Eeg Quotes

Libet’s EEG experiments suggest that we might not have free will. If the results of the experiment are to be believed, then what is the point? What is the fun if everything is determined? Wouldn’t Almighty get bored with us? We are more than our thoughts. And we are certainly way more than our actions. But how and why?

Your scientists have done studies with people connected to an EEG brain-scanning device while watching TV; they registered activity in the delta wave frequencies, essentially occupying a highly programmable sleep state while viewing TV.

moribund patients, conducting autopsies on them all and EEGs on some.

EEG measurements in newborns show a difference between the response to touch and the response to the pain of a heel prick only as of thirty-five to thirty-seven weeks.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.

folded across his chest, Klein was sitting on the edge of his desk. “Well, the EEG would have proved that she had it,” he said, “but the lack of dysrhythmia doesn’t prove to me conclusively that she doesn’t. It might be hysteria, but the pattern before and after her convulsion was much too striking.” Chris furrowed her brow. “You know, you keep on saying that, Doc—‘convulsion.

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys." 
Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system. 
Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.

There is some evidence that dreaming is necessary. When people or other mammals are deprived of REM sleep (by awakening them as soon as the characteristic REM and EEG dream patterns emerge), the number of initiations of the dream state per night goes up, and, in severe cases, daytime hallucinations-that is, waking dreams-occur.

The EEG provided a record of rhythmic fluctuations in potential voltage over various parts of the head. Berger at first thought there was only one wave from the whole brain, but it soon became clear that the waves differed, depending on where the electrodes were put. Modern EEGs use as many as thirty-two separate channels, all over the head.

There are numerous brain rhythms, from approximately 0.02 to 600 cycles per second (Hz), covering more than four order of temporal magnitude. Many of these discrete brain rhythms have been known for decades, but it was only recently recognized that these oscillation bands form a geometric progression on a linear frequency scale or a linear progression on a natural logarithmic scale. leading to a natural separation of at least ten frequency bands. The neighbouring bands have a roughly constant ratio of e = 2,718 - the base for the natural logarithm. Because of this non-integer relationship among the various brain rhythms, the different frequencies can never perfectly entrain each other. Instead, the interference they produce gives rise to metastability, a perpetual fluctuation between unstable and transiently stable states, like waves in the ocean. The constantly interfering network rhythms can never settle to a stable attractor, using the parlance of nonlinear dynamics. This explains the ever-changing landscape of the EEG.

This blending of sleep and awake states can actually be detected with an electroencephalography (EEG). On EEG tracing, these periods show both the alpha waves of being awake and relaxed and the theta waves of the sleep state. This is the only time we know of when alpha and theta waves overlap. So, focused awareness during the dusk and dawn of your sleep could hold the key that unlocks the creative potential of your subconscious.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

Everyone has had the experience of suddenly feeling intense physiological and psychological shifts internally at trading glances with another person; such shifts can be exquisitely pleasurable or unpleasant. How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. The effects of maternal moods on the electrical circuitry of the infant’s brain were demonstrated by a study at the University of Washington, Seattle. Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant-mother exchanges did not occur — despite the mothers’ best efforts. Significantly, these effects were noted only in the frontal areas of the brain, where the centers for the self-regulation of emotion are located. In addition to EEG changes, infants of depressed mothers exhibit decreased activity levels, gaze aversion, less positive emotion and greater irritability. Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.

Diallo, a West African immigrant in New York, matched a description of a rapist. Four white officers questioned him, and when the unarmed Diallo started to pull out his wallet, they decided it was a gun and fired forty-one shots. The underlying neurobiology concerns “event-related potentials” (ERPs), which are stimulus-induced changes in electrical activity of the brain (as assessed by EEG—electroencephalography). Threatening faces produce a distinctive change (called the P200 component) in the ERP waveform in under two hundred milliseconds. Among white subjects, viewing someone black evokes a stronger P200 waveform than viewing someone white, regardless of whether the person is armed. Then, a few milliseconds later, a second, inhibitory waveform (the N200 component) appears, originating from the frontal cortex—“Let’s think a sec about what we’re seeing before we shoot.” Viewing a black individual evokes less of an N200 waveform than does seeing someone white. The greater the P200/N200 ratio (i.e., the greater the ratio of I’m-feeling-threatened to Hold-on-a-sec), the greater the likelihood of shooting an unarmed black individual.

Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or “dead” and discovered that this was not at all the case. “What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal.” In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that’s the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: “By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn’t make you ‘clinically dead.’ It only means your heart isn’t beating and you may not be conscious.”31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain—quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga—interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is interpreted as supernormal or paranormal.

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

He lifted an eyebrow at his self-indulgence, made a note to himself to spend a little extra time in the Disciplines that evening, and moved to the terminal. Its chiming stopped as he touched it: another second and the terminal had read his EEG through his skin, recognizing the pattern. The screen filled with column on column of blue symbology, a list of calls to the flat since he left. Most of them were unimportant compared to the one name and commcode at the far right-hand side of the list, the most recent, the one message that had caused the “urgent” chime. He had rather been hoping that the embassy would not need him further today: but hope was illogical. Life was about dealing with what was. He touched the screen, and the computer dialed the code. He waited a moment or so before speaking. The link was scrambled, and before communications began, the computer had to agree with the one on the other end as to the eighty-digit “satchel” crypton they would use to keep the link secure. He had the utmost confidence in the ciphering process. Ninety-six standard years before, he had invented it. He

For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe. So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds. Figure 11. This shows the path taken to create memories. Impulses from the senses pass through the brain stem, to the thalamus, out to the various cortices, and then to the prefrontal cortex. They then pass to the hippocampus to form long-term memories. (illustration credit 5.1) A single memory—for instance, a walk in the park—involves information that is broken down and stored in various regions of the brain, but reliving just one aspect of the memory (e.g., the smell of freshly cut grass) can suddenly send the brain racing to pull the fragments together to form a cohesive recollection. The ultimate goal of memory research is, then, to figure out how these scattered fragments are somehow reassembled when we recall an experience. This is called the “binding problem,” and a solution could potentially explain many puzzling aspects of memory. For instance, Dr. Antonio Damasio has analyzed stroke patients who are incapable of identifying a single category, even though they are able to recall everything else. This is because the stroke has affected just one particular area of the brain, where that certain category was stored. The binding problem is further complicated because all our memories and experiences are highly personal. Memories might be customized for the individual, so that the categories of memories for one person may not correlate with the categories of memories for another. Wine tasters, for example, may have many categories for labeling subtle variations in taste, while physicists may have other categories for certain equations. Categories, after all, are by-products of experience, and different people may therefore have different categories. One novel solution to the binding problem uses the fact that there are electromagnetic vibrations oscillating across the entire brain at roughly forty cycles per second, which can be picked up by EEG scans. One fragment of memory might vibrate at a very precise frequency and stimulate another fragment of memory stored in a distant part of the brain. Previously it was thought that memories might be stored physically close to one another, but this new theory says that memories are not linked spatially but rather temporally, by vibrating in unison. If this theory holds up, it means that there are electromagnetic vibrations constantly flowing through the entire brain, linking up different regions and thereby re-creating entire memories. Hence the constant flow of information between the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the thalamus, and the different cortices might not be entirely neural after all. Some of this flow may be in the form of resonance across different brain structures.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.

RESUMEN El mapa no es el terreno. No te enamores de tu plan. Casi seguro es erróneo. Planea sólo lo que necesitas. No intentes proyectar todo con años de anticipación. Planea apenas lo suficiente para mantener ocupados a tus equipos. ¿Qué tipo de perro es esto? No evalúes en términos absolutos, como horas; está demostrado que los seres humanos somos pésimos para eso. Evalúa las cosas relativamente: a qué raza de perro o tamaño de camiseta (CH, M, G, EG, EEG) corresponde el problema, o emplea la secuencia de Fibonacci, de uso más común. Consulta el oráculo. Usa una técnica ciega como el método de Delfos para evitar sesgos de condicionamiento como el efecto halo o tren, o el mero pensamiento grupal. Planea con póker. Usa el póker de planeación para evaluar rápidamente el trabajo por hacer. El trabajo es una historia. Piensa primero en quién recibirá valor de algo; luego, en qué es esto, y después en por qué lo necesita. Los humanos pensamos

To find out, he hooked up a group of people—some highly creative and others less so—to EEG machines, then gave them a series of tests that measure creative thinking. The results were surprising: the more creatively inclined subjects showed lower cortical arousal while taking the test than did the noncreative subjects. The heightened concentration of cortical arousal is helpful when balancing your checkbook or evading a tiger, concluded Martindale, but not when trying to compose an opera or write a novel or come up with the Next Big Internet Thing. For that, we need to enter a state that Martindale called defocused, or diffused, attention. Someone in this state of mind is not scattered, at least not as we normally think of the word. Like Buddhists, they have mastered the art of “detached attachment.” They are both focused and unfocused at the same time. But why, Martindale wondered, are some people able to benefit from this diffused attention while others are not? Creative people are no more capable of controlling their cortical arousal levels than noncreative people. Creative achievements, he concluded, are based not on self-control “but rather on unintentional inspiration.” Unintentional inspiration? What can that mean? Martindale, who passed away in 2008, never said, but I can’t help but wonder if this phenomenon explains why creative people are often restless. By changing locations, they are unconsciously attempting to lower their levels of cortical arousal, defocus their attention.

The Australian Department of Defence asked his research group to measure the effects of deployment to combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan on mental and biological functioning, including brain-wave patterns. In the initial phase McFarlane and his colleagues measured the qEEG in 179 combat troops four months prior to and four months after each successive deployment to the Middle East. They found that the total number of months in combat over a three-year period was associated with progressive decreases in alpha power at the back of the brain. This area, which monitors the state of the body and regulates such elementary processes as sleep and hunger, ordinarily has the highest level of alpha waves of any region in the brain, particularly when people close their eyes. As we have seen, alpha is associated with relaxation. The decrease in alpha power in these soldiers reflects a state of persistent agitation. At the same time the brain waves at the front of the brain, which normally have high levels of beta, show a progressive slowing with each deployment. The soldiers gradually develop frontal-lobe activity that resembles that of children with ADHD, which interferes with their executive functioning and capacity for focused attention. The

Imagine the future of work when brain monitoring becomes more ubiquitous if these laws and norms are not in place. After a banner year at the company, division manager Sue calls employee Pat to offer her a contract renewal with a 2 percent pay raise. Sue knows the company could easily afford and would be willing to pay up to 10 percent to retain her but hopes Pat will take less. Pat takes Sue’s call using her company-issued in-ear EEG earbuds. Pat keeps her voice even throughout the call so as not to give away her emotions and promises to follow up with Sue the next day. All the while, Sue has been watching Pat’s brain activity and decoding her emotional reaction to the news. Pat’s brain activity revealed joyfulness upon learning of the 2 percent pay raise and remained joyful throughout the day.97 The next day, Pat calls Sue and says that she was hoping for a bigger raise. But Sue can’t be bluffed; she knows that Pat was happy with the 2 percent raise; moreover, she now sees that Pat is fearful as she makes her request for a bigger one. Sue responds that 2 percent is the best the company can do, and Pat accepts the offer. Pat’s attempt to negotiate a better salary was over before it began. Even the staunchest freedom-of-contract libertarian would question the fairness of this negotiation.

The New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg puzzled over a similar issue—why people weren’t donating to Syrian refugee relief. One answer came from his interviews with the social scientists Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson and David Hudson, who have spent years studying how charities solicit donations. “Children who have lost their homes, starving families, the heartstring things,” David Hudson told him. “That’s what everyone believes works.” But they found the opposite to be true. When campaigns shift from images of poverty-stricken children and messages like “Please donate before it’s too late” to hopeful and inspiring images of children holding signs like FUTURE DOCTOR, people are more likely to give. “If you can trigger a sense of hope, donations go up,” explained Mr. Hudson.28 Or as Duhigg puts it, “It’s not entirely your fault” if you aren’t donating to refugees. “You just haven’t been manipulated properly.” When neuromarketers tweaked an unsuccessful campaign by the Italian UNCHR for refugees, its new commercial led to a 237 percent increase in sellable calls over the prior one. The brains of test subjects showed them how to do it. The first commercial had low emotional arousal throughout, and poor engagement during the final call to action. Using EEG insights from participants watching the commercial, they modified the new commercial with new images to evoke greater empathy in viewers, and with new visual effects in the call to action that better engaged viewers’ brains.29

The two groups had similarly normal EEGs at rest, but the ADD group showed excessive “slow wave” activity during directed tasks such as reading or drawing.

A team of scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) designed an ingenious experiment to determine if humans could detect energy fields similar to those of the earth. They hooked participants up to EEGs and confined them in a shielded room, screening out virtually all known sources of energy and radiation. They created a magnetic field generator that precisely mimicked the earth’s field. They then varied the direction of the magnetic field unpredictably, in very short bursts of one-tenth of a second. That’s too quick to be consciously detectable. The EEG recorded changes in brain wave amplitudes and frequencies throughout the experiment, which was repeated up to 100 times per subject. The investigators found drops in alpha waves of up to 60% whenever they changed the direction of the field. They conclude that “the human brain can detect Earth-strength magnetic fields, demonstrating that we have a sensory system that processes the geomagnetic field all around us.” The Caltech authors also noted: “We’ve known about the five basic senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste since ancient times, but this is the first discovery of an entirely new human sense in modern times.

In Scientific American, Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi looked at the ways that “television addiction is no mere metaphor,” noting that EEG studies show diminished mental activity during television viewing compared to other activities. Viewers describe themselves as “relaxed” and “passive” while watching, yet while the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflected that television had “somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted,” with “more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before.” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi equate this effect with the first law of physics: “A body at rest tends to stay at rest.”13 Further corroboration of this can be seen with studies linking the alarming rise in childhood obesity to increased time spent watching TV.

Rollin has demonstrated that when two people are touching, the EKG measures of heart rhythm in one person, is detected in the EEG, which measures brain waves, of the other person, showing that one person's heart rhythm has the potential to affect the other person's brain wave pattern. He is, as of this writing, working on a project to demonstrate the same effect between a baby's heart rhythm and the mother's brain waves when they're touching.

Our own lives are too small for us to have enough "material" to feed a deep moral decision-making process. Reading novels and stories allows us to gain access to deeply imagined lives other than our own. Experiencing complex moral situations enriches the pool of experience from which we make decisions. Great novels also have the complexity to strengthen our moral muscles.

War, along with fear, reaches you in an instant. It penetrates walls, it moves over mountains, through rivers. It enters the human mind, human hearts, human souls. It settles there and will not leave.

These children, the spirited ones, when surprised or faced with a potential threat startle more easily, their pulse races, blood pressure rises, stress hormones flood into their systems, and on an EEG, their brain even shows more activity on the right side.

In the less than two years since Crux was released, science has continued to advance. In 2013, a pair of researchers at the University of Washington demonstrated that one human being could control part of another human being’s body via a non-invasive brain-computer interface. The two researchers, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, played a video game together, in a very peculiar way. Rajesh Rao, in one building on campus, could see the video game display, but had no controls. Andrea Stocco, in another building across the campus, had the controller (a fire button), but couldn’t see the display. When Professor Rao wanted to shoot, he would think about shooting, and an EEG cap on his skull would pick up his intent and transmit it across campus. There, a magnetic stimulator on Andrea Stocco’s head would send a pulse through part of Professor Stocco’s motor cortex, causing his finger to twitch and hit the fire button.

A quantitative EEG (QEEG) is a test that can indicate if a patient has a “noisy brain.” This study is often done by advanced neurofeedback practitioners, and must be interpreted by an expert who has actually met with the patient, not simply run the information through a machine.

The brain is essentially an oddly shaped sphere of Jell-O, crammed inside a box, covered in a shallow layer of cerebrospinal fluid. This gelatinous material contains a kind of electrical grid—hooked up to an EEG, the brain can power a toy train—that transmits information through the body via microscopic fibers called axons. When someone is hit in the head or stops suddenly, the brain is jolted against the skull’s jagged interior, distorting or even severing the axons and interrupting the function of the synapses, the connections between the fibers of the brain.

There have been some extensive studies done on meditation and the most noteworthy finding of these studies seemed to show in the EEG measuring of brain wave patterns. During your waking consciousness, brain waves are random and chaotic. The brain usually operates with different wavelengths from the front to the back of the brain, and from hemisphere to hemisphere. Meditation changes this drastically. Subjects in meditation show increased Alpha waves and these waves continue to increase throughout the duration of the meditation.

The frequency of these brain waves has been crudely correlated with states of consciousness. Delta waves (0.5 to 3 cycles per second) indicate deep sleep. Theta waves (4 to 8 cycles per second) indicate trance, drowsiness, or light sleep. Alpha waves (8 to 14 cycles per second) appear during relaxed wakefulness or meditation. And beta waves (14 to 35 cycles per second), the most uneven forms, accompany all the modulations of our active everyday consciousness. Underlying these rhythms are potentials that vary much more slowly, over periods as long as several minutes. Today's EEG machines are designed to filter them out because they cause the trace to wander and are considered insignificant anyway. There's still no consensus as to where the EEG voltages come from. They would be most easily explained by direct currents, both steady state and pulsing, throughout the brain, but that has been impossible for most biologists to accept. The main alternative theory, that large numbers of neurons firing simultaneously can mimic real electrical activity, has never been proven.

Only one research team followed up this work, some ten years later.Sidney Goldring and James L. O'Leary, neuropsychiatrists at the Wash-ington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recorded the same DC potentials from the human scalp, from the exposed brain during surgery, and from the brains of monkeys and rabbits. As noted before,the potentials varied in regular cycles several minutes long, like a basso continuo under the EEG. In fact, Goldring and O'Leary found waves within waves: "Written upon the slow major swings were lesser voltage changes." These were weak potentials, measured in microvolts (millionths of a volt) and varying in waves of 2 to 30 cycles per minute, sort of a pianissimo "inner voice" in a three-part electrical fugue.

Personal Thinking Blockchains More speculatively for the farther future, the notion of blockchain technology as the automated accounting ledger, the quantized-level tracking device, could be extensible to yet another category of record keeping and administration. There could be “personal thinking chains” as a life-logging storage and backup mechanism. The concept is “blockchain technology + in vivo personal connectome” to encode and make useful in a standardized compressed data format all of a person’s thinking. The data could be captured via intracortical recordings, consumer EEGs, brain/computer interfaces, cognitive nanorobots, and other methodologies. Thus, thinking could be instantiated in a blockchain — and really all of an individual’s subjective experience, possibly eventually consciousness, especially if it’s more precisely defined. After they’re on the blockchain, the various components could be administered and transacted — for example, in the case of a post-stroke memory restoration. Just as there has not been a good model with the appropriate privacy and reward systems that the blockchain offers for the public sharing of health data and quantified-self-tracking data, likewise there has not been a model or means of sharing mental performance data. In the case of mental performance data, there is even more stigma attached to sharing personal data, but these kinds of “life-streaming + blockchain technology” models could facilitate a number of ways to share data privately, safely, and remuneratively. As mentioned, in the vein of life logging, there could be personal thinking blockchains to capture and safely encode all of an individual’s mental performance, emotions, and subjective experiences onto the blockchain, at minimum for backup and to pass on to one’s heirs as a historical record. Personal mindfile blockchains could be like a next generation of Fitbit or Apple’s iHealth on the iPhone 6, which now automatically captures 200+ health metrics and sends them to the cloud for data aggregation and imputation into actionable recommendations. Similarly, personal thinking blockchains could be easily and securely recorded (assuming all of the usual privacy concerns with blockchain technology are addressed) and mental performance recommendations made to individuals through services such as Siri or Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, perhaps piped seamlessly through personal brain/computer interfaces and delivered as both conscious and unconscious suggestions. Again perhaps speculatively verging on science fiction, ultimately the whole of a society’s history might include not just a public records and document repository, and an Internet archive of all digital activity, but also the mindfiles of individuals. Mindfiles could include the recording of every “transaction” in the sense of capturing every thought and emotion of every entity, human and machine, encoding and archiving this activity into life-logging blockchains.

It’s ironic that our nearly three trillion dollar medical system actually has some of the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture? The Book Of Science is Constantly Being Rewritten Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no new mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. —Humphry Davy (from a public lecture given in 1810)

She chuckles. "If you love it now, you should see it before. Back before there's more hotels and bars than shells. Back when only real backpackers come and visit. You're too skinny," she adds. "Eat more eggs." I take a bite. "What do you mean?" "Eggs give you big tits.

This possibility may be supported by another unusual feature of hypnosis. Unlike other altered states of consciousness, hypnosis is not associated with any unusual EEG patterns. Physiologically speaking, the mental state hypnosis most closely resembles is our normal waking consciousness.

We tranquilized a salamander lightly, placed it on a plastic shelf be-tween the poles of a strong electromagnet, and attached electrodes to measure the EEC As we gradually increased the magnetic field strength, we saw no change—until delta waves appeared at 2,000 gauss. At 3,000 gauss, the entire BEG was composed of simple delta waves, and the animal was motionless and unresponsive to all stimuli. Moreover, as we decreased the strength of the magnetic field, normal EEG patterns returned suddenly, and the salamander regained consciousness within seconds, This was in sharp contrast to other forms of anesthesia.

According to Scientific American, people watching TV “reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading. . . . Habit-forming drugs work in similar ways.” In short, scientists conclude that “TV does seem to meet the criteria for substance dependence.”1

When neurons fire together, they exchange charged elements that then produce electromagnetic fields, and these fields are what are measured during a brain scan (like an electroencephalograph, or EEG). Humans have several measurable brain-wave frequencies, and the slower the brain-wave state we’re in, the deeper we go into the inner world of the subconscious mind.

The experience led Dweck to develop the idea of two contrasting mindsets that shape our attitudes to our own and others’ abilities. People with a ‘growth mindset’, as she called it, like the positive pupils above, see their intellectual ability as something that can be developed through effort, learning and practice, while people with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe they were born with a certain amount of brains and talent and nothing they can do will change that. Growth mindset people are the more go-getting bunch. Faced with problems, they engage and persevere. Failure isn’t permanent, it’s success not just yet. Using electroencephalograms (EEGs) scientists found more brain activity relating to error adjustments among college students with a growth mindset than among their peers with a fixed mindset.7 Growth-minded people also showed better accuracy after mistakes.

Here’s a window onto madness. Our planet is a cosmic madhouse, said Goethe as much as a hundred years and more ago, to which Nietzche, while he was still of sound mind,... added: With individuals madness is rare; but with groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

A view of the sea drives people crazy—in a positive sense, it calms them, but it disturbs them too. There must be some atavistic link between the eye, the soul and water, extensive waters of mystic depths and an inaccessible, dark bottom. Some connections quiver, are inexplicable.

It is damaging to tie yourself. To a country and a home. Sooner or later both will fuck you up.

Subtle distinctions of pronunciation in our language are being lost and words are becoming slimy, spoken often with an idiotic smile as speakers fashionably soften nonexistent consonants. Degenerate. Like children, half-articulate, vacuous, infantile orators roll words around their mouths like hot potatoes, as though they were toothless, they shift them about, squash them, then open their mouths to eject a mash, a sticky pre-masticated porridge, which slides down their chins.

So, at funerals you learn all kinds of things. One corpse is laid to rest in the earth, another climbs out.

What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time. Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps—hillocks—and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there. Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted wit veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses. Placed side by side, there is no current between them, because both these kinds of life collapse into themselves, silently and menacingly like rising waters. Kaleidoscopic lives. Like the drawings of schizoid patients.

The medical literature did not encourage that idea. Decades of clinical experience and research have established that brain activity decreases within six to seven seconds of the heart stopping. And after ten to twenty seconds, the electroencephalogram (EEG) goes flat, indicating no activity in the cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for thoughts, perceptions, memory, and language. Analysis of the EEGs of people after life support is withdrawn show that the brain’s electrical activity in such cases actually stops before the heartbeat stops and before blood pressure ends—and after the heart stops there is no well-defined EEG activity. That seemed to answer my question about whether NDEs could be related to electrical activity in the brain.

I had grown used to watching her brain waves. It was a way of hearing her talk.

Other research establishes the ability of one person to affect another through these fields. For instance, studies at the Institute of HeartMath in California have shown that one person’s electrocardiograph (heart) signal can be registered in another person’s electroencephalogram (EEG, measuring brain activity) and elsewhere on the other person’s body. An individual’s cardiac signal can also be registered in another’s EEG recording when two people sit quietly opposite one another.89 This interconnectivity of fields and intention is a marriage of subtle energy theory and quantum physics. As Dr. Benor pointed out, Albert Einstein has already proven that matter and energy are interchangeable. For centuries, healers have been reporting the existence of interpenetrating, subtle energy fields around the physical body. Hierarchical in organization (and vibration), these fields affect every aspect of the human being.90 Studies show that healing states invoke at least the subtle biomagnetic fields. For example, one study employed a magnetometer to quantify biomagnetic fields coming from the hands of meditators and yoga and Qigong practitioners. These fields were a thousand times stronger than the strongest human biomagnetic field and were located in the same range as those being used in medical research labs for speeding the healing of biological tissues—even wounds that had not healed in forty years.91 Yet another study involving a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) showcased large frequency-pulsing biomagnetic fields emanating from the hands of therapeutic touch professionals during treatments

For example, one device, called the SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) magnetometer, can detect the biomagnetic fields, that are created by the biochemical and physiological activities of the body. Biomagnetic fields around the body have been found to give a more accurate reading of a patient’s health than traditional electrical measurements, such as EEGs and EKGs. In fact, scientists now know that the heart’s electromagnetic field is so powerful that it can be accurately measured three feet away from the body. The reading can be taken from any point on the body and any point in the electromagnetic field, because the field itself contains the information in a three-dimensional, or holographic, way. Still,

Research on workplace engagement funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture found that with EEG, it is now possible to classify the type of activity an individual is engaged in—central tasks (e.g., programming, database, web development), peripheral tasks (e.g., setting up a development environment, writing documentation), and meta tasks (e.g., social media browsing, reading news sites).47 As pattern classification of brain wave data becomes ever more sophisticated, employers will be able to tell not just whether you are alert or your mind is wandering but also whether you are surfing social media or developing code.

When investigative journalists David Kocieniewski and Peter Robinson broke the story about the ties between Donald Trump’s incoming national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and a company that sells brain wave technology to governments worldwide, surprisingly few people noticed.66 Serving alongside Flynn on Brainwave Science’s board of directors was Subu Kota, a software engineer who had pleaded guilty to selling highly sensitive defense technology to the KGB during the Cold War.67 Brainwave Science sells a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. Among its customers are the Bangladeshi defense forces as well as several Middle Eastern governments.68 Following some successful experiments at the Dubai Police Academy, Emirati authorities have recently deployed the technology in real murder investigations. At least two cases have successfully been prosecuted.69 In one case, the police were investigating a killing at a warehouse. Suspecting that an employee was involved, they forced the warehouse workers to don EEG headsets and showed them images of the crime. Purportedly, a photo of the murder weapon triggered a characteristic “recognition” pattern in one of the employee’s brains (the P300 wave), while none of the other employees showed a similar response. Confronted with that evidence, the suspect confessed, revealing details that only the guilty party could have known.

Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had been meditating for more than forty years when he redirected his research to the effects of meditation on the brain. This shift in his work occurred at a meeting with the Dalai Lama, who wondered at the focus of his research: “You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to study depression, and anxiety, and fear. Why can’t you use these same tools to study kindness and compassion?”11 This question would lead him on a journey to find out just how much we can learn from EEG.

As neurotechnology and the algorithms decoding them continue to improve, EEG-based systems will become the gold standard in workplace fatigue monitoring. Not just employers but society as a whole may soon decide that the gains in safety and productivity are well worth the costs in employee privacy. But how much we ultimately gain from workplace brain wearables depends largely on how employers leverage the technology. Will employees receive real-time feedback from the devices so they can act on it themselves? Will managers directly monitor employees’ incidence of fatigue? If so, will they use that information to improve workplace conditions? Or will it justify disciplinary actions, pay cuts, and terminations of employees who suffer from fatigue more often?

Norepinephrine: The Wake-Up Neurotransmitter One of norepinephrine’s effects on the brain is to sharpen attention. As we saw earlier, norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) can function as both a neurotransmitter and a hormone. When we perceive stress and activate the fight-or-flight response, the brain produces bursts of norepinephrine, triggering anxiety. But sustained and moderate secretion can also produce a beneficial result in the form of heightened attention, even euphoria, and meditation has been shown to produce a rise in norepinephrine in the brain. A modest dose of norepinephrine is also associated with reduced beta brain waves. 5.11. Norepinephrine: your wake-up molecule. Notice the paradox here. Norepinephrine is associated with both anxiety and attentiveness. How do you get enough to be alert, but not so much you’re stressed? Surrender is the key. Steven Kotler, co-author of Stealing Fire, says that stress neurochemicals like norepinephrine actually prime the brain for flow states. At first, the meditator is frustrated by Monkey Mind. But if she surrenders, despite the perpetual self-chatter of the DMN, she enters the next phase of flow, which is focus. She has hacked her biology, using the negative experience of mind wandering as a springboard to flow. Norepinephrine’s molecular structure is similar to its cousin, epinephrine. While epinephrine works on a number of sites in the body, norepinephrine works exclusively on the arteries. When both dopamine and norepinephrine are present in the brain at the same time, they amplify focus. Attention becomes sharp, while perception is enhanced. Staying alert is a key function of the brain’s attention circuit, which keeps you focused on the object of your meditation and counteracts the wandering mind. It also stops you from becoming drowsy, an occupational hazard for meditators. That’s because pleasure neurotransmitters such as serotonin and melatonin (for which serotonin is the precursor) can put you to sleep if not balanced by alertness-producing norepinephrine. Again, the ratios are the key. Oxytocin: The Hug Drug 5.12. Oxytocin: your cuddle molecule. Oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus, part of the brain’s limbic system. When activated, neurons in the hypothalamus stimulate the pituitary gland to release oxytocin into the bloodstream. So even though oxytocin is produced in the brain, it has effects on the body as well, giving it the status of a hormone. It is one of a group of small protein molecules called neuropeptides. A closely related neuropeptide is vasopressin. All mammals produce some variant of these neuropeptides. Oxytocin promotes bonding between humans. It is responsible for maternal feelings and physically prepares the female body for childbirth and nursing. It is generated through physical touch but also by emotional intimacy. Oxytocin also facilitates generosity and trust within a group. Oxytocin is the hormone associated with the long slow waves of delta. A researcher hooking subjects up to an EEG found that touch stimulated greater amounts of delta, with certain regions of the skin being more sensitive. The biggest effect was produced by tapping the cheek, as we do in EFT. It produced an 800% spike in delta.

Someday employers could nip labor organizing in the bud by monitoring employees’ growing brain synchrony. One recent study tracked the EEG signals of high school students over a semester and found that their brain activity became more synchronized as they focused on collective tasks.106 In other words, just by looking at patterns of brain activity across employees, it might be possible to tell who is planning something together like organizing a union. Those who are less engaged with the group can similarly be identified by their lower brain-to-brain synchrony.

In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that a primary school in Jinhua required its fifth-grade students to wear EEG headsets, which fed data to their teachers, parents, and the state. The US-based manufacturer and supplier of the devices, BrainCo, had shipped more than twenty thousand of them to China already.13 About an inch wide and made of black plastic, the Focus 1 (or Fu Si) headsets are worn across students’ foreheads. A light in the middle blazes red, yellow, or blue to signal the student’s engagement.14 More intensive brain wave data is sent in real time to the teacher’s computer, whose software generates real-time alerts about students’ attention levels. The teachers overseeing the program believed that brain monitoring substantially improved their students’ engagement. One student agreed, saying he had “become more attentive in class. All of my assignments come back with perfect grades.”15 Other students are less sanguine, having been punished by their parents for their low attention scores.

When one writes, it helps to repeat oneself. It’s even desirable to transpose whole passages from one book to another, which is what I do from time to time, because people are chronically forgetful.

I’ve read some extracts from those idiocies of Knausgaard’s, absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is riddled with holes,

For some time, an arbitrary line in the sand was drawn at the end of the first trimester as the demarcation marking the beginning of "life". Of course, advances in medical technology continued to force those who stood on that line to retreat further and further toward the beginning of gestation. For instance, it has been established that a fetus has brain waves which can be measured by EEG only 40 days after conception, and merely 18 days after conception, the fetus has a measurable heart beat. In fact, they were getting so close to the beginning of gestation, i.e., conception, that the PC pro-abortion genderists then had to adopt the more ephemeral "viability" position. Of course, according to their definition of "viability", comatose patients would not be considered human being because, in some ways, a fetus is actually more "viable" than someone who is comatose. As obstetrical and gynecological medicine continued its inevitable advance, revealing more and more about the nature of a human fetus, the pro-abortion forces continued their retreat until now they do not even discuss the fetus at all. As with all politically correct positions, if a fact gets in the way, it is simply changed or ignored. Unfortunately for the pro-abortion genderists, the fetus is a fact, a fact which is itself usually the result of "choices". Furthermore, the simple scientific fact is that at the moment of conception, the embryo is not a part of the mother's body. At that point and forever more it is a genetically distinct being with its own genetic code that is completely and totally different from every other human being who has ever lived or ever will live, including the mother. So here is the first instance of PC genderism crashing into scientific fact. It also seems ironic that while more and more law enforcement agencies in this country are now turning to DNA identification in criminal investigations and our courts are now admitting such identification as evidence in criminal prosecution, the rights of a fetus, which has its own, distinct DNA code at the moment of conception, are still not legally recognized in all cases. Now they are recognized in some cases, for there have been instances of people being prosecuted for two murders when they have killed pregnant women. There are also cases where mothers who have given birth to babies who are addicted to illegal drugs have been prosecuted, but there are no consistent standards or guidelines. It is also a macabre irony that in this country it is illegal to destroy the egg of an American bald eagle, but the government uses our tax dollars to destroy human embryos and fetuses.

The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.

Every novel is about salvation, says Bela Hamvas, there is no novel without confession.

In our neurofeedback lab we see individuals with long histories of traumatic stress who have only partially responded to existing treatments. Their qEEGs show a variety of different patterns. Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life. Our research showed that calming the fear center decreases trauma-based problems and improves executive functioning

The waking brain, too, has an appetite for the generative chaos that rules in the dream state. Neurons share information by passing chemicals across the synaptic gap that connects them, but they also communicate via a more indirect channel: they synchronize their firing rates. For reasons that are not entirely understood, large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency. (Imagine a discordant jazz band, each member following a different time signature and tempo, that suddenly snaps into a waltz at precisely 120 beats per minute.) This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking—millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm. But the brain also seems to require the opposite: regular periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other. If you follow the various frequencies of brain-wave activity with an EEG, the effect is not unlike turning the dial on an AM radio: periods of structured, rhythmic patterns, interrupted by static and noise. The brain’s systems are “tuned” for noise, but only in controlled bursts.

There have been EEG studies that demonstrate that television watching converts the brain from beta wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with a daydreaming state, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills.

The German psychiatrist Hans Berger pioneered electroencephalography (EEG) in his lifelong quest to prove the reality of telepathy. He first recorded the brain waves of a patient in 1924 but, filled with doubt, did not publish his findings until 1929. EEG became the foundational tool of an entire field of medicine, clinical neurophysiology, although Berger was never accorded any significant recognition in Nazi Germany and hanged himself in 1941, despite being nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.

Og det er med samvittigheten som med hjertet. Du merker den bare når det er noe som er gærent.

the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture?