Finished reading A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback last night.

This is essential material for understanding where brain/mind technologies are going with blistering speed. Only two or three years ago neurofeedback was gaining acceptance although nowhere near mainstream. Seems that NF has now broken through an acceptance barrier and is taking old school biofeedback into realms the inventors couldn't imagine.

The NF revolution closely parallels NLP methods in that it is highly process oriented, low content weight, and concerns itself with brain function as the source of outwardly manifesting symptoms, problems, confusions...

What this suggests is that NLP and NF may eventually converge on those points where NF can give the practitioner the fastest, most specific reading of the brain's "state"... and herein is a curious point... NLP has a rather amorphous, broadband definition of "state", while NF sees "state" as being specific (and to a degree directly observable) condition of electrical energy (as expressed by frequency, amplitude, phase, chaoticity, random noise components, and so on) in exact regions of the brain.

NF thought and behavioral modification clinics are springing up everywhere, and able to charge rather breathtaking sums for a course of training, also suggesting that NF might be delivering the quantifiable goods enough so that clients are willing to pay that kind of freight.

Sooner or later I'd expect mental states like shamanic consciousness or hypnotic suggestibility or zen masterness to be efficiently trainable.

Go read the book. It isn't overly technical, perhaps it is a touch overly anecdotal with litanies of the petty politics and ego struggles of NF, not unlike, ahhh...

Dwight,

It sounds a fascinating read. Can you tell me how you would measure the effectiveness of NLP as in a measurable scientific way? and how this would work with the new brainscience measurements of brainwaves and biofeedback.

Thanks
Nina

Doh? There IS a book review section ? erp.

For starters the measuring equipment is improving exponentially... soon there will be easy to use, accurate head connectors, probably like tweaky skullcaps... so you could take a sample of a population that has had great results with a technique and see where and how their brain energy changed, possibly you would see one frequency shift in the left hemisphere and another frequency shift in the right, so then you'd have an image of how a brain looks when it gets a technique... then you could play those frequencies into another person via headphones or other methods (some are absolutely off the map, using radio frequency waves to send signals deeper in the brain) WHILE the subject is attempting the techinique... a new subject who wants a strong success response... thus the subject is pre-entrained into the energy bands where the application seems to take most successfully, and you run the swish, fire the anchors, or whatever is called for....

so there is a feedback part... what is a happy brain doing that leads to happiness ? and a feed foreward part, how do you get a stuck brain making the right brainwaves to operate like an unstuck brain ?

grabbed this snipped from wikipedia:

Within the last 5-10 years, neurofeedback has taken a new approach, in taking a second look at deep states. Alpha-theta training has been used in the treatment of alcoholism (first reported by Penniston in 1989[citation needed]) and other addictions as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, the dysphoric disorders of women, musicians, and psychopathic offenders.[citation needed] This low frequency training differs greatly from the high frequency beta and SMR training that has been practiced for over thirty years and is reminiscent of the original alpha training of Elmer Green and Joe Kamiya. Beta and SMR training can be considered a more directly physiological approach, strengthening sensorimotor inhibition in the cortex and inhibiting alpha patterns, which slow metabolism. Alpha-theta training, however, derives from the psychotherapeutic model and involves accessing of painful or repressed memories through the alpha-theta state. The alpha-theta state is a term that comes from the representation on the EEG. During this therapy, when the alpha waves amplitude is crossed over by the rising amplitude of theta waves, the state is called the alpha-theta crossover state and is associated with resolution of traumatic memories

As far as I can see, one of the current difficulties with neuro-feedback being practical at the moment is that with inexpensive equipment it is only possible to monitor the surface structures of the brain. You need much more expensive equipment to get real time feedback of the structures deeper inside such as the limbic system.

You can even now get an surgical implant to directly stimulate as well as monitor deeper structures.. I was recently talking to a neuro-science researcher Christopher Harris at sussex university who is trying to promote this in a more publicly accessible way.. I'm sure that silly people will be tempted to abuse it though!
iPlant - program yourself

The major barrier at the moment is bone, the skull is a good insulator and degrades the signal quite a lot. Then you get the cortex itself which is a six layered structure... the first, innermost layer exhibits some form of resonant linkage with the thalamus, the thalamo-cortical loop... and that activity is hard to "see" because it is buried... that said, NF is sure better than nothing, and far better than it was a generation ago.... the observation that the brain appears to have a degree of receptivity to VLF radio frequency (which reportedly) may be able to penetrate further down into limbic tissue is fairly astounding to my way of thinking.... I had been reading old literature that mentioned primitive experiments in direct piping of auditory material into the limbic regions via VLF emissions.... a bit of technacalia here... according to the Shannon-Nyquist theorem, any analog signal (voice, music, etc.) requires a carrier frequency of 2x the maximum frequency of the signal.... so for voice messaging, assume a maximum frequency requirement of 5000 Hz, thus a RF signal of 10,000 Hz could, hypothetically serve as an adequate carrier... which is all very interesting... one might notice that after these initial experiments were performed all discussion of the subject vanished, as is usually the case when the US Department of Defense begins to take an active interest in the subject.... hoverver, there is one US based "subliminal encoder" manufacturing concern on the USA that does build and sell Radio Frequency enhanced subliminal audio encoder units, meaning that an audio subliminal is encoded in music while a second channel (the same mesage stored in a chip memory which you program as you see fit) is emitted from a local antenna....
If you find that Orwellian and creepy you are not alone. However, getting RF at that low of a frequency out there in the environment poses a technical problem of constructing an antenna large enough to
resonate with the carrier frequency, even a quarter wave dipole would be freaking huge... a mere 23,000 feet per element... still you can squeeze a little bit into the environment with a small antenna... possibly enough to get the job done...

That's what seems to have happened by pure accident in the development of one of the lines of NF equipment, there was an unplanned leakage of RF into the goggle wiring that produced unexpected deep entrainement, at least accroding to them...

Thus, we may, just possibly might be able to use RF as a form of brain-sonar... send a probe signal in via RF and then watch and see how the surface level dynamics move around...

In case you were wondering about the reality of radio frequency "thought implantation", here is a link to the actual Lowery patent for this technology:

United States Patent: 5159703

That would be patent number and approval date:

5,159,703 Lowery October 27, 1992

The question remains open, does it really work ? How impactful is it if it does work as advertized ? Can this phenomenon be exploited for substantial beneficial uses ?

Thank you Dwight,

This is all fascinating stuff... but I have another question.

How safe do you think it is to just look at parts of the brain and manipulate them or entrain them or hypnotically suggest changes in them against the naturual holistic way of just allowing the unconsciuos mind to make the changes - as opposed to man made ones that may be missing vital peices of information that contribute to the over all balance of the human - as we do not have all the answers yet - wouldn't people be in danger of doing all sorts of damaging programming?

The analogy that comes to mind here is that of a body builder who is focused on only getting large pectorial (chest) muscles - so he works out and works and gets really great pecs.. but he neglects the back and those muscles elongate while the chest ones have shortened, and inturn knocks the whole spine out of whack... the spine being the centre from which all else is hinged on physically. So as with the brain, are we being arrogant in thinking we can change what really should be left to higher sources ? Or should this process be left to only the highest of educated who have extensive knowledge to be let loose with this technology?

Thanks
Nina

These are excellent questions, ones that have no easy answers. My guess is that less evolved elements in any society are the ones who most readily act to exploit new technologies in these ways... they aren't the folks who naturally think about ecology frames..

FWIW... I attended a "big training event" a few years ago, a very tech heavy affair with ludicrous excesses of production... aaaand there was an unmistakable feeling that some outside force was impinging on my mind... I could not describe it other than a deep mind sense of something happening to my consciousness that was not me, not my way of thought, bizarrely alien... now this could have been no more than a mild situational paranoia realted to the culty mood surrounding the thing, yet I could not get over how distinct and specifically unnatural the feeling was.... and then I had to spend days getting that weird energy out of my head... later when I came to know more about the Lowery technology it struck me that there was a possibility that it was being used....

Leading to this point, a skillful and ethical and well trained therapist/coach may be able to use neurofeedback correctly, in precise ways, probably as an adjunct to an array of methods, so the experience feels holistically integrated...

There is a wonderfully trashy B movie that is an underground classic about a future world where everything contains subliminal messages like OBEY... title of the movie is They Live...

Any time a cult leader or programmer engages in "thought slamming" you wind up with confused, disturbed, grossly incongruent outcomes.

Well great answer too! Thank you.

I think that deserves a cup of tea

eheheh

Any experience / feedback / views on: Awakened Mind Seminars and Workshops
?

Wow... I don't have the foggiest idea about these specific presenters, nor the technology they are using... althought it sure looks interesting... if I had the time I absolutely would attend one of these affairs to see/hear/feel if the solid real world value lives up to the promotional storyline.

For all I know this could put NLP on afterburners and shoot it past Mach 1.... perhaps if there were a training of combined methods... say a NF preparatory course followed by a straight NLP course... would be fascinating to learn which sequence would be more effective, NLP first, followed by NF, or NF first, followed by NLP, or NLP sandwich, i.e. NLP>NF>NLP.... who knows, we might find ourselves accomplishing things we never dreamed possible ?

Snagged this from their website.... rather intriguing frame, of use in the NLP context ? We report, U decide:


"Shamatha and vipashyana then are about the process of extracting the thread of awareness from state and perspective, much as one would draw out the thread of silk from its cocoon... slowly and carefully. This is accomplished in the first three stages of shamatha by learning to deeply relax the body while not falling asleep. This is accompanied with attentional training, vipashyana, by following the breath, and allowing thoughts to arise and fall without attempting to change or control them.

This may be accomplished more rapidly, and just as efficiently, using the tools of biofeedback and neurofeedback. Using heart rate variability, skin conductance, and surface emg for muscle relaxation, one can achieve a deep state of physiological relaxation in a very short time frame. Attention can be trained using neurofeedback for the gamma brain wave. We have known for some time that gamma in the 40 to 42 hz range is associated with focused attention. For example 40-42 hz increases in the frontal lobes when one focuses on balancing on a balance beam.(Unfortunately in some forms of ADD attempts to focus attention decreases blood flow to the frontal lobes and therefore decreases one's ability to maintain attentional focus.) Recently it has been found that long time Tibetan Buddhist meditators, 20,000 hours plus, can produce extremely high gamma in deep focused meditational states. The significance of this feat is still being debated but it is quite possible it is related to states of highly focused attention. "

I am here to share some good thoughts for you guys. I know this really can help. This is about choices for healing - body, mind, spirit.
Create Your Health (CYH) is designed to inspire and give you choices regarding improving your life – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Each episode will introduce you to a particular therapeutic tradition and demonstrate what a treatment within that practice is like. Check out their website http://createyourhealth.com and discover several alternative health practices and take charge of your life to be able to live pain free again - no drugs and no surgeries.

Hi Jenny

It's usually considered polite to tell the group a little about yourself and what you hope to gain from being here, before making recommendations for products.

John

Clearly we need some sort of barrier built between you and I, I'm thinking of something made of potatoes perhaps?