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Improve mental health with neurofeedback
How you can train your brain to help reduce stress, enhance creativity and improve mental health.
From a materialist perspective, the key seems to be neurofeedback's ability to help us connect memories and sense perceptions that have been laid down in disparate regions of the brain—to achieve the feeling of unified consciousness by unifying the brain's electrical impulses. But if neurofeedback can foster and even enhance such a state, this begs the question of whether the phenomena we typically describe in terms of "spirituality" are just physical by-products of a material mind.
Wuttke turns such skepticism on its head. "The way I look at it," he says, "we may be able to map an experience through physiology, whether it is a profound sense of peace or a religious sense, but that doesn't mean the material brain is the source of those experiences." Instead, he sees the brain as "a transformer, something that conducts energy between metaphysical and physical reality." He admits neurofeedback can't necessarily help any Joe off the street achieve the transcendence of a Tibetan yogi, but adds, "It has been my experience that everybody is enlightened; they just don't know it."
After my first session of neurofeedback therapy, there's little chance I'll be confused with one of the enlightened—something my wife readily confirms. But as I watched the red bug move with increasing dexterity about the screen, it certainly felt empowering to see how much control we can exert over our minds, moods and selves. Over the next few weeks, it's a sensation I'll recall during moments of stress, like the long nights with my ever-wakeful children. Just this recollection seems to have some tangible effect, slowing the quickening pulse and quieting the static I've seen in the graphic representations of my brain waves. As Wuttke would say, we can sometimes be locked into old scripts, reacting to our world in ways we don't understand or seem to control. Neurofeedback's potential is so inspiring, in part, because it can help us rescript our brains and, thus, rewrite our lives.
Blaine Greteman, who trains the brains of undergraduates as a professor at Oklahoma State University, wrote about micro power generation in the September 2008 issue.
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Is there a good resource for acquiring a biofeedback machine for ones-self? A practitioner may not be readily available for some of us, or affordable.
posted by odysseus on 2/23/2009 12:35 pm