Hey umop,
I didn't realize Northstar was selling their designs or that anybody here was using it. Guess I need to get to reading the literature I downloaded. Off the top of my head I wonder if it would be suited for ILF/SCP training too, although for all I know that's part of the design. Very interesting, I'll have to look into it. Also you've got me interested in Dharma Overground now; I try to limit my board participation due to the time factor, but I find that I've been drifting more heavily into meditation and general enlightenment topics over the past several years, and accumulating a lot of texts and resources on it--but most importantly settling into an almost daily meditation routine. Thanks for the links.
For Entropy Training or TAGsync I think a breathing focus would detract, for me at least I find those two designs have a strong sort of mental focus. Like they point to certain mental characteristics that are pretty formless, so I think focusing on an object (other than 'emptiness' for entropy/concentration, or 'awareness' for TAGsync) would complicate training in a sense. For me at least they work better at pointing to these more diffuse mental qualities.
From my much less experienced point of view, it would seem that anything requiring attention like a timed breath cycle would necessarily detract from what I'm guessing you're pursuing, i.e. some sort of nondual awareness state. I mention it though because when I'm on one of my kicks training HRV for hours at a stretch (I plug into finger sensors while studying Anki cards at the pc) I find that I settle automatically into a timed breath loop unexpectedly while doing other things, without any mental counting taking place, or not until I notice I'm doing it anyway. That, and the state of HRV coherence just seems intuitively like it would enhance whatever state you're pursuing via EEG in respect to meditation. I've been reading though my Chapin Neurotherapy book (finally) and it describes coherence basically as oscillatory systems moving into synchrony (coherence)--respiratory and circulatory systems in HRV coherence, and brainwave states at various sites doing the same in deep meditation. If all these things are in coherence at the same time, it seems like that would be immensely powerful. Or maybe that's what you're getting at here:
Though I'm looking into some designs by Glyn Blackett (he calls them "Mindfulness Technology") for training Mindfulness of Breathing meditation. There's a guy on the Dharma Overground forums that goes by the handle Dan Cooney that talks a lot about 'breath harmonics'. The general idea is you locate the essential muscles for breathing and streamline everything to a fine degree until a kind of optimized breathing becomes habituated and you can go for breath cycles longer than a minute. This is supposed to make it really easy to enter absorbed states like the jhanas because by calming down your breathing to such a fine degree you're also calming down your mind. Skillful breathing is bound to be good for health or general body and emotional awareness, too. So I think HRV training can factor in significantly into an advanced meditation practice, but it would probably be more something like that. I intend on adding something like that to my toolbox eventually, too.
I'm reminded again of that Jim Hardt story I was talking about with Crowstream. He found that when he was fully immersed in his Alpha state that he had to suspend breathing entirely for as long as he could stand it because the act itself would pull him back out to some fractional degree. This 'breath harmonic' thing sounds like a potential compromise. I already have a pretty long breathing cycle for HRV, but it still requires 3-4 cycles per minute, and of course I have to count it out still, too.
When I was doing some research it seems like Pete Van Deusen uptrains beta and downtrains theta at Fp1 for "Motivation", but I'm a bit prone to hypomania and training beta seems to make that more likely for me. Beta training seems like it might reflect one element or one kind of positive stress, though.
I was going to mention that too, but the section I read used the term "FP01," and I couldn't tell if that was a typo or possibly one of the more specialized frontal sites. I know for instance that Sebern Fisher utilizes an upside-down electrode placement just under the ocular ridge near the corner of one of the eyes that's meant to somehow target the amygdala directly, although how that works I don't know, since the amygdala is supposed to be "invisible" to EEG (probably no pyramidal cells). Anyway I thought maybe FP01 was some other placement so I was holding off until I could look into it.
Anyway though the point is that van Deusen says he gets an immediate jolt of motivation from that montage, such that he has to get up and "do something" before getting through an entire sitting. That's great, I guess, but it's not so useful to me if I have to do an EEG session every time I want to get motivated to do something. It reminds me of reading HEG reviews by people who talk about how "focused" they are after the session--first of all, it's exercise, and if you're doing it right, if anything you should find it harder to focus afterward--but even if true, what's the use of a device that you have to put on first and sit with every time you need its benefit? Imo you'd be much better off with a nootropic intervention of some sort, if that's all you get out of it. EEG is even worse from that standpoint.
So maybe it's useful to know that a certain band of activity in the left frontal region is implicated in motivation, and perhaps with training over the medium term with occasional reinforcement there might be a way to create a conditioned response for boosting motivation on demand. EEG is used for classical conditioning (alá Pavlov) in all kinds of performance applications like creating Alpha anchors for athletes to access right before specific activities, so it stands to reason that something similar might be available here too. Maybe there's a way to take van Deusen's protocol and create an anchor for it via some repeated physical posture or gesture during the training. Actually, that sounds quite doable.
The other option is that HEG might increase motivation over time, and @Strangelove I'm kinda winding around to answering your question here too--although obviously I've already left an extensive record of my observations over at the Bulletproof forums, where I'm due to update again soon. But I'll say briefly here that I'm coming to view HEG training as a very long-term sort of prospect in terms of what gains one should expect, and I think there's a fundamental misidentification of this fact out there that colors most of the commentary and reviews that you're likely to run across--including a lot of mine, as I had very little idea going in what the reality of the training effect over time would be. But what I'm finding is that while there is a notable improvement in the 20-40 session term, it's totally unpredictable how that will manifest for the individual trainee, and the improvement itself may be in an area completely unlooked-for, to the extent that it may go unnoticed for a long time. What I suspect is that HEG training increases ALL executive function by strengthening the PFC, but it develops very slowly over the long term in tiny unnoticeable increments, and with potential side-effects along the way making it seem at times as though you're actually getting worse. Plus there's a time factor required to integrate and utilize the structural improvements that form in the PFC as the result of improved blood supply and flow.
In other words, I wouldn't pay a lot of attention to anything you find by individual consumers of HEG training. You're dealing with inexperienced users groping in the dark for a magic bullet or quick fix to a problem that they likely haven't even defined in any meaningful terms either to themselves or for you. The only people with really clear goals that I've seen are the ones who suffer from attentional disorders, which is unfortunate because issues like that are a lot more complex than how much processing power you have on hand for decision making. If you want to learn more about HEG though, I'd concentrate on actual clinical studies and published remarks from clinicians and developers, although unfortunately a lot of that has to be taken with a lick of salt too, like much of Hershel Toomim's ideas about training HEG at specific sites all over the head correlating to specific functions and problems.
Everybody wants to "focus" better, or get smarter, or kick a lot of ass, but very few of them have any idea what that would look like on the ground in a day-to-day setting, aside from just feeling great and on top of things. Here's what I think happens: it's like sitting down at a table in Vegas and adding a fraction of a percent to your odds of winning slowly over time, like say +.05% every week. Even from a month-to-month view, you're getting nowhere, but in a year you've increased your odds of winning at everything you do by better than 2%. That might not seem like much in the beginning, but as the years go by, you gradually improve your lot in a global sense because you're altering for the better how you function and deal with literally everything in your life. In 5 years you might find yourself in a very good place compared to where you started.
Anyway, it's a theory. For my two bits, I think everybody should do HEG like they should do cardio or other essential exercise, although I'd be very measured in my approach to it as I've found that over training is a real possibility, easy to do, and difficult to recover from. Maybe a Body By Science approach with a heavy burst once a week or so would be ideal; daily training doesn't seem to be a good idea. But I'd recommend it to everybody and then tell them not to expect anything from it, because whatever happens it's likely not to be what they had in mind.
I've been working lately with TLC's 2-band sync design, which looks essentially like TAG but with a different interface and a more elaborate response conditioning system, that is, requiring a bit less effort on the part of the trainee although still not all that easy. I'm a bit all over the place though because I'm wedging my EEG work in mostly at the end of the day after studying, and a lot of days I either don't finish studying with enough time to spare for EEG, or often as not I just don't finish at all. Hopefully I'll have more to say about all that soon, but for the moment I'm out of time.
hza, for entropy training I'm using the designs from NorthStar Neurofeedback. They seem to work quite well, it's actually my favorite protocol right now because it's so easy and relaxing where before my meditation practice was inclined a bit more towards 'striving'.
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