NLP Courses Podcast 7 Brain Waves Click to download Transcript

 

Hello and welcome to podcast number seven, my name is John Cassidy-Rice and I have the pleasure to be your host. Wow, seven already how time flies. What have you been up to? What have you been doing? I’ve been wearing my suit quite a lot this week, and doing a lot of corporate stuff. It is great fun, but every now and again you need to find time to play, so off I toddled, down to the park, early in the morning, and have a play on those slides.

We all need to let our inner child go every now and again. Right, so what are we going to start to explore within this podcast show? Well we’ve been looking at the unconscious mind in the last few podcasts, so I thought this time we’ll take a different angle. Now whenever we think we create electrical activity, and you can measure that electrical activity, and it’s called Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta. Now you’ve come across this theory before, I’m sure you have, so I’ve been digging around to see if I can come up with some different angles or way of understanding the different brain wave states.

Now when we read about them and when we talk about them, we do talk about them separately, as though there independent of each other yet they do not work like that. If you’ve got some high Alpha activity within your brain, you’ll also have some low level of Beta and some Theta. Now why is this important to bring up at this point? Because if you look at any studies into flow states, being in the zone, there seems to be a combination of this, being and relaxed and open which is all to do with Alpha state, but also being highly focused, and that’s to do with Beta brain wave states. They seem to work together, so in a highly focused state, some of the things that seem to be going on is high electrical activity Beta, and also Alpha which is a slower brain wave state.

I want you to just keep that in mind, although we are going to talk about this separately, and each of the different brain wave states have benefits and down sides, so we’re going to start off with Beta activity, which is 14-35 cycles per second. Now this is when you’re awake, when you’re concentrating, when you’re focused. Now I’m outwardly engaged at the moment, so if we’re to measure my brain waves, we probably would measure low level activities of Beta. Now if we were to measure your brain wave states, depending on what you’re doing of course, as you’re listening to this, you’re taking information in and you’re normally in Alpha brain wave state. Now within Beta, what we find is that habitual beliefs are formed and acted upon, this is great state for road memories, so if you’ve got to sit down and memorize a list or procedures, Beta activity is the best place to be. Because this is where you’re focused; it’s really good to get everything organized. When you’re doing any written language, not creative writing, but written text where you need to give instructions, those types of things, so i.e. concentration.

Okay, so we kind of know that, so let’s go to extremes to explore the benefits and downsides of this particular brain wave state Beta. So what happens if you have too much Beta activity for sustained period of time? We’re talking say 40minutes; we’re talking maybe a couple of days. Well a black and white thinking starts to take in; you don’t see any subtleties of what’s going on around you. It’s either right or wrong. Now then you start to become concerned about what others think, you become concerned about yourself, basically a perfectionism starts to kick in, you want everything to be perfect, that’s yourself, and other people, which means you start to become really critical of self and others. Now because a high electrical activity going on, insomnia normally occurs, you know those nights when you can’t sleep, and your brain is racing really, really fast, that’s a lot of Beta activity.

Now if you know somebody who struggles to sleep, let me pass along this bit of advice I got from a neurosurgeon. Now this is not medical advice, you have to seek medical advice; I’m just passing on a bit of information. Every cell in the body pulls in calcium and pushes out calcium, that’s a very simplified version of that, but that’s essentially what’s going on. What can sometimes happen is the calcium starts to build up a little bit, and that can irritate the cell which increases electrical activity. Now there is something that will naturally calm all of that down, it’ called magnesium. Now magnesium is a trace me not, we don’t need a lot of it, but if you lack it, you will have trouble relaxing and have trouble sleeping, now to see whether you have any magnesium deficiency.

A very simple test, you can go to one of this house stores and buy a magnesium spray, and if you spray it on your forehead, and it stings, that’s normally a sign that your magnesium deficient, it takes about 48hours to 36hours for the magnesium to build up, and you don’t need a lot of it, but the magnesium spray will quickly stop stinging, and it will start to normalize. You can also buy magnesium flakes, and have a 20minute magnesium bath before you go to bed, you will probably have the best night sleep you’ll ever have. The other place I came across this, was in sports injuries. If you have an injury and you spray magnesium on the area, yes it will sting, it will sting, but it also starts to bring the inflammation down very quickly. Like I said, I’m not a doctor, but that’s some information that I picked up.

A lot of electrical activity creates this insomnia which means you’re tired, and then you get this perfectionism and you can’t do well and everything starts to become a spiraling circle. Also you feel like life is rushing past and you’re missing out. What happens if we have too little Beta activity? Well now we have a poor memory, we have lack of motivation, dullness starts to kick in, and disorganized, we said this is all about organization. Well if you’re having trouble generating Beta activity, there’s a disorganization of thoughts, which is a good way of saying that, and you start to become, unintentionally irresponsible to other people. It’s not that you don’t care or want to help; you’re just having trouble focusing. Now I did come across a study somewhere, where it said that, they were some underperforming children in schools, and what they did, they trained them to generate Beta activity; it only took about 5minutes a day, just little activities to increase the brain wave speed.

What they noticed, after about three weeks, I understand, the children could concentrate and focus, and in so doing, their behavior improved, their schools start to improve, so this Beta activity is important, to be able to focus and concentrate, but too much of it is detrimental, and too little of it is detrimental.

Notice, we tend to live in society that wants people to focus all the time, and you can’t do it, it’s detrimental to your health, which leads us quite neatly into Alpha brain waves. Now this is between eight to 13 cycles per second. This is when you’re day dreaming, when your minds just wandering, yes I know, when you’re listening to this podcast, your mind is wandering, I kind of count on it. If you’ve ever done any accelerated learning, it’s all to do with Alpha activity. There’s certain music that really puts your brain into this Alpha activity that helps you absorb information very quickly.

Now some classical music has been shown to be the best, but it’s not all classical music, Baroque music seems to work really well, but it’s not all Baroque music, it’s the largo sections within Baroque music, and that’s normally at 60 beats per minute, which is your resting heart rate, and the music goes, “Da, daaaa, diii, daaaadiiii,” and it slows down your heart rate as you start to in tune with the music, your breathing slows down, and your brain wave slows down, which enables you to absorb the information very quickly.

This is about solving problems, coming off with new ideas. Now Edison who solved one or two problems in his life noticed this, and especially noticed it when he was out in nature, and he used to go and sit at the end of the pier with a fishing rod, because anytime you are near water, especially, the water seems to trigger this Alpha activity. This is also why, when you buy those relaxation CDs, they’ve always got a recording or somebody running their bath. They claim it’s a trickling Baroque; it’s not a recording of their bath.

Back to Edison, Edison noticed when he was out sitting by the sea especially, he would come up with new ideas, new insights, and he said, “If I sat at the end of the pier just by myself, people come up and talk to me, and I didn’t really want that to happen, I wanted this free flowing of ideas, so if I sat there with a fishing rod,” apparently he didn’t have a hook on the fishing rod, because he didn’t want to catch a fish, because that would interrupt his thinking, but he had a fishing rod, people left him alone.

So creativity is done at Alpha, and this is why, you’ve heard that brainstorming, innovation, new ideas is best done in this playful state, because a playful state seems to trigger Alpha activity. Special awareness also becomes heightened in this particular brain wave state, and so somebody like an architect who’s designing a building, can specially sort information, and this is done best in this relaxed state, the Alpha state. It’s also where, for the first time you become empathetic to somebody else, you can understand their view point, you tend not to do that in Beta activity, but Alpha is the first state where you really start to understand somebody else’s map of the world. Okay, so what happens if there is too much Alpha activity for sustained period of time?

Well you have a wonderful rich inner world, it’s wonderful inside your head, and you have ideas for businesses that would easily make you a millionaire, in two to five years, and do you? No, because why would you like to take those ideas from this wonderful place, between your ears to the outside world, that is way too much effort.

You miss out on opportunities, not because you’re not having the ideas, you are having the ideas, it’s just that you’re not acting upon them. It’s very easy to become detached from society, and trying to disappear, basically undisciplined routines become oblivious to other people’s lives, and it’s again not because you don’ care about them, it’s just it’s so wonderful inside your own head, your finding it hard to concentrate on anything around you, so time disappears, so what happens if there’s under activity of Alpha?

Well, now you have been struggling to come up with new ideas, new solutions, and you can’t solve problems, your also looking for an external input, something that’s interesting, anything that’s interesting, that could be other people, Television, it could be drugs, anything just to create some stimulation for this lack of internal world or a void if you like. Next we move into Theta, Theta is the love brain wave. Now when you feel those real deep emotions for other people, this is a Theta activity. Parents holding new born children, we measure their brain wave, huge amounts of Theta, people who are in love, huge amounts of Theta, so there’s deep emotions.

You know that point when you’re falling off to sleep? You’re not asleep, but you’re not awake, that’s Theta, and you have that idea, and it’s such a good idea. It is the type of idea that solves world hunger in two to three years, and you think to yourself as you’re drifting off to sleep, “It is such a good idea, I do not need to write that down,” and do you remember in the morning? No it’s disappeared.

Now Edison again, noticed that during the evening in his arm chair, as he sat by the fire, and he was drifting off to sleep, he would have those insights, and he wanted to have more of those, so apparently what he did was he got hold of a ball bearing and he would hold it in his one hand, and as he was drifting off to sleep, he would drop the ball bearing which would wake him up, and then he would do that again, and he would just do that until he can train himself to stay conscious at Theta.

Now I thought to myself, “That’s quite a strange thing to do.” Then it occurred to me, do people who instinctively make a difference in the world, seem to know at some level, that at different brain wave stage, you get different responses, so I went on that hunt. Here’s the thing, in the arts, music, it’s easy to find examples, so let’s go very straight lace, let’s go for scientists. Now again I can make this easy on myself and go for Albert Einstein, we all know about his wonderful thought experiments which would have been done in Alpha and Theta activity.

Let’s go somewhere else, have you heard of Richard Feynman? Richard Feynman is a wonderfully interesting guy. He was up there with Albert Einstein, and the difference between the two, Albert Einstein we kind of put on a pedestal, “We worship you Albert, we’re not worthy.” Whereas Richard Feynman is known as the everyday Physicist, he’s also known as the bongo playing Physicist. Now here’s the thing, you cannot find a picture of Richard Feynman where he doesn’t have the biggest smile on his face.

He really loved life, he played at life. He really had this incredible left brain; he could do the physics, mathematics, just like that. He also had an incredible right brain, like I said he played the bongos, and I’ve heard recordings of this top physicist making songs up about orange juice. On his bongos he’s going, “I want some orange juice,” as he played the bongos.

Now whenever you heard him talk, and you could get his lectures on audio, and they are worth listening to, and you listen to them, and you go, “man this sounds fascinating.” No idea what he’s going on about, but man it sounds fascinating. I was reading the instruction to one of his books, where he said, “Do you know, people come to a physics lecture expecting not to understand it,” and he said, “That is because none of my students understand it, that is because I don’t understand it, and that is because, nobody truly understands it.”

Which also puts into context what Neil Bohr said about string theory, where he said, no sorry quantum theory, where Neil Bohr says about quantum theory, “If you think you understand it, you are hopelessly lost, it is weirder that we could ever predict?”

I was reading about Richard Feynman’s life and halfway through the book he said, he trained himself to stay conscious while he was asleep, so he could wake up in his dreams, and control his dreams. Well this is just whacky stuff, but you will be amazed time and time again, that people who seem to make a difference, a real significance difference in the world, instinctively know that different level of thinking, you get different results.

This is getting fascinating. Now also, Theta is about insights, so if we’re to measure your insights from this podcast today, and then measured your insights tomorrow, now keep in mind that insights are deeper than just knowing facts, it’s about how you imply something, and because you slept on it, your insights tomorrow will be deeper than they are today. If anyone has ever said to you, “I need to sleep on this,” what they’ve just instinctively said is I need this information to pass through Theta, before I’m comfortable with it.

Now that has implications for us, because if we want someone to make a decision on some brand new information that they’ve not heard before, and you force them to make a decision there and then, they are quite likely just to say no. If you say to them sleep on it, and I’ll get back to you, 24 hours is good, 48 hours is better, and if it’s right for them, not guaranteed they’ll say yes, but if it’s right for them, their more likely to say yes. So Theta is also about advanced meditation. Most people who meditate normally get down to Alpha, and as they go into Theta, will start to fall asleep.

You can always tell when you’re about to move into Theta, for whatever reason, any images you have while you’re mediating initially go black and white before they turn back into color. It all seems too connected with profound spiritual experiences, and this was first measured in the 1970’s with the Indian yoga’s coming over, and measuring their brain waves.

Right, so what happens if there’s too much Theta? Well, the uncontrollable need to sleep; it’s a very slow brain wave. Also seems to be connected to petit mal seizures. Now petit mal seizures or any seizure in that fact is a complex situation, so it’s a contributing factor. Now my son, I’ve got a son that’s disabled, he’s a wonderful lad, and we suspected he was having petit mal seizures, but it’s really hard to track, because the petit mal just means small, and seizure is like a nervous system freezing.

Like on your computer where you get that spinning icon, and then it comes back online, well that was basically happening to his nervous system. Like I said it’s really hard to track, because you don’t know if something just caught his eye, his thinking about something, or he has left the planet.

Now quick aside, he developed into uncontrollable epilepsy, he’s on a whole range of drugs, but one of the things he’s had done, was he’s had a magnet connected underneath his skin, with a wire going up to his vagus nerve, and every, I think at the moment at 0.2 seconds, he’s getting a slightly electrical activity into his brain to disrupt this epileptic fits, if you like.

If he starts to move into one, we’ve got a very strong magnet that we scan the battery with, that’s under his skin that sends electrical charge up into his brain, which helps reduce the epileptic fit. The surgeon essentially said to us, “Now we know it works in various different ways, we don’t really know why it works, we have some theories obviously.” He said, “Some of the side effects seemed to be an improved feeling of goodwill, and better energy states.” I was thinking of having one installed myself.

What happens if there’s too little Theta activity? But we said that this was the love brain wave, well if there’s too little Theta that inability to feel those deep emotions to feel connected to other people, the wonderful experiences like love, that trust of other people. Now when you don’t feel that, you start to mistrust other people, now that can lead itself to you feeling either superior or inferior to other people, and that is all connected with either wanted to control that relationship or in fact being controlled by that relationship.

Next, we move into Delta, Delta is when you’re sleeping; your brain is repairing itself. Now when you’re dreaming you have Theta activity firing at the same time, so we’re talking sleeping, and this is how important sleep is. We were willing as cave people to curl up in the corner of a cave and go to sleep, knowing that a Saber Tooth Tiger, who come in and say, Some to eat… French Saber tooth tiger, we need to put ourselves at risk to be able to sleep, so sleeping is really important to us, it’s where the body and brain is repairing itself, and sorting out what happened during the day to us. I hope you found this useful.

We’ve been exploring, Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta, and we’ve looked at some of the extremes knowing that each one of them are important, but too much of one, or too little of one of this brain wave states is detrimental to us.

I have a gift for you, if you would like the gift, what I would invite you to do is to leave me a review, a five star review on the iTunes, it really helps us. It helps us get into the news and noteworthy, and in exchange for a genuine five star review, what I would like to do is send you an audio where we have a way to take you down into Theta, using this piece of audio, very powerful, so post your review, email me it and I’ll send you a link to that audio.

Thank you for listening, and I’m looking forward, I know this has been a little bit longer than some of the others, it was a big topic, and I’m looking forward to catching up next week.

All the best then, thank you.