In the winter of 1965, a 30-year-old former medical student at the University of Amsterdam named Bart Huges squatted in front of a mirror and drilled a hole in his head using an electric drill. He had performed a trepanation – a procedure involving the removal of a piece of bone from the skull dating back thousands of years and practiced by cultures around the world. A craniotomy, the modern version of trepanation, can in fact be lifesaving when conducted for the right reasons. Yet Huges never obtained a medical diploma and, according to writings published before and after the self-surgery, had come to believe that trepanation could enhance brain function and help one obtain a higher state of consciousness.
Despite any reliable medical or scientific evidence supporting this theory, Huges and his subsequent followers gained notoriety, helping popularize the concept among those experimenting with drugs during the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. According to Paul McCartney, even John Lennon at one point considered it. Yet the purported benefits of trepanation proclaimed by Huges and others was not only unfounded — its promotion was also dangerous.
