Feedback

Don’t think; don’t try. Just pay attention to the feedback.

Meaning of Tones

What does music mean?!! What do sounds mean? Of course an anxious, obsessive person, a person driven by the need to control, wants to know that kind of stuff. That’s exactly why I started playing with music feedback when my son first introduced me to the WaveRider back in the mid-to-late 90’s. Of course, those clients HATED closing their eyes, and even more HATED being told just to listen. They resisted with every fiber of their conscious minds. But after a while they tended to wear themselves out and give up trying at least briefly–in short, to let the feedback actually pass through to the brain WITHOUT filtering the heck out of it with their minds–and to their horror it often had a positive effect.

When one is taught to believe that it’s really the conscious intellectual mind that has to make things happen, and when one commits to that belief, it’s incredibly limiting. I know that only those folks who live in their minds have figured out stuff like chaos theory and the various forms of “new” physics, etc. But I also know that the same stuff was known thousands of years ago by Taoist masters who had never heard of particle accelerators or quarks.

You can study music. You can use music. Or you can listen to it and resonate to it and enjoy it. If the conscious mind is indeed the one that runs the show, then we better explain the music–or better yet, just do away with it. If the conscious mind just gets in the way of much of life, then I feel justified in continuing to irritate the heck out of compulsive and anxious clients by refusing to talk with them about what the music means and what it’s “supposed to” do.

If your conscious mind really ran the show, then you would not be anxious, I tell them. You don’t want to be anxious. You’ve thought about it and tried to control it for years or decades. How come you are still anxious? Because the anxiety results from energy patterns in your brain, and you can’t “think” those away. Give up–or just keep being anxious and obsessive. Giving up control is the ultimate key to so much of life–the basis for meditation, religious experience, 12-step programs, getting into the zone, falling in love, and a lot of other important parts of experience.

How Feedback Works

One of the brain’s major functions/interests is to send something out (words/actions) into the universe and see what comes back. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is selecting what to do and receiving the information back. I’ve used the analogy of a kid learning to wiggle his ears: if you can practice in front of a mirror that is immediate and accurate, you will learn much faster than if you just sit around and try to tell if you are doing it or not. The more you limit the brain’s experience to what is in the mirror (close your eyes, put on headphones, sit in a comfortable chair) the more clearly the mirror focuses the brain’s attention on a specific response. Combine that kind of mirror (we could call it “feedback”) with intention (e.g. I want to see my ears move in response to what I’m doing), and the brain can learn.

Take the WS Alpha temporal design. It changes the pitch and volume of the sound based on the amount of activity the brain is producing in the frequencies we want to reduce. Once the client stops “thinking” and “trying” then the brain is receiving feedback in the form of changing pitches and volumes, and as it looks through what it is doing it begins to recognize that there is a relationship between high energy states and the sound. That’s the feedback mirror. The intention is that I’ve told the client “you can’t MAKE the bell ring, but whenever it does, that is very good!” The brain can figure out that the chime rings only when it is moving to lower energy states, so it’s likely to move that direction. Sorry, there’s nothing magic about the tones or anything like that. They are reflecting brain activity, and we’ve given the brain a hint toward the desired direction.

So the idea of NF is that you set your thresholds so that the brain is rewarded for doing something it already does!! You teach a dog to sit by tossing him a treat each time he sits down on his own and repeating the command “sit.” If you take a client whose Theta/Beta ratio ranges from 1.8 to 5.0 and only give feedback when he hits below 1.5 (0% of the time), the brain will learn nothing. If you give the feedback whenever it is below 5.0 (100% of the time) it will learn nothing. But if you set your target at, say 3.8, so the ratio is below it 75% of the time, what happens. The brain is motivated to “cut off the outliers”–reduce the times that it goes way up in slow activity. This is done by improving control circuits. As they improve, eventually the brain’s “normal” range may change to 1.7 to 4.0, and you slide the threshold down to, say 2.9. Now a new batch of brain activation patterns are defined as “outliers” and the brain begins to learn to minimize them and further improve control. You are “shaping” the brain’s behavior, little by little.

Continuous vs. Contingent Feedback

Stripped of all the hype, there are two types of feedback: Continuous and Contingent. Continuous, which is heavily built into many of the brain-trainer designs, gives music or video feedback that doesn’t stop. It modulates brightness or pitch or volume or size to give the brain information. If you are reducing a type of activity we want you to reduce, the music may move to higher pitches and quieter volume. It’s no more complex than that. Your brain learns to connect the music moving in one direction with specific states it is producing, and we can guide it into new states.

This works fine with people who are “hyper” emotionally or intellectually–stressed, racing thoughts, anxious, etc. But if you take a person who is nearly asleep most of the time (ADHD or depressed) calming down is unlikely to help them.

Contingent feedback, with game interface or points, etc. keeps the brain engaged. When the brain starts to drift away, the feedback STOPS, so the client is pulled back. Clients needing to activate do better with Contingent feedback, where it is either on or off and only on when all training conditions are being met. Beeps and dings and clicks.

One of the things our designs try to do is to combine continuous feedback with contingent, so the brain not only can recognize the relationship between frequency activity and the music but can also recognize what direction is best to move in.

How to Coach Feedback

“Don’t think; don’t try. Just pay attention to the feedback.” The goal is to listen to the music. Pay attention to it and don’t worry about “trying” to make anything happen. When you try, your conscious mind gets between the feedback and the brain. When you just pay attention, let the music slide through the conscious mind, the brain gets the connection between what it is doing and what’s happening in the feedback.

Percent Feedback/Reward

I would define the feedback percent strictly in terms of the client. The more “internal” the person is, the lower reward rate I would set, trying to keep the client “out”. The higher the anxiety level, the higher the reward rate I would set, trying to keep the client from “trying” too much. I actually prefer to combine continuous and contingent feedback in a design, which allows me to set a more stringent target for the contingent feedback (which only plays when all targets are met), such as the 10% I use with the chime feedback in the Squish protocols, while giving the client’s brain continuous feedback that provides information via pitch and volume (or brightness of the video display).

I think most trainers would consider 40-50% to be pretty stringent as a reward rate and 85-95% to be pretty loose. On this list, a number of trainers have reported that they find that clients actually do better with the richer reward environments, and I have seen that in my own work with clients in a number of cases. Once again, for me it depends on the client’s response.

Delays in Feedback

To learn from feedback, the general rule is that it needs to be as immediate as possible. An analogy would say if you tried to learn to wiggle your ears by looking in a mirror, but you didn’t see the results of your actions until 10 seconds after you took them, the learning would be very slow. If you saw response immediately, the learning would happen more quickly.

I aim never to have the delay between activity at the electrode and feedback on the screen exceed 250ms. I think you may be confusing Sterman’s comments about re-charge period, the break between one bit of feedback and the next, with feedback latency.

MIDI

The sound of the MIDI object IS the feedback. There’s no “song” being played. Each brain in each session in each minute will play a different melody, because the melody is strictly based on what the brain is doing in the target frequencies.

Multiple Inhibits

I don’t often use multiple inhibit protocols. As soon as you start setting multiple reward/inhibit thresholds, you begin multiplying the problems in keeping all the targets set appropriately and losing control over the feedback rate. For example: If I have two inhibits and a reward, setting the inhibits at 80 and 90% pass rates and the reward at 85%, which would appear to be pretty loose targets, I have the potential for the client only to be scoring 61.2% of the time (multiplying the 3 together, since it’s possible that each will be blocking when the other two are both passing. A windowed squash or a percent training design give me the same effect or greater (all bands being inhibited except one reward) with a single threshold, so I can be very clear what percent of the time the client is scoring.

Percentage Feedback

I think most trainers would consider 40-50% to be pretty stringent as a reward rate and 85-95% to be pretty loose. A number of trainers have reported that they find that clients actually do better with the richer reward environments, and I have seen that in my own work with clients in a number of cases. Once again, for me it depends on the client’s response.

More impulsive, impatient clients will be bored with rates below maybe 80%–sometimes higher. More internal, lost-in-space clients generally respond better to lower feedback rates, somewhere around 40-60%, because they really can’t drift away very far before the scoring stops. In my opinion, length of training segment is also important, and the style of trainer participation is also very important. These are different for different types of training.

I generally start a session with auto thresholds and then, as they stabilize, finding the client’s baseline at the beginning of training, I switch the inhibits from auto to manual, leaving the reward bands in manual.

Define the feedback percent strictly in terms of the client. The more internal the person is, the lower reward rate I would set. The higher the anxiety level, the higher the reward rate I would set, trying to keep the client from trying too much. I actually prefer to combine continuous and contingent feedback in a design, which allows me to set a more stringent target for the contingent feedback (which only plays when all targets are met), such as the 10% I use with the chime feedback in the squish protocols, while giving the client’s brain continuous feedback that provides information via pitch and volume (or brightness of the video display).

Bored with Feedback

I’m guessing the reason you are training is because you want to get better at doing some things that you don’t do very well right now, maybe even feeling your own emotions, relating in a meaningful way with those around you, etc.

And I’m guessing that the things that are hard for you are NOT the things that are exciting and entertaining–most people don’t have trouble with those.

So it’s very possible that what you need to do is to teach your brain to do things that aren’t fun or entertaining–things like work, or learning or listening to another person or stuff like that, which may even be BORING.

Consider the possibility that you won’t train your brain to deal with routine tasks by being entertained. They might even be two different states.

I don’t know how old you are–probably not as old as me. I’m so old that I can remember many years in my life when there was no expectation that everything would be fun and entertaining. I actually learned that there were things I had to do–cooking or cleaning or doing jobs at work or school, reading and studying–sometimes even watching news on TV or driving long distances–that were, BORING (though I didn’t think of them that way.) I spent many hours of my life for many years (and I still do even now) being alone and being quiet. It gave me a great benefit to grow up and live as an adult in those times, because I learned that there are very few things that are really boring; only things that I don’t pay attention to. That freed me. It allowed me to be happy and successful in many areas of my life. I found my own way to keep interested.

Yes, I know that today those thoughts are ridiculous for many of the people with whom I work. To be still and silent in their own heads is very unpleasant for them, perhaps even impossible. They NEED to be entertained. They don’t have the ability to entertain themselves just by paying attention, by finding the interest in every task.

I have a client now who is struggling with the idea of spending 10-20 minutes per day being still and letting go of the high-adrenaline TV shows or YouTube videos or films or video games on his tablet and his smartphone. He told me 2 sessions ago that he was practicing being still for 20 minutes a day–surfing on his phone through “news” sites. He was quite surprised when I told him that wasn’t the same thing. Being still is being STILL, and it takes practice, and it’s not necessarily entertaining. But it IS empowering and freeing.

I asked him to keep track of how much time he spent on social media or surfing the net or watching TV or streaming video or music each day, and he couldn’t do it, because he does it so automatically that he doesn’t even realize it. He likes it because he can turn himself off. I asked him what he had actually produced during all those hours every day (one of his goals is to become more productive), and he couldn’t name even ONE thing that actually had any value in his performance or awareness.

When you plug in to the popular culture–never walk without an i-pod blowing songs in your ear, never wait even 30 seconds for something without checking to see who’s sending you “likes” or “tweets” or whatever–you unplug from that part of yourself which can contact the spiritual that channels within you. The “still, small voice” of the spirit never shouts–at least not until the water is already up to your neck. You grow empty inside, because you can’t make room for your own spiritual self.

Nearly everyone I see lacks that center of stillness, lacks the ability to get to their own center. They MUST have more entertainment. They are trapped by their own boredom. They think they have opinions, but their opinions are TV or YouTube opinions. They think they have feelings, but their feelings are cheap, manufactured emotions produced by media. They think they need things, but their desires nearly always go back to the ads that are a part of all that “free” entertainment they must consume every hour of every day.

Training an hour a day or two or four doesn’t fix the problem–especially if the training is all about being entertained.

Use a music/video feedback design and set up a playlist of fractal zoom videos (get some good ones at ericbigas.com). Put on headphones and listen to the music and watch the video. Boring as hell! But allow yourself to get still, as much as you can, practice doing breathing exercises and paying attention to your breaths. Practice the breathing for 3 minutes, counting the breaths, 2 or 3 or 5 times a day. Let yourself find that still center and get comfortable staying there for longer times. Get used to being “bored” until you recognize that people are bored because they are boring. There is no “them” within themselves. They become cultural consumption robots for whom “friends” are people you’ve never met on a social media list, for whom, “like” is an opinion, and stillness in their own center is a thing to be avoided at all costs.