Last week Daedalus proposed a method of measuring brain activity, in neural pulses per second. Each pulse puts the sodium ions of the relevant nerve into brief 1-kilohertz oscillation. At that moment, their nuclear magnetic excitation at 1 kHz is strongly damped. DREADCO volunteers are now testing a nuclear magnetic psychometric hat, which measures the wearer's changing sodium-ion relaxation density, locates the sources of this activity by magnetic imaging, and transmits the results to a base station.

The steady cerebral base load of bodily ‘housekeeping’, keeping the heart and lungs pumping, and so on, should be fairly constant. Processing due to perception and conscious thought will vary wildly, but in keeping with the subject's circumstances. Sensory processing will be identified by its decline during sensory deprivation, and conscious thought by standard tasks and tests. The most interesting study will be subconscious thought. Even psychologists find it an elusive concept.

Daedalus feels that the subconscious mind cares little for the conscious needs of the moment. Thus a creative scientist can have a new idea at any time. The subconscious may have been developing the idea for ages before suddenly 'pushing it upstairs' for conscious consideration. With luck, one of Daedalus's volunteers will have such an inspiration while wearing the psychometric hat, thus capturing the whole sequence. It should show the subconscious activity, the burst of inspiration, and the transfer of activity to a different region as the conscious mind considers the new idea.

The subconscious also handles personal problems. Volunteers wrestling with superego–id conflicts, or shouldering or rejecting guilt or anger, or arguing with internalized parent figures, should reveal the fact by extra heavy processing in specific regions.

Once identified, subconscious activity could be tamed and trained by biofeedback methods. Shown their brain activity in real time, the volunteers could learn how to control it. Chronic worriers will soothe away their fears; those sabotaged by repressed memories or fatigued by obsessive notions will learn, if not to damp them out, at least to run them efficiently with the minimum number of neurons. Even conscious thought could be neurologically streamlined. The mental space thus opened will give a new freedom and spaciousness to mental life, and make room for more creative imagination.