Dr. James Hardt: Interview Archive
When you tinker with biofeedback or neurofeedback on your own, without a tested protocol and without a skilled trainer beside you, the likely result isn't growth. What you may actually be doing is teaching your own ego to fend off the very insights that a more rigorous, disciplined session would let through. For that reason, the notion of starting this training at home makes me cautious. I'm not saying it can never work. But I've put together methods for running it in India, where a thousand people sit together in one enormous hall, each sending their own signal the way you might in a language lab, with semi-skilled people acting as coaches or trainers. That setup isn't the equal of a truly skilled trainer, yet it beats struggling alone with someone who has no training at all. I keep in mind that I'd like this to reach seven billion people, so I'm looking for ways to deliver it at scale.
Erik: That's wonderful, and it's good to hear such large ambitions for the future of psychological health and spiritual development in people. Before we close out the call in the next couple of minutes, I'd like to ask whether there's anything else you think listeners should know.
James: I touched on it briefly before, that I know the brain wave patterns associated with halos.
Erik: Yes, please, tell us about that.
James: I don't yet have the equipment ready to teach that pattern, but I'm building toward it. Let me explain how I came across it in the first place. I had FM recordings of brain wave meditations from somewhere around thirty Zen meditators. The group included a famous Roshi along with advanced, intermediate, and beginning practitioners. I also had access to a computer program whose assembly language code I had documented myself, so I probably understood it better than the person who wrote it. That gave me the chance to run those magnetic FM tape recordings through the program, which analyzed power and coherence using spectral analysis, and I generated graphs from the results.
The first thing I noticed was confirmation of the patterns that Kasamatsu and Hirai had reported from a comparable study they ran in Japan with Zen meditators, the brain wave distinctions separating beginners, intermediates, and advanced practitioners. On top of that I had the Roshi, a Zen master, a very well known one. His recording showed a pattern I had seen in only one other person out of all thirty, one other among the advanced meditators. In science, one case out of twenty is enough to reach statistical significance. P less than .05, one in twenty, and at that point you can call it significant.