September 8, 2011
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Affordably Build Your Brand
FedEx Global Brand Management Director Monica Skipper shares a cost-effective way to build a bigger brand for your small business.
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The year is 2009, and I am sitting in a comfortable recliner in a darkened room, listening to strange, oddly soothing sounds of some New Age kind of music being played at varying rhythms. There are electrodes wired to my scalp and earlobes. It’s the signals being emitted from the goings-on in my head that are responsible for the undulations in the music and their corresponding images on the computer screen before me. A psychedelic screensaver of vivid color and dynamic patterns dances across the monitor: They are complex images based on the electrical impulses from my brainwaves, which have been converted by a mathematical algorithm.
I’ve come to a neurofeedback center in West Los Angeles called BrainPaint, in search of the answer to the question: Is there a way to induce that elusive feeling of being in what athletes call "the zone" and what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow"—that state of fluid creativity, relaxed focus, and effortless power?
I'm here because after my early failure at meditation (see "How to Get Started With Meditation") the neuroscientist instructing me, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, asked me if I would like to see what kind of brainwaves I was generating, and if I would be interested in discovering an alternative to meditation.
Bill Scott, another neuroscientist working with UCLA, is the founder of BrainPaint. He has developed treatment protocols used by other neurofeedback centers all over the world, some of which cater in secret to executives, Wall Street traders, and professional athletes looking for ways to train the brain to find “the zone.” (The 2006 World Cup champion Italian soccer team, trained in a secretive European neurofeedback center called the Mind Room.) Scott has agreed to give me a few hours of his time to take me through an extended neurofeedback training session.
“You can’t come at this head-on,” Bill warns me. “You can’t just flip a switch and power your way to the zone. It’s just the opposite.” I had told him I was an avid cyclist, so he put things in terms I could easily grasp. “When you are riding fast, do you tell your heart to beat faster?” No, Bill, just my legs. “And when you are riding fast, do you tell your lungs to breathe deeper in order to take in more oxygen?” No, Bill. “Most of what your body does to rise to the occasion," he says, "is not coming from conscious commands, it’s coming from the power of your brain, automatically. If you improve the brain’s functioning, then you improve your game, whatever your game may be. This really is all about getting out of your own way so you can perform at your best.” Sounds good to me.
Bill explains this type of feedback, which is based on electroencephalogram (EEG). EEGs work by detecting electrical signals given by brainwaves, all of which have different wavelengths and frequencies. Neurofeedback works the way most any feedback mechanism works, be it a mirror, a videotape of your performance, even a live audience: Your actions get fed back to you so you can adjust accordingly. In this case, you can see and hear, in real time, what’s going on between your mind and your brain through the images on the computer screen and the music that’s being played, all of which corresponds to the various types of brainwaves you’re generating. Your brain then learns to improve the management of these states. Once these new developmental skills are learned, they eventually become automatic, like riding a bike or tying out shoes—no thinking required.
The underlying philosophy is the same as that behind mindful meditation—indirectly influencing the physical connections in the brain by directing the mind—but using a bit of technology as a guide. Here, by training your brain to a resting state, you not only set yourself up to more automatically find the zone, but also set the stage for the kind of creative insights that result in the aha! moment.
Bill took me through a full feedback session of around 20 minutes, starting with a guided visualization exercise. He wanted me to focus on some image that represented a memory of a relaxed and carefree state. I focused on a mental image of myself as a little boy of about four. I have a picture of me at that age, with a bag of gumdrops in my hand and a rather weathered old teddy bear under my arm, sitting on the curb at the end of the driveway, waiting for my grandpa to visit.
Monitoring the brainwave feedback, Bill told me to hold that image in my mind. Explore it deeper. So I imagined what I must have been feeling, how untroubled I must have been. Then he let me watch the patterns on the screen and listen to the music, both of which changed based on brainwaves I was generating. The BrainPaint software helps train your brain to stay in the zone. Through the feedback from the on-screen images, and attempting to reproduce them by focusing on the mental scenes discovered through the visualization exercises, new patterns get made in your brain. My goal in the future—it takes at least a couple dozen sessions to realize significant results—would be to try to reproduce those cues on-screen by revisiting that image of myself as a little boy. Doing so would help me find that zone of relaxed awareness.
The most fascinating part of the session was how the BrainPaint software converted the signals I was sending. BrainPaint differs from other feedback technologies in a rather significant way. Bill Scott wanted a way to illustrate the complexity of a person’s EEG. Before he developed the algorithm for BrainPaint, neurofeedback systems only gave feedback on the linear parts of the EEG—frequency and amplitude. In other words, all you would see was a single wave line displayed on a simple x‑y axis. “That’s like using a triangle to illustrate a mountain,” says Bill. “Brainwaves do not travel in straight lines.”
Bill wanted to provide feedback on all the textured information coming from a brainwave. In other words, in addition to describing ocean waves by simply detailing how high they are and how often they crash on the beach—simple linear measurements—he wanted to describe all the various nonlinear nuances a surfer in the water experiences: Curvature, speed, cross-currents, undertow, curl, location, volume, water temperature, etc.
Below you will see an image taken at the time during my BrainPaint session when I was in the general vicinity of Jeffrey Schwartz’s “stable state of relaxed awareness.” It's just one of several fascinating rendering. You can view an entire gallery here.
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postlinearity 8 months ago
forty years of brain wave research and STILL not one enlightened scientist? maybe study ≠ practice?