EEG beginnings

====March 6, 2009
So, I have decided to start my brain blog, of which you dear readers are the unfortunate receivers of this perhaps unwelcome wisdom. I mean a blog would be far more polite, as that way you would have a choice of whether to see it or not.

The point of this blog is to record my experiences, so you might have an idea of what it would be like to spend 20-60 minutes each day with the EEG machine.

I think I am roughly 2 weeks into my training now. I am attaching some jpegs so you can see the change in brain wave patterns that I have affected during training. (brainWave0 is an example of starting, brainWave is when I thought I was doing pretty well, and brainWave2 I have only managed once)

The goal was to make the top wave as large as possible, and the bottom wave as small as possible. The effects of changing your brain waves intentionally seems to last for a good part of the day. On the day that I achieved the almost flat line on the bottom it was almost scary. The good part was that I seemed to have much better focus. The strangeness was that it felt like when you put on a new pair of glasses that you have not adjusted to yet & you think it will be ok, but it feels off. The scary part was that every now and then I had to do deep breathing as it almost felt like I was going into a state where I might pass out. So my guess here is that I was probably using more oxygen than usual and needed to change my breathing habits some. But it was cool, as I seemed to zip through a couple of tough problems the contractors at work were having.

Now note that this is not a linear progress, today could not create the nice large waves in the 12-15 range (top graph). But I tell you, it does make you feel different. One of the differences I notice is that although I am 'in' the world, things do not affect me as much at the personal level. Also, I tend to think less in the 'me' form.

So this training is what was recommended for the newbies to this, later will work on Alpha waves, and possible gamma assuming my EEG unit will pick them up.