1923 – 1979 · A portrait
A Czechoslovak-born inventor who built the steerable cardiac catheter, then wrote a bestselling book proposing a physical model of consciousness based on the body's natural rhythms.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
Self-taught, with no engineering degree, he built a steerable cardiac catheter that let doctors guide the device through blood vessels. It helped found the biomedical company Medi-Tech and came into standard medical use.
In Stalking the Wild Pendulum he proposed that micro-motions of the skull make the brain oscillate against the cerebrospinal fluid, producing standing waves he linked to meditative states and the yogic idea of kundalini rising through the body.
His model found an audience among transpersonal psychologists and consciousness researchers, but no controlled experiment tested the physiological mechanism he described.
Neuroscience has never confirmed the mechanism he proposed, and critics count the wider theory as unfalsifiable.