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  • Writer's pictureLuke Jensen

Luke's presentation on the history of neurofeedback and his current research on plant medicines.

Back in July I gave a presentation that included the history of my field and how QEEG brain mapping is leading us to new discoveries in the area of plant medicines.  For me, this presentation was about bridging the gap between technology, our understanding of brain waves and plant medicines.  My goal was to bring these ideas to a group that have a lot of experience around plant medicines but little knowledge of the of the current technology. There is so much synchronicity within discoveries around brain waves it is hard not to feel that the Universe might be at work in a special way.  Hans Berger discovered the first brain wave after a psychic experience led him on a lifelong quest to discover the mechanism for such experiences.  He almost died in a military training exercise in Germany and received a telegram that night from his family check to see if he was alright.  “His sister, at home many kilometers away, had a feeling he was in danger and insisted their father telegram him. The incident made such an impression on Berger that, years later in 1940, he wrote: "It was a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger, and as I contemplated certain death, I transmitted my thoughts, while my sister, who was particularly close to me, acted as the receiver.”  He changed his whole life, enrolled in medical school, with the goal of discovering the physiological basis of "psychic energy.  He later discovered the alpha wave in the 1920s.

 

After the discovery of the alpha wave, it became apparent that the brain was an electromagnetic organ that science did not expect at the time and the implications are still largely unacknowledged in mainstream science today.  Today’s mainstream scientific outlook, like in the past two hundred years, is obsessed with the idea that the human body is totally or almost totally a biochemical organism.  This discovery of brain waves, along with many other discoveries, has demonstrated that the biochemical model is incomplete, and that electromagnetism and likely other more subtle energies are at work.  This has significant implications for not only human health but also our human nature and even spiritual insights.

Later in the 1960s, Barry Sterman made experiments to see if cats could train or increase certain brain waves.  It was found that in fact this was the case.  This alone would have been an amazing discovery, that mammals can have the ability to control minute electromagnetic phenomena in their own brains when given feedback.  Such abilities were considered impossible before that and such would be considered in the realm of mysticism, not science.  This unexpected discovery turned into serendipity when the cats in the brain wave experiment were later used in another experiment to test the lethal dose of rocket fuel.  The reason for such a brutal experiment by today’s standards is that NASA wanted to know at what level rocket fuel Monomethyl Hydrazine might kill astronauts.  They knew that the fumes could be dangerous if released in the cockpit or released during fueling operations, but they did not know the amount.  When several cats were exposed to the rocket fuel in a chambered room, a portion of them had seizures and died quickly, another portion seemed very resistant to both seizures and death.  It was discovered that the portion of cats that were resistant to both seizures and death were in the previous brain wave training study. Thus, it was discovered that brain waves could not only be trained but this training could have a powerful biological effect.  Afterwards, some of the first research was to use this discovery to treat epileptics, it was proven very successful and to this day neurofeedback is a prevailing treatment for people with seizure disorders, with some people going from hundreds of seizures a day to none through extensive neurofeedback training. The synchronicity in the field continued with individuals like Joe Kamiya and Elmer Green.  Joe Kamiya discovered that he could train people to increase their alpha waves.  Joe Kamiya stated that the first subject who he trained to increase their alpha waves was so astoundingly good at it that it made a huge impact on him regarding the possibilities of the training.  Even though everyone has the ability to train alpha waves, this unique individual was unusually proficient at it.   Fate or synchronicity brought this person to Joe Kamiya and it is likely that if this unique person had not shown up when he did Joe Kamiya would not have taken the interest in brain wave training that he later did.  Now it is known that the alpha brain wave is associated with meditation and other spiritual states.  It is a brain wave that meditators have been manipulating for thousands of years and it can now be controlled with neurofeedback in what I call “spiritual brain training”.Elmer Green is such a great in the field and was such a deeply spiritual man it is hard to know where to start.  He has been a great inspiration to myself, my work and research.  He was a pioneer in biofeedback, inventing much of the technology himself.  He learned yoga and spiritual practices very early on, in the 1930s, when such practices were almost completely unknown.  He used these practices to discover the answers to complex mathematical and physics problems in college.  He had a dream of a clock tower that he had never seen before and knew that that would be the place where he would start his most important work.  It was not until years later that he arrived at the Menninger clinic and when he saw the clock tower from his dream, he knew fate had taken him to where he was supposed to go.  Elmer Green went on to develop biofeedback and neurofeedback technology.  Elmer Green invented the alpha-theta protocol which I believe is still one of the most important protocols in neurofeedback.  This protocol is not only powerful with the healing of trauma, peak performance, and creativity but it is also a very spiritual protocol that helps connect the conscious mind to the unconscious mind (the human soul.)  Elmer Green later went on to study Yogas and spiritual adepts and traveled to India in the 70s to study these people with special abilities with some of the best technology of the time.  His research in this area has inspired my current research with shamans.  Today with shamans and plant medicines, I have been observing through the lens of QEEG brain mapping that plant medicines have an extremely powerful effect on the neurology of an individual.  Plant medicine shamanism seems to move people into a healthy direction no matter where they are starting from.   This is somewhat of an unexpected finding, and it will be interesting to see what future research elucidates in this field. It seems that science might finally be coming full circle.  Since the Enlightenment and before, science has seemed to separate us from our spirituality.  This is more due to the ideas that were fashionable at the time rather than actual scientific observation and observation is what science is all about.  Now we are observing amazing things that were thought to be impossible not only in my field of brain mapping and neurofeedback but many other fields as well.   We have truly reached a watershed moment in history, though most people have not realized it yet, but I strongly believe that that time is coming and coming soon.  The evidence keeps piling up and it is becoming too large to ignore.  At the same time current fields of human understanding are at a point of crisis, humans are more physically unhealthy, more psychologically disturbed, and more spiritually atomized than at any other moment in human history.  But is has been said it is “always darkest before the dawn” and just like individuals, it often takes a civilization in crisis to finally propel that civilization into the deep inner struggle of the soul that leads to spiritual growth.  I appreciate the current phase of human spiritual awareness and look forward to the next.


Full Video is here.



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