Humanity has a history of wanting to use external strategies to augment human function, rather than developing our innate inner capabilities. Today, competing technologies may be applied to the human race with the idea of improving or enhancing function. The ones that come to mind are neurocybernetics (the implanting of computer chips into the brain), molecular biology, and pharmacological interventions. Of course, in cases such as physical deformity or brain malfunction, these technologies may indeed prove useful. However, as appealing as these technologies might be as ways of enhancing already-healthy people, it is unclear what side effects may occur in humans who undergo these alternations. Regardless, the use of any of them assumes that we have already gone as far as we can on our own and are in need of this sort of augmentation.
In contrast to this thinking, over 20 years in the field of psychophysiology
have shown me that most of us are nowhere near our human potential, and that
we can approach that potential in a reliable, noninvasive, and completely self-directed
manner through biofeedback training. Restricting ourselves to the aforementioned
alluring approaches to "improve ourselves" runs the risk of denying
us the opportunity to enhance ourselves in more holistic, organic, and systems-oriented
ways. In this article, I hope to illustrate how psychophysiology and biofeedback
could be used with children (as well as
adults) to dramatically enhance function.
Simply put, biofeedback as it is traditionally used is a means for gaining
control of our body processes to increase relaxation, relieve pain, and develop
healthier, more comfortable life patterns. Biofeedback gives us information
about ourselves by means of specialized instrumentation that monitors various
physiological processes as they occur in real time. The psychophysiological
systems traditionally monitored and fed back include brain wave activity, muscle
activity, temperature, sweat gland activity, heart rate, and respiration. Moving
graphs on a computer screen and audio tones that go up and down "reflect"
changes as they occur in the body system being measured.
Biofeedback is one of the few areas in which the use of advanced computer technology
has a directly empowering impact on the individual who is using it. For example,
the Bio Integrator, which I designed at the Bio Research Institute to provide
highly engaging and easily understood feedback, has dramatically improved the
learner's ability to see and understand intricate internal functioning and develop
strategies for influencing psychophysiological processes. Through the use of
instrumentation such as this, the individual is able to see, hear, and optimize
mind/body functioning.
We are at a critical juncture where children and adults need to be empowered to be their own heroes and healers as much as possible. In order to do this, one must have access to one's inner resources and be able to depend on them in an accurate and reliable way. Biofeedback is a means for developing these skills.
Biofeedback is not a treatment. Rather, biofeedback training is an educational
process for learning specialized mind/body skills. Learning to recognize physiological
responses and alter them is not unlike learning how to play the piano or tennis--it
requires practice. Through practice, we become familiar with our own unique
psychophysiological patterns and responses to stress and success, and learn
to control them rather than having them control us.
Throughout our lives, we develop patterns of responding to the environment
that serve us in the immediate moment, but may hang around long beyond their
usefulness. For example, the child whose parent engages in binge drinking every
Friday night, becoming subsequently abusive, develops a "psychophysiological
strategy for survival" to cope with this phenomenon. This strategy involves
a noncognitive development of specialized physiological activity that provides
protection and soothing, which is utilized every Friday night. Even though the
child may leave this situation, or the parent may work his or her way out of
alcoholism, the child may well carry this psychophysiological strategy
for survival into adulthood.
My observation of long-term biofeedback training has shown that outmoded patterns
of response can be interrupted and new ones become possible.
People who have undergone extended mind/body training tend to make better choices
in their lives without particular guidance from the trainer/therapist, as their
consciousness is freed from the effects of chronic activation and sustained
dysfunctional patterns. Because they learn much more easily than adults, children
stand to benefit greatly from the use of biofeedback, in terms of both avoiding
dysfunctional patterns and developing useful ones.
As we develop, we learn through the harshness of our environment to desensitize ourselves to many experiences in order to avoid painful stimulation. For example, children will inevitably be exposed to people who treat them harshly or who do not respond positively to their overtures. Such experiences lead them to develop "psychological calluses" that interfere with interpersonal experiences. These withdrawal strategies, practiced and reinforced over time, form a kind of rigidity or armor that reduces the capacity to experience life fully and impedes the self-actualization process, including the learning process.
This psychophysiological withdrawal strategy may contribute to people becoming "set in their ways" as they grow older. Such self-protective desensitization may result in the development of rigidity, unwillingness to take risks, and the minimization of creativity. Further, it diminishes our capacity to play, love, learn, and relax.
Sometimes, in an attempt to get back in touch with old feelings they have stifled,
or to block current painful feelings, people self-medicate. In the case of one
popular drug, alcohol, people often say they drink to relax, to reduce stress,
or to regain the unselfconscious and spontaneous "good feelings" often
left behind in
childhood. In addition, people sometimes engage in high-risk behaviors
in order to "feel alive," because they have lost their ability to
feel alive in ordinary life. With current concerns regarding children and substance
abuse, as well as high-risk behavior, it makes sense to offer practical, concrete
ways for them to understand and make good choices regarding their own feelings.
Here at BRI, we work with children with a wide variety of presenting complaints,
including learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, anxiety, depression, headaches, obsessive/compulsive
disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and conduct disorder. We know that
bio offers them concrete tools that empower them to take more effective responsibility
for their own well-being, and helps them cope positively with the stresses that
confront them. Their parents report that these children also function better
in school.
As a practical way to encourage the development of enhanced learning and coping skills, I suggest that if it's good for children to have a physical education class, then it surely would be good for them to have a mind/body class featuring biofeedback. Here they would learn to make contact with themselves and modulate and influence their own mind/body functions. With the world becoming increasingly complex, we've done very little to give people the skills necessary to be aware of and manage their own mental, spiritual, and physical states. The net result of this is a disturbing increase in personal and societal disarray. The basic idea here is that if our internal states are in chaos and disorder, then it is likely that our external behaviors and interactions will be the same. I submit that not only could biofeedback serve our children as means of approaching behavioral problems that consistently plague our schools today, it could prevent the development of these problems and in fact free up energy and creativity for significantly greater gains.
Over 50 years of research have shown that chronic stress degrades the human
condition, and has been shown to have significant personal, familial, educational,
and cultural implications. Currently, we face this in the schools on a daily
basis, administering drugs to children with attention problems, depression,
anxiety, and other psychophysiological difficulties. Violence is also a major
problem in the schools, and is directly related to the inability of children
to cope with their own emotions and understand cause and effect. Special education
classes attempt to address those children who most obviously suffer the problems
described above, but they are unable to provide enough practical ways for children
to learn how to reorganize their own psychophysiological systems so that they
can better cope with the stresses they face. Biofeedback is one of the few proven
means of giving people practical skills for identifying and coping with stress.
Starting psychophysiological training early can prevent the development of many
stress-related acute and chronic illnesses, and given the escalating costs of
health care, this is no small consideration.
Nationally, there has been an increase in the use of biofeedback for children with behavioral and physical problems. Within the health care field, biofeedback is increasingly recognized as a cost-effective means of both addressing and preventing psychophysiological disorders, and it has the bonus of providing clients with a strong sense of having power over their own lives.
So when I'm asked to imagine what the future could hold for our children and humanity in general, I am excited to report that a wide variety of enhanced functions could become available immediately through the wider application of biofeedback training. These functions take the form of superior personal insight, better mental and physical health, enhanced intuitive function, greater capacity for learning, enhanced emotional intelligence, greater creativity, and more rewarding and long-lasting personal relationships.
If biofeedback were incorporated into existing educational systems, mind/body training would be directed towards facilitating appropriate levels of arousal during the learning process, thereby preventing students from associating learning with unpleasant, uncomfortable effort, in short, preventing the development of inappropriate psychophysiological strategies for learning.
If biofeedback were incorporated into existing educational systems, other significant
changes would occur. For example, the emphasis on the brain's left hemisphere
capacities (such as verbalization, rote memory,
etc.) would be augmented and enhanced by deliberately cultivating the right
hemisphere as well in order to provide a more global, intuitive learning approach.
In addition, mind/body training from an early age would promote the development of specific capabilities most appropriate to the subject at hand. Increasingly, we recognize that specific regions of the brain contribute to specific functions. Enhancement of activity within certain regions of the brain, through pleasurable and entraining EEG feedback strategies such as educational biofeedback games, could stimulate the child to learn in specific disciplines, creating more "gifted" children by allowing them to develop the various parts of the mind/body that contribute to academic and artistic skills.
The potential applications of biofeedback training within traditional educational
systems include the utilization of psychophysiological labs within primary and
secondary schools, which children would attend as regularly as other classes.
Mind/body training would be incorporated as part of the regular curriculum.
Through regular training, students from an early age would become familiar with
their own physiologies and responses to various stimuli. Such training would
be particularly useful for teaching stress education to children at a young
age, to prevent stress-related accidents and the development of stress-related
disease and set the stage for psychophysiophilosophic development throughout
the child's life. The goal of training would be to increase each child's self-knowledge,
and empower him or her to take more responsibility for self-development and
self-regulation.
In the bio lab, children would learn progressively more sophisticated psychophysiological skills as they went from grade to grade. For example, in the first grade, classes would focus on exploring how internal processes are reflected through the instrumentation. Breakthroughs in biofeedback technology can provide entertaining and beautiful animated graphs and images that catch children's attention and promote awareness and concentration. Becoming familiar with the mechanics of biofeedback would set the stage for later refinement of psychophysiological skills, such as relaxation and recruitment of appropriate levels of arousal for a given task (differentiating between "spacing out" and being "over-amped"). Further, the bio curriculum would include interaction skills, where children would see how their actions affected others, and how others affected them, on a psychophysiological level. For example, children would be able to see the psychophysiological effects of angry, hurtful, kind, and supportive words as well as experiencing these effects emotionally. In addition, children could participate in other curriculum tasks while refining their bio skills, and develop a broader sense of how they actually felt about what they were learning.
From a technical standpoint, biofeedback used in the laboratories and classrooms would eventually be very different from that available today in universities and private practice. In the classroom, work stations equipped with comfortable chairs and individual monitors would be available for each child, with sensors for different physiological systems embedded in the work stations themselves, providing information with minimal hookup procedures and restrictive sensor applications.
Educational topics would be presented by teachers from a master station, where the physiological responses of the entire class could be displayed and visible to all. The teacher would have continual access to each student's psychophysiological behavior and would be able to tell when any student was "spacing out" or "overamped." The teacher could also let the students observe one another's responses, giving the children some idea of how they were functioning in relation to their peers. Documentary-like programs on various subjects would be accompanied by sound and/or dialogue at each work station. For example, when learning about the geography and animal life of Africa, students might see and hear a pride of lions. While watching the film, they would also see a portion of the screen dedicated to questions about the lesson.
Accompanying the educational presentation would be a portion of the screen
in which the student's own psychophysiological activity was displayed. This
biofeedback information would supply a felt-sense of contact to the material
being presented; the student would be aware of how he or she was responding
to the information. This awareness would extend far beyond what is currently
available to students. Instead of being limited to the self-knowledge that they
were either bored or interested, students would have a far more precise sense
of the way in which they were interacting with the material being presented,
and let them link their intellectual and emotional states to their physiological
states: are they drifting, peaking, or appropriately engaged?
Study skills would be enhanced when students learned which levels of mind/body
activity were most appropriate for them personally in relation to individual
subjects; they would develop an economy of use for various physiological systems
when studying particular curricula. If students had an awareness of their psychophysiological
states while studying, they would be able to avoid both over- and under-arousal;
they would be able to catch themselves when their attention was fading, or when
they were "trying" so hard that they defeated their purpose (as in
the case of test anxiety).
The inclusion of mind/body information with various areas of study would also
aid in the student's overall integration of knowledge. For example, since their
psychophysiological states could be reflected numerically, mathematics would
have an immediate analytic application, and simultaneous displays of the same
information in graphs and other images would stimulate spatial development.
Over the course of years, this kind of exposure to personally relevant information presented in spatial and analytic ways, as well as through audio feedback, would facilitate the development of children's capacities to approach and process information of all kinds in a more comfortable and effective way.
With practice in matching appropriate levels of mind/body activity to specific
subjects for optimal learning, children would develop the capacity to shift
between specialized states of attention with grace and ease. This ability would
generalize beyond the classroom, enhancing the individual's ability to respond
optimally in other life situations.
Psychophysiological training within the schools offers benefits that far outweigh the cost and effort that would be required for teachers to become adept at providing this aspect of education. In addition, teachers would derive a much greater understanding of each student's learning capabilities and style, and be more able to make timely and appropriate modifications of subject material and thus promote learning.
Teachers would be able to extend classroom discipline beyond the maintenance of order in the classroom. It would be possible to promote genuine cooperation and interdependence between students. When children became disruptive, instead of being sent to the principal's office or the "time out" room, the teacher could send them to the biofeedback lab, where they could simultaneously participate in a feedback game that promoted cooperation, with both parties driving the feedback and simultaneously lowering their arousal levels. Disruptive children could also go to the lab individually to learn specific relaxation and alertness skills.
Teachers assisted by psychophysiological monitoring of students would be aware of collective physiological responses occurring even when the class was quiet, and could take advantage of this by going more deeply into facets of the subject that stimulated particular responses in the students. These responses would provide a data base leading to refined academic programs geared to student interest and excitement. Individual students would benefit from teachers being aware when their interest began to diminish, and able to respond by re-engaging the students.
Through these and other practices, students could be provided with a path out of what I call "primary consciousness" into a more optimal and facilitative state that I refer to as "secondary consciousness."
Primary (autonomic) consciousness includes the basic attributes we share with other animals, such as the need for food, the drive toward procreation, and the imperative for survival in general (including the fight-or-flight response, in which the individual faced with a stressor prepares to fight the opponent or flee the situation). Primary consciousness also manifests itself in many of the psychological patterns that we carry through our lives.
On the other hand, secondary consciousness includes the natural desire for
self-actualization and transpersonal or spiritual development.
Like primary consciousness, secondary consciousness is inherent within human
beings, but it becomes more readily available when particular relationships
between psychophysiological systems have been achieved.
It is characterized by a less individualized focus, in which persons are motivated
to act with the interests of others in mind, and by gentler, more loving emotional
states. This state corresponds with specific psychophysiological levels of activity
that are associated with the
decoupling of inappropriate autonomic responses.
I believe that an educational system with a psychophysiological component would
significantly change our concepts of child development and maturity. It is exciting
to imagine what children who had experienced such refined self-awareness from
a young age might be like by the time they left school and entered the work
force. Such children would have a ready ability to adjust their psychophysiological
responses to life events. This ability to meet the environment with optimal
states of consciousness for the tasks at hand would foster increased use of
the subtler human capacities such as intuition and creativity, which are currently
most often overwhelmed by cruder and more immediate characteristics such as
fight-or-flight or competitive pack-animal
behavior, etc. In addition, there are vast health care savings to be
had over the course of an individual's life when he or she is adept at managing
and facilitating proper physiological levels. Many presenting complaints are
either caused or greatly aggravated by chronic sympathetic nervous system outflow
(characterized by inappropriate stress responses), coupled with reduced parasympathetic
activity (the nervous system in which healing and recovery occur). Biofeedback
training is ideally suited to teach individuals how to observe and manage these
systems.
The stages of human development that traditionally elicit particular social concern, such as adolescence, would be made more comfortable and productive for everyone involved if children were trained from an early age to identify and cope with psychophysiological change. Mood swings, outbursts, and misbehavior that are usually attributed to genetically programmed hormonal changes would be more manageable if the young person were accustomed to being aware of mind/body phenomena and adjusting psychophysiological arousal to meet the needs of the situation. This would empower these young people and reduce their alienation from the rest of society by giving them body-centered tools to cope with their physiological changes.
In western culture, it is becoming increasingly difficult for adults to provide
the kind of guidance that can help children navigate the ever-more-complex world
in which we live. Many of the situations facing children today were not faced
by their parents and teachers, and it is hard for an adult to serve as a "guiding
light" in a world where he or she has had no experience comparable to that
which the child is facing.
If children were encouraged to develop their decision-making abilities through
enjoyable mind/body education and training, they would be better able to cope
with the multitude of complex stimuli and decisions that confront them. Such
abilities to make better choices would also support them in dysfunctional family
situations, creating the possibility that they would be able to break the cycle
instead of repeating with their own children what their parents had done with
them.
As part of evolution of humanity, we need to help our children learn to transcend some of the negative animal responses that we inherited over the millennia (our primary consciousness). At one point in our development, these primitive responses served a useful purpose; however, many of them today serve as a hindrance to the evolution of humanity and the achievement of personal satisfaction with life.
Biofeedback is a powerful means of learning about oneself, managing oneself, finding one's inner direction, and exploring optimal levels of functioning and states of consciousness. Further, it is a strategy that is available now, one that could be included in the curricula of schools today to assist our children in facing the challenges of tomorrow. I understand that this would involve a significant commitment of resources, but the investment would be well worthwhile, and we would reap the benefits of such a long-term vision within a generation. By providing our children with practical, hands-on strategies for learning about their unique makeup and functioning during their developmental years, we could have a dramatic impact on generations to come in a variety of areas, including health, learning, professional development, spiritual growth, psychological well-being, and emotional and social functioning. We have the capacity to give our children tools that will allow them to be so much more, and it is my greatest hope that as time goes by, the wisdom of these ideas will be implemented across school districts, cultures, nations, and continents.