I have lived since early childhood
Figuring out what’s going on, I,
I know what hurts, I know what’s easy,
When to stand and when to run,
And there’s no hole in my head.
Too bad.
-Malvina Reynolds, No Hole In My Head
Amanda Feilding, a 27-year old art student, sits dressed in a white robe. Before her a row of operating utensils is laid neatly out on a table. She calmly shaves her hairline, then dons a shower cap to restrain the remaining hair. She injects herself with a local anesthetic, then retrieves a scalpel from the line-up of tools and, with a firm look of determination, begins to excise a patch of skin from her head. Next, she reaches for an electric drill, aims it carefully at the spot on her head and presses down on the foot pedal. The drill screeches to life and begins chewing away at Feilding’s frontal bone. Blood geysers from the hole, roughly three-eighths of an inch wide, splattering her white robe. She grins widely in the mirror as rivers of blood run down her face.
Feilding then washes the blood from her face with a cloth and wraps her head in bandages. She changes out of the blood-stained robe and begins getting dressed, donning a gold headdress to disguise the bandages. Finally, waving goodbye to the camera, she heads off to a fancy dinner party.
The film you have just watched is a 1970 short documentary entitled Heartbeat In The Brain. It was filmed by Amanda Feilding and her partner Joe Mellon, both followers of a man named Bart Hughes, known as the father of the modern trepanation movement. The film is quite difficult to find now. The pair showed it at lectures they gave on trepanation across Europe and America, including one event where several viewers were said to have passed out, “dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums.”
The film has since become part of the pantheon of cinematic curiosities, much sought after for their depiction of the bizarre and unusual by those whose curiosity is sufficiently morbid.
“Clean up all your bad vibrations. Letting the spirits out of the hole, that was the Greek version of it. . . . Eight orifices in your head now. Get you responding to undiscovered electromagnetic fields. . . . Your brain’s got an erection.”
-Heathcote Williams, AC/DC
The motivation behind all this? Proponents of trepanation reason that over time both gravity and the hardening of the skull bone serve to decrease the pulsation of blood through the brain. Boring a hole in one’s head, they say, allows for increased blood volume, thereby enhancing one’s level of consciousness.
As for what happened immediately after the film ends and Feilding goes off to her dinner party, she states that she felt, “a lifting upwards, like the tide coming in, and at the same time a feeling of relaxation and silence in the head, a peace, a stopping of that voice in the head.” Somehow drilling a hole in her own head seemed like a natural move for Feilding. “I was trained as a sculptor,” she said, “so I thought, ‘I spend all my time making holes in objects, I might as well make one in my own head.’ “
A graduate of Temple University's English program, Jeff Havel can be frequently found on street corners swatting furiously at the air and yelling at tall buildings. A righter of wrongs, a doer of goods, a hoarder of sheep, Jeff is currently available for freelance writing work as well as the finest burlesque performances money can buy. 
Very good documentary in whole. I’d highly suggest watching it to anyone interested in the more science-y (read biological/physiological) reasoning behind boring a hole into one’s head. From a cultural standpoint it links us with a lot of ancient people’s.