has a mountain to sell, call me!" And sure enough, once he got off camera, somebody did.

At the end of the summer he took two grocery sacks full of money and ran! He gave one to the IRS, and he bought "Laughing Coyote Mountain" with the other. He began to axe timber and build log cabins. That was in 1957. For the next thirty years Stingo dedicated himself totally to explore behavior from the perspective of the human brain. He and his staff examined every bit of available scientific research and philosophic literature they could get their hands on. They ran their own short and long term studies and experiments. The environment of rugged mountain wilderness provided a total focus into the self that could never be replicated in any city or sterile clinical hospital. There was no electricity (As Carl Jung had insisted in his own Swiss study retreat), no TV, no movie entertainment. There were no four-lane highways to get away from it all. You were away from it all- to face only yourself, your mind, and your brain.

To the end of the lab's operations in 1993, it remained remarkably free of electrical power lines or even running water. It was just you, the hand water pump, a wood stove, and your own central nervous system.

The brain lab's records grew and grew. The log buildings became crammed full with file cabinets. The books lined the walls from the stone floors to the ceiling rafters eighteen feet up. In the end, he and his group discovered the mechanisms to release startling new intelligence, creativity, and pleasure inside the human brain. His conclusions were original and unmatched by any other research establishment at the time. Then, and since, his findings are supported and corroborated with foundation findings by scientists everywhere.

My Own Brain

After my first visit to the lab in 1981, I spent the next eleven years running back and forth between my own home in Denver and the forest field station. My own personal "experiments", with my own brain, was guided by the work done at the Dormant Brain Lab. This took the form of "brain exercises", journal keeping, analysis of activity, and periodic consultation with the director, and other staff members and participants. Before long I was assisting the director in various assignments he gave me, organizing city group sessions, information gathering, organizing lectures, and eventually writing my own books on the subject.

The results of my work was breathtaking on many occasions- sitting on the peak of Laughing Coyote Mountain, with the clearest possible perception of everything around me- a fifty thousand square mile view of the earth circle, with incredibly heightened senses and awareness. I learned how to go far beyond my own limitations, mental and physical, tested by pulling hundreds of thirty foot tall firewood logs down the labs steep wooded slopes. I ecstatically felt on many occasions the most powerful emotional experiences of my life. This might take the form of fantastic waves of internal energy, or indescribable and spectacular feelings of unity and balance. Strangely enough, these were more often than not triggered by simple daily activities- hearing a piece of music, walking among the trees, discarding a useless notion, or just sitting on my sofa at home.

When I began my investigations into the work at the lab and into how my own brain worked, my creativity and emotional state might be compared to a plugged up toilet (even with my degree, magna cum laude)- not to mention what I observed in most everybody else at the time. Since learning the basic bio-mechanics of my own human thought motor- utilizing the discoveries of general neuroscience as well as the brain lab's own methods and discoveries, I have written, arranged, performed and recorded eight albums of original music, some of which has received national public television and radio airplay. I have written several books, and I have established an run my own successful musical teaching and publishing business, sidestepping the 9 to 5 minimum wage-slave labor syndrome. My social relationships have gone from amazingly disastrous in pre-brain days, to harmonious and highly entertaining. The simple ABC's of "how the human brain works" has had nothing short of a miraculous effect on my daily life. And as for the miracles of paranormal telepathy and pre-cognition- they have become rather commonplace for me after many years of clicking my amygdala forward and turning on magical frontal lobes circuits."