Jon A. Frederick, M.S.
Although supporting scientific research into psychoactive drugs and plants is the primary mission of MAPS, something of a revolution appears to be happening in the science of electroencephalography and neurofeedback, which I think warrants the attention of the psychedelic community.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method of recording the large scale electrical activity of the brain by using electrodes attached to the scalp. Neurofeedback is a method of increasing conscious awareness and voluntary control over patterns in EEG recordings, by "feeding back" the EEG to the subject through a monitor.
Many neuroscientists are biased against this method because the scalp, skull, and several other layers of tissue provide so much insulation that the EEG has a relatively poor spatial resolution - one generally cannot tell with very much precision where in the brain many EEG signals originate, with the exception of the outermost layers of cortex underlying the electrodes. However, compared to other brain imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET), the EEG has a very high temporal resolution, allowing one to track changes in brain activity on the scale of milliseconds. This high temporal resolution allows the use of the EEG as a biofeedback device (Olson, 1987).
EEG neurofeedback
The most established uses of EEG neurofeedback are for the treatment of epilepsy (Rockstroh et al., 1993) and attention deficit disorder (Lubar, 1995). However, a recent conference in Key West (Feb. 8-13 1996) brought together a number of speakers who claimed that neurofeedback training can effectively treat disorders as diverse as alcoholism, depression, headaches, and sleep disorders. They reported that neurofeedback training (or "neurotherapy") can induce psychotherapeutic insights and altered states of consciousness (abstracts for this meeting can be browsed on the World Wide Web, see Kall, 1996). Many of these reports, however, were based upon uncontrolled clinical studies, and have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals. I was, nonetheless, convinced that neurofeedback is a powerful tool for altering consciousness, and that, like psychedelic therapy, controlled studies of neurofeedback's therapeutic efficacy should be given a higher priority by government funding agencies.
Like psychedelic research, EEG neurofeedback research has been poorly funded by the NIH. However, since anyone can buy an EEG machine without breaking the law, neurofeedback therapy has progressed significantly in the private sector, outside the halls of academia and established medicine. In fact, some neurofeedback clinicians are so confident that they claim it would be unethical to run control subjects that do not receive neurotherapy. They also claim that the biomedical research establishment is applying a double-standard to their research: requiring extensive double-blind studies, while at the same time providing almost no funding to do this research. Meanwhile, double-blind controlled studies have not been required of a wide variety of standard practices in psychiatry and psychotherapy. This double-standard is similar to the narrow-minded dogmatism that effectively banned human psychedelic research in this country for twenty years (see Strassman, 1991).
Implications
The implications of neurofeedback for psychedelic drug research, and of psychedelics for biofeedback, have yet to be adequately recognized, but it is clear that the two therapeutic strategies share a number of common goals and mechanisms, and their combined therapeutic effects could be synergistic. Dr. Sigfried Othmer, whose clinical institute, EEG Spectrum, has provided neurotherapy to more than 1000 patients, explained, "The fundamental information provided by EEG is where the person is in physiological arousal." For example, specific changes in the EEG are highly correlated with different stages of sleep/wake and dreaming (Kleitman, 1960). By rewarding patients for producing brain wave patterns associated with different states of arousal and attention, Othmer argues, patients can be trained to choose brain states that are more adaptive to the circumstances that arise in their daily lives. A theme repeated by several speakers at the conference was that the goal of neurotherapy is not to bring about a specific state of functioning, but to improve a patient's ability to make transitions between states. This sounds remarkably similar to what Tim Leary suggested as the goal of psychedelic therapy: the development of a transcendent perspective from which it is possible to "dial and tune" states of consciousness (Leary, 1982).
Another exciting development presented at the conference was the use of sound-and-light machines and cranioelectrical stimulators (CES) to "entrain" specific brain frequencies. Some investigators believe that such entrainment devices can induce states of consciousness associated with EEG training "automatically," or that they can speed up the process of learning by EEG neurofeedback (see, e.g., Hutchison, 1991, 1994; however, see Rosenfeld's abstract at Kall's (1996) web site for a contrasting view).
Common neuronal mechanism
Interestingly, the neuronal system that mediates the effects of neurofeedback training on arousal and attention, the midbrain reticular activating system (RAS), is also involved in the mechanism of action of psychedelic drugs such as LSD. An essential component of the RAS is the serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) system, which largely originates from the dorsal and medial raphe nuclei of the midbrain. These serotonin-releasing neurons project axons diffusely throughout the central nervous system, and have been implicated in a variety of behavioral and cognitive functions, including the sleep/wake cycle, attention, and appetite; as well as a number of psychiatric disorders, such as depression, schizophrenia, and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Psychedelic drugs such as DMT, LSD, and mescaline exert their specific effects by binding to serotonin receptors (of the 5-HT2A subtype) on postsynaptic neurons, those which receive impulses from the midbrain raphe nuclei (Jacobs, 1987; Roth, 1994).
One of the important effects of 5-HT2A-acting hallucinogens is their disruptive effects on attention. Rats treated with hallucinogens are unable to habituate, or adapt, to a repetitive startling stimulus (such as an air puff or a loud noise), repeatedly jumping as if each repetition were as startling as the first (Geyer and Tapson, 1988). Habituation - the "simplest form of learning" - is essential to the selectivity of attention. As Dr. Mark Geyer said, "If one can't learn what not to pay attention to, the flip side of that is one can't learn to pay attention to anything in particular." (Frederick, 1994.) This defective filtering of irrelevant information" or, to put it another way, this expanded sensitivity to information we ordinarily ignore as irrelevant, could explain a lot of the subjective phenomenology of the psychedelic experience. Geyer and his colleagues at UCSD suggest that this might be the basis of what Aldous Huxley (1963) called "opening the doors of perception." For example, human psychedelic subjects tend to free-associate, reporting a feeling that everything is connected to everything else. In other words, psychedelic drugs suspend the "top-down" cognitive filtering that ordinarily limits the flow of ideas and perceptions to those which fit into our preconceived rational and perceptual categories. Hallucinations, meanwhile, result from deficient filtering (or enhanced sensitivity) within and between sensory modalities. For example, some subjects describe the experience of synesthesia, a crossing over between the senses, or "hearing lights and seeing sounds." It might not be too far out to speculate that synesthesia is a disruption of attention on a larger scale, such that a subject cannot contain his or her interpretation of a stimulus to only one sensory modality. My own theory is that hallucinations are a synesthesia between conscious and subconscious sensory modalities (Frederick, 1996; see also Cytowic, 1995).
The analogies between neurofeedback and psychedelic research are so pronounced that it surprises me that no one has yet reported trying to do both at the same time. Brain wave technology is getting cheaper, suggesting that neurofeedback experiments might be easy to "piggyback" on to some of the drug studies funded by MAPS. For example, Dr. Thomas Collura's (1996) web site explains how just about anyone can build an EEG from scratch for less than $300. Consider the simple experiment of recording the EEG patterns of subjects under the influence of LSD, MDMA, or ketamine. The logical next step would be to train normal subjects to reproduce these specific brainwave states with neurofeedback and entrainment devices. Quite possibly, these technologies could be used to help replicate particular psychedelic experiences without the use of drugs. This could prove an effective strategy for reinforcing therapeutic achievements in psychedelic patients, or even for introducing the psychedelic experience for the first time - without the possible side effects and legal problems associated with taking drugs.
A basic science of consciousness
However, I think both the neurofeedback and human psychedelic research communities are excessively focused on developing clinical applications, at the expense of "basic" science. Indeed, the vast majority of researchers in both fields are practicing clinicians, usually psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. Dr. Joe Kamiya, a pioneer and an elder statesman in the neurofeedback field, spoke at Key West about the importance of developing a basic science of consciousness, with biofeedback at it's core. Kamiya believes that the process of scientific discovery is not just about revealing of connections between events in the external world. "My view differs from that of behaviorist connectionism," he said. "I say we are feeding or nurturing innate predispositions... Since DNA and the brain evolve from the universe it is not remarkable that our mathematical reflections about the universe show some correspondence. We learn about nature as a sort of maturation process." He predicted the arrival of a new school of scientists, connecting themselves to brainwave monitors, introspecting, recording their experiences, and developing a new vocabulary of psychology and neurophysiology.
An introspective science of neurophysiology could very well lead to theories of nature that are more parsimonious, predictively powerful, and intuitively obvious than those of extrospective neuroscience (Frederick, 1996). Let us hasten the day when scientists and philosophers will have the intellectual freedom to create such a science, with all of the necessary tools at their disposal.
References
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