Neurofeedback and the Mind Mirror: An Interview with Judith Pennington

Eric opened the conversation on his program "A Psychology of the Future" by introducing his guest, Judith Pennington. She is widely regarded as an authority on EEG, neurofeedback, and meditation, and she founded the Institute for the Awakened Mind. Her lineage traces back to two well-known neurofeedback trainers, C. Maxwell Cade and Anna Wise. In her own practice she works with the Vilistus Mind Mirror 6, a current-generation neurofeedback and biofeedback device she uses to study the connection between brain, body, and consciousness.

Judith thanked Eric and said she was glad to talk about the subject. He suggested they start with her background before moving to the slides and brainwave examples they had prepared.

Her route into this field was unusual. For thirty years she worked as a journalist and freelance writer, and it was during the writing of a book about her own awakening consciousness that she came across Anna Wise's work almost by accident. She read Wise's book on the subject and found that it described, in precise scientific language, the very experiences she had been having subjectively. The two began corresponding, and in 2001 Judith trained with Wise at the Esalen Institute.

A few years passed. Around 2005 she started getting persistent inner promptings telling her to go study with Wise directly, so she did. Over 2005 and 2006 she made six separate trips to Wise's home in Berkeley, California. She described it as an extraordinary period, one that gave her a deep grasp of how the felt sense of awakening lines up with what shows on the Mind Mirror screen. Wise also had her assist at Esalen for four years, where Wise ran workshops of five and seven days, three or four times annually. Judith put it plainly: she learned directly from the master of the Mind Mirror.

Wise died in 2010. When no one else came forward to carry the work ahead, Judith took it on herself. For three years she had been working with a software engineering and EEG manufacturing firm in England, and together they built a new Mind Mirror system, parts of which would appear later in the program. Because the newer equipment lets them observe far more than before, they had begun making fresh discoveries.

She also described connecting the existing awakened-mind trainers around the world through a website, InstituteForTheAwakenedMind.com. Interest in EEG, meditation, consciousness, and the brain has been rising sharply across the globe, she said, which brings more people to them for training and has spread the work internationally. There is now a new user manual, and Cade's book has been translated into French, Spanish, German, and Russian. Judith said it felt like carrying the work to the places Cade and Wise had hoped it would reach, with no obvious ceiling in sight.

Eric then shifted to a slideshow Judith had provided, aimed at people still learning how brainwaves relate to consciousness, and began the screen share.

Judith walked through the charts. Four colors appear, and the spacing between one wave and the next indicates frequency. At the top, in red, the waves sit very close together and run strong in amplitude: that is beta. Below that, in green and blue, the waves spread out a little more: that is alpha. Lower still, with wider gaps, comes theta at slower frequencies. At the bottom is delta. These four are the primary categories trained in neurofeedback, though she noted they are now also examining gamma, which the slides would cover.

Her own framing is that brainwaves are the electrical activity of the mind. From a neurofeedback standpoint, she said, you are watching thought move through the brain. Since thoughts and emotions travel along the same electrical pathways, what you are really observing is consciousness. She was careful to add that this does not mean the brain produces consciousness. In an era when people talk about the quantum field and the biophotonic field around the body, she suspects most would agree that consciousness is larger than the brain. Still, the brain is where consciousness can be monitored and trained, and the Mind Mirror lets them do this to a remarkable degree.

She turned to the figure who began this line of work, C. Maxwell Cade, shown in one of the images. Cade blended scientist and mystic. A physicist by trade, he was also trained in medicine and belonged to all the Royal Societies in the UK, respected in particular for his contributions to radar. From the 1950s onward he had tracked neurofeedback developments worldwide, and he was especially struck by 1957, when Joe Kamiya showed that a person could reproduce alpha simply by learning the feeling of those frequencies, and then train it.

Cade was also a skilled hypnotist and a Zen meditation master. He had the idea that he could pursue something close to what Abraham Maslow was doing in the United States: rather than treating sick people, he would help healthy people self-actualize. His aim was to map the patterns of consciousness in people during peak and transcendent experiences. Even on the early Mind Mirror units from the first slide, this was possible. Judith pointed out the headbands with electrodes underneath, carrying brain signals into the device, where rows of LED lights would illuminate and form patterns.

She drew attention to another sensor on the unit, the ESR, a rectangular box set inside a black frame. Cade had used the ESR since the early 1960s, in collaboration with the biofeedback specialist at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, to track physiological arousal and excitation in the body. That could register a momentary flash of stress as readily as the gradual descent into meditation.

Both instruments, the neurofeedback device and the biofeedback sensor, are still used together today, exactly as Cade used them. He had correlated the two sets of readings, and the correlation held up dead-on true, even with the modern equipment. In his classes he seated groups at a table and guided them down into meditation. At the time he relied on hypnosis; today they use meditation methods that are less intrusive, since hypnosis involves a good deal of talking while meditation guides keep their instructions brief. The underlying technique and its effects on consciousness are the same. By this approach Cade completed 3,000 case studies with the system.

Judith read from the original language describing those studies: from the brainwave patterns of some 3,000 pupils, along with swamis, yogis, Zen masters, healers, mediums, and clairvoyants, it had become possible to establish that the unusual abilities some people show, self-control of pain, self-healing, healing of others, telepathy and the like, are tied to changes in the EEG pattern toward a more bilaterally symmetrical and integrated form.

She said there was actually more to it than that. Bilateral symmetry refers to the two sides of the central channel on the display, the left hemisphere on the left, the right hemisphere on the right, and symmetry does matter for developing consciousness and the capacity to meditate. But another factor is really the heart of their work, she added, beginning to explain what the monitor was showing at the top where it read 38 Hertz.