Mind Modulations has something new coming in from Germany:

The release of the much anticipated Emotiv Systems Epoc is delayed until next year, according to Big Download. They were told by a Emotiv PR representative that the device is being delayed so that it works as planned when released.

 

The new release date will be sometime in 2009.

I just saw this on the great blog 'Neuro Philosophy'.

Two researchers from the Center for Brain and Cognition have found a rare new form of synaesthesia that they have labeled 'tactile-emotion synaesthesia'. They have found two individual cases of patients experiencing specific emotions whenever touching particular textures! The feeling of denim, in one of the cases, caused strong feelings of depression and disgust.


Abstract:


We discuss experiments on two individuals in whom specific textures (e.g., denim, wax, sandpaper, silk, etc.) evoked equally distinct emotions (e.g., depression, embarrassment, relief, and contentment, respectively). The test/retest consistency after 8 months was 100%. A video camera recorded subjects' facial expressions and skin conductance responses (SCR) were monitored as they palpated different textures. Evaluators' ratings significantly correlated with the valence of synesthetes' subjective reports, and SCR was significantly enhanced for negative synesthetic emotions. We suggest this effect arises from increased cross-activation between somatosensory cortex and insula for 'basic' emotions and fronto-limbic hyperactivation for more subtle emotions. It may represent an enhancement of pre-existing evolutionarily primitive interactions between touch and emotions.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18821168

HOBSON'S CHOICE

Can Freud's Theory of Dreams Hold Up Against Modern Neuroscience?

 

It wasn’t until the 1950s, fifty years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams,that scientists began bringing people into their labs for sleepovers. They’d spray water on them, or rub their faces with cotton puffs, or ring a bell and then wake them up and see what happened. Volunteers were kept up for days and watched closely, to see whether or not they’d go insane. The early experiments were crude and often conducted by psychiatrists trained in Freudian theory. One prominent researcher studied sexual dream symbols by attempting to correlate erections (he wrapped a nooselike device around the sleeper’s penis) with aggressive dream content, like dog- and snakebites, knife fights, and scenes of choking. He was able to correctly predict tumescence seven times out of eight.

Other researchers took a sociological approach to dreams, meticulously cataloging their content: women dream of men more than men dream of women; black people are more likely to be physically damaged in their dreams than white people; 80 percent of adult dreams have a negative component—their hair looks bad or they can’t find their keys or their kid won’t stop crying—and after ninth grade, children’s dreams become significantly more aggressive.

The field of dream research deals with the worst kind of data: reported by groggy volunteers, grasping at half-formed memories. Once you wake someone up, you’ve already interfered with the evidence. Hobson’s Activation-Synthesis model was so well received, in part, because it was based on neuroscience, not subjective reports. Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who is well known for her research on how dreams affect mood, recalls first hearing Hobson propose his model at a conference in the early ’70s. “A bunch of us were sitting next to each other and we said, ‘You got it the wrong way around! We won’t let your physiological tail wave our psychological dream-dog!’ I used to say about Allan, ‘Oh the trouble is, he’s looking at cell recordings, he’s not talking to people—if he were paying attention to his own dreams, he would be smarter at it.’ When he did start paying attention to these things, I felt he modified his ideas a good deal.”

Only in recent years has Hobson become willing to talk more about the part of dreams that most people are interested in—feelings, symbols, characters, themes. After waking up from a particularly vivid nightmare, few of us are wondering, What part of my brain was just functioning? With practice and the help of a Nightcap (a bandanna device that beeps every few hours, wakes you up, then records whatever you say about your interrupted dream), Hobson began focusing more on the softer side of his field. “I love to talk about my dreams,” he said at the consciousness conference last year. “I’m not sure any of it really makes any difference, or that I learn anything I didn’t know, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to do.”

His enthusiasm for dreams became even more pronounced when, for a startling month in 2001, he lost the ability to have them. While vacationing in Monte Carlo, Hobson suffered a stroke that affected the precise part of the brain stem that he began his career studying. He knew how his body would respond because he had done countless experiments on how damage to this area affects lab cats. He became nauseous, lost balance, and felt he was drowning in his own saliva. For eight days, he lost the ability to fall asleep. For a month, he couldn’t dream. He felt himself becoming psychotic with exhaustion. Like Freud, inventor of the talking cure, dying of oral cancer, Hobson seemed to have the perfect affliction. “I was wide awake all night long,” he recalls. “I said to myself, I am a cat. I am an experimental animal. But this is no experiment.”


Click 'Read More' below for the rest.

EEG coherence effects of audio-visual stimulation (AVS) at dominant and twice dominant alpha frequency

Jon A. Frederick, Ph.D.* DeAnna L. Timmermann, Ph.D.** Harold L. Russell, Ph.D.*** Joel F. Lubar, Ph.D.****

Journal of Neurotherapy, In Press

*Corresponding author. Center for Computational Biomedicine, University of Texas Houston Health Science Center, 7000 Fannin Suite 600, Houston, TX 77030. (713) 500-3464, email: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

**Department of Psychology, Eastern Oregon University, One University Avenue, LaGrande, OR 97850.

***P.O. Box 240, Galveston, TX, 77553.

****Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, 307 Austin Peay, Knoxville, TN 37996.



SUMMARY. The effects of a single session of audio-visual stimulation (AVS) at the dominant alpha rhythm and twice-dominant alpha frequency on EEG coherence were studied in 23 subjects. An eyes-closed baseline EEG determined each subject's dominant alpha frequency. Subjects were stimulated at their dominant alpha frequency or at twice dominant alpha frequency for twenty minutes, while EEG was recorded in 5-minute intervals. A post-session baseline was recorded 30 minutes after each session. AVS decreased coherence in the intrahemispheric projections from the occipital region and the parietal midline, and generally increased coherence, with few exceptions, among all other longitudinal pairs. Interhemispheric coherence increased posteriorily and high frequencies, and tended to decrease frontally and low frequencies. Alpha AVS was more effective than twice-alpha AVS at producing interhemispheric synchronization, and tended to produce more effects overall. Although main effects of frequency and time were observed, when individual coherence pairs changed, they almost always changed in only one direction. Overall coherence was greater during the first ten minutes than the last ten minutes, and greatest in the beta 1 and delta 2 bands, and lowest in the alpha and delta 1 bands. Few, if any, significant effects persisted into the post-stimulation baseline. A new method of assessing the effects of multiple comparisons on experimentwise error, based on randomization theory, is proposed and implemented.


Click 'Read More' below for the rest

From T3

Mind-controlled Nintendo Wii 2.0 set to rock Mario's console galaxy?

The Nintendo Wii may have revolutionised gaming but we wouldn't bet against it further upping-the-ante, should a mind-controlled Wii 2.0 ever grace our living rooms.

Our awesome artist's impressions, part of the future tech feature in the new issue of T3 Magazine, showcase a Wii headset accessory that uses brainwaves to control characters and also feature immersive in-ear headphones. Sweet.

We've also imagined a streamlined Wii Remote with just the one button. You point and press, your frontal lobes do the rest.

Brain-wave technology is already becoming a reality with Emotiv pioneering in-game systems, but our crystal ball of gadge is advising us to stick a few quid on Nintendo knocking-out the first mind-controlled console on the market.

Hopefully we'll have more info on this soon. Some more images:

   

By Andrew Webb

Technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have developed technology to translate thoughts into musical notes.

The Brain Computer Interface for Music requires electrodes to be attached to the head.

They pick up electrical impulses from the brain which are passed through an electroencephalography (EEG) machine and analysed.

The man behind the project, Dr Mick Grierson, demonstrated the system to BBC News.

When musical notes flash the scientist stares at the display while thinking of a note he wants to play.

When the same note appears it unconsciously triggers a change in his brain activity - a change registered by the computer he was plugged into.

"After a while it will make a decision about which note I am thinking about and it tries to play it," he said.

Dr Grierson has run trials in which 6 out of 8 notes played were the same as those being thought of.

From Engadget:

 

Hey you. Yeah, you, listen in close; we've seen the future here at CeBIT. If you thought that the idea of controlling your gaming rig with only your mind was just a bit too Tomorrowland, then you haven't laid eyes on the "brain-computer interface" developed by Austria's Guger Tecnologies (g.tec).

We're happy to report that in a game of thought-control vs. Engadget man-editor, we were totally pwned at Pong. 10-to-4 if you must know. Our competition sat smug in his stool thinking about where he wanted his paddle to go, as we flailed about helpless with mouse and keyboard in a wake of alpha waves. At least we didn't have to smear gel on our scalp and wear a funny hat -- ha! The system works by cleverly measuring fluctuations in electrical voltage in the brain and then translating them into computer commands. The technology has already been commercialized into the size of an iPAQ Pocket PC for hospitals and research institutes. It costs about $5,000 with a 99 - 100% level of accuracy for "trained subjects." We had our hat handed to us by a person who just started using the system, yesterday. Hell, that's a shorter learning curve than Graffiti.

Although the technology shows great promise in controlling prosthetics and assisting the disabled with communications, we found ourselves (and our new best scientist friends, Christoph Guger and Ingo Niedermayer) eagerly discussing its use as a Second Life controller and of course, in robotics. Be sure to click the read link below for all the details; check the gallery for the gore.

link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/16/g-tecs-thought-control-hat/

From the New York Times:

  

There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.


What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

 


Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University showed a computer screen grid of nine numbers to six chimpanzees. The chimps were previously trained to recognize the ascending nature of the numbers. They were also shown to nine college students. When subjects touched one of the numbers, all of the others vanished. They then had to touch the squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

When the numbers flashed for just four-tenths of a second or less, one of the chimps beat all of the college students.

Here's the press release from 'Current Biology', a publication of Cell Press:

This is a great article from the now defunct Canadian magazine 'HorizonZero'. The zine was a multimedia web magazine about digital art and culture in Canada. This article is from issue 15 published in 2004 - but this is the first time I've seen it. This article was written by Andrew Brouse.

You can check out the other issues at http://www.horizonzero.ca

 

A Young Person's Guide to Brainwave Music
Forty years of audio from the human EEG
by Andrew Brouse

It is mid-August 2003. In the midst of a sweltering heat wave, James Fung and other students of University of Toronto "Cyberman" professor Steve Mann are hectically preparing sophisticated electronic and computer technology for a unique sonic and visual event: an improvised collective musical piece created interactively from the brainwaves of audience participants. REGEN3: Regenerative Brainwave Music will be orchestrated by feeding tiny micro-voltages gathered from forty wired performers into a responsive EEG network: a "cyborg collective" comprising the cybernetic interactions between performers, musicians, electronics, and computing machines. Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, would be impressed.


Unfortunately, the planned performance coincides with the largest blackout in North America's history. Major cities from New York to Toronto are effectively shut down. Pre-empted by the failure of a far more massive network - the North American power grid - this networked performance of music and minds has to wait for another day.


Music of the Mind


Two weeks later on August 30, 2003, Steve Mann and James Fung do manage to gather together the needed human energies to present REGEN3 / Regenerative Brainwave Music. [http://regen.eyetap.org Using hardware from Thought Technology [www.thoughttechnology.com and the PD interactive programming environment, [www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software the brainwaves of the audience-performers are channelled into the creation of an interactive sonic and visual environment, where the participants' brainwave patterns create the music and lighting effects for the evening.


Readers having sensations of déjà-vu are not entirely mistaken: this event was only the most recent salient example in the history of brainwave music in which diligent visionary individuals, artists and scientists, have worked together to synthesize hybrid works of art-science. Since 1965, when Alvin Lucier composed the first piece of music using human brainwaves as a generative source, brainwave music has undergone a fascinating evolution. To fully appreciate the directions this music is taking today, it is helpful to reflect upon the history of bioelectricity, brainwaves, and the context in which brainwave music has evolved.


Bioelectricity


Brainwaves are a form of "bioelectricity", or electrical phenomena in animals or plants. The history of research into bioelectricity began around 1780 with Luigi Galvani, who discovered that he could cause muscles in a frog's leg to contract by applying an electrical current to exposed nerves. This work was followed by that of Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond, considered the founder of modern electrophysiology, who in the 1840s began to measure biological currents in electric fish and later in humans via electrodes embedded directly in his own arm.


In 1875 the British neurophysiologist Richard Caton succeeded in measuring brain electrical activity using electrodes implanted directly in the brain tissue of rabbits and monkeys. At the time, it was not believed to be possible to extract meaningful data by measuring more non-invasively, with electrodes placed on the human scalp. (Electrical implants directly into the brain were not widely used on humans for obvious ethical reasons.)


History of Brainwaves


Human brainwaves were first measured in 1924 by Hans Berger, at the time an unknown German psychiatrist. He termed these electrical measurements the "electroencephalogram" (EEG), which literally means "brain electricity writing". Berger published his brainwave results in 1929 as Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen ("On the Electroencephalogram of Man"). The English translation did not appear until 1969.


Berger is a complex and enigmatic figure in the history of medical science. He had a lifelong obsession with finding scientific proof of a causal linkage between the psychical world of human consciousness and the physiological world of neurological electrical signals. He pursued this quest in the most methodical, disciplined scientific manner possible, determined to explain observed telepathic phenomena in terms of theories of the conservation of energy. Yet Berger's belief in this hypothesis stemmed not from his research itself, but from a personal subjective experience. Berger had almost died in an accident in his youth. The very same day he received a sudden unexpected telegram from his family inquiring into his health. Berger believed that his family had received some sort of telepathic communication from him at his moment of near-death.


Sonification of Brainwaves


Initially, Berger's work was largely ignored. It was not until five years after his first paper was published (when E.D. Adrian and B.H.C. Mathews verified Berger's results) that his discovery began to draw attention. In their 1934 article in the journal Brain [http://brain.oupjournals.org , Adrian and Matthews also reported successfully audifying and listening to human brainwaves which they had recorded according to Berger's methods. This was the first example of the "sonification" of human brainwaves for auditory display.


Music from Brainwaves


If we accept that the perception of an act as art is what makes it art, then the first instance of the use of brainwaves to generate music did not occur until 1965. Alvin Lucier [http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/ had begun working with physicist Edmond Dewan in 1964, performing experiments that used brainwaves to create sound. The next year, he was inspired to compose a piece of music using brainwaves as the sole generative source. Music for Solo Performer was presented, with encouragement from John Cage, at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in 1965. Lucier performed this piece several more times over the next few years, but did not continue to use EEG in his own compositions.



Spacecraft


In the late 1960s, Richard Teitelbaum [http://inside.bard.edu/teitelbaum was a member of the innovative Rome-based live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV). In performances of Spacecraft (1967) he used various biological signals including brain (EEG) and cardiac (EKG) signals as control sources for electronic synthesizers. Over the next few years, Teitelbaum continued to use EEG and other biological signals in his compositions and experiments as triggers for nascent Moog electronic synthesizers.


Ecology of the Skin


Then in the late 1960s, another composer, David Rosenboom [http://music.calarts.edu/~david/ , began to use EEG signals to generate music. In 1970-71 Rosenboom composed and performed Ecology of the Skin, in which ten live EEG performer-participants interactively generated immersive sonic/visual environments using custom-made electronic circuits. Around the same time, Rosenboom founded the Laboratory of Experimental Aesthetics at York University in Toronto, which encouraged pioneering collaborations between scientists and artists. For the better part of the 1970s, the laboratory undertook experimentation and research into the artistic possibilities of brainwaves and other biological signals in cybernetic biofeedback artistic systems. Many artists and musicians visited and worked at the facility during this time including John Cage, David Behrman, LaMonte Young, and Marian Zazeela. Some of the results of the work at this lab were published in the book Biofeedback and the Arts (Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, 1976). A more recent 1990 monograph by Rosenboom, Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System [ http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/MONOGRAPHS/ROSENBOOM/rosenboom.html , remains the definitive theoretical document in this area.


Simultaneously, Manford Eaton was also building electronic circuits to experiment with biological signals at Orcus Research in Kansas City. He initially published an article titled Biopotentials as Control Data for Spontaneous Music (Orcus) in 1968. Then, in 1971, Eaton first published his manifesto Bio-Music: Biological Feedback Experiential Music Systems (Orcus; republished in 1974 by Something Else Press), arguing for completely new biologically generated forms of music and experience.



Corticalart


In France, scientist Roger Lafosse was doing research into brainwave systems and proposed, along with musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry, a sophisticated live performance system known as Corticalart (art from the cerebral cortex). In a series of free performances done in 1971, along with generated electronic sounds, one saw a television image of Henry in dark sunglasses with electrodes hanging from his head, projected so that the content of his brainwaves changed the colour of the image according to his brainwave patterns.


Brain-Computer Interface


Unbeknownst to these various composers, Jacques Vidal, a computer science researcher at UCLA, was working to develop the first direct brain-computer interface (BCI) using a batch-processing IBM computer. In 1973, he published Toward Direct Brain-Computer Communication (Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering Vol. 2). Incidentally, the computer used in Vidal's research was one of the nodes on the nascent Arpanet, precursor to the Internet. Vidal has recently revisited this field in his speculative 1998 article Cyberspace Bionics. [www.cs.ucla.edu/~vidal/bionics.html



Burst of Alpha


Throughout most of the 1970s there was a burst of activity in brainwave music and art. Parallel to the work in Toronto, the Montréal group SONDE, along with Charles de Mestral, did some brainwave performances. At Logos in Ghent, Belgium, real-time brainwave triggered concerts were presented in 1972 and 1973. In Baltimore the Peabody Electronic Music Consort did performances. Rosenboom and others continued their work at Mills College.


Toward the end of the 1970s, biofeedback and brainwave research fell into a period of quiescence due to many factors, primarily a lack of funding and of sufficiently powerful computers. Almost nothing happened in the field for about ten years.


BioMuse


Then in 1990 two scientists, Benjamin Knapp and Hugh Lusted, began working on a computer interface called the BioMuse. [www.biocontrol.com/biomuse.html It permitted a human to control certain computer functions via bioelectric signals including EEG and EMG (electromyogram: a measure of muscle-related bioelectricity). In 1992, Atau Tanaka [www.sensorband.com/atau/ was commissioned by Knapp and Lusted to compose and perform music using the BioMuse as a controller. Tanaka continued to use the BioMuse, primarily as an EMG controller, in live performances throughout the 1990s. In 1996, Knapp and Lusted wrote an article for Scientific American about the BioMuse called Controlling Computers with Neural Signals. [www.absoluterealtime.com/resume/SciAmBioCtl.pdf



Current Work


During the past five years or so there has been a renewed interest in brainwave music and a resurgence in its performance. Much of this new work is naive in the sense that the musicians are not fully cognisant of the rich history of brainwave music and research which has preceded them. There has also been something of a bifurcation between those using hobbyist "biofeedback" equipment or techniques and those preferring to take a more rigorous "scientific" approach. Nonetheless, current advances in Brain-Computer Interface technology, along with advanced digital signal processing and more sophisticated aesthetic theoretical foundations, will inevitably drive the field forward into a new era of possibilities and music not yet imagined.


Below is a sampling of some of the new and promising projects currently underway.


Music and Art


Artist/musician Neam Cathode showed Cyber Mondrian [www.oboro.net/archive/exhib0001/neam/neam.html at Montreal's Oboro Gallery in 2001. This work incorporated Mondrian-like generated images with synthesized sound that was controlled using the Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer or IBVA system. [www.ibva.com

New York improviser David First created OPERATION: KRACPOT [http://davidfirst.com/krac.html in 2002 using "brainwave entrainement" and the phenomenon of the Schumann resonances [www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Schumann.html to create haunting music.


Paras Kaul, the so-called "Brain Wave Chick", [www.brainwavechick.com/ has been using the IBVA system in her own brainwave music at George Mason University for many years.

Adam Overton, a student of David Rosenboom at CalArts, has very recently performed his series of works entitled Sitting.Breathing.Series and Other Biometric Work. [ http://www.calarts.edu/~aoverton/projects/Sitting.Breathing/


Andrew Brouse, the author of this article, created his InterHarmonium [www.music.mcgill.ca/~brouse/interharmonium in 2001. This Internet-enabled brainwave performance system uses Max/MSP [www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp.html and OpenSoundControl [http://cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/ software.


BCI Research


Jessica Bayliss has a background in music technology, and has been working on Brain-Computer Interfaces for real-time control of computers at the Rochester Institute of Technology. [www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/bci.sigproc.html


Eduardo Miranda runs the Neuromusic lab at the University of Plymouth, [http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/neuromusic.html where researchers are trying to further earlier research into brainwave music using the latest advances in Brain-Computer Interfaces.


There are other active BCI research projects at universities around the world, including the University of British Columbia, [www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm the Wadsworth Centre [www.bciresearch.org in Albany, the University of Tubingen, [www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/tci/ and the University of Technology Graz. [www.dpmi.tu-graz.ac.at/bci.htm


Andrew Brouse is a multidisciplinary musician, composer, artist, and technologist. He has worked in the contemporary intermedia arts and music for over fifteen years. He currently lives in Montreal.

 

The following is a study used lucid dreamers to determine the subjective measurement of time in dreams - by Daniel Erlacher and Michael
Schredl from Germany.

Time required for motor activity in lucid dreams

Daniel Erlacher - Institute for Sport and Sport Science, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Michael Schredl - Sleep laboratory, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany

Summary

The present study investigated the relationship between the required time for specific tasks (counting and performing squats) in lucid dreams and in the waking state. Five proficient lucid dreamers (26-34 years old, M = 29.8, SD = 3.0; one woman and four men) participated in this study. The results showed that the time needed for counting in a lucid dream is comparable to the time needed for counting in wakefulness, but motor activities required more time in lucid dreams than in the waking state.

Introduction

The relationship between subjectively estimated time in dreams and real time has intrigued scientists for centuries (cf. Hall, 1981). Maury (1861) reported a long and intense dream about the French revolution which ended with the dreamer in the guillotine and the sleeper waking up with a piece of his wooden bed top having fallen on his neck. Because of the logical line of dream action, Maury (1861) hypothesized that the dream was generated backwards by the arousing stimulus. Nowadays, the hypothesis is widely accepted that the subjectively experienced time in dreams corresponds with the actual time (overview: Schredl, 2000). This relationship was first experimentally demonstrated by Dement and Kleitman (1957). In this study, the participants were awakened in a random order either after 5 or 15 minutes of REM sleep. After awakening, participants were asked to estimate whether the elapsed sleep interval was 5 or 15 minutes. From 111 awakenings, 83 % judgments were correct. Furthermore, the elapsed time of the REM period correlated with the length of the dream report (from r=.40 to r=.71). The latter findings were replicated by Glaubman and Lewin (1977), as well as by Hobson and Stickgold (1995). Rosenlicht, Maloney, and Freiberg (1994) found only small differences between time of REM sleep and the reported length of dreams. Overall, these studies support the idea that dreams take the same amount of time the actions would take in waking.

Lucid dreams might be particularly applicable to study time intervals in dreams, because lucid dreamers are able of executing prearranged tasks in their lucid dreams and mark the beginning and the end of the task with eye signals that can be measured objectively by electrooculogram (EOG) recording (cf. Erlacher, Schredl, & LaBerge, 2003). The term “lucid dream” designates a dream in which the dreamer, while dreaming, is aware that she or he is dreaming and she or he can consciously influence the action in the dream (Tholey & Utecht, 1997; LaBerge, 1985). In a pilot study, LaBerge (1985) showed that time intervals for counting from one to ten in lucid dreams (by counting from one-thousand-and-one to one-thousand-and-ten) are close to the time intervals for counting during wakefulness.

We hypothesized, that there is no difference between the time needed for counting or performing a motor activity in a lucid dream and the time needed for the same activities performed in the waking state.

more after the jump

 

This was from yesterday's New York Times - an article called 'Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking'. It talks a little about the concept of lucid dreaming, but also focuses on a new movie being written and directed by Jake Paltrow called "The Good Night".

 


Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking


Established sleep researchers say lucid dreaming is occasionally reported by subjects, though it is difficult to validate scientifically. “Yes, lucid dreaming exists,” said Dr. Rodney Radtke, the medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Duke University. “Yes, people certainly can, within their dream, realize ‘this is just a dream’ and continue to participate.”

“Do I believe that someone could potentially alter or interact with their dreams in such a way that they could change the dream? Yes,” he said. “Do I think that you could essentially design a dream — ‘Oh, I want to go to Honolulu and have this big hunk hit on me’? It’s a bit of a stretch. But I can’t say it can’t happen.”

He added: “Only in New York or California do they worry about this stuff.”

Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and the founder of the Lucidity Institute (lucidity.com), conducts lucid dream research and
teaches people to do it.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Dr. LaBerge said. “Fly. Dream sex. That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and anxieties, learning more about yourself.”

A student at Stanford University, where Dr. LaBerge conducted much of his research, wrote in The Stanford Daily: “In one of my earliest experiences with lucidity, I announced to an auditorium full of people that I was their god (wasn’t I?). When they did not respond deferentially, I used telekinesis to send one of them flying across the room.”

It can be particularly appealing to those who have nightmares, as it allows them to realize while still asleep that they are just dreaming.

Interest in these potential real-world benefits and the otherworldly freedoms of lucid dreaming — as well as the questions it provokes about the precarious nature of reality — has spurred the invention and evolution of seemingly wacky dream aids. There are masks with lights and sounds; Orwellian devices that announce THIS IS A DREAM! in the middle of the night; and pills.

At the Hawaii gathering next month, attendees will be able to check out Dr. LaBerge’s NovaDreamer, a mask meant to light up during REM sleep and cue the person entangled in the sheets that he or she is dreaming. It is based on the notion that people can make a plan while awake and then execute it in their dreams. A light or sound is meant to remind them of their goal of lucid dreaming without actually waking them up. Participants may also take part in experiments with an herbal version of a drug that impacts acetylcholine, a neurotransmitting compound that affects memory.

As bizarre as these things may sound, there is a scientific rationale for cueing users during REM sleep. “REM-sleep dreams are much more visual,” said Matthew P. Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. “They have a strong narrative that runs through them. They’re hallucinogenic.”

There are several reasons for this, including that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes more inactive during REM sleep, while other areas of the brain, like the visual and emotional centers, rev up.

Scientists, however, are still trying to discover the difference between the dreaming brain and the lucid-dreaming brain. The leading candidate, Dr. Walker said, is the lateral prefrontal cortex. He thinks that during REM sleep, the activity level of this logic-oriented part of the brain begins to rise back to waking levels, and when it does, an invisible switch is flipped and the sleeper gains lucidity. “In the next five years, I think somebody will demonstrate that,” he said.

Lucid-dream researchers say there are myriad mental exercises a person can do during waking hours to try to become cognizant while dreaming. One technique involves performing various reality checks many times a day — such as looking at the numbers on a watch, looking away, and then looking at them again to make sure that night has not suddenly become day. The theory is that if a person does this regularly while awake, he or she will likely repeat it while dreaming and will recognize inconsistencies — if, say, the watch is melting in a Dali-esque way. Then the sleeper will think: “This looks surreal. I must be dreaming.”

more after the jump

Michael Persinger is a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is

that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's

feverish activities. He has attempted to create experiments to show that when the right hemisphere of the brain

is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere is called

upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates what is felt as a 'sensed presence.'

 

Many of Persinger's studies detail the reactions that people have when their temporal lobes are stimulated with complex magnetic
fields. Some of the subjects experience a 'sensed presence' in the form of the deity from the culture that they were raised in.
They see the God (or spirits associated with their God - the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, etc) that they believe in. Others have had
experiences that mimic the feeling that one would have during alien/UFO visitation - these people tend to be more agnostic.

In 2003 the BBC arranged for Prof. Richard Dawkins to be a subject in one of Persinger's experiments.

 

The results are shown in the video below:

There has been a surge of interest in binaural beats during recent years, and a number of software only products that utilize this technology have become quite popular.

What are they?

A binaural beat is generated from two tones.

Each tone is of a slightly different pitch.

One tone is presented to the left ear, and the other to the right.

The two tones combine into a single tone sensed by your brain.

This single tone pulse is the stimulating when entraining with binaural beats.

Binaural beats are probably the most well-known stimulus used for entrainment. They have been shown to work, but other entrainment techniques are more effective. Our machines produce binaural beats and dual binaural beats. They also include other audio entrainment methods in addition to these. I've personally found the that frequency following effect of binaural beats is quite modest, but they do actually work and have an effect on brainwaves that can be shown with EEG.

Here's a bit of history from Gnaural's web page, which we'll discuss in a moment.

In 1839, German experimenter Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that playing two tones simultaneously, one in each ear, induced the perception of a "beat frequency" when the tones were of slightly differing frequency (generally less than 100 Hz apart). What was interesting about Dove's discovery was the fact that there was no acoustic mixing of the tones. The perceived beats existed solely within the auditory system.


 
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove

Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered binaural beats in 1839. While research about them continued after that, the subject basically remained a scientific curiosity until 134 years later, with the publishing of Gerald Oster's article "Auditory Beats in the Brain" (Scientific American, 1973). Oster's paper was landmark not so much for its own new laboratory findings, but rather that in the way in which it identified and tied together the isolated islands of relevant research done since Dove, in a way that gave the subject fresh insight and relevance to scientific research.

In particular, Oster saw binaural beats as a powerful tool for cognitive and neurological research, addressing questions such as how animals locate sounds in their three-dimensional environment, and also the remarkable ability of animals to pick-out and focus-on specific sounds in a sea of noise (what is known as the "cocktail party effect").

Oster also considered binaural beats to be a potentially useful medical diagnostic tool, not merely for finding and assessing auditory impairments, but also (because they involved different neurological pathways than ordinary auditory processing) for more general neurological conditions. For example, Oster found that a number of the subjects he worked with that were incapable of perceiving binaural beats suffered from Parkinson's disease. In one case, Oster was able to follow one such subject through a week-long treatment of Parkinson's disease; at the outset the patient couldn't perceive binaural beats, but by the end of the week of treatment, the patient could hear them again.

Oster also reported (in corroborating an earlier study) that there were gender differences in the perception of beats. Specifically, women seemed to experience two separate peaks in their ability to perceive binaural beats that seemed to correlate with specific points in the menstrual cycle (one at the onset of menstruation, one around 15 days later), which led Oster to wonder if binaural beats could be used as a tool for measuring relative levels of estrogen.

Until Gerald Oster's 1973 article, binaural beats were basically considered no more than a scientific curiosity. Oster's paper was landmark not so much in presenting new laboratory findings, but rather in identifying and tying-together the isolated islands of relevant research done since Dove in such a way as to give the subject fresh insight and relevance to scientific research. In particular, Oster viewed binaural beats as a tool for cognitive and neurological research, addressing how we locate sounds in our environment, and the so-called "cocktail party effect" (e.g., the auditory system's propensity for selective attention). Oster also considered binaural beats to have potential as a diagnostic tool, for finding Parkinson's disease, auditory impairments, and even for gaging fluctuations of estrogen (the latter assertion rising from a study he replicated that corroborated findings of gender differences in the perception of beats).

SBaGen is a free binaural tone generator that has been out for quite some time now. It works great, but there is a better out now called Gnaural2.

  

If you don't want to download and install Gnaural 2, you can use a version placed on the web as a Java Applet. Check it out here

You can download Soundscapes and Gnaural Example files for Gnaural here
You can even use them with the online Java Applet version.


A ton of links after the jump...

NextFest is Wired Magazine's four-day festival of innovative products and technologies. We blogged about MindBall last year, which is the commercialized version of Brainball. BrainBall is a game created by Interactive Institute. Players of the game have EEG sensors connected to their forehead with a strap. The electrodes in the strap read the players' brainwaves.

Brainball is a game that goes against the conventional competitive concept, and also reinvents the relationship between man and machine. Instead of activity and adrenalin, it is passivity and calmness that mark the truly successful Brainball player. Brainball is unique amongst machines since it is not controlled by the player's rational and strategic thoughts and decisions. On the contrary, the participants are dependent on the body's own intuitive reactions to the game machine.

At first glance, Brainball seems similar to a traditional two player game - two people challenge one and other and take their respective positions at each end of a table that is laid out with two goals and a little ball. The rest of the game's equipment is more special. Both players wear a strap around their forehead that contains electrodes and is wired up to a biosensor system. This system, that is used to measure the body's biological signals, is tightly fastened to the frontal lobes and registers the electrical activity in the brain - so called EEG (electro­encephalo­gram). The players brain activity is graphed in a diagram on a computer screen so that the public can easily follow the players mental processes during the match.


Here's a picture of Buzz Aldrin beating Wired Magazine publisher Jay Lauf in a BrainBall match.

 
Picture taken by Dave Bullock - (Thanks Dave!)

MindBall can be purchased here

There are sites on the net that claim to teach the ability, there's an International Remote Viewing Association that even has conferences (there's one starting on October 19th, apparently), the US government has funded research in it (in the 1970's), we've even had customers buy our mind machines to help them with remote viewing and claim great success. I've never had any type of experiences that are anything like remote viewing - and I'm not sure that I believe that it is even possible - but I'm open to the idea.

 

What is it? I think a simple explanation for it is just the ability for an individual to descibe locations not yet visited. The CIA and the US Army spent millions of dollars on researching remote viewing and other parapsychological activities and dubbed it 'Star Gate'. They began the program in 1970 (then called SCANATE - good thing they changed the name to something that sounded cooler) at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Ca. This program continued in different forms using both soldiers and civilians who were believed to posess natural psychic abilities for over 24 years.

The remote viewing program was shut down by the CIA in 1994 because they were convinced that remote viewing was of no practical value to the intelligence community.

What is a sketpic supposed to believe? (That's a trick question) There is so much controversy surrounding the people in these programs, the programs themselves, the data from the programs, etc etc etc - that there really isn't anything to go off of. Unfortunately there have been no peer reviewed studies that prove that remote viewing is a reality. darn. Research the links below and see what you think.


An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning - by Profressor Jessica Utts of UCDavis

Critique of the PEAR Remote Viewing Experiments - by Jessica Utts, Betty Markwick and George P. Hansen

The STAR GATE Program - From the Federation of American Scientists

An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications - prepared by the American Institutes for Research (PDF)

The American Institutes for Research Review of the ... STAR GATE Program: A Commentary - by Edwin C. May, PhD from Cognitive Sciences Lab.

The Cognitive Sciences Laboratory Web Site

A Skeptic's Notebook - Scientific Remote Viewing - by Robert A. Baker

This is supposedly the original remote viewing manual used by SRI International - HERE

Remote Viewing? Remote Chance... - From Karen Stollznow, The Naked Skeptic

Here is a PDF of the original remote viewing manual - COORDINATE REMOTE VIEWING, STAGES I-VI AND BEYOND FEB 1985

The Farsight Institute

Remote Viewing Timeline

What are they and how do they work? Of course everyone reading this already knows :) But it helps to have a quick reminder to refresh our memory every once in a while.

Having a basic understanding about these special chemicals in our brain and how they work helps us to understand memory, learning, behavior, addiction, how drugs work, and emotions.

First we'll quickly go over some of the most important neurotransmitters.

  Acetylcholine: The first neurotransmitter to be identified. It allows nerve cells to communicate with each other.





  Noradrenalin (Norephinephrine): Acts as a stress hormone and affects the parts of our brain where attention and responding actions are controlled. It is what is behind the fight-or-flight response.





  Dopamine: Plays an important role in motivation and reward, sleep, mood, attention, motor activity, cognition and learning.





  Endorphin: Helps modulate pain ("natural opiates"), cardiac, gastric and vascular function.





  Serotonin: Believed to help regulate anger, aggression, mood, sleep, appetite, sexuality and body temperature.





  GABA: One of the most abundant neurotransmitters. It is an inhibitory neurotransmitter - inhibiting all sorts of activating systems.






  Glutamate: Heightens sensitivity to other neurotransmitters. An excitatory neurotransmitter involved in cognitive functions like learning and memory.






So... Neurons pass messages along themselves using electrical impulses, but they use neurotransmitters to pass messages to other neurons. Neurotransmitters are released from synaptic vesicles, flow across gaps between neurons called synapses and then bind with a receptor on the target neuron.

How about a slideshow?

Found on Neurofeedback on the Brain Blog

  

An Image Gallery of BrainPaintings can be found here

More on Bill Scott's EEG biofeedback system here

From NPR

 

Tor Wagner from Columbia University (and colleagues) used an fMRI study to what parts of the brain are activated when patients experience the placebo effect.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Wagner discussion the team's findings.

Free access to:

Journal of Biological Rhythms
 

The Neuroscientist
 

Journal of Child Neurology
 

Multiple Sclerosis
 

Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair
 

Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology
 

American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease & Other Dementias
 

Click here (requires registration)

A company called Ambient has developed a device that intercepts signals sent to the voice box from the brain via a sensor laden neck band. They claim to be able to decode these signals and match them to a pre-recorded series of words - even when the words are voiced out-loud. Theses 'words' can then be used to control things via a computer.

They are currently using this system to direct a motorized wheelchair, allowing a paralysed person to navigate without moving or speaking out-loud. Ambient is developing the technology with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to help people with neurological problems operate computers and other electronic equipment despite their problems with muscle control.

 

This is the first time (that I know about, anyway) that a device has been able to convert electrical impulses from the brain into actual words. This is different from traditional EEG, which measures brainwaves, as it is analyzing signals outside the brain on their way to the larynx.

Audeo is currently selling a developer kit that allows researchers to develop new applications with their technology. If this works as well as they claim, the possibilities are endless.

 


Check out the rest of this article for a video presentation of the device.

Discussion on brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity, has increased during the past several years. What is it and why should we be concerned about it? Our brains can migrate activity associated with specific functions to a different location as a result of neuroplasticity. This is an extremely important ability to have after a brain injury or even after normal experience (such as aging). Neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-wire itself as a response to changes in the environment. It is also what is behind the learning process and memory formation.

Plasticity consists of laying out preferred pathways within the brain for circulating important information and is the brain's ability to adapt.

 

Biofeedback/neurofeedback may play an important role in the future if specific operant condition techniques can be designed to increase voluntary control of neuron responses that will increase neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity from Wikipedia


Here is a link to a great audio interview from CBC radio with Dr. Norman Doidge. He is the author of "The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science".

Nancy Leo, a senior at Arizona's Hamilton High School, had her science fair research project selected as one of 18 projects to be presented at the Sixth World Congress on Stress in Austria.

 

Leo's study focuses on HRV (heart rate variability) and salivary cortisol changes that occur during stressors in the laboratory while using biofeedback. She found that an increase in stress resulted in less heart rate variability and an increase in salivary cortisol. She also found that the stress response could be changed significantly with biofeedback.

More from Arizona's East Valley Tribune here