Manfred Clynes Inventions Information

Manfred Clynes (born August 14, 1925) is a scientist, inventor, and musician. He is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.

Manfred Clynes' work combines music and science, more particularly, neurophysiology and neuroscience. Clynes' musical achievements embrace performance and interpretation, exploring and clarifying the function of time forms in the expression of music—and of emotions generally—in connection with brain function in its electrical manifestations. As a concert pianist, he has recorded versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. As an inventor, his inventions (about 40 patents) include, besides the CAT computer for electrical brain research, the online auto- and cross-correlator, and inventions in the field of ultrasound (Clynes invented color ultrasound.) as well as telemetering, data recording, and wind energy. The creative process of computer realizations of classical music with SuperConductor is based on his discoveries of fundamental principles of musicality. Clynes was the subject of a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21 1991.

Clynes concentrated on what he saw as the natural and unalterable interlocking of the central nervous system with basic expressive time forms, and on the innate power of those forms to generate specific basic emotions. He recognized that we are all familiar with this interlocking in our experiences of laughter and of yawning, although its scientific importance had been largely swept under the carpet by a Skinnerian bias and still largely is. According to Clynes’s experimental research these time forms (“sentic forms”), as embodied in the central nervous system, are primary to the varied modes in which they find expression, such as sound, touch, and gesture. Clynes was able to prove this by systematically deriving sounds from subjects’ expressions of emotions through touch, and then playing those sounds to hearers culturally remote from the original subjects. In one trial, for example, Aborigines in Central Australia were able to correctly identify the specific emotional qualities of sounds derived from the touch of white urban Americans. (This experiment was featured on Nova, What Is Music? in 1988). Clynes found in this a confirmation of the existence of biologically fixed, universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion that give rise to much of the experience within human societies.

Some of these dynamic forms appear to be shared by those animals that have time consciousnesses at a similar rate to humans; hence the intuition of pet owners that their dog or cat understands tone of voice and the emotional form of touch. Anger, love, and grief, for example, according to Clynes, have clearly different dynamic expressive forms. Importantly, a cardinal property of this inherent biologic communication language, in Clynes’ findings, is that the more closely an expression follows the precise dynamic form, the more powerful is the generation of the corresponding emotion, in both the person expressing and in the perceiver of the expression. Hence, presumably, such phenomena as charisma (in persons whose performance of emotional expressions closely follows the universal form). His experience with Pablo Casals confirmed for Clynes the importance of this faithfulness to the natural dynamic form in generating emotionally significant meaning in musical performance.

Drawing on these findings, Clynes also developed an application—a simple touch art form—in which, without music, subjects expressed, through repeated finger pressure, a sequence of emotions timed according to the natural requirements of the sentic forms. The 25-minute sequence, called the Sentic Cycle, comprises: no-emotion, anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. Subjects reported experiencing calmness and energy. Many also evidenced progress in the alleviation of depression, and, to some degree, tobacco and alcohol addictions, as a result of repeated application of this process. Thousands of people have by now experienced sentic cycles, some for years, some even decades. In the 1980s especially, Clynes taught various groups to conduct Sentic Cycles on their own. Nowadays, the Sentic Cycle kit is available on the Internet.

Early work developing sentic cycles in the 1970s had convinced Clynes also that it is easy with it for most people to proceed from experiencing one emotion to another quite rapidly. After three or four minutes of one emotion, a person tended to be being satiated with the current emotion. The ready switching to the next emotion with quite fresh experience pointed to the existence of specific receptors in the brain, he suggested, that become satiated with particular neurohormones; this was later confirmed by the identification of a number of such receptors.This finding links well with the historic tendency of composers to vary emotions every 4 minutes or so in their compositions. The human need for variety is based on brain receptor properties. As anyone who has seen more than three Charlie Chaplin movies in a row can testify, laughter, too, palls after prolonged exposure, and it seems to be for the same reason.Clynes also studied laughter, "nature's arrow from appearance to reality". In (nonderisive) laughter, according to Clynes, a small element of disorder is suddenly understood to be only apparently disordered, within an actual, larger, order. He then predicted the existence of soundless laughter, in which the sound production is replaced by tactile pressure at the same temporal pattern. In studies at UCSD the mean repetitions of the “ha's” was found to be approximately 5.18 per second. Clynes further hypothesized that couples with unmatched speeds of laughter might not be as readily compatible as those whose laughter was harmoniously coordinated.

Clynes enthusiastically published his realization that love, joy, and reverence were always there to be experienced, capable of being generated through precise expression and accessible by simple means, due to the connection to their biologic roots. Music had always been a special means for this, but now, with this touch artform, it was universally accessible. By this means, even negative emotions, such as grief anger, could be enjoyed in a compassionate non-destructive framework.

In the 1970s and in the 1980s Clynes had started to write poems, a few of which had found their way into his book Sentics. Later, Marvin Minsky quoted from them in his book The Society of Mind. In the late 1980s and in the 1990s he wrote his 12 Animal Poems. Boundaries of Compassion is a substantial set of poems growing out of his experience in Germany while doing experimental work at the Luedenscheid hospital in the summer of 1985, poems in regard to what Germans call “the Jewish Question.”

Clynes is credited with developing and coining the term cyborg, which refers to beings with both biological and artificial parts. In other words, cyborgs are beings whose abilities have been enhanced due to the presence and advancement of technology. The term cyborg has become an important concept to technoself studies; an interdisciplinary domain of scholarly research dealing with all aspects of human identity in a technological society focusing on the changing nature of relationships between the human and technology.

Manfred Clynes was born on August 14, 1925, in Vienna Austria. His family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in September 1938 to escape Nazism. In Australia, at fifteen, in his last year at high school, having newly learned calculus, he invented the inertial guidance method for aircraft using piezoelectric crystals and repeated electronic integration, but Australian authorities denied that it would work. In fact, the same system Clynes had invented was later used with great success, during the last part of the Second World War. The detailed descriptions of this invention as written by the fifteen-year-old Clynes are rigorous; it was the first of his many inventions to come that worked. (Clynes' earlier attempt, at the age of thirteen, to create a perpetual motion device was naturally a failure). In 1946 Clynes graduated from the University of Melbourne having studied both engineering science and music.

Around this time he also had lessons with the Polish virtuoso Ignaz Friedman, then resident in Sydney. Having seen Friedman play in concert several times, Clynes approached him by letter and was accepted sight unseen. He hitchhiked from Melbourne as he could not afford the train fare, let alone the fee charged by Friedman. His musical talent was recognized by a series of awards, concerto performances and prizes, one of which provided a three-year graduate fellowship to the Juilliard School. At Juilliard, he was a piano student of Olga Samaroff and Sascha Gorodnitzki.

He received his MS degree from Juilliard in 1949, after having performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Tanglewood Music Festival (in 1948) then under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky in a performance of which the pianist Gerson Yessin, who was present, recently recalled as "monumental." [Yessin: "Manfred played beautifully, outstandingly."] After graduating from Juilliard (It gave no doctorates then), Clynes retreated to a small log cabin at six thousand feet altitude in the solitude of Wrightwood, California. There he learned Bach's Goldberg Variations and other works. He performed them for the first time in October 1949, in Ojai, at Jiddu Krishnamurti's school, and, in 1950, along with other works, in all the capital cities of Australia, to great acclaim. He soon became regarded as one of Australia's outstanding pianists.

In 1952 he was invited to Princeton University as a graduate student in the Music Department, and issued a green card, to pursue his studies in the Psychology of Music, with a Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Award. There he became aware of the work of G. Becking, who in 1928 had published a sensitive, if nonscientific, study of distinctive motor patterns associated in following the music of individual composers. It was this work that led, in the late 1960s, to Clynes' scientific sentographic studies of what he termed composers' pulses, as their motor manifestation, in which Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin were to be his first subjects.

Young Clynes had a personal letter of introduction to Albert Einstein from an elderly lady in Australia, with whom, in her youth, Einstein had exchanged poems. Soon Einstein invited him repeatedly to dinner at his home, and a friendship sprang up between the two men. Clynes played for Einstein on his fine Bechstein piano, especially Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. He loved Clynes' playing of Mozart and Schubert, calling Clynes "a blessed artist" ("Ein begnadeter Künstler") In May 1953 Einstein wrote Clynes a personal letter by hand to help him in his forthcoming European tour.

(Translation of Einstein's letter, dated Princeton, 18 May 1953: "Dear Mr. Clynes, I am truly grateful to you for the great enjoyment that your piano playing has given me. Your performance combines a clear insight into the inner structure of the work of art with a rare spontaneity and freshness of conception. With all the secure mastery of your instrument, your technique never supplants the artistic content, as unfortunately so often is the case in our time. I am convinced that you will find the appreciation to which your achievement entitles you. With friendly greetings yours, A. Einstein.")

In 1953, helped by the letter from Einstein, Clynes toured Europe with great critical success, playing the Goldberg Variations. The tour ended with a solo concert before an audience of 2500 at London's Royal Festival Hall, which had just been built.

In 1954, in order to provide for his parents and to raise funds necessary to underwrite his musical career, Clynes, on the basis of his scientific training, took a job working with a new analog computer, a device about which, at the time, both he and his interviewer were ignorant. In short order, however, Clynes mastered that computer, and then within a year created a new analytic method of stabilizing dynamical systems, which he published as a paper in the IEEE Transactions.Bogue, the company he was working for, doubled his salary, after a year, unasked. "Only in America!" was Clynes' reaction. (He became a citizen in 1960.)

In 1955, at Clynes' suggestion, Bogue employed his father, then aged 72, from Australia, as a naval architect; the elder Clynes had not been permitted to work in his profession in Australia, because he was not British-born. For a time Clynes father and son went to work together every morning (to Clynes’ rejoicing).

As the result of a chance meeting, in 1956, Dr Nathan S. Kline, Director of the Research Center of Rockland State Hospital, a large mental hospital, offered Clynes a substantial research job at the Center, where he in 1956 became ‘Chief Research Scientist’. Kline was to become the recipient of two Lasker Awards, and had built up that research center to formidable renown. (It is now called the Nathan S. Kline Psychiatric Center.)

An autodidact in physiology, Clynes applied dynamic systems analysis to the homeostatic and other control processes of the body so successfully in the next three years, that he received a series of awards, including, for the best paper published in 1960 - Clynes' annus mirabilis (miracle year), the IRE W.R.G. Baker Award (1961). In 1960 he invented the CAT computer (Computer of Average Transients) a $10,000 portable computer permitting the extraction of responses from ongoing electric activity—the needle in the haystack. The CAT quickly came into use in research labs all over the world, marketed by Technical Measurements Corp., advancing the study of the electric activity of the brain (enabling, for example, the clinical detection of deafness in newborns). In this way, Clynes made his fortune by age 37.

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