I want to make an obvious distinction between what I call ‘do-it-to-you’ inducement technologies that include any delivery of rhythmic sensory stimulation (sound or light) and drugs and the natural learning technologies that include meditation and neurofeedback. With alpha feedback training, you are 100% in the driver’s seat, where your brain learns new patterns through accurate, immediate, and aesthetic feedback.
Any rhythmic sensory stimulation, like lights that flash in your eyes or stereo sounds from CDs that are created out of various sound frequencies, is a ‘do-it-to-you’ technology. Devices that feed electrical frequencies into your brain to change or control the type of brain wave pattern you are experiencing are examples of ‘do-it to-you’ technologies.
These inducement technologies are a form of external control, and you cannot truly know all of what they are doing because there is no measurement or feedback. The yogi Vivekananda was very stern in warning people against external control. In his 1935 book entitled Raja Yoga, he said that a race should remain wicked than to be made artificially good through the morbid imposition of external control.
With brain wave neurofeedback training protocols, you are simply receiving feedback on your own brain’s alpha waves, and you are invited and encouraged to learn to control them. There is nothing in the feedback that controls you or constrains your brain waves. The feedback is pure information that your brain learns from, according to your own intentions.
To a certain degree, some people are naturals at producing alpha, but most people have to learn how, and it’s not something you can describe in words, even volumes of words. Alpha isn’t what you think. Alpha isn’t what you say. If it could be easily and quickly taught with words in a book or by some meditation or visualization
the technique, I wouldn’t have spent my adult life and over nine million dollars to develop the patented and proprietary technology I now use—amplifiers, filters, synthesizers, sound systems, and three computers to run each feedback chamber!
The brain is so complex and generates so much information that any meaningful brain-machine interface will be complex. For this reason, it will take even the most eager and attentive trainee quite a while to learn how to use this brain-machine interface effectively. There is a tremendous amount of information that comes out of the brain, and it needs to be processed accurately, wisely, and very rapidly and fed back to your awareness so that you can literally be experiencing the workings of your brain at the moment that your brain did whatever it just did. There is also a large potential for artifacts that come from movements and muscle tension.
EEG:
These artifacts can confuse and mislead the neurofeedback trainee if the technology technicians are not writing out the raw EEG activity on polygraphs
or some graphic media and doing real-time quality control. The technicians need to spot artifacts in the EEG record and then call into the soundproof and totally dark
feedback chambers to alert the trainee(s) that they are making artifacts. With this expert technical coaching, the trainees (clients) can stop moving or tensing their jaws, or whatever else is causing the artifacts, muscle activity, as in movements and tension (artifacts) are typically 1,000 times larger than real EEG signals. Muscles produce millivolts, and the brain waves are in microvolts.
This means any muscle activity can be misinterpreted as brain wave activity and can artificially inflate the brain waves’ scores. Quality control during the feedback process is essential to the clients receiving accurate feedback from the technology. When skilled Biocybernaut technicians operate the technology, the clients (trainees) are provided with amazing information about their own brain activity that directly underlies their conscious processes.
When you are privileged to have access to that position as the observer of the workings of your own brain, then you can bring consciousness there to that point where your consciousness comes into your being, your brain. You can begin to know your own mind, and you can begin to guide and steer your experiences in dimensions that you can’t even talk about.
Alpha training at Biocybernaut creates a closed feedback loop from the standpoint that you get accurate, scientifically based feedback. With other techniques that I have explored, like meditation, the only feedback is subjective, and even that feedback does not come at the beginning of meditative practice. Feedback is most important in the beginning stages of learning, where most of what the student tries is wrong.
In meditation, it is only after years of practice that you begin to get subjective feedback about how well you are doing. Alpha training is the most objective method
of training the brain to create a higher alpha state or any other desirable brain state. In the feedback chamber, you receive only the objective feedback of sound directly related to your own brain waves’ strength and frequency. And periodically, the sound stops so you can open your eyes and look at numerical scores that quantify your progress.
Brain wave neurofeedback opens up new worlds inside the mind and takes you to levels of experience with no way of being described in English. Sanskrit is an ancient
language described as having been designed by beings higher than humans to help humans express the subtleties and nuances of higher consciousness. Sanskrit
has words to describe some of the processes a person may go through during neurofeedback training, but even Sanskrit cannot describe the higher states of awareness. One of the mystical experience hallmarks is that it is inherently ineffable or unable to be described in words. In other words, you’ll know it when you experience it – but won’t be able to describe it in its entirety.
