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Future Applications Index
Mood Maps
Virtual Reality Implications

Individual and Cultural Implications of Brain Activity
Mapping and Training
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.

"Feedback changes any system to which it is added. From engineering we know that adding feedback to a mechanical or electronic system endows the system with new and often surprising properties. When American culture received the first televised feedback from the cultural activity known as war [Vietnam, 1970s], the culture was rapidly changed by that feedback in ways that surprised the government.

When individuals receive Brain Activity Feedback, they can change in ways which give them greater objectivity, increased self-honesty, greater self-responsibility, more choices, and a degree of freedom from cultural conditioning, all of which changes can have surprising consequences, and beneficial consequences. With appropriate Brain Activity Training, individuals can improve their skills and their abilities, and they can learn both how to have new desirable experiences [happiness, vigor, contentment] and how to stop having undesirable old experiences [like anxiety, depression, paranoia].

Indeed, people can learn how to change the core dimensions of their personality, by changing their brain activity, just as a computer's basic characteristics can be changed by loading a new operating system. By changing their brain activity, people can change their behavioral characteristics and they can learn how to regulate almost any process in their minds and their bodies. An individual with such a range of capabilities is far outside the range of the cultural norms.

The appearance of such individuals, even in small numbers, will have an enormous impact on established cultural values and cultural institutions, and will rapidly redefine our cultural beliefs about what is possible and desirable, and what is normal. A culture of consciously self-regulating individuals will bear little resemblance to any culture as we know it, and it is beyond our current abilities to fully imagine.

We know from physics that harmonic oscillators brought into resonance will exhibit "emergent properties", which are new properties which cannot be observed or inferred by study of the individual oscillators. As the oscillations in different regions of a person's brain are aided by feedback in coming into resonance, there will be emergent properties of mind. As brain scientists who are using this powerful new tool of brain activity feedback, we must prepare to accept as real, to carefully study, and to communicate to our culture about these emergent properties, these paranormal abilities which we will be assisting our trainees to develop. And beyond the individual paranormal mind skills, there will also be new collective mind abilities.
..."

Dr. James Hardt
www.Biocybernaut.com