Tale of Self Discovery Part 5

History of Dr. Hardt's Work In Brain Wave Feedback

Part 5 - continued from part 4
[Published in Megabrain Reports, May, 1994, edited for the web]
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
The Biocybernaut Institute

At the beginning of my professional career, I recognized the importance of making this central vs. peripheral distinction. This recognition occurred for me in 1968 during a deep transpersonal experience triggered by a lengthy session of personal training in Alpha feedback. This awakening experience is described above and in my 1975 paper, "Pathways of the Mind: In the Master's Footsteps with Technology ".

"This experience was so profound that I have dedicated my entire professional life to the quest of creating the technology to most effectively transmit this experience to others, and studying this process scientifically so that it can be understood, so that it can be evaluated as to suitability of methods and the range of benefit outcomes, and so that it can be ultimately accepted by the professional scientific communities. This quest led me on a course, over the last 25 years, to first establish that individuals do have an innate ability to control their own brain waves (contrary to the "conventional thought "), and then secondly to develop and to optimize a technology and methodology with which to obtain the profound and wide ranging benefits which result from voluntary control of central nervous system activity.

Prompted by my original experience, I studied from 1968-1970, as a graduate student, conducting extensive literature reviews and searches and reading and absorbing everything available in the prior history of research on brain waves, including Hans Berger's original papers in German. Out of this study I developed a deep understanding of the natural reactivity of the brain waves (electroencephalogram or EEG) to various sensory stimulations, an area known as psychophysics. Because of my undergraduate background in physics, I recognized that competence in the design of EEG feedback equipment required, at a bare minimum, mastery of this classical literature in the psychophysics of the EEG.

Aided by this knowledge, from 1971-1973 I constructed and tested EEG feedback equipment as well as designed formal academic research trials of the Alpha/anxiety relationship, and conducted a series of single blind research studies at Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) and at the world renowned Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. In 1971 I received an NIMH pre-doctoral fellowship, which enabled me to leave Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh and move to San Francisco to study at the Langley Porter laboratory of Dr. Joe Kamiya.

These studies initiated the construction of a large multi-parameter psychophysiological data base, which has been of extraordinary value, and from which I have written numerous scientific papers. In those pioneering early years, data analysis was quite a challenge. At that time there were no computers on the West Coast which had Analysis of Covariance programs for multiple groups with repeated measures, so I undertook to write one for the Kamiya lab's DEC PDP-15 minicomputer. I verified my ANACOVA computer program by comparing its results with a hand analysis, done on an HP-35 pocket calculator. I then used the resulting ANACOVA program (yes, with the epsilon correction added) to confirm that Alpha trainees could significantly increase their Alpha scores over time. The whole process was something like selecting the seeds to grow the trees from which mill the lumber with which to build a ship with which to voyage into discovery.

In 1974 I published a report which established that successful replication of learning in brain wave training studies was dependent upon how Alpha activity was quantified and fed back to the trainee. This pioneer work was the first to recognize that the Alpha enhancement failures being published by other Alpha researchers of that era all employed a percent time feedback and measurement technique. On the other hand, the small number of successful reports of positive learning results typically used amplitude integration for scoring and feedback. In spite of the publication of this finding in the charter issue (1976) of Biofeedback and Self Regulation, many researchers attempting brain wave training today still do not see the implications of this finding, if they know of it at all.

Without utilization of amplitude integration for scores and feedback signals, the effectiveness of the training is greatly reduced, and the ability to standardize protocols with predictive outcomes becomes very doubtful and open to question. Even the ability to report meaningful data, which can be compared between different subjects, or between different days of training for the same subject, is impossible with percent time measures. Percent time measures are like a rubber ruler in that they suffer from both ceiling and floor effects and they also suffer from gauge variance. This 1976 report was the first major study to emphasize the need for highly definitive protocols and measurement techniques which were both accurate and precise in order to achieve predictable and effective results.

From 1974-1979 I wrote extensively for the scientific literature, publishing my research findings to put them on a solid scientific foundation. In addition to book chapters and specialty journals such as Biofeedback and Self-Regulation, Yoga Journal, and Nous Letter: Studies in Noetics, I published in the most respected and conservative scientific journals including Journal of Experimental Psychology, Psychophysiology, and Science.

It was in 1978 that I published a landmark study in Science (7/7/78), which linked Alpha increases with reductions of both trait anxiety and state anxiety. This study subsumed previous negative reports on this topic as special cases of low anxiety subjects, which were shown to be irrelevant to the treatment of high anxiety people.

Even more importantly, this was the first report in a world class scientific journal that personality traits were linked [possibly causally linked] with brain wave activity. I had previously published (in 1976) on the correlation of changes in the MMPI's clinical scales with changes in EEG Alpha activity at three different locations on the head. But this paper was published first in a conference Proceedings and was then abstracted in a specialty journal (Biofeedback and Self-Regulation), so that little or no attention was paid to this finding by the Psychiatric and Psychological communities.

However, when this report appeared in Science in 1978 showing both that people could learn to increase their Alpha brain waves with EEG feedback training, AND that such learned Alpha increases resulted in significant decreases in both State and Trait Anxiety, the scientific establishment was put on notice of a new paradigm for medical and psychological research. It would still be more than 11 years before Peniston and Kulkosky (1989) would publish what is considered to be their landmark study, which confirmed my 1976 and 1978 reports of personality changes following learned control of EEG activity with EEG feedback, and added the report that alcohol addiction was effectively treated (80% success rate) with EEG feedback of both Alpha and Theta activity.. Peniston and Kulkosky (1989) employed an inpatient setting for alcoholic subjects and provided 30 sessions of EEG feedback training (Alpha plus Theta).

Drug and alcohol studies have been one of the sub-themes of my research since 1966, when I was still an undergraduate in the Physics department. Then I was the statistician and computer programmer for the Campus-Wide Drug Use Survey at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. In this role I got an early and very complete look at the developing patterns of drug use in a University setting. In 1971 when I started doing formal academic research studies on Alpha feedback I always included drug use histories and daily surveys of the daily drug use of my Alpha research subjects.

In 1972 I continued this drug use and drug history research in San Francisco at UCSF with Alpha feedback volunteers drawn from San Francisco State College. At that time average daily marijuana use of low anxiety subjects was 0.1 marijuana cigarettes per day, whereas high anxiety subjects were averaging 1.1 marijuana cigarettes per day. Given that Alpha levels are depressed in high anxiety subjects, and given that published studies of the brain wave effects of marijuana show that it increases Alpha brain activity, especially in the occipital region, it may be that the high anxiety people were self-medicating to lower their anxiety. A useful follow up study would have been to determine if marijuana use declined in the high anxiety people who learned to increase their Alpha activity. However, college students were very transient, and there was never an opportunity to do follow up studies to see if success at Alpha training reduced subsequent drug usage, at least not until 1979 when I was awarded a large Federal Grant from NIMH.

In 1979 I had the opportunity to provide Alpha training to a woman who I later discovered to be a multiple-drug user and a drug dealer. I did not know that she and her husband (also a dealer) were consuming almost an ounce of cocaine per day, between the two of them. She was drinking a 5th of hard liquor to take the edge off the cocaine, and she smoked tobacco daily, and took LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and marijuana on a regular basis. She also took tranquilizers and stimulants to change her mind state whenever she wanted and in whatever direction she wished. Her personal motto was, "Excess is not enough! " I did not know she was using drugs during her training, except for tobacco, which she thoughtfully smoked only outdoors.

On the fifth day of her Alpha training she described, "falling into a pool of Alpha, " which forever changed her life. Although she had no intention of reducing or stopping her drug use when she started Alpha training, and in spite of the fact that she liked her drug use lifestyle and thought her life "was working well, " her drug use began to fall away. Within 6 weeks of the end of her Alpha training, she was not using any drugs. Even the tobacco smoking had stopped. And now she found that she could no longer live with her husband, who had not done the Alpha training, and who continued to use drugs and to deal drugs.

I had the opportunity to follow up with this woman for the next 9 years and she continued her drug abstinence to the extent of usually avoiding even caffeine beverages. During the time I was directing the NIMH Federal Grant (1979-1982) all of the subjects completed extensive drug use histories as well as daily drug use logs over their 3 days of introductory baselines and 20 days of brain wave feedback training. Subjects also had 6 month and 12 month follow up sessions all of which included drug use reports, so this drug use data could be analyzed to relate changes in patterns of drug use to learned changes in the brain waves. The funding for this Federal Grant was eliminated by President Ronald Reagan's first budget, so this data was never analyzed, but I did carefully collect and archive it.

When my laboratory moved off the UCSF campus in 1983 and relocated to the San Jose campus of the Agnews State Hospital, I began training people specifically to treat drug addiction, sometimes working with several members of the same family simultaneously. Word of this success spread locally so that a local judge gave alcohol offenders the option of jail or my Alpha training program.

One of the most interesting success stories in a court referral shows the extremely broad range of chemically dependent people treatable with EEG feedback. This man was an alcohol and cocaine user. He was a farm hand adopted into a wealthy family and was unschooled and averse to learning. Referred by a court, he showed up for the first day's training in the company of his step brother with both of them late, drunk, and hungry, so they excused themselves to go out and eat [and drink more alcohol]. However, the next morning he had sobered up enough to begin the training, though his drug abusing step brother did not join him.

He did not understand any of the transpersonal themes typically discussed in the training, but he did know what he liked. He liked fixing farm equipment down in the shed, and he began to describe his moments of highest Alpha like the visualizations of a born mechanic. His Alpha scores went higher each day, and he became calmer and more patient and more sober. Several months later he called to express a surprisingly complex mixture of deep sadness and deep gratitude on the occasion of his step brother's death in a drug-related auto accident. He wished that his step brother had done the training, and he was so grateful that he had done it. Two years later he was still clean and sober.

However successful these various drug treatment studies were, I saw them as only one of the many applications of the technology I was developing. Other significant adventures of discovery, included two trips to India to study brain waves and other physiological functions on Yogis of many different traditions, some of whom could profoundly alter cardiac functions, walk on hot coals, and even eat broken glass and razor blades. Some had been meditating for over 50 years and combined a beatific radiance with the ability to sustain monotonic increases in their Alpha activity for over an hour during meditation.

The 1978 Science paper on the inverse correlation between Alpha and anxiety supported the award of the Federal Grant in 1979. However this NIMH Grant also had another primary theme: Aging. In fact the tile of the Grant was Anxiety & Aging: Intervention with EEG Alpha Feedback. Prior research had shown (Gurin, Veroff, & Feld, 1960), that anxiety increases with age, in both men and women, and anxiety goes up faster in women. In addition, at every age, anxiety is higher in women than in men.

So I undertook to study Alpha EEG training in the people most at risk for anxiety: women over 60. In preparing this research grant, I discovered Alpha activity declines as atherosclerosis advances. Abundant Alpha in the elderly was a marker for cardiovascular health. Many of the age-related losses of mental and physical function had accompanying brain wave changes which could be explained by reduced blood flow to the brain. Clogging of arteries and reduced elasticity of the blood vessels were both implicated. I also recognized the possibility of a connection between learned Alpha increases and increased blood flow to the brain. It had already been shown, by others, that hand temperature feedback succeeded in warming the hands through the mechanism of learned dilation of the peripheral blood vessels, and I speculated that people might be learning cerebrovascular dilation as part of the underlying mechanism of increasing their Alpha brain waves.

I began to formulate the hypothesis, and to collect evidence, that part of the mechanism of learning increases in Alpha activity could be a learned dilation of cortical blood vessels, resulting in increased blood supply to the brain. Neuroscience recognizes that the brain works better when it is adequately supplied with blood, and thus glucose and oxygen. I recognized that the current population demographics mandated that any effective geriatric applications of Alpha feedback training would eventually assume increasing importance and value.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Charles Yeager, set up EEG labs in the California State Hospital system in the 1950s, and he visited these labs annually and did EEGs on the elderly residents of the State Hospitals. He commented to me that even if someone was 100 years old, if that person had good strong Alpha waves in his or her EEG record, that he knew that person would still be around next year when he came to visit. On the other hand, if the elderly person had shifted into a non Alpha record characterized by Theta and Beta activity, he would say a special good bye because he knew it was unlikely that person would be still be alive when he visited again next year. I was learning that brain waves relate to everything, and that control of brain waves had life and death implications, as well as implications for the quality of life. Any experience you can have has a specific underlying brain activity associated with it. If you can control your brain activity, then you can control your life and your experiences in life.

Training of Trainers. My NIMH grant on Anxiety and Aging ran from 1979 to 1982. This grant was run as a double blind study. Because I had formulated all the hypotheses, I could not, under the double blind protocol, conduct any of the trainings myself. This required that I recruit and train other people to serve as the Trainers. This first training of Trainers was the beginning of learning how to transmit to others the skills, abilities, and the transformational perspective required of Trainers. This transmission of Trainership abilities should now be formalized and institutionalized through the establishment of a Training Institute to create and maintain the skilled groups of Trainers who will be needed in each of the many applications of the Biocybernaut Process. Even more important than the recruitment and training of Trainers, is the identification, recruitment, and training of those exceptional individuals who will become Trainers of Trainers.

From 1982 to 1983 I took a leave of absence from UCSF for the specific purpose of developing patentable technology for both a portable EEG feedback unit and for a multi-user Training-Center version of the EEG feedback technology. In 1983 I founded the Biocybernaut Institute, Inc., a for profit California Corporation to serve as the corporate arm of my Research and Development and Training programs. The Biocybernaut Institute undertook the creation of my new EEG feedback technology, both hardware and software.

In the Fall of 1983 I was awarded the first in a series of large annual grants from the John E. Fetzer Foundation, and with this award, I went back on staff at Langley Porter, the Department of Psychiatry of the UCSF Medical Center, and I moved into a new laboratory on the campus of Agnews State Hospital. I returned to the University staff only after issuing a waiver to the UCSF patent policy declaring my intention to continue to develop patentable EEG feedback technology. Thus I was not required to sign the UCSF patent policy, but was limited to a maximum of 50% time at the University.

My time at the University was dedicated to conducting EEG feedback trainings with an ever widening client base to explore the range of applications effectively served by EEG feedback training. The balance of my time was devoted to work on technology R&D at the Biocybernaut Institute, where I developed microprocessor-based EEG feedback instruments, including 2 and 4 channel portable units, and 8 channel laboratory training systems for single users and multiple simultaneous users.

In late 1983 I provided several weeks of EEG feedback training to officers from Army Intelligence who were given the task of exploring new technologies to increase military performance and effectiveness. This training laid the basis for later work with peak performance training for Army Special Forces (Green Berets). When the work with U.S. Army Intelligence expanded, it became part of a larger project and involved Alpha training for two 12-man teams of Green Berets at a secret Army base.

As part of a larger peak performance research project, one of the Biocybernaut Institute's multi-user laboratory systems was installed at this army base. I had designed this Multi-User Lab System which as then built by the Biocybernaut Institute and was configured to train 6 people simultaneously. Consequently, I was able to demonstrate in a real application what I had predicted and designed for during my leave of absence from UCSF, namely that significant economies of scale were possible in EEG feedback training. This was my first opportunity to test the multi-user system concept in a long term study.

The advent of IBM's AT class computers created the opportunity to upgrade the hardware platform of my brain wave feedback instruments. I undertook the redesign of all of the special purpose computer boards for the feedback function. The AT also proved a suitable hardware platform for large EEG data analysis programs I had begun in 1981.

The largest such program was BIOCAL, a software post-training filter to the EEG data. BIOCAL incorporated pre- and post-training calibrations to produce adjusted scores of higher accuracy than the hardware could produce on its own. BIOCAL compensated for amplifier drift over time and for nonlinearities of gain across different amplitude ranges, and it automated the process of identifying and rejecting artifacts in the EEG data, through complex, heuristically developed algorithms involving simultaneous comparisons of many EEG channels and different filter bands.

Using the highly purified data from BIOCAL, I was at last able map the dynamic brain patterns of specific experiences in what I called the "Cartography of Consciousness ". The creation of these "Mercator Projections of Mind States " required the purest possible brain wave data for comparison with subjective measures of mind states. The ability to successfully relate brain states to mind states and to performance opens up new possibilities in implementing useful applications of EEG feedback.

Other software development projects I undertook about this time were upgrades of the MOOD SCALE programs to administer and score the three mood scales used every day in the brain wave training, and originally written as three individual programs mood scale programs in 1978 for the Astral Computer, a 6800-based machine. These now needed to be combined and upgraded for daily use.

I had discovered in the Green Beret study that my skills in memorizing every response made by a trainee to the hundreds of adjectives in the mood scale test batteries were overwhelmed by having 4 to 6 trainees simultaneously. The three individual mood scale programs were combined to automate and computerize both the administration and the scoring of the mood scales. In this way I only had to remember a few calculated dimensional scores for each trainee instead of hundreds of individual responses. Also, by computerizing the administration of the mood scales, it became possible to time each person's response to each item very accurately, in hundredths of a second. This data would prove extremely valuable in later developments.

One of those developments was a significant change in the computer programs administering and scoring the mood scales and a related significant change in the way the results of the mood scales were presented to the trainees. Response latency timing information on a trainee's responses to each of the mood scale items was already being collected with a precision of one hundredth of a second. To this software capability I added the calculation of descriptive statistics for each of the different responses. Suddenly it became possible for the trainee and the Trainer to know subtle details the trainee's response patterns. To this was added statistical significance testing on the responses. I soon recognized that some of these statistical patterns were pointers to an alternate part of the mind which was filled with unacknowledged (and thus buried) anger or fear or guilt or sadness or whatever else.

Equipped with these new tools I was able to function as though I were telepathic or psychic, but with the added advantage that my insights were supported by measured data derived scientifically from the trainees' own responses. Once the buried emotional blockages of a trainee had been identified by the new computerized mood scales, they often came very quickly to consciousness. And once the emotional blockage had come to consciousness, it then quickly became possible for the trainee to work through the "charge " or valence on the emotion in the next day's Alpha training.

Bringing to mind some highly charged emotional topic in the Alpha training would, at first, block or suppress the Alpha, and the feedback tones would shut off and the scores would drop. But then the challenge for the trainees would be to discover new ways of relating to their own experiences of that emotion and the events behind it. This is one of the key growth experiences of the Biocybernaut Process, and the trainees would grow through their fear or anger or guilt or sadness much faster than believed possible.

What does it mean to grow through an emotion like anger? We all know suppressing anger does not work. That leads to heart attacks, ulcers, unhappiness, and occasional violent outbursts of anger. On the other hand "expressing " anger does not work very well either. If someone practices expressing anger, then they usually develop the habit of expressing anger, they become too good at it, and it become a form of public littering. What is needed is to get to the source of the experience of anger in the mind and to learn how to adopt a new point of view about that experience.

In the Biocybernaut Process, trainees have daily assessment of their emotions by computerized mood scales together with in depth interviews by highly skilled trainers to help them become aware of hidden, buried, and latent emotions. Once the awareness of these emotions has been raised to the level of conscious self awareness, then the trainee can begin to use the brain wave training process to gain control of his or her emotional processes.

By exploring their emotions during brain wave feedback training, people learn how their emotions develop and change. In the process people learn how to take the perspective of an outside observer in looking at their own emotions. This gives them objectivity about their subjective experience, which is the key to understanding and controlling all aspects of subjective experience, including emotions. Thus the person is no longer subject to his or her emotions, but rather develops mastery over them. Again the brain waves are the key to any experience. If you can control your brain waves, then you can control your experiences, including your emotional experiences.

Development of Patents. In the more than 15 years since my early reports which defined and demarcated key issues in the field, I have been able to conceive and implement a highly optimized methodology and technology for rapidly producing learned control of brain waves. As a result of my discoveries and conceptualizations, I have been able to write broadly based U.S. and International patents, which now have been granted and provide protection on both the training methodologies and the feedback technologies. This technology and methodology is in a standardized form that can be readily replicated in a manner which produces consistent and predictable beneficial results.

Since it is somewhat unusual to be granted patent protection on both a technology and the methods of applying that technology, it would be useful and informative to consider what is unique about the Biocybernaut Process, and how it evolved. Early on I realized that there were three essential components of an optimal EEG feedback training: [1] An ergonomic technology, which includes the training environment, [2] An optimized training procedure or protocol, and [3] A transformational perspective on the part of the Trainer. Let us consider these one at a time.

An ergonomic technology. To be most effective, any bio-feedback must be (1) Accurate, (2) Immediate, and (3) Aesthetic or Comfortable. In addition, the physical environment and the feedback itself must be designed with a deep understanding of the "natural reactivity " of the Alpha [or other EEG activity]. For example, Alpha is reduced or eliminated by light or any visual processing, so those early feedback devices which caused a light to get brighter in response to increased Alpha were very badly designed. They were not ergonomically designed. Even devices which required a trainee to look at a swinging meter were non-ergonomic.

Optimizing the amount of Alpha produced requires eyes closed training or at the very least minimizing the Block's law equivalent of the stimulus and minimizing the information content of the stimulus. Block's law, from psychophysics, states that the Alpha blocking power of a stimulus is proportional to the product of its luminance and the visual solid angle it subtends. Very few designers of feedback equipment are familiar with such considerations, resulting in mostly non-ergonomic EEG feedback equipment. Auditory tones are a more ergonomic feedback stimuli for Alpha training than are lights or visual displays. Many subtleties apply, including the loudness and the pitch of the tones. All these optimizing features of the technology are carefully described in my patent claims.

The quality of the brain wave filters is also very important. The filters separate the different frequencies of brain waves [Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and sub-bands within these]. If the filters are not sharp enough, or do not have enough decibels of attenuation in the stop band region(s), then they will not exclude other kinds of brain waves from the one kind the filter is allegedly tuned for. If you are doing Theta feedback, and the Theta filter allows in some Alpha energy on one side and some Delta energy on the other side, the trainee is being deceived by the technology and learning is slowed or even prevented.

Feedback must be accurate in order to be effective, and if 60% of the feedback is false feedback due to a deficient filter (which allows in other kinds of brain waves), then the feedback is not accurate. This finding also casts doubt on the validity of any EEG scores derived from such inaccurate filters, and the typically smaller Theta EEG scores are more vulnerable to this contamination than the larger Alpha scores. It could also raise questions about any data analysis performed on such scores and about any conclusions reached based on such data analyses. The contamination could be larger than the "real " Theta signal present under reasonable assumptions of the true Alpha and Theta amplitudes. It is impossible to do good science or good EEG training or to replicate results with such inaccurate technology.

The physical environment is also an important consideration. In the Kamiya lab, I used to see my trainees' Alpha diminish when a water was used three floors below, because the sound traveled up the water pipes. Sound, light, temperature, humidity, ionization, fragrances, all must be carefully understood in their effects on the brain activity one is trying to control. For example, the smell of musk has been shown to reduce Alpha, whereas the smell of lavender has been shown to increase Alpha. First one must do the homework to understand the natural reactivity (the ergonomics) of the EEG signal one wishes to train, and then the technology and the physical environment must be designed with this knowledge carefully in mind.

My System and Method patent has 37 separate claims,- too many to describe here. However, one of those claims is so general and so useful that it should be mentioned here. I have patented the idea and the practice of using multiple simultaneous channels of EEG feedback. I was the first person to do multiple channel EEG feedback, and I was able to show the patent examiner that there are significant advantages of multiple simultaneous channels of EEG feedback.. Included among these advantages are the prevention of localization of control, which can occur within a few hours of EEG feedback training. As the field of brain wave feedback grows, this idea of multiple simultaneous channels of EEG feedback may prove to be among the most useful teachings of this patent.

An optimized training procedure or protocol. Back in the 1970s when most published Alpha studies were reporting "No learning of Alpha control ", it was standard practice to provide very little feedback training time. I was learning that consecutive days of training were better than three times a month or even three days per week. I found that the more training time was provided, the greater was the percentage of people learning to increase their Alpha above an initial baseline level. How much is enough? One of my typical 7 day protocols allows people to accumulate between 12 and 20 hours of actual feedback time during their first 7 consecutive day training. For most people, this is sufficient. I have found this amount of training to be adequate for treating many types of chemical dependency. However, some strong addictions, like nicotine, often require a second 7 day training in order for withdrawal to be effective and lasting.

The basic principle here, which is included in my System and Method patent, is that massed practice is better than distributed practice, and hours of training time is more effective than minutes of training time. This may soon seem obvious to people in the field, but very recently people scoffed in disbelief when I explained that one of the reasons they could not obtain EEG learning was their use of too little training time, and too many (or too long) interruptions of that training. And that was the point of the patent: to teach the practitioners of the current art how to improve their practice, by following the recommendations of the patent.

A transformational perspective on the part of the Trainer. When I came out of my own break-through experience in Alpha feedback, there was a crowd of people eager to hear about my experiences (all of the Kamiya lab crew who rushed back from the restaurant to rescue the forgotten trainee). Some of them had been to India and all of them understood something about meditation and were supportive of my report about my elevated states of consciousness. Their comments and questions helped to validate and contextualize my highly unusual experiences.

Validation and contextualization are very important, and are part of the transformational perspective of the Trainer. If these people had been hostile, skeptical, or fearful, then my life may have had a different direction. It would have been possible to take a critical and culturally limited view of these experiences and to label them with the language used to describe psychiatric disorders. If the Kamiya laboratory staff had wanted to be critical of my experiences, they could have suggested I was delusional for reporting out-of-body experiences [taking a perspective from outside of myself] or that I was risking psychosis by having an ego disintegration. Such adverse interpretations of my experiences would have been culturally sanctioned, and might have stunted my growth into this new field by creating fear of new awareness states, and I might have remained a physicist.

Therefore, the end of each training session in the Biocybernaut Process, a skilled Trainer conducts an in depth interview with the trainees. Each trainee is asked to describe his or her subjective experiences. Then the Trainer asks wise questions to clarify key points and to elevate significant aspects of that trainee's experience into prominence, so that all elements of the trainee's mind, including the rational mind, can begin to accept and integrate the insights born in deep reflection.

Later the Trainer reviews the objective results of EEG scores and mood scale scores with each trainee, and together the Trainer and all trainees look through the polygraph record of the entire session, which may be hundreds of polygraph pages. This enables the minds of the trainees to correlate their new insights and altered states of consciousness with the actual graphical images of the brain waves which enabled those breakthroughs in consciousness. Inner and outer experience are united. Subjective and objective experiences are fused into a coherent whole.

If the Trainer can look at the trainee and see endless possibilities of growth and transformation, then that Trainer has a transformational perspective. And if the Trainer has the compassion and intuition and love and understanding of both Virgil and Beatrice, who guided Dante's explorations, then that Trainer has a transformational perspective. This deep metaphysical comparison is not whimsical, but eminently practical.

Why practical? The mystical experience and the Alpha feedback experience share basic dimensions. For example Dr. Arthur Deikman surveyed the mystical literature and identified Five Hallmarks of the mystical experience: (1) Intense Realness, (2) Unusual Sensations, (3) The Experience of Unity or Oneness with all things, (4) Trans-Sensate Phenomena, which come to the person from beyond the realm of the senses, and (5) Ineffability, or the difficulty or impossibility of describing the experience in words (Deikman, 1966). Some or all of these phenomena attend the profound Alpha and Theta EEG feedback training experiences. If the Trainer has personal experience with both culturally ordinary and mystical realms, then that Trainer can exemplify wisdom, self-understanding, self-honesty, and love for the trainee.

This is practical because it is most effective in aiding the growth of the trainee. Exemplification teaches and guides far better than mere words or technical knowledge. If EEG feedback trainees begin to grow in their abilities of insight and perception and they see that the Trainer is insecure, opinionated, doctrinaire, or is struggling to suppress latent anger or fear, the trainee may be afraid to grow in the presence of such a Trainer, and will almost certainly not confide in such a Trainer about the details of his or her experience. Such a limited Trainer will thus never be told about the ecstatic experiences of the trainee, but even worse, such a Trainer may actually tarnish or even inhibit such experiences.

The brain wave feedback process can produce experiences so profound and so outside the competence of most educated people in the West, that great care must be taken to screen, select, and train Trainers for this new field. My training process for Trainers, which has been evolving over 15 years, requires two full months of training to learn the basics of this profound process, and only about half of the candidates I have been asked to train have achieved the necessary transformational perspective of a Trainer.

Yes any nurse, or psychiatrist, or teacher can buy an EEG feedback machine and start training volunteers. But there may be some unexpected, even disagreeable, surprises in store for the Trainer and the trainees, and surely valuable opportunities will be missed. Optimizing the training process and the results seldom occurs by chance. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel or to make the early learning mistakes alone and unaided.

The central purpose in my life's work has been and is to create technologies and methodologies for the increase of awareness and for the attainment of mastery in all those human endeavors which require expanded awareness and improved skills and abilities. I am keenly interested in assisting people who wish to develop their talents and gifts and in discovering, refining, and transmitting the knowledge of how best to do this. The Brain Activity Mapping And Training techniques [BAMATs], described in the last section of this paper, provide some ideas about the vast range of applications which can benefit from optimized brain wave feedback training.

Two of the themes which I have found most intriguing over the years have been (1) The relationship between meditation on one hand and Alpha and other types of EEG feedback training on the other hand, and (2) How EEG feedback training could be used to accelerate and enhance the development of gifts of the mind. Creativity is one familiar and useful type of mental giftedness, and I was very interested to study the relationship between Alpha feedback training and increases in creativity among a group of scientists. Before describing the details of studies done on these two topics, it could be useful to share with you the results of a thoughtful comparison between mediation and EEG feedback embedded in the procedural context I have developed and refined over 25 years, the Biocybernaut Process.

Self discovery continues - Part 6