They found me...
They know what we've done...
They don't like it!
Oh shit!
Oh 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.
Wouldn't like what?
If we found it.
Found what?
A short-cut to God.
At first I thought it was a joke.
We named his apparitions The Religious Authorities.
But I didn't be believe him.
It could't be true.
Perhaps you should cut the self testing.
You could do serious damage.
Migraines. Seizures..
Hallucinations.
Who else is there?
No.
It's perfectly safe.
Says the paranoid schizophrenic.
I'm not paranoid.
Prove it.
I can't.
But you can.
So the experiment took a turn.
It didn't take long to finish the sequence.
Join the dots.
We named it The Brain Hack.
But there was still one problem.
Damn it!
It happened again.
Some kind of reflex. A safety catch.
Look..
The Brain Hack starts at 4:22
At 4:28 the velocity increases. It's working.. But then..
8 seconds in. Some kind of defense mechanism.
Maybe the brain is trying to tell us something.
How would you like to be lobotomized?
Just the prefrontal lobe.
I can scoop it right out.
Then Fallon disappeared.
2 days. No Word. No Warning
What if the visions were real?
If you open the door to God.
Maybe you let the Devil in too?
Hello?
Well?
Sit down.
You don't need that.
Now we've found the pattern it will work every time.
Like Haynault predicted?
Universal. No matter who views it.
And the defense mechanism?
I know how to beat it.
What are you doing?!
Fallon?
Shit! No..
NO.
Fallon!
That's right. Let the adrenaline come.
Fear. This is how you beat the defense mechanism.
Flooding the cerebellum with fear.
If you don't want to see the results..
Look away now!
Well?
Did you see anything? Tell me.
Nothing? I don't understand.
It doesn't work Fallon.
But the reaction was incredible!
You should've seen it.
Seen what? God?!
Fuck you!
It took 20 minutes. But then it happened...
The poet Valery once wrote...
The universe is built on a plan.
The profound symmetry of which is somehow present..
In the inner structure of our intellect.
He was right.
And it's beautiful.
Fallon?
Fuck.
They've found me...
This is it Harper..
The rest is down to you.
Finish it!
Are we doing the right thing?
What do you mean?
We could be fucking with our brains.
No. The brain evolved to do this.
It's a natural function.
A natural function?
Yeah. It's just..
Most people never get there. Modern life how it is.
We're not touching the hardware.
Just hacking the software.
Giving them a cheat code for the final level.
God mode.
You want to talk moral implications?
We're not the ones asking for money.. Devotion..
Preaching hate.
Telling people that they're sinful.
Teaching them to maim and kill.
We're showing them the truth!
The numinous is free.
Closeness to God isn't just for monks and priests..
And self-proclaimed prophets.
It's personal. Within us. Every one of us.
The Brain Hack needs to go public.
On the internet. Festivals. TV.
If everyone had seen what we've seen...
We could end wars.
I once asked why you were in film class..
Well.. now you know!
We'll make a short film.
Half documentary.
Half dramatic fiction.
We may need to embellish the story.
Just enough to get the audience on the edge of their seat.
Get the adrenaline pumping.
To beat the defense mechanism.
Because at the end of the film...
We show The Brain Hack!
Live and uncut!
But it's untested. Unsafe.
Are they ready for it?
They have to be!
If you don't want to see the results..
...look away now!