The Brain Hack

They found me...

They know what we've done...

They don't like it!

Shit!

Fuck...

This is it Harper... The rest is down to you.

Finish it!

Arghh...

Why did I follow him?...Fallon

Was it a backlash to my Catholic school?

The morbidity of faith?

Or maybe I just wanted to make something good...

For once.

My pact with the devil.

Why are you here?

Huh?

...in film class?

I wanna make films.

You want to make the best film ever made?

Neurotheology and control engineering?

I study computer science.

So... Why are you in film class?

Can a work of Art be so precise...

In design and execution...

...that it could inspire the viewer to see God?

How do you mean, God?

Imagine you're a medieval pilgrim...

Sleeping in the gutter...

Hallucinating due to malnutrition...

At the end of your journey...

You gaze up...

To see sunlight refracted through the glass of the Sainte Chapelle windows.

You think it was chance...?

These designs?

You think they were accidents of the imagination?

No... There's technique... maths... geometry...

Back then, mixing science and religion could get you killed!

These guys knew more than they could let on!

In the fourteen hundreds...

A leather trader... Karim Nisbah...

Spent 12 days in the desert.

His camel died.

The sun burnt his retinas.

But after dragging himself home...

All he could say to his wife was...

'I've seen God.'

In 1937, a German marine scientist...

was hypnotized by the sway...

of bioluminescence on lake Karakum...

His first words upon revival?

'I've seen God'.

And the connection is?

Hypno-induced temporal lobe epilepsy.

There's a direct link...

Between the optical nerve.

And the region of the brain responsible for religious devotion.

You're saying images can induce visions of God?

That's why I joined your film class.

I want you to document the experiment.

We know that white noise and binaural beats...

Stimulate the brain

And the visual cortex responds to symmetry.

Some patters work better than others.

So we alter them using various parameters.

Scale. Color. Position.

Which work best?

We test them. One at a time.

Measuring the results on an EEG.

You recording?

Hundreds of people work on this. Across the globe.

It's called Haynault's Pattern Theory.

They're looking for a perfect image?

But it could take forever to find.

And that's what you do?

No. I work for Stratten.

A tech firm who build HIDs.

Mice. Keyboards. And this prototype...

Scans brain activity.

I do software for this thing.

Then last month... This happened.

It gave me an idea.

If the scanner could give feedback on a standard binary switch...

What could it do for pattern theory.

It's a simple script.

Is X stimulated?

If no. Deviate. If yes...

Mirror and split. Repeat.

No. Deviate. Yes. Mirror and split.

Can you control it? The patterns?

No. It feeds from the subconscious,

So you're testing on yourself? Incredible.

That's not all.

Check the readout you get when you watch this thing back!

Shit! You've found it.

Haynault's Pattern!

And so the work began.

Ellen White. Founder of the Seventh Day Adventists...

Suffered a brain injury at age 9. Had frequent seizures.

Spoke directly with God.

She was epileptic?

So was Dostoyevsky.

You know what he called it?

The ecstatic aura.

You're saying the entire history of religious prophecy...

...is linked to brain malfunction?

10,000 years of fanatical belief!

God isn't a bearded man sat in the clouds.

Or a four armed elephant.

He's a bug.

A glitch.

A neurological construct.

We worked through the night.

Longer hours.

Fallon never slept.

Fallon?

Have you told anyone?

About the experiment?

What?

I was followed. Last night.

And again this morning.

By who? The police?

The church.

You think they'd like it?!

They wouldn't fucking like it.