On her Gifted Universe site, Elisa provides a good summary of brainwave entrainment. Here is an excerpt:

How to shut or slow down the hamster wheel of a gifted mind? This is question I’ve been asked and have sometimes asked myself.

Truthfully, it’s only recently that I’ve become aware of the potential for my brain to ramp up – intellectually and emotionally. Totally randomly, I came across brainwave entrainment through binaural beats. I had never heard of such a thing but here’s an overview of how it can help rest your mind…

Brainwave Entrainment

We have different brainwaves that track at different frequencies. Brainwaves can be affected by external stimuli and induced into patterns associated with sleep, being relaxed etc. Visual and auditory stimuli can shift a person’s brainwaves into more regulated patterns.

Binaural Beats

Binaural beats are a form of stimuli to slow down your brain. Apparently, if a person listens to a sound at 100Hz in one ear (for example) and a sound of 104Hz in the other ear, the brain creates a response for the difference between the two: binaural beats. If you pitch two sounds exactly 4Hz apart , the 4Hz beat created by your brain is similar to the natural brainwave pattern while sleeping. The threshold of binaural beats is below the spectrum of how people are able to hear but you still feel the effect.

From Brainwave Entrainment or How to Rest Your Mind

Related:
Centerpointe Research Institute mental fitness technology
How Holosync Works, By Bill Harris
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Darold Treffert, MD explains, “Savant Syndrome is a rare, but spectacular, condition in which persons with various developmental disabilities, including Autistic Disorder, have astonishing islands of ability or brilliance that stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the over-all handicap.” From his article The Savant Syndrome: Islands of Genius.

Daniel Tammet , as one example, is able to recite 22,514 digits of pi from memory. An author with autistic  savant syndrome, he thinks differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated, to the detriment of how most of us value our own abilities and develop our talents.

From my post Savant abilities and learning differences relate to developing multiple talents.

Professor Allan Snyder is Director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney. Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. interviews him in his post Conversations on Creativity with Allan Snyder.

Here is an excerpt :

Snyder believes a ‘thinking cap’ might one day be possible, which would enable us to remove our ordinary filters of perception, and thereby improve memory, reduce prejudice, and make us more creative.

Here I have a conversation with the award winning scientist who is inventing ways to access nonconscious savant-like skills, to enhance creative thinking, and to unravel the ingredients of extraordinary success.

Scott. You have argued that savant skills are latent in all of us. Could you please elaborate why you think this is true?

Allan. My hypothesis is that savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels. Due to a failure in top-down inhibition, they can tap into information that exists in all of our brains, but is normally beyond conscious awareness.

Several lines of evidence point to this interpretation. Savant skills appear to be universal – they don’t seem to vary according to what’s valued in a particular society.

Across different cultures, savant skills are restricted to the same domains: art, music, calendar calculating, arithmetic, and mechanical/spatial skills. The skills can emerge without training, and they’re not qualitatively improved by practice. In fact, savants generally don’t have insight into how they perform their skill.

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[Snyder goes on to talk about his research to stimulate savant abilities in neurotypical ("normal") people, using "low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to inhibit the anterior temporal lobe, a region important for semantic processing, conceptual knowledge, labels and categories."]

Photo of Snyder from National Geographic program Accidental Genius.

Snyder is quoted in the book Creativity and the Brain, by Mario Tokoro, Ken Mogi.

Another book: Extraordinary People : Understanding Savant Syndrome, by Darold A. Treffert

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The film Mystical Brain reveals the exploratory work of a team from the University of Montreal who seek to understand the states of grace experienced by mystics and those who meditate.

Filmmaker Isabelle Raynauld offers up scientific research, which proposes that mystical ecstasy is a transformative experience and could to contribute to people’s psychic and physical health, treat depression and speed up the healing process when combined with conventional medicine. In French with English subtitles.

In this short excerpt from the film, below, Matthieu Ricard talks about his approach to meditation while preparing for a study of his brain activity.

View the entire film on the Mystical Brain site.

Related Articles:

Articles and Resources: Meditation and mindfulness
Mindfulness: The Seat Belt of Mental Health
Meditation Associated with Increased Grey Matter in the Brain
How The Sedona Method Greatly Enhances the Benefits of Meditation

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Chocolate could be more than just a welcome distraction, especially from holiday stress. It may have a calming effect on our anxiety.

An ounce and a half a day keeps the stress away

According to Dark Chocolate: The New Antianxiety Drug, by Dr. Mercola, “the use of chocolate as a cure for emotional stress has gotten new support from a clinical trial. The trial found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones.”

High anxiety metabolism

“In the high anxiety group, eating this amount of dark chocolate significantly reduced stress hormone levels, and the participants in this group also reported feeling less anxious after eating chocolate.”

The results may show that “people with higher levels of anxiety also have a distinctly different metabolic profile.”

Raw cocoa powder

“Dr. Mercola warns against eating this much chocolate a day, but cites a second study that shows just which forms of chocolate are likely to be the most beneficial. Raw cocoa powder wins with it’s high level of flavonol antioxidants and lack of sugar.”

Because chocolate can be an anxiety trigger for some, above all ‘know thyself.’

Image: Chocolate Therapy by Linda Troeller

Related:
Anxiety Relief Solutions
Any more chocolate than my limit is an anxiety cause. Jen Crippen
Avoid holiday stress with “9 Holiday Depression Busters”
Elaine Aron on holiday stress relief for sensitive people
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From Your brain on Tetris, The Week magazine, Sep 25, 2009

Playing Tetris, the classic computer game, actually enlarges your brain, scientists say.

The game, which turns 25 this year, calls on players to rapidly fit together colored puzzle pieces as they fall from the top of the screen.

In a recent study, neuroscientists asked two dozen adolescents to play Tetris for a half-hour every day for three months.

Subsequent brain scans revealed that, in these players, certain regions of the cerebral cortex—areas with a role in planning complex movements and coordinating sensory information—had added new cells and grown a half-millimeter thicker.

“It used to be thought that the number of neurons in the brain was fixed after a certain age,” neuroscientist Richard Haier tells BBC.com. “This appears not to be true.”

Left to be resolved is whether the growth in brain cells leads to overall improvements in memory and problem solving. “The $64,000 question is whether these brain changes are beneficial to activities other than playing Tetris,” Haier says.

Photo: Basel 016 Nintendo Tetris by watz

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Related :

Scientists dissect mystery of genius

Imaging Intelligence

Gender and Brain Imaging

[From a Dana Press Blog:]

At the recent Learning and the Brain Conference in Washington D.C., Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., discussed the importance of providing students with a “liberal education” that combines the study of the arts and the sciences.

She asked: How important are the arts for optimal development of the mind and brain? How important are the sciences? And how important is it to integrate both in our educational programs?

Nancy Andreasen:  The arbitrary division of domains of knowledge and the quest for specialization is a relatively recent phenomenon.

During the Renaissance, one of the great eras of exuberant creativity, people did not divide the world into art and science. Instead they saw them as a seamless continuum.

Michelangelo was a sculptor, architect, painter, engineer, poet and anatomist. Leonardo was an inventor, painter, engineer, sculptor and anatomist.

Great naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, made discoveries that we call “science” while trying to understand the beauty and order of the natural world.

As one great naturalist, Konrad Lorenz, has said, “He who has seen the intimate beauty of nature must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are good enough and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.”

To the extent that our current educational system fails to integrate art and science, it fails in an important aspect of nurturing creativity in young people.

What is the nature of the creative process?

Many introspective accounts from individuals as diverse as Mozart or Poincaré or Coleridge share a common theme.

Creative ideas, insights and solutions tend to occur rapidly and spontaneously, as sudden flashes of insight, although they may be preceded by an incubation phase.

They are most likely to arise while a person is daydreaming or relaxing or engaging in “free association” — a state called REST (Random Episodic Silent Thought) or the “default state” in imaging research studies.

During this state, regions of the association cortex are especially active, reflecting the fact that mental connections are being tossed around chaotically—until an original idea sometimes emerges.

This process reflects the highly complex nature of brain organization. The brain is able to spontaneously generate novel ideas and content because it can function as a self-organizing system (a concept from “chaos theory”), a system in which components spontaneously organize to produce something new in a nonlinear, dynamic and unpredictable way.

From Illuminating genius: insights from science and the arts, the Dana Press Blog June 01, 2009.

Nancy Andreasen is author of the book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.

The top image is a detail from a self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652/1653), the first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence.

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An autistic savant, Daniel Tammet can recite more than 22,000 digits of pi from memory. He believes such astounding abilities are based on an associative form of thinking and imagination, not due to some cerebral or genetic fluke.

He thinks differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated, to the detriment of how most of us value our own abilities and develop our talents.

Read more and see video on High Ability.

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A new Eide Neurolearning Blog post refers to studies on attentional style and creativity, including a study that notes, “…psychometric measures of creativity and measures of real-world creative achievement are associated with a habitual tendency toward diffuse rather than focused attention, which results in ineffective filtering of distracting or irrelevant environmental stimuli.”

From the Highly Sensitive site post Highly sensitive people: latent inhibition and creativity.

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From soft winds to software

A flickering candle, the sound of surf, beating drums, psychotropic plants – those can all be seen as early “devices” for altering mental states and consciousness. Now, there is a wide range of much more sophisticated devices, software and smart drugs designed to enhance awareness and cognitive abilities, which may or may not work.

The process known as brainwave synchronization or entrainment has been used for years in sound-light based mind machines (termed Auditory Visual Stimulation Devices). The main idea is to “drive” our average brainwave frequency from a high or faster level to a lower level, more associated with relaxation and meditative states.

Bill Harris, founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute, describes his company’s version of this technology, acclaimed by many personal development leaders including James Ray and Jack Canfield.

Harris notes, “In the early 1970s the Menninger Foundation studied some Indian yogis who were in the United States. They hooked these yogis to different machines in order to measure the yogis’ control over supposedly unconscious mental and physical functions. These studies gave researchers the first peek at the electrical brain wave patterns of meditation.

Holosync

“At about the same time, but completely independently, a researcher named Dr. Gerald Oster of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York… discovered a method, using sound, to create any desired electrical pattern in the brain, including those of meditation.”

Continued in his article How Holosync Works.

Paraliminal CDs boost concentration

Another related mind enhancement technology (also via CD programs) is the Paraliminal series.

Steve Pavlina, author of the upcoming book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, wrote on his blog that he missed the action boost that caffeine gave him, but has found the Paraliminal CDs “have done a beautiful job of filling this void. After every session I enjoy a lingering aftereffect that usually lasts a couple hours.

“The Paraliminals provide a noticeable concentration boost that allows me to steadily flow through my work while still maintaining my priorities — that delightful state of flow. For me this effect translates directly into practical, down-to-earth results. During a period of a few weeks when I used Paraliminals once or twice a day, I completed several key projects that required a lot of focus and concentration, definitely much faster and at a higher level of quality than I would have otherwise.”

From article: Caffeine, anxiety, productivity.

Also see article Foundations of Paraliminal Technology, by Paul Scheele.

Biofeedback

Another area of mental health and performance enhancement is biofeedback: using body activity like muscle and heart electrical signals that can be translated into sounds or images, and thus “fed back” so you can “see” what your body is doing, and control those activities more consciously.

The photo is the emWave program which collects data through a finger or ear sensor which plugs into a computer, to translate heart rhythms into user graphics.

Benefits claimed include more creative energy levels and less stress.

Neurofeedback

Another form of the technology – neurofeedback – displays graphics based on brainwaves, and is also helpful for stress management, plus treatment of ADHD and other conditions.

Drugs

Now on to drugs.

The Temple of the Oracle of Delphi in Greece [approx. 1400 B.C. to A.D. 381] was visited by people seeking answers about the future.

The photo is one of the oracles, as depicted in the movie “300.”

Research confirms a mythology about the psychedelic origin of the Oracle’s typically obscure or enigmatic messages. A National Geographic News article by John Roach says there were hydrocarbon gases in spring water near the site of the Delphi temple; one is ethylene, which has a sweet smell and produces a narcotic effect described as a floating or disembodied euphoria.

Cognitive-enhancement drugs

But what about more targeted cognitive enhancement drugs, like Ritalin?

Maia Szalavitz, writing for MSN Health & Fitness, notes that a recent online poll by Nature magazine of 1,400 readers, mainly scientists, “found that one in five admitted to using stimulants to boost brain power and 80% said they thought such drug use should be permitted.

“A study also found that 4 percent of students—and on some campuses, up to a whopping 25 percent—admitted to using drugs to improve academic performance.”

She adds, “For people with attention-deficit disorder (ADD), stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall (a form of amphetamine) clearly improve intellectual performance. But do they boost brainpower for people without ADD?

“How helpful—or potentially harmful—is it? And what do we know about how these stimulants affect different types of thinking—like creativity—anyway?”

She quotes Martha Farah, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania: “There are plenty of laboratory studies that suggest that stimulants are somewhat helpful for most people. We don’t know how helpful they are if you are trying to learn a language or master some new area of study or write the great American novel.”

Continued in article Cognitive enhancement drugs, by Maia Szalavitz.

Drugs and the creative process

Psychologist Stephen A. Diamond notes “Drugs and alcohol are often employed precisely for this purpose, a sort of chemical lubrication of the creative process.”

But, he warns, “such immersion in the unconscious can be dangerous, and the artist can be swamped, inundated and swept away into full-blown mania. Or the mood can suddenly switch to its opposite, triggering a major depressive episode.”

From interview article: The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons.

More articles:
Gifted, Talented, Addicted
Mental health & fitness articles

Related pages:
Mental fitness sites / programs
Drugs and creativity
Stress / de-stress
Stress resources: articles books programs

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The image is from the book Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, by B. Alan Wallace, founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. The book notes “There are certainly kinds of neuronal activity that causally contribute to the emergence of specific states of consciousness and mental activity.”

Bill Harris, Director of the Centerpointe Research Institute, writes about the development of the Holosync technology for providing the “benefits of meditation.” Here is an excerpt from an article of his:

Brain wave patterns during meditation

In the early 1970s the Menninger Foundation studied some Indian yogis who were in the United States. They hooked these yogis to different machines in order to measure the yogis’ control over supposedly unconscious mental and physical functions.

These studies gave researchers the first peek at the electrical brain wave patterns of meditation.

At about the same time, but completely independently, a researcher named Dr. Gerald Oster of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York published a paper in Scientific American about research he had been conducting since the 1950s into the effects of sound waves on brain wave patterns.

Oster had discovered a method, using sound, to create any desired electrical pattern in the brain, including those of meditation.

A small field sprang up around this technology and a related technology that uses flickering lights to alter brain wave patterns.

The essence of the experience

This field has always focused (mistakenly, in my opinion) on what I would describe as the symptoms of exposure to these brain-altering technologies.

You will hear people say, for instance, “we will put you in an alpha brain wave pattern and such-and-such will be your experience” or “we will put you in a theta state and you will have an out-of-body experience” (or whatever).

This, to me, is like a runner thinking the important thing about running is that you breathe hard, you get sweaty, and your legs get tired.

These are symptoms of running, but the real essence of the experience is that the cardiovascular system and the muscles are reorganizing at higher levels of functioning.

Continued in How Holosync Works.
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