Why Train The Brain?

Brainwave training is the scientific way to deepen into an optimal meditation state that balances the brain, coordinates it with the nervous system, and allows the body-mind to heal and restore itself. The body relaxes and heals, emotions calm, creativity is released, and the unleashed spirit soars.

The focused awareness and sustained attention that develop through meditation cause other extraordinary changes. The brain, cleared of static, unites with itself and gains access to all of its dimensions by uniting into awakened mind pattern. The awakened mind combines the lucid intelligence of the conscious mind, the creativity, insight and spirituality of the subconscious, and the empathetic psychic awareness of the unconscious. 

The awakened mind pattern amplifies into higher states of awareness that seem to be unlimited in their power and scope. As Mind Mirror inventor C. Maxwell Cade wrote in his seminal book, The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness,



"For beginners in biofeedback training, and for people generally, it is very difficult to grasp the concept that our so-called normal waking state is neither the highest nor the most effective state of which the human mind is capable, that there are other states of vastly greater awareness which one can enter briefly and then return to normal living enriched, enlivened and enhanced."

We have only just begun to understand who we are as sentient beings and what we are capable of.

However, one amazing certainty has already revealed itself: assisted by EEG-monitored meditation training, the human brain-mind can not only expand its awareness and consciousness, it can also learn to reprogram itself and heal or remediate any mental, physical and spiritual illness and injury.  

Studies have consistently revealed that mental-emotional stress is the cause of pain and some 90 percent of most illnesses, a significant majority of which can be reversed by the simple psycho-physiological relaxation that is the foundation of meditation. 

Research conducted over the past few decades shows that meditation develops the mental mastery that allows people to reduce stress and pain, which in turn heals the mind and body. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is one of many modern researchers who have proved that after only eight weeks of instruction in mindfulness meditation where patients simply focused on and listened to their thoughts, they experienced a dramatic decrease in chronic pain. 

This program has been so successful that it is now a mainstay in some 700 hospitals and medical schools in the United States and Canada. Mindfulness meditation, amounting to enhanced self-awareness, has been the subject of hundreds of studies. Visit Recent Studies to read some of them. 

Awakened mind meditation, which deepens the mind into its subconscious content, increases self-awareness in the same sense as mindfulness, but goes further by giving people the tools and techniques to stay relaxed and find effective solutions to issues that disturb inner peace and contentedness. 

EEG-led awakened mind meditation thereby promotes healing on every level, as Max Cade, a biophysicist and psychobiologist, reported in his studies on the brainwave patterns of people with anxiety and related illnesses. Cade also studied healers and their patients and found that shifting brainwave states almost unfailingly enables healing to take place. Read these chapters of his extraordinary book, The Awakened Mind.

In 1990, psychologist Eugene Peniston, Ph.D. startled the audience at the annual meeting of the Association of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback by announcing his studies with Paul J. Kulkosky.

Peniston stated that the elevated alpha-theta brainwaves of meditation promote healing states that heal a wide array of illnesses ranging  from alcohol and drug addiction to severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Using techniques learned at the Menninger Clinic, Peniston and Kulkosky did brainwave biofeedback training with chronic alcoholics at the Fort Lyon, Colorado Veterans Hospital. Their patients steadily grew more relaxed and became less depressed, their endorphin levels stabilized, and their MMPI personality profiles shifted into more desirable directions. They also quit drinking and three years later were still alcohol free.

A wealth of psycho-physiological research on alpha-theta meditation training followed. 

In a subsequent Peniston study, alpha-theta training with veterans suffering post-traumatic panic attacks, anxiety, depression, phobias, nightmares and flashbacks cured 12 of the 15 men trained over the course of a month. Thirty months later, they were living normal lives, while all 14 in the control group had relapsed.

Their conclusion was that alpha-theta meditation accesses deep states in which the brain shifts its chemistry and neural pathways. The brain and central nervous system heal themselves and the consciousness flowing through every oscillation in the body-mind.

Brainwave training studies done on violent criminals provides startling proof of the power of meditation to expand people into higher states that heal the brain and nervous system.

Postmortem work and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have shown that some people who are cruelly abused and neglected as infants and children develop 20 percent fewer neurons in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where rational thought is processed. As a result, they are unable to make reasoned decisions or grasp the consequences of their actions.

Mentally and physically deadened as a result of the lack of love, people who are abused and neglected in childhood cannot empathize or trust. Unlike other people, they process their emotions in the right prefrontal cortex (the seat of negative feelings like rage, jealousy, hatred, vengeance and depression) and, as a result, behave aggressively, as antisocial and cold-blooded criminals hard-wired for trouble.

Deep-state meditation reverses habitually negative thinking.

In research carried out by psychologist Douglas Quirk, Ph.D., at the Ontario Correctional Institute near Toronto, criminals trained to produce the alpha-theta frequencies of meditation shifted their brainwave activity to the more positive left prefrontal cortex where we experience love, joy, peace and compassion. 

In another study, Quirk did brainwave meditation training with seventy-seven convicts and taught them to relax. He believed all of his subjects to be victims of head injury or abuse that created in them, as in epileptics, an electrical “seizure” in the drive centers of the primitive, instinctual reptilian layers of the brain. Quirk held that the convicts fell into sudden rages, violent or addictive behavior, and uncontrolled acts as a result of this seizure activity.

Whether or not Quirk was right about the source of the convicts’ rages, the results of his study proved conclusively that tendencies toward anger, rate and violence could be curbed. A year and a half after Quirk’s group of offenders was released from prison, follow-up interviews revealed that those who had received zero to four sessions of biofeedback meditation training had a 65 percent rate of rearrests for violent offenses, a figure in keeping with the national recidivism rate.

However, those who received thirty-four or more sessions had an astonishingly low 20 percent rate of re-arrest. 

EEG biofeedback meditation, as a method of relaxation and self-healing, accomplishes what nothing else can. Meditation makes us whole, by connecting left brain reason with right-brain emotion; shifting negative thinking to positive thinking; increasing blood flow to grow new brain cells; and enhancing self-awareness and insight as the brain and central nervous system build and improve their circuitry. 

It is clear from these studies that once people experience peaceful, meditative states and expanded awareness, neural pathways shift, brain cells grow, and the brain/mind rewires itself toward a new start in life. The invariable result is a happier, healthier and self-actualized life based on a more peaceful and higher state of consciousness.

In the case of brain disorders and injuries, neurofeedback practitioners believe that training specific sites in the brain to more advantageous frequencies floods vibrantly oxygenated blood into the dendrites (thought-impulse receptors) in the area of the brain being treated; consequently, this electro-chemical refueling of the treated site heals the illness or injury. The increased blood flow reorganizes and strengthens existing neural connections to carry electricity that stimulates healing and rejuvenates cells. 

Many neurofeedback practitioners, medical workers, and psychotherapists have reached some compelling conclusions about the fundamental nature of illness. Their theories pivot on the basic assumption that the health of the body derives from the health of the brain and central nervous system. The theory goes like this:

A chronically overaroused nervous system produces physical and mental stress, anxiety, agitation, impulsivity, and anger. Hyperarousal is thought to be the cause of nervous system burnout and physical conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, among others. 

A chronically underaroused nervous system produces some types of depression, lack of motivation, and spaciness. 

Brain instability produces bipolar disorder, migraines, PMS, panic attacks, motor and vocal tics, vertigo, teeth grinding, epilepsy, and other problems. Brain instability is described as an automobile with loose lugs nuts and a wobbly front end. Sometimes the car drives well, but at other times it veers off in one direction or another, and there is nothing the driver can do to steer the vehicle back on the road.

In the above model, nearly all health problems flow from overarousal, underarousal or instability in the frequencies of the body-mind. When any of these causes too much stress in the brain and body (and consequently the mind and spirit), conditions like joint pain, sleeplessness, migraines, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, and attentional problems flare up. 

EEG-led biofeedback meditation, along with other avenues of deep-state meditation, relaxes the body-mind and in doing so automatically rebalances the two hemispheres of the brain. Free of static interference, the brain and nervous system reconnect and electrically power up all systems in the body. 

The central nervous system synchronizes with and balances all other systems, improving health and happiness and producing the central benefits of meditation and awakened mind training: inner peace and consequently improved health, heightened awareness, perception, intuition and intelligence. 

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to consciously change its structure and function. We now know that neuroplasticity is the key to personal health and human evolution. 

Contrary to what was believed for centuries, the completely malleable human brain is always generating new brain cells to serve a wide variety of needs, from memory storage and retrieval to self-healing, creativity and intelligence.  

The coherent brain that operates in relative calm and symmetrical balance can often heal itself of illness and injury. When it cannot, it assigns unused neural “real estate" to perform the functions of injured or imbalanced brain areas. 

Most importantly, the human brain can change its mind. Because it is a self-aware biofeedback device, it is able to change its thoughts and thought patterns in order to make changes in its physical structure. 

For example, the electricity and oxygenated blood flow activated by thought creates new brain cells (neurons) and pathways (circuits) for the transmission of thought and information. If the mind chooses to let go of a thought pattern or behavior, the brain literally "unplugs" that neural circuitry and creates a more positive pathway in its place. 

Just as the repetition of habitual thoughts conditions brain circuitry to specific pathways to begin with, the brain/mind is easily able – with practice and repetition – to reconfigure itself. Neuronal activity changes us into what we prefer to be. This is the foundation of personal transformation.

It is also the basis of personal healing. The ramifications of neuroplasticity are immense and barely understood. Since only the survival mechanisms in the brain and body are hardwired, everything else can be changed. The brain is smart enough to evolve itself, which is why brain-enhancing modalities like neurofeedback, biofeedback meditation, hypnosis, and mental training achieve such excellent results. 

Our new understanding of the brain's ability to self-modulate has given rise to a number of compelling books and revolutionary approaches to healing.

Today, many medical doctors are teaching the brain to reverse the devastating effects of stroke, brain disorders and brain injury.

Consciousness trainers are guiding people into deep subconscious meditation to access higher and healthier states of awareness. Neurofeedback therapists are teaching their clients to self-regulate their brains in order to heal epilepsy, ADD, addiction and chronic pain.

The well-chronicled ability of brainwave training to improve health and happiness is rapidly changing the direction of health care. People in this field, usually without realizing it, are working with the light of consciousness in its many forms: from the electrical current that generates new brain cells, to the power surge of the "aha" insight that amplifies brainwaves and awakens awareness, to the high-voltage brainpower of the mega-mind that heals and evolves the brain and “body electric.” 

EEG awakened mind practitioners and self-trainers living all over the world use the Mind Mirror to advance their consciousness through brainwave mastery and personal transformation. This is the work of conscious evolution. It is available to everyone who enters the subconscious depths of awakened mind meditation.

Expanding the light of consciousness via biofeedback meditation training builds and balances the life force, bringing healing on every level. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, science will continue to develop technologies that enable us to monitor and increase the speed of the healing and evolution of the human brain, mind and body. 

We are harnessing these remarkable technologies and the unlimited healing intelligence within us to evolve humankind into much more than we are and all that we can be. 

Begley, Sharon. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Random House, New York, 2007.

Cade, C. Maxwell and Nona Coxhead. The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness. Element Books, Shaftesbury, Dorset, England, 1989.

Dispenza, Joe. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind. Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Fla., 2007. 

Green, Elmer & Alyce. Beyond Biofeedback. Delacorte Press, San Francisco, 1977.

Hagerty, Barbara Bradley. Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Penguin Group, New York, 2009. 

McTaggart, Lynn. The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. HarperCollins, New York, 2002. 

Pennington, Judith. Your Psychic Soul: A Spiritual and Scientific Journey into the Light of Consciousness. 4th Dimension Press, Virginia Beach Va., 2013.

Robbins, Jim. A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback.

Wise, Anna. Awakening the Mind: A Guide to Mastering the Power of Your Brain Waves. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. New York, 2002.

Wise, Anna The High-Performance Mind: Mastering Brainwaves for Insight, Healing and Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. New York, 1995.