A Heart-Stopping, Eye-Bulging, Wave-Making Idea

You would never guess that Swami Rama has been practicing yoga since the age of four and heads a monastery in Rishikesh. Now, in his mid-40s, he looks more like an Italian nobleman in his Nehru jacket and turtleneck sweater, and so he appeared very much out of place in Topeka, Kansas.

He was there for a short visit with Dr. Elmer Green, director of the Menninger Foundation's voluntary-controls project; and on the morning he was to leave, after completing an extensive series of tests in Green's laboratory, he decided that it was time to stop his heart.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Green asked.

"Yes, yes." the swami reassured him. "There will be no problem. If you like, I'll sign papers releasing the Menninger Foundation of any responsibility."

"Oh, that shouldn't be necessary, but I'm worried about your health. You say you'll stop your heart by controlling your vagus nerve. But the vagus also innervates the stomach--you could get very sick. You had dinner at our house last night, you know."

"I know," said the swami, "and usually I would fast for two or three days before trying this. But I'm leaving Topeka today; I have a plane to catch. And besides, I want to see if I can do it." He paused and turned to Green. "You would like to see a man stop his heart, wouldn't you?"

"Well, yes, of course," said Green. "But I don't want any thing to---"

"I will do it, then," the swami interrupted. "Now, if my stomach were empty, I could safely stop my heart for three or four minutes, but I think I should limit the time today. How much will be sufficient for your measurement?"

"Ten seconds will be quite impressive," said Green, as he began to attach the EKG electrodes to the Indian's right ear and left hand.

Swami Rama had already shown remarkable control of his body in Green's laboratory. Three days before, he had caused the temperature of two spots on the palm of his right hand to differ by ten Fahrenheit degrees--the left side turned red, as if slapped by a ruler, while the right side turned ashen gray.

The electrodes were finally in place and everyone was ready for the heart-stopping test. Green stood by the swami's side, while Green's wife, Alyce, and a gaggle of technicians and professional colleagues sat in the control room watching the polygraph pens perform their strange spastic dance.

The swami made a few trial runs at speeding and slowing his heart, then said, "I am going to give a shock. Do not be alarmed."

Green naturally thought the swami meant he was going to give himself some kind of neurological shock. But the shock he was talking about was psychological. The swami was telling observers not to be concerned by what they were about to witness.

But no one, not even the swami, expected to see the mad pattern drawn on the EKG paper that day. Before the shock, his heart rate was smooth and even at 70 beats per minute; then, suddenly, in the space of one beat, it jumped to nearly 300 beats per minute. The polygraph pens reacted crazily, jerking up and down five times every second for a span of at least 17 seconds. When the swami arose, he was as surprised by the recording as everyone else. Yet he felt the test had certainly been successful: "When you stop the heart in this way it still trembles in there," he said, fluttering his hands to illustrate.

The swami's heart had experienced a sudden atrial flutter, a dangerous cardiac condition that usually renders a patient unconscious, a condition in which the heart vibrates so fast that blood does not fill the chambers properly, the valves fail to work as they're supposed to and no blood is pumped to the body.

The swami had used this technique many times to stop his pulse for the benefit of skeptical doctors, but he didn't realize until he saw the results of his EKG that in order to do it, he had forced his heart to flutter so fast that it couldn't function properly.

• • •

The theoretical impact of Swami Rama's demonstration was significant, not so much because of what he did--stopping his pulse for 17 seconds--nor how he did it; the demonstration was really important because it took place when it did. Actually, the same study could have been performed 20 years ago; equipment was available and yogis have claimed for centuries to be able to stop their pulse. But it was done in 1970 and, ironically, was much more impressive than if it had occurred five years earlier.

Why? Because in 1965, and for centuries before that, it was an accepted medical fact that the body's muscles were of two distinct types--voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary muscles, such as those in the arm, are triggered by the central nervous system, so one can move them by merely deciding to do so. But the muscles of the heart and other internal organs, it was believed, were entirely different. They were thought to be under the sole control of the autonomic nervous system, which, as the name implied, was autonomous: It acted independent of consciousness, automatically regulating the body's involuntary, visceral responses.

Therefore, in 1965, a traditional scientist would have called the heart-stopping demonstration a trick. "Anyone can change his heart rate by simply varying his breathing pattern," he would have said. "And we know it is possible to slow the heart drastically by tightening certain voluntary muscles that squeeze against adjacent blood vessels and block the flow of blood feeding the heart--the so-called Valsalva's maneuver. But this shows only that the swami has developed fine control of his voluntary muscles. He cannot actually control his heart directly, because the heart is an involuntary organ. The swami's feat is no more significant than if he had claimed voluntary control of his salivary glands, and then demonstrated it by voluntarily putting a lemon in his mouth."

Then, in 1966, Neal Miller and his colleagues at Yale destroyed the traditional argument with one ingenious experiment using rats injected with curare, a drug that blocks all the central-nervous-system outputs to voluntary muscles. (Curare is the drug with which South American tribes tip their poison darts. A victim feels the pain of the dart and remains conscious, with his brain and internal organs functioning normally, but he lies limp and helpless, unable to make any voluntary movements. Since his breathing muscles are among those silenced, he quickly suffocates. To prevent this unhappy event in his curarized rats, Miller kept them breathing with an artificial respirator.)

Miller's experiment showed that a rat with all its voluntary muscles blocked could still learn to raise or lower its heart rate in order to get the reward of a brief electrical charge to the "pleasure center" of its brain.

This one experiment proved that the heart was not involuntary and suggested that perhaps the distinction between voluntary and involuntary body organs should be thrown out the window.

Soon after it was known that rats could learn to control their hearts, many researchers reported that undrugged human beings could do the same thing. Psychologist Bernard Engel and his colleagues at the Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore have trained cardiac patients to control their own premature ventricular contractions, the irregular heartbeats associated with an increased probability of sudden death. Half of Engel's patients learned their lessons well enough to maintain good control at home and in later followup laboratory sessions.

Out of the knowledge that many bodily responses thought to be involuntary can in fact be controlled has grown the technique called biofeedback. All learning requires feedback. If you are learning to shoot a bow and arrow, you must be able to see the arrow and the target and know the results of your shot. If you are learning to speak, you must be able to hear. A child who is hard of hearing speaks poorly; given a hearing aid, he may learn to speak as well as a normal child. Biofeedback is simply feedback applied to biological matters. It acts like a hearing aid. It "turns up the volume" on internal body signals that are normally too faint to be heard.

By its very nature, biofeedback implies the use of machines. A biofeedback machine is any device that makes a person more aware of an internal bodily function than he normally would be and that the person uses in an attempt to control the function voluntarily. A stethoscope can be a biofeedback machine if a person uses it to observe his own heartbeat, to learn what it feels like to have his heart rate go up or down and to try to bring his heart under voluntary control. The stethoscope can be improved upon electronically, of course. The heartbeat might be amplified through speakers, making it possible to detect smaller changes. Or it might be connected to a visual display, so that a subject can look at a dial that tells him what his heart rate is at any moment. Or the signal might go to a computer that turns on a light whenever the heart rate is, for example, two percent faster than it was the previous minute. Obviously, the sophistication and expense of biofeedback machines can vary tremendously.

Theoretically, if a person can be made sufficiently aware of any bodily process under neural control, he can learn to control it voluntarily. This includes almost everything imaginable--heart rate, pupil size, brain waves, the secretion of hormones and digestive juices, even the activity of individual nerve cells. It also includes abnormal processes such as headaches, insomnia and systemic diseases. This is the theory, and the promise, of biofeedback.

• • •

Is it all theory? Does it really work? Although biofeedback is still in its infancy, enough research has been done so that it's fair to ask how well the early promises have been fulfilled. The answer is complicated and varied, as varied as the special areas of biofeedback that are now being investigated. In some areas the findings have been dramatic and exciting, almost spectacular. In others, the results have been less successful than we might have hoped.

Some of biofeedback's greatest success has been in relieving muscle tension. With special machinery that registers muscle activity with a tone or electronic clicks, it's possible to learn to relax a muscle completely or to isolate a single motor neuron and learn to "fire" it at will, making it sound, through amplified feedback, like a drum roll.

Variations on the muscle-feedback technique have already been used to partially rehabilitate stroke victims, to teach asthmatic patients how to breathe properly and to eliminate subvocal speech in slow readers--the silent mouthing of words that keeps people from learning to read any faster than speech speed (about 150 words per minute).

New York psychologist Erik Peper used muscle feedback, converted into electronic clicks, to cure a man's facial tic that was so pronounced at the beginning of treatment that the recording electrodes wouldn't stick to his head. The man described his successful therapy as a revelation: "I kept saying to myself, 'Relax ... relax ...' then I concentrated on the clicks. At that moment, a whole new world was brought before me. I felt a deep warmth.... For once I controlled my body movements, they didn't control me.... I told myself, 'Don't tic'--and I didn't, and I cried for happiness."

In an even more dramatic use of the biofeedback technique, University of Wisconsin psychologist Peter Lang saved a nine-month-old infant's life. The baby weighed only 12 pounds and was being fed through a stomach pump because he vomited everything he ate. He was not expected to live. Lang measured the muscle activity along the baby's alimentary canal and gave him brief electric shocks on the leg whenever his esophagus started to back up. "After only a few meals with this therapy, the infant ceased to vomit," said Lang. "He is now a healthy toddler."

On the other hand, heart-rate-control experiments have been somewhat disappointing. They have proved that some control is possible, and this has now been confirmed many times at Harvard and the universities of Wisconsin and Tennessee. But the changes achieved so far are still rather small and the best subjects have been young volunteers, not the more elderly cardiac patients who really need this treatment.

Blood-pressure research has also been inconclusive. So far, only a few researchers claim to have helped patients with essential hypertension, one of the most common forms of high blood pressure. Neal Miller, now at Rockefeller University, claims temporary success with one patient, and Albert Ax at Detroit's Lafayette Clinic says he succeeded with one hypertense patient and failed with another. The Harvard team of Herbert Benson and David Shapiro has had good results with seven patients, but only in a laboratory setting. Still, other Harvard researchers have demonstrated that some people can learn to manipulate blood pressure and heart rate independently--making one go up while holding the other steady.

It is obvious that a person could learn (continued on page 244)Wave-Making Idea(continued from page 230) to control his own body with biofeedback to the point of potential physical harm. According to a Wall Street Journal report, one enterprising specialist is teaching men how to fail their military physicals by raising their blood pressure to pathological levels.

At the Menninger Foundation, researchers are using biofeedback to cure migraine headaches. The same emotional reactions that cause the main artery of the head and face to swell, resulting in a painful migraine, also cause blood vessels to constrict in the bands, making them cold. This concurrence led Joseph Sargent to a remarkable kind of biofeedback therapy: He treats migraine headaches by teaching patients to raise the skin temperature of their hands. The therapy has now been used with over 70 patients, and about 80 percent of them have shown definite improvement; they use less medication and their headaches are fewer, shorter or milder. One woman patient later used the technique to warm her feet voluntarily, relieving a chronic source of her insomnia.

Many factors besides age work to determine how well a person responds to biofeedback training. Peter Lang argues that there are "autonomic athletes" and "autonomic duffers." Other research suggests as much: It notes that musicians, artists and athletes are especially adept at controlling their brain waves. Another interesting, and logical, finding from University of Tennessee psychologist Jasper Brener is that actors may be able to learn heart-rate and sweat-gland control more readily than the rest of us. Taking it one step further. Bob Stern at Penn State reports that Method actors, who try to experience each emotion they portray, can learn to control galvanic skin response (an activity related to sweating in the palms) much faster than can non-Method actors.

• • •

Of all the frontiers being explored with biofeedback, one has received more publicity than all the others combined: the alpha wave. The market now carries perhaps 30 brands of low-cost "alpha machines," which beep or buzz or light up to signal that the wearer's brain waves have entered the mysterious alpha state.

One firm capitalizing on the craze says that by learning alpha control "you will relax physically and mentally ... control fears ... find peace and vitality ... solve problems while you sleep ... create an amazing memory bank in your own mind ... learn to develop extrasensory perception...."

Such advertising, with an assist from overzealous newspaper and magazine writers, has led to an almost unanimous misunderstanding of what alpha is.

Perhaps the most surprising, and nearly accurate, description of the alpha state was given by Swami Rama, during brain-wave tests with Dr. Green. After he had explored his inner states of consciousness with the aid of Green's feedback machine--which sounds a different tone for each brain-wave frequency, including alpha--the swami arose and said. "I have news for you. Alpha isn't anything. It is literally nothing."

In truth alpha is something that occurs when you feel nothing. It is a brain wave with a frequency between about eight and 13 cycles per second (cps). Brain waves are the constant undulations in electrical activity that occur in any living brain. These waves are picked up by sensitive electrodes at the scalp and transferred to an electroencephalogram (EEG). Brain waves are a rough measure of mental activity: They are fastest during active, attentive thought and slowest in deep sleep. Generally, stimulants such as caffeine, tobacco and amphetamines speed up the predominant brain waves; while alcohol, morphine, marijuana and decreased blood sugar tend to slow them down. The alpha state is typically described as relaxed, pleasant, detached from reality.

Alpha is a steady, clean rhythm that stands out from the apparently random squiggles on a typical EEG record like a 4/4 drumbeat in a composition by John Gage. Faster activity (above 13 cps) is called beta. It signifies that the brain is active--worrying, perceiving, deciding or attending. Waves slower than alpha (below eight cps) are called theta and delta. The latter two usually occur only in drowsiness or sleep.

If an average adult is relaxed but not sleepy, if his eyes are closed and he's thinking of nothing in particular, he is probably "in alpha." (I specify average adult because infants do not have alpha waves, nor do about ten percent of adults, who are otherwise perfectly normal.) If you were to interrupt an EEG subject during his alpha state and ask, "What were you just thinking about?" he would probably answer, "Nothing." But as soon as you ask the question, the alpha waves would disappear and be momentarily replaced by faster beta waves. This response is called alpha blocking, and a person in the alpha state experiences it whenever something catches his attention.

Albert Einstein was said to be able to solve mathematical problems in his head while his alpha waves chugged merrily on. But if someone gave him an unfamiliar problem that required conscious thought, his alpha state became blocked like anyone else's. Einstein was so familiar with the world of formulas and figures that mathematical thinking came automatically, by second nature.

Alpha waves do not indicate total inactivity. They may occur while a person is actively doing something--whistling, peeling potatoes, even driving a car; but at these moments he is behaving automatically and is paying no attention to what he's doing.

So, in a sense, alpha isn't anything, as the swami said, and it is especially not most of the things people seem to think it is. Alpha is not a state of mind for spiritual enlightenment, creative insight or intuitive wisdom; it does not bring telepathic or psychedelic visions; it does not cure diseases.

The first popular report that people could be trained to control their own alpha waves appeared in a 1968 Psychology Today article by Joe Kamiya, now at San Francisco's Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. Experimenters rang a bell at random and asked patients hooked to an EEG machine to guess whether or not they were in alpha. By guessing correctly, patients eventually learned to produce alpha waves. Of the people who did, 80 to 90 percent could learn to control them to some extent.

The early stages of alpha-feedback training can be quite frustrating. As a subject relaxes and his mind goes blank, his brain waves start to enter the alpha range. Then the tone comes on and, of course, the subject notices it. But this disturbs his alpha state, so the tone stops. At this learning stage, the feedback seems to defeat its own purpose. After several trials, however, the tone no longer disrupts the subject's relaxed state; it fades into the background, like a refrigerator's hum, and one learns to hear it without listening to it.

Kamiya's discovery was significant and far-reaching, but it took on extra drama and intrigue when he pointed out that the mental discipline necessary to maintain an alpha state was connected with Zen and yoga meditation. Prior research at Tokyo University had shown that Zen meditators increased their alpha as they began meditation; and the more experienced Zen masters showed the most pronounced increase.

So Kamiya tried his alpha-feedback technique on seven practiced Zen meditators and found, not surprisingly, that they. learned alpha control much faster than his other subjects did.

Yoga masters, too, have prominent alpha waves. At New Delhi's All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, students with naturally high alpha levels do better in their yoga training than students who have lower alpha levels to start with. (A high alpha level does not necessarily mean that the alpha wave is strong but that it is present much of the time, and in a large proportion of the brain.)

These findings inspired writers to report, a couple of years ago, that scientists had discovered the brain state corresponding to satori, and that we could now reach that state with a machine.

Such sensational speculations are easy to criticize, but, as a matter of fact, they may not be far from the truth. There are many striking similarities between the alpha state, as scientists understand it, and various meditative states as they have been described by mystics.

For one thing, their basic methods and aims are similar. Ramana Maharshi has said that the aim of yoga is "the cessation of mental activities," a phrase that could just as easily describe the aim of alpha training. In order to reach alpha, one must block all distractions. To accomplish this difficult task, some people center their attention on a single focus and come back to it whenever they find that their minds have wandered. This centering soon becomes automatic and effortless and alpha waves begin to appear.

Similarly, all forms of meditation use centering devices designed to reduce distractions. A beginning Zen student is told to concentrate on his breathing and to return his attention to it when his mind wanders. A Zen master will dwell on an irrational riddle, or koan, such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or "What did I look like before my parents met?" Yogis may concentrate on a visual center--a mandala--or on a point at the center of the body. And in transcendental meditation, everyone has his own mantra, a phrase or sound (such as "Om") that he repeats over and over during meditation. Borrowing from that vocabulary, the instruction manual for a popular home alpha machine states that "the tone of the Toomim Alpha Pacer may be used as an effective mantra."

Considered in this light, all the stereotyped practices of the meditator--sitting in a prescribed posture, contemplating the navel, burning incense and renouncing all worldly desires--act to reduce potential disturbances and therefore to increase the likelihood of alpha waves.

Although a distracting stimulus will block alpha, a constant, unchanging one will facilitate it. This happens through a mechanism called habituation. We tune out anything that is familiar and repetitious. When someone is in the alpha state while a bell sounds, his alpha will block, giving way to faster, low-voltage beta waves. Alpha waves then return a few seconds later. When the bell sounds a second time, alpha blocks again but resumes sooner. Each time the bell rings, alpha blocks less and less, until eventually it is not disturbed at all.

Undeniably, habituation has its benefits--one can read this article, for example, without being distracted by the shape of the letters on the page, the feel of the clothes on one's back or the sounds of traffic outside. But habituation also causes a certain sensory impoverishment; it restricts awareness and makes one miss the rich, changing subtleties of the sensory environment.

Meditators can apparently override this automatic tuning-out mechanism. The Zen master responds to the 20th bell ring with the same attention he paid to the first. In technical terms, his alpha block does not habituate. This seems to corroborate Zen Buddhists' frequent claims that they reach a state of "perpetual here and now" with meditation and can "look at the world with a fresh eye, as if seeing it for the first time." Research on yogis shows that alpha is not blocked at all, even if lights flash or gongs sound or the skin is touched with a hot test tube.

Could the rest of us learn to reach this painless yogic oblivion with biofeedback? It may well be possible, and Erik Peper has done some promising research at the College of Mount St. Vincent indicating that if a person can learn to produce a strong, stable alpha rhythm he may be able to withstand a painful stimulus, such as a dentist's drill.

What's amazing, finally, is not so much that we can obtain fine physiological control with biofeedback devices but that Zen and yoga disciples have been able to do it for centuries without machines. The only explanation is that they are able to quiet their conscious minds so completely as to detect faint internal signals the rest of us can never hear without electronic amplification.

Neal Miller found an analogous effect in his rats. Normal animals could not learn to control their heart rates nearly as well as could rats injected with curare. The paralysis in the drugged rats apparently eliminated their muscular distractions and allowed them to attend to the subtle signals coming from their hearts. (Miller reports that in the past two years, researchers have been unable to teach rats the same degree of heart-rate control that was obtained in earlier experiments. He is now investigating the possibility that in the past few years there may have been changes in the quality of curare available to researchers or in the strain of rats supplied by breeding houses. At any rate, the new difficulties do not change the earlier conclusion that the heart is not an involuntary muscle.)

• • •

I once asked Dr. Barbara Brown, chief of the experiential-physiology lab at the Sepulveda, California, VA hospital, whether there were noticeable personality differences between people with naturally high and naturally low alpha levels. She paused a few seconds, then asked, "Do you know what your alpha-wave level is?"

"Not really," I said. "The machines I've tried so far weren't very good."

"Well, then I can answer the question without hurting your feelings," she laughed. "In general, people who tend toward a lot of alpha in their EEGs are dull, uninteresting, unimaginative, hardworking, plugging-along, ordinary people. And that's the truth. One finds this in everyday lab experience. All you have to do is look at an EEG record and you can tell what kind of personality the person has."

This doesn't mean that a person who trains with an alpha machine will definitely become the dullard Dr. Brown describes--and many researchers would consider her generalizations exaggerated--but there is no guarantee that he won't, either.

Certainly, many people find the alpha experience quite pleasant, and they understandably wish to increase the amount of time they are in alpha. But there are many ways to do this. Just sitting quietly and thinking of nothing will result in a significant increase in alpha. Defocusing the eyes will do it, too, as will training in deep muscle relaxation. Many people can increase their alpha waves by simply rolling their eyes upward as far as possible. (This, by the way, is the position assumed by some yoga meditators when concentrating on the ajana, or "third eye.") "If all you want to do is have lots of alpha." said Dr. Brown sarcastically, "you can stuff yourself full of marijuana, or be a chronic LSD user, a heroin addict, a depressive schizophrenic, or have specific kinds of behavioral problems."

You can also use an alpha-feedback machine. Unfortunately, on many cheaper machines the tone will respond not only to alpha but also to theta or muscle tension. Dr. Brown says that one man who had been training on a home alpha machine recently volunteered to demonstrate his abilities on her laboratory EEG machine. When the man went into the state he called his alpha, nothing came through the EEG but exaggerated eye movements. The man's machine had been responding to his muscle potential, and by trying to "keep the tone on." he had taught himself a pronounced eye tremor.

Sometimes the consequences can be more serious. Some of the brain waves associated with epileptic seizures will trigger many alpha machines. A potentially epileptic person who tries to keep the tone on may be horribly surprised if he succeeds.

After my conversation with Dr. Brown, I tried alpha feedback on the sophisticated research machine in her laboratory. It told me not only when alpha was present but also how strong it was and where in the brain it was coming from. I loved it. After the extended session I felt very relaxed, very good. I would recommend the experience to anyone.

But while the session made me feel good, being in alpha, as such, was not necessarily the source of the good feelings. First of all, there was an exhilarating feeling of self-mastery. Realizing that I could control my own brain waves was thrilling. The pleasure was in doing it, in turning alpha on and off at will. But staying in alpha was boring. I don't like enforced mental inactivity. Others do, apparently, and for them an alpha machine can be a splendid enforcer.

Also, I'm sure the power of suggestion colored my reactions. We are told that the alpha state is quiet, tranquil, pleasant. So whenever the feedback signal came on, I thought, "Ah, it's working. I'm relaxing. The machine says so." And so I relaxed. The power of suggestion plays an essential part in the alpha experience. Research at the Bedford, Massachusetts, VA hospital has shown that before a person will state that an alpha-feedback tone is associated with pleasant feelings, two conditions must be present: (1) The tone must really be linked to the person's alpha and (2) he must be led to expect that the tone will be correlated with a pleasant inner state. The absence of either of these conditions has resulted in subjects' reporting that the experience was not pleasant.

Stating that the alpha experience makes you relax is misleading. It implies that a subject somehow makes his brain cells fire at eight to 13 cps and, as a result, he relaxes. Actually, the reverse is more accurately the case. The alpha experience is relaxing, but it is not that alpha waves as such cause you to relax. Rather, you must relax in order to achieve the alpha state. Since a session with an alpha machine is really nothing more than a period of monitored relaxation, people emerging from the experience can feel no way but relaxed.

The confusion comes from the understandable tendency to summarize biofeedback's advances in quick and easy terms. We say that a person has learned voluntary control of his heart rate or skin temperature, which leaves the impression that he can somehow flex his ventricles like biceps, open and close his blood vessels at will and direct his blood How. Actually, he does not directly learn to control his heart or his blood vessels or his alpha waves; he learns only to keep the tone on. He does this, first, by trying to detect some internal event--a thought, an image, a feeling--that seems to correlate with the tone, and then by concentrating on that event to reproduce it as often as possible. At this point, when one knows what it feels like to slow his heart, lower his blood pressure or enter the alpha state, the feedback machine is no longer needed and the person can continue his physiological control unaided.

• • •

It is unfortunate that so much attention has been focused on ways to achieve the alpha state, because some of the most exciting biofeedback research deals with methods for avoiding it.

Tom Mulholland, past chairman of the Biofeedback Research Society, has suggested that automobile drivers and heavy-machinery operators might wear an "alertometer," which would sound an alarm whenever their brains drifted into alpha. In a more immediate application, Mulholland is using this approach with children who have learning difficulties often accompanied by short attention spans. He has developed a teaching machine with a slide projector that throws an image only when the student is in beta, meaning that his attention is strongly focused. When the child's brain waves slip into alpha, the machine stops until he is again attentive and ready to continue.

Advertising agencies are using these principles to test the effectiveness of their commercials: Any ad that doesn't block alpha is obviously ineffective.

A few years ago, Barry Sterman, chief of the neuropsychology lab at the Sepulveda VA hospital, noticed that when cats stand very still, the waves in the sensorimotor part of their brains are predominantly 12-14 cps. When he trained cats to produce this frequency to get a food reward, they became quiet and still, even when injected with a drug that ordinarily produces convulsive seizures. Since then, Sterman has trained three epileptic patients to generate this 12-14-cps wave and says that their seizures diminished markedly and their day-to-day EEG patterns have become more normal. He cautions that controlled studies must yet be done, but at this point the research is very promising; this is the first report of a lasting change in a person's EEG as a result of biofeedback.

Other researchers are studying theta waves, the four-to-eight-cps frequencies that seem to be associated with drowsiness, reverie, recall, creativity and the experience of "expanded consciousness" associated with LSD trips. As Elmer Green describes it: "There is a door to your inner self which is locked under normal circumstances. LSD is one of the keys to this door, but it throws you directly into an uncharted, unexplored world, unable to control how far in you go and how fast you get there. Thus, the 'bum trips.' With feedback, you enter slowly, feel your way around and proceed a step at a time. And you can turn around and come back out any time you so desire."

Green and his wife are studying the relationship of theta waves to hypnagogic imagery, which is defined as "pictures or words that are not consciously generated or manipulated but which spring into the mind full-blown." Many people experience these images just as they are falling asleep; when these images occur, their EEGs are likely to register theta waves.

August Kekulé, a German chemist, once dreamed of atoms undulating in a snakelike chain. Suddenly, one of the snakes held its own tail in its mouth. The image led Kekulé to postulate the existence of the benzene ring, which has been called the most brilliant piece of prediction in organic chemistry.

Niels Bohr's conception of the structure of the atom, the invention of lead shot for shotguns and Elias Howe's sewing machine--all came to their creators as hypnagogic images.

Robert Louis Stevenson regularly used this state of mind to generate tales such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He would drift into reverie and command "the brownies" of his mind to furnish him with a story while he slept. He could even return to this state later to change an unsatisfactory ending.

Of course, we don't know the nature of these men's brain waves at the moment of their creative insights, but from what we have learned about hypnagogic imagery, it's probable that they were theta waves.

It's been very difficult to study the theta state and hypnagogic imagery in the past, because we don't stay in theta very long; we usually pass through it briefly on the way to sleep.

The Greens have developed an ingenious instrument to overcome this problem. Their feedback machine has been devised so that each brain-wave frequency has its own musical tone: The fast beta waves sound like a piccolo, alpha sounds like a flute, theta like an oboe and delta like a bassoon. (Green says that in grant proposals he sometimes claims he will try to train subjects to play The Star-Spangled Banner with this brain-wave orchestra, in hope that Government granting agencies will be encouraged to release more funds for research.) The machine will even record the information from the left and right sides of the brain and feed it back in stereo--the music of the hemispheres. In theta training, the machine feeds back only the oboe sound of theta.

To keep a subject from passing through theta into sleep, Green added an imaginative secondary feedback trigger. Whenever alpha disappears for 30 seconds, a bell automatically sounds to rouse the subject. In this way, he can remain in a predominantly theta state for extended periods of time. He can observe his unconscious images, surface to consciousness and report on them, and then return to theta.

"Alpha is normally being aware and theta is being unaware," Green says. "And if you can learn to stay in the phase where both waves are present, you may become aware of normally unconscious material. Apparently a certain amount of alpha must be present so that a person can bring the hypnagogic images over to consciousness."

Green's studies with Swami Rama shed some light on this point. After several periods of practice with the feedback machine, the swami announced that he would produce delta waves in the laboratory. No adult had ever shown slow delta waves while awake; they are present only in deep sleep. Yet the swami was able to produce delta waves during a prearranged period of 25 minutes, then waken and report accurately on what had happened in the room while he was asleep. The relevant point is that the swami's record never reached above 40 percent delta; the rest of the time was spent about equally in the other brain waves. Green speculates that it's necessary to retain some alpha in order to be aware of what is happening on the unconscious stage, but not so much that unconscious levels are lost.

Charles Tart, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, suggests an easy way to study hypnagogic imagery at home: "Lie flat on your back, as if going to sleep, but keep your arm in a vertical position, balanced on the elbow, so that it stays up with a minimum of effort. You can slip fairly far into the hypnagogic state this way, getting material, but as you go further, muscle tone suddenly decreases, your arm falls and you awaken immediately."

Will people trained by theta feedback become more creative and generate great inventions or Nobel Prize-winning insights? Green is reluctant to say while his research is still going on. And Barbara Brown, who was delightfully candid about much of her biofeedback work, was circuitous and noncommittal when asked about her ongoing theta-training studies.

Most researchers have become restrained when speaking to reporters. They have seen too many impossible headlines ("Turn on with Alpha"; "Think your Headaches away") that make biofeedback sound like vitamin C or copper bracelets.

Of all the major researchers, none has received more publicity than Joe Kamiya, the man who first demonstrated voluntary control of alpha waves. For a while he seemed to revel in the publicity and was free with his speculations to reporters. He talked about eventually curing nearly every bodily illness through biofeedback. He no longer speaks so freely. "There's been too much publicity for me," he said, "and I feel as though my work is not yet really ready for presentation." He is concerned that his colleagues will regard him as a publicity seeker: "I, more than any of the others in the field, have been behind in my [professional] publications." Now Kamiya is even discounting the potential of alpha control. "By itself," he has said, "alpha feedback is not a useful therapeutic tool at this time." And Neal Miller adds, "Learning the skills of alpha control may have no more significance than learning to move one's ears."

Some traditional scientists resent the fact that researchers who have lately hopped onto the biofeedback band wagon are concentrating on the most spectacular areas of study rather than helping to work out the background parameters that will define biofeedback's scope and limits. As Peter Lang put it: "A lot of people are going for the throat before they know where it is."

Finally, Miller fears that the public will expect too much too soon: "This exaggerated optimism may lead to inevitable disillusionment which will prevent the hard work that has to be done to see what therapeutic value, if any, there is in this approach."

So, publicly, biofeedback researchers have become cautious, underselling their own discoveries. But they certainly haven't given up their experiments and hundreds of other scientists have joined them. Between 1969 and 1972, the Biofeedback Research Society grew from about 20 members to over 300.

There's little wonder that biofeedback has been sensationalized by the press: It is sensational, one of the most exciting new fields in science. We can now explore objectively those obscure, dimly comprehended states of consciousness that have been talked about for centuries by yogis and mystics, and more recently by hypnotists and acidheads.

The possibilities in medicine are overwhelming. Once one understands the basics of biofeedback, the speculations seem to pour forth. Can we control heart rate and blood pressure? Then perhaps we can prevent deaths from heart disease. Can we control brain waves? Then perhaps we can control epilepsy, personality disorders and learning deficiencies. Can we overcome the alpha-blocking response? Then we may learn to ignore pain. Can we control blood flow? Then we may be able to teach a man to have an erection at will, or to kill a cancerous growth by starving it of its needed blood supply. Someday, perhaps, the ancient dictum will be changed to "Patient, heal thyself."

And, potentially most significant, many physicians estimate that about 80 percent of human ailments are at least partly psychosomatic. If the mind can make the body sick, perhaps it can also make it healthy. This concept means not only that abnormal disorders can be treated but that everyone's general health can be raised to new levels. So someday we may all be taking courses in psychosomatic health. If so, biofeedback researchers are already building the teaching machines that will be used in the classroom.