Tale of Self Discovery Part 4

Current Context of Neurofeedback

Part 4 - continued from part 3
[Published in Megabrain Reports, May, 1994, edited for the web]
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
The Biocybernaut Institute

An ever increasing body of evidence is defining and substantiating the knowledge that the brain has the power to regulate all bodily functions. In addition, brain activity is increasingly being implicated as a significant, even a controlling, factor in both wellness functions and in the onset and progression of illnesses, including addictive behaviors.

In recent years, an explosion of knowledge in the neurosciences has uncovered dozens of chemical messengers that the brain uses for its far ranging influence in the body and communication between cells. Among these potent compounds are stress hormones and fast acting neurotransmitters that vary in magnitude, time of action, and kind of action depending, in part, on a person's moods, attitudes, and learned ways of reacting to one's perceptions of various situations. How one thinks about an experience and how one defines it to oneself effects cell receptors for the neurochemicals.

However, medicine's archaic bio-mechanical/disease model gives only limited recognition to the mind's influences on the bodily processes we call wellness or disease. The old disease model includes mainly genetic and external factors in the Illness/Etiology equation. As a consequence, much of medicine has not considered relevant the manner in which a person reacts to life's experiences. Up until now, the person's reactions to life's events and the person's brain activity has not been considered relevant in the diagnosis and treatment of most illnesses.

The "bio-mechanical/disease " model of medicine is now no longer considered valid for up to 80 percent of all illness and with most addictive behavior. It was founded on the incomplete assumption that mind and body are separate and the incorrect view that there are no mechanisms by which attitudes and moods could physically affect organs and tissue.

Consequently, much of the arsenal of current medical treatments are not optimally effective, resulting in billions of dollars being wasted annually, directly and indirectly, on unsuccessful treatments, which are the logical consequences of the incomplete medical model. Most treatment of disease has been directed overwhelmingly towards giving symptomatic relief. Treatment has been palliative, meaning that it is directed toward suppressing or eliminating the symptoms of disease, and very little has been done to cure and remove the basic causes.

Another source of misdirected treatment comes from the urgent need to contain health care costs. In attempting to solve Medicine's current economic crisis, current efforts are directed primarily at reducing costs, rather than producing effective outcomes. Soon people will realize that producing effective outcomes is the best way to reduce costs in both the short and the long term. There are vast monetary implications here because of the many billions of dollars currently misdirected in the health care system. Whoever can best implement the new knowledge of the brain's central role in disease and wellness will make huge profits while simultaneously lowering the total amount of money spent on health care in our society and will also provide more effective outcomes for people seeking health care. When people's medical needs are met early and effectively treated it, the progression to debilitating chronic conditions can often be avoided, at huge savings in costs and in quality of life.

Disease is not so much the effect of external forces as it is the faulty efforts (reactions) of a person's mind and body to deal with them. Microbes already reside in our bodies. We are born with our genetic strengths and weaknesses. When our responses to apparent problems in life are excessive or deficient, the central nervous system and hormones act on our immune defenses in such a way that "germs " and genetic weaknesses aid and abet disease rather than cause it. These disorders are the result of normal natural processes of the body going awry by too much or too little stimulation as a result of an autonomic nervous system stress reaction.

Antiquated medical practice draws the incomplete conclusion that the brain's and the body's autonomic responses are autonomous, ie. that they are not available to our conscious control and direction. Consequently, the powerful and ultimately determinant role played by cortical activity is largely ignored. And more importantly, "standard " medical practice does not, and can not, account for the role of intention, of will, and of awareness in the control and regulation of the autonomic systems of the brain and body.

Thus, under the old bio-mechanical/disease model, stress and the resultant illnesses and addictive behaviors are either simply unavoidable consequences of life or attempts are made to deal with this situation symptomatically by prescribing tranquilizers and the like for the amelioration of stress. Psychologists typically attempt to treat the stress problem through the teaching of coping mechanisms, which is likewise symptomatic because it attempts to reduce the effects of stress without eliminating the stress reaction right from the start.

Both approaches are premised upon the incomplete idea that the stress responses of the autonomic nervous system, ie. its sympathetic and parasympathetic responses are unavoidable, because of a false belief that we innately do not have the ability to control the brain activity that affects those responses. Whereas the truth is that we DO INNATELY HAVE THE ABILITIES TO CONTROL BRAIN ACTIVITY, but that we are taught, through cultural conditioning, not to use them.

Dr. Willis Harmon has described the cultural conditioning we give our children (the process of acculturation) as meeting the classical definition of hypnosis, so perhaps most of us are hypnotized in our early years into accepting a rigid and limited view of our own mental abilities. Exceptional and gifted people have simply learned how to adopt additional viewpoints, new mind perspectives, which require only that they can control their brain activity in new ways.

Any experience you have requires specific underlying brain activity. Choosing and controlling what you will experience is as easy as choosing and controlling your brain activity. Most people can control their brain activity sufficiently to go to sleep and to wake up as needed. Those who have exceptional mental abilities simply have additional subtleties of brain self-regulation available to them.

Learning to understand and control the subtleties of one's own brain function opens up vast new areas of skills, abilities, and experiential fulfillment. It is simply learning to operate one's bio-computer more effectively, and the rewards are beyond your current ability to imagine, just as a 2 dimensional person could not imagine life in a 3 dimensional world. You first need to make the shift into a new mind perspective, a new point of view, to understand the implications of having that new point of view.

And then there are additional benefits of having multiple perspectives. For example depth perception requires at least two eyes, spaced some distance apart. With three perspectives, it is possible to triangulate and find the location of a signal source anywhere in three dimensions. As we will see later in this paper, creative people have the natural ability to adopt a different [high Alpha] brain state when they are working on a problem. This ability to step into a different brain state, gives them a new mind state, and one that is ideal for being creative. Thus they are completely interconnected. Without this ability to change the brain activity, the person is non-creative. The ability for voluntary control of our brain activity is one key. The other key is experiencing the subtleties and knowing what brain changes to make for any situation.

Some people have been using meditation to control their own brain activity. Substantial evidence now exists about meditation's beneficial effects on the brain wave components of the stress reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Consider for example, Dr. Dean Ornish's report on successfully reversing coronary artery disease through a program emphasizing meditation, mild exercise, and dietary changes. For the first time someone has shown that the internal blockage of arteries can be reduced, and Dr. Ornish suggests that the meditation component may play the most important role.

Another means that some people are beginning to use to gain control their own brain activity is brain wave feedback training, which is at the core of the Biocybernaut Process. Brain wave feedback is a recently developed technology for learning control of the activity of one's own brain waves. Moreover, brain wave feedback has recently been shown by Hardt (1993) to be faster and more effective than meditation in producing beneficial learned changes in the brain waves.

Another important consideration is that brain wave feedback is effective without the quasi-religious overtone or Eastern cultural overlays often associated with meditation training. Thus brain wave feedback has both the benefits of being faster than meditation and of being more nearly culturally neutral, so that it is free of the cultural resistance many people have to meditation.

There are many benefits to having a clear, clean mind, and it is not necessary to spend your whole life to find the keys to a few subtleties of shifting your brain waves. Meditation is a slow process requiring patience, persistence, and lots of time. Brain wave feedback training can provide virtually the same insights and much faster access to those insights and to the underlying control of one's brain activity. (See the following discussion of the Biocybernaut Process compared to meditation and the research study published by Hardt in 1993 in the Proceedings of the Association of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 24th Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, March 25-30, 1993: "Alpha EEG Feedback: Closer Parallel with Zen than Yoga ").

Self discovery continues - Part 5