Feeling and seeing belong together. I’ve said so for years.

From Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B – abstract (my clarifying additions):

People see with feeling (something I’ve been saying for 20 years). We ‘gaze’, ‘behold’, ‘stare’, ‘gape’ and ‘glare’. In this paper, we develop the hypothesis that the brain’s ability to see in the present incorporates a representation of the affective (emotional) impact of those visual sensations in the past (meaning you don’t actually “see” – you FEEL + SEE). This representation makes up part of the brain’s prediction of what the visual sensations stand for (meaning = emotion+visual stimulus) in the present, including how to act on them in the near future (based on how we feel about what we see, we act accordingly). The affective prediction (emotional interpretation) hypothesis implies that responses signalling an object’s salience, relevance or value do not occur as a separate step after the object is identified (seeing = FEELING + SENSUAL INPUT). Instead, affective (emotional) responses support vision from the very moment that visual stimulation begins.

You see AND feel – never see alone. Your visual signals pass through and interact with the emotional parts of your brain – so OF COURSE you’d attach feeling to visual stimulus. I’ve said it for many years and every Rapid Eye Technician knows it from experience. Nice to see that someone is considering doing some solid science about our hypothesis and experience.

Throughout your life you’ve been conditioned and conditioned yourself to believe in certain cause and effect relationships. Some of your cause-effect relationships may be faulty, however, because you formed in your mind some of those cause-effect relationships at times when you were too young, too ignorant, too traumatized, and/or too inexperienced to adequately evaluate the evidence at hand.

With practice, you’ve perfected your cause and effect relationships to such an extent that they have become automatic – so much so that you simply accept them as truth without question. Further, you tend to apply the “rules” of those relationships to later similar events. For example, the rule that “men cannot be trusted” because (cause-effect) one molested me as a child – taints all future encounters – setting up romantic interludes for failure before they even start. And there’s the first rub – your faulty cause-effect relationships have become so automatic you no longer question them – in fact, you may indeed be completely unaware of many of them.

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A light and sound mind machine can be WAY fun! And therapeutic as well.

Years ago I discovered that I could use a Light & Sound mind machine while my client described their issue symptoms. At frequencies of 8.5 – 10 hz alternating, I found that clients tended to more quickly solve their own problems. One woman I worked with said she felt she could do anything in that state of mind.

For RET Technicians, try using a mind machine while doing RET Life Skills Coaching.

What seemed to work for me was to slowly adjust the mind machine’s frequency up, little by little, until the client showed a distinct relaxing of the facial muscles. Then I’d leave the frequency there for a while before inviting the client to discuss their issue with me. My job was to help them elicit further aspects of their issue or problem. “What ELSE…” “…And then…” etc. Mostly I focused on behavior, belief, and physical sensation, rather than on emotion.

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A light and sound mind machine can be WAY fun!

Have you ever tried a mind machine? You know, those cool hand-held computers that present you with flashing lights and brain wave tones? Basically, you put on headsets and special glasses that have LEDs in them, close your eyes, hit the start button and WOW! Yeah – those are the mind machines I’m talking about.

I own several models – Voyager Mind’s Eye (used to be Voyager XL), Voyager Galaxy, Proteus, and Sirius (Used to be Orion). My favorite is the Voyager Mind’s Eye. Here is my personal evaluation of each:
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Beta and delta brain waves were always present to some degree during wakefulness.

A study published in Neuron, helps us understand the value of delta and beta brain waves in a new way. Basically, the study showed that beta brain waves denote attention and attentiveness while the much slower delta brain waves tell us when to pay attention. It makes sense that we don’t pay attention to everything all the time – we’d be overwhelmed. Some mechanism within us figures out the patterns of attention we need to employ in order to better utilize our attentive powers. Timing is everything…

Through a series of experiments utilizing a brain-computer interface, the study authors discovered that beta and delta brain waves were always present to some degree during wakefulness. The frequency and intensity of the delta wave helped the authors predict when attention would be paid while the frequency and intensity of the beta wave helped them predict how attentive the subject would be at any given time. Fundamentally, this demonstrates that our brains are always bathed in delta AND beta waves during times of outward attention such as when noticing something important or just paying attention to something. The study did not investigate sleep states.

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