Dr. James Hardt on the Origins of Brainwave Biofeedback

This is from "A Psychology of the Future," an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman, where people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine talk through the ideas behind practical psychology. In this session Lenderman sat down with Dr. James Hardt, one of the first researchers to work seriously with brainwave biofeedback.

Hardt is the founder and president of The Biocybernaut Institute. His background is a little unusual: a Bachelor of Science in physics from Carnegie Institute of Technology, followed by a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. For roughly three decades he has looked at the electrical activity in the brain that accompanies spiritual states. His subjects have included advanced yogic meditators, Zen practitioners, and people engaged in Christian prayer and contemplation, and he trains others to reach similar states using feedback from their own brain waves.

When Lenderman asked him to describe what he had spent those years doing, Hardt reached back to how it all began. He was still a physics major at the time, walking out of the student union on the Carnegie campus after lunch, when he noticed a large hand-painted sign. Every letter was a different color. It announced that a Dr. Joe Kamiya would be speaking on brain waves and consciousness in about ten minutes, at a building just a short walk from where he stood.

He had no class that hour, so he went in. What Kamiya described stayed with him. Only a few years earlier, Kamiya had shown something that ran against the accepted view of the time: that brain waves, long assumed to be autonomic and beyond any deliberate influence, could actually be brought under voluntary control. That single finding opened up a new area of study, which came to be called neuronal self-regulation, or neurofeedback.

Hardt did not stay a spectator. He became an early participant in the research, writing and winning both private and federal grants to carry it forward. He also built the tools for it. In 1978 he produced what he describes as the first micro-computerized system in the world for giving people feedback on their brain waves and analyzing the signals as they came in.