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MD Magazine
The People With Holes in Their Heads
By John Michell
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 Huges. 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 cause 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 Huges
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 adult that the bony carapace is formed which completely
encloses the membranes surrounding the brain and inhibits their pulsations in response 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 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 skull to get permanently high.'
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