Der folgende Artikel kommt von R. Adam Crane, Chef der American BioTec Corporation "a full service company providing assistance to health care and educational professionals in acquiring the correct equipment, training, and in-depth understanding of the rapidly developing science and economics of Biofeedback, Neurofeedback (EEG Biofeedback) and applied psychophysiology". Ich fand den Artikel bemerkenswert und kann ihn erstmals in Deutschland vorstellen - herzlichen Dank an Adam Crane!

The Future of Biofeedback
R. Adam Crane

Abstract: Biofeedback is a technology of self-knowledge, and as such will become ubiquitous both in healthcare and performance enhancement applications. 'Consciousness Processing' technology and services will become one of the most robust industries on earth with both commercial and nonprofit manifestations.  As Quantum Physics unfolds, technologies of self-knowledge will become even more important.

 "Try to develop models which are not arbitrary and man-made, but organic and natural.  The difference is in the intention. Arbitrary man-made models have as their intention manipulation and control.  Natural, organic models have as their intention resonance and reverence." Margaret Mead Shall I seize this opportunity to promote our company, or say what I feel, and risk driving potential clients into the arms of the competition (most of whom are my friends)?  So, my friends, open your arms because here comes my spin on our future.

                              NEAR TERM

 Biofeedback Equipment Survivors are developing telemedicine, virtual reality (VR), increasing capabilities, decreasing size and cost etc.  Internet applications will grow in terms of training and diagnostics.  VR Feedback will deliver some of the most effective self-regulation learning systems ever developed. Flight simulators and VR training of special forces in dangerous combat skills illustrate.  Computers are necessary in order to maximize clinical effectiveness.  However, the market will grow for portable, battery operated instruments reminiscent of Walkmans and Palmpilots.  However, I want to invest my 2152 words discussing the somewhat unseen.

 Although estimated biofeedback billings range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, manufacturing is one of the smallest niche industries in Healthcare.  The future of biofeedback depends on where the culture is headed.  I love George Carlin's humor, but the entire culture is not 'circling the drain'.

 Segments of the status quo are 'circling the drain' - probably a good thing. That makes me an optimistic apocolyptist. I do not think the terms biofeedback or applied  psychophysiology adequately describe this technology.  There are 'paradigm shifts' under way in many sciences, and we are a scientific melting pot.  I prefer to think of biofeedback as a Technology of Self-knowledge. If that is true, then biofeedback has a huge and complex future.

 The unfolding of that future depends on investment.  Investment depends on the importance our culture places on self-regulation and the nurturing of consciousness.  Improving consciousness is destined to become a huge 'industry' with powerful organizations taking both commercial and nonprofit forms.

 Elmer Green's Mind Body Principle implies that enhancing consciousness improves health, and vice versa.  But how long will it take biofeedback to attract adequate capital to make it a mature industry?

 "The gift of prophesy is but the flowery trapping of the Tao and the beginning of folly." Lao Tzu Our team is investing in three areas: clinical equipment, personal equipment, and training.

 Clinical software has come a long way, but must evolve in order to catch up to the hardware's capabilities.  We provide exceptional flexibility by combining Windows and DOS, but that will not do much longer.  Manufacturers are fighting the 'Windows Wars' as Microsoft keeps changing the rules, forcing purchase of its new products.  We're looking into Open Source but costs are daunting.  Programmers must develop more intuitive software, and improve flexibility so practitioners can easily tailor reports to payors, referrals, client learning etc.  Clinicians and researchers must be freed creatively.

 Four amplifier Neurofeedback/QEEGs will emerge, just as four channel evoked potential (EP) systems became common in neurology. A significant advance is the integration of normative databases into the software so that clinicians can better understand when signals are normal.  We are integrating the Thatcher data base with CapScan.  We intend compatibility with other databases as well.  UniComp blood pressure and CapScan (whole body mapping) and synchrony training systems are among the most advanced available.  We know how to improve them considerably; however we, like others, stalk investment while stretching capital. Equipment developers will continue influencing research by providing better tools.

                  ARTFULNESS WILL ATTRACT FUNDING

 Both clinical and emerging life/performance enhancement technology are already ahead of the art.  Early movie technology provides an example.  It took years before artists, writers, directors, even actors emerged who knew how to use movie technology in a way which delivered compelling stories.

 Several computerized biofeedback systems have unexploited capabilities. We await practitioner/artists to more fully employ existing potential.  Our team, dancing to the beat of daily operations and our emerging MindFitness® business, long to contribute more to this artistry.

 Like other immature industries, funding awaits mass acceptance while mass acceptance awaits improved artfulness, and improved artfulness awaits funding.  We grow slowly until 'killer applications' emerge.  Then we move to more creative and economically rewarding levels.  Our field screams for more creativity.  Learning strategies must be so good they work well without biofeedback.  Then biofeedback makes them work better.

 The wagon worked.  Then we added engines.  Instruments are limited without mighty 'mind stuff' behind them.  Instruments by themselves are like spoons without food.  Granted, gifted practitioners can make even subclinical instruments work.

 Master carpenters can make something beautiful with a piece of wood and a penknife.  But they choose to use the $80,000+ worth of tools in their pickups.

 "Your young shall see visions.  Your old will dream dreams."
 Isaiah

 Playing prophet, I believe our field will give birth to astounding developments.  The line between clinical biofeedback equipment and a popular Technology of Self-Knowledge blurs. Personal instruments will become as ubiquitous as bathroom scales and mirrors.  If science fiction writers are correct, then beautiful instrumentation will be worn like clothing and jewelry. I co-founded QTran, which invented the Mood Stone - a beautiful, functional temperature trainer.  After selling millions of dollars worth of them (they were expensive and durable - $150 in '75) we were wiped out when costume jewelry manufacturers flooded the market with useless junk.

 $500,000,000+ worth of them were sold before the 'fad' was killed off.  We attempted to raise money for heart rate watches in '78.  Others succeeded in developing a substantial business. But these kinds of personal instruments are trivial compared to what will emerge. We will develop fashionable and effective instrumentation. Algorithms already emerging will increase awareness of healthy or unhealthy influences in terms of stress, psychoneuroimmunology, brainwaves, heart function, blood pressure, pulmonary function etc. We can be warned if something we are eating or breathing is toxic, blood alcohol levels are too high, we are too drowsy etc. All detectable radiation can be fed back.  Signals of incredible subtlety can be fed back.  If the aryuvedic 'chakras' reflect actuality (probably reasonable third dimensional models of fourth dimensional phenomena) then why can't 'subtle energy' information be fed back?

 As room temperature superconductors emerge, walls will be turned into sensors monitoring any living thing close by creating hundreds of applications (dialing 911 if you become unconscious) and privacy worries.

 Over 50% of communication is nonverbal.  Personal instrumentation can augment communication between us in a more subtle way than even telephones since telephones, amplify words which are basically thoughts (abstractions) and instruments amplify primal signals radiating from the psychophysiology. Lying could become more difficult and less fashionable.

                             THE MISSION

 Awakening human beings to signals, which were there all along, implies a biofeedback 'endpoint' mission, enhanced awakening, with an applicable understanding of how the mind/body linkage works.  Biofeedback leads to increased sensitivity.  Increasing sensitivity means increasing the quality of intelligence.

 (Intelligence, from the Latin Intelligere - to see between threads finely woven).  As the sensitivity grows there is less need for the instruments.  The mission becomes how to improve moment to moment quality of consciousness. "The intention with which you approach the problem is more important than knowing what to do about it." Krishnamurti

 If it is true that there are no practical limits on the improvement of consciousness, this technology will be a moving feast for hundreds of years.  We are all interconnected.  When we can monitor subtle energies interplaying interpersonally - changing world views will change politics.  Acts of kindness and anger spread outward like circles.  Biofeedback amplifies those 'circles', increasing sensitivity to them - decreasing dependence on biofeedback itself.  Our focus will intensify on rediscovering, understanding and teaching 'deep space' (meditation?) consciousness clarification.  Arguably, biofeedback's greatest mission is increasing understanding of meditation.  Problems with the word meditation continue even as the 'real thing' catches a second wind as an efficient way to enhance sensitivity and emotional (EQ) intelligence.

                        RESEARCH MUST EVOLVE

 An ancient hunter was probably amusing himself twanging a bowstring.  (S)he invented the forerunner of the guitar (probably three strings) and from that the piano evolved.

 Biofeedback instruments are like quality musical instruments. Everything depends on the artistry of the player.  Our research lags our artists.  Quantum physics, nonlinear dynamics, neuroscience, neurophilosophy are leading to research transformation.  The maxim 'If it can't be counted it doesn't count' will change to 'That which counts most cannot be counted'.  The concept 'knowledge is power' is beginning to yield to the astonishing principle asserting that the greatest way to enhance creativity is to learn how to 'empty the mind of the known'.  And living creatively is already job one for a growing number.

 Relatively few are aware of the psychological seachange.  Even fewer are aware of biofeedback's power to serve 'the new sciences'.  Neurofeedback is an oasis where the new sciences convergence, integrate.  The intermarriages are robust and fecund.  Something old is dying.  Something new is being born.

 In the 20's the scientific establishment knew that the entire universe was the Milky Way Galaxy.  Then Hubble proved there are other galaxies - 100 billion and counting.  Now that's a paradigm shift!

 Niche markets will breed diversity.  Even greater differences will emerge in the way similar tools are used.  A saw cuts wood or bone.  Carpenters should not amputate even if they do charge less than surgeons.

                         DRUG WAR VICTORY?

 Better research will reveal biofeedback's power to potentiate drugs.  Under enlightened medical supervision practitioners will achieve results with drug/biofeedback combinations that will astonish skeptics and motivate politicians.  Inspiring applications to neuroimmune disorders will unfold.  Animal studies are inadequate to meet our research challenges, increasing pressure to invent better research strategies.

 Voters will have to lead, but as Healthcare costs escalate pharmaceutical companies must realize that making less drugs work better is in their long term (and maybe short term) interests. Entrepreneurs will combine electromedicine with pharmaceuticals, decreasing costs profitably.

           THE BODIES ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC

 Pop star musicians will hold concerts in which they produce music and visual displays by manipulation of their physiology.

 We have experimented with simple conversion of physiological signals to musically corrected sound. Amazing how like jazz it sounds.  We speculate that jazz derives much of its power from intuitive sensing of psychophysiology and integrating same with emotions and thematic material (We sold an early neurofeedback device to Stan Getz).  This has been done in crude form but lacked the technology and artistry to be glorious.  When the technology is ready the artists will appear.

 Education which keeps up with the technology challenges us. Our BCIA Certification seminars, MindFitness Training Series, The Process®, e-learning courses, coaching and consulting comprise our current best efforts to meet this challenge.  We are developing better ways to provide deeper, more universal understanding of those principles which lie at the heart of quality human existence.  Principles which must be better understood include attention, sensitivity (to a greater portion of the total EM spectrum) and perhaps the most practical of all - enhanced ability to watch thinking as it happens.  The individual and general result will be further unfolding of the quantum consciousness cornucopia like a flower in spring.

 Our understanding of David Bohm's work indicates mindfulness (profound attention to 'what is') brings out the enfolded potential within a given time and space, making the implicit, EXPLICIT.  I term the quality of mind that best activates potential inherent in the moment present - fourth dimensional consciousness.  Time/space become the same thing (well, relatively) from a psychological perspective.  This phenomenon clarifies otherwise obscure meditation literature.  If we play a bit more, we discover that quality of attention corresponds to the quality of consciousness.  This (I playfully suggest) may be influencing the collapse of the wave function.  There is the notion in quantum physics that at the quantum level infinite potentials exist until 'observation' is introduced.

 At that moment all potentials but one 'collapse' (go away). What if the quality of consciousness of the 'observer' significantly influences which of all those potentials within any given moment collapse, and which manifest?  Schrodinger believed consciousness is a special case, a kind of singularity, regarding the wave/particle laws.  Biofeedback, the technology of self-knowledge, is dedicated to improvement of consciousness quality.  What if consciousness is assisting in ongoing manifestation of the Universe?  Walking the talk is not always easy, but what alternative exists? 

                     INTEGRATION OF DISCIPLINES

 Ancient Greeks considered psychology the greatest of all sciences because it dealt with the health of the mind.  A healthy mind is required to keep other sciences 'running true'. As science becomes more aware of the implications inherent in integration of disciplines (wholeness) a new appreciation for what has been called spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical is emerging.

 "The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.  It is the power of all true science." Einstein Bohm and other scientists consider the mystical to be the fountainhead of creativity.  Hawking said, "The truth about the boundaries of our universe is that there are no boundaries".

 If that makes science arduous and at times ineffable, so be it. To paraphrase Betty Davis..."Science ain't for sissies".

 "Given sufficient development of advanced technology it is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clark

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