Slow Waves, Profound Attention, a Compass for the Gifted Thinker

 Presentation at 2nd Annual SSNR Meet Las Vegas May 1994

The late Edward’s Deming is arguably the most inspiring statistical engineer and business thinker of the century. He introduced the term “Profound Knowledge” in order to differentiate between the kind of knowledge which really breeds quality and healthy growth and far less effective even counter productive forms of knowledge.

The historian Oswald Spengler said that a hypothesis does not have to be absolutely correct as long as it is useful. A number of people have told me they consider the following hypothesis useful.

This hypothesis holds that thought is matter and (like movies) thinking is a material process and an image making process based on memory. Furthermore, high order, what could be termed the capability for “Profound Attention” is probably the most important asset a human being can have.

The Capacity for “Profound Attention” can in many if not most human beings be enhanced. This enhanced, “Profound Attention” carries with it the capability of conscious observation of thought and the implications of this are that this ability to watch oneself think is the healthiest possible way to manage and improve the quality of thought. This observation itself is a kind of “field”. Einstein said, “The field is the soul governing agency of the particles”. In this case the particles are thought. The implication follows that one of the most effective ways in the history of learning to enhance this “Profound Attention” and improve the quality of thought is slow wave, relatively synchronous Neurofeedback training.

This hypothesis further asserts that as cartographers of consciousness, we are now being forced to define much more carefully terms that have hitherto been taken far too much for granted. We must now come to much more precise definitions of intelligence, thinking, imagery which transcends thinking, attention, etc in order to clarify what we really want to reach for.

If the ancients (and many of the modern masters) are correct and the problem is that psychothenia, over thinking, “unconscious” or unobserved thinking is the fundamental barrier to the natural intelligence and creativity latent in humans and if it is true that in most “normals” slow wave (ALPHA/THETA) but mostly mid-range ALPHA training can enhance the ability to profoundly attend to internal (thought, archetypical imagery, etc) and external phenomena simultaneously, in real time, then indeed ALPHA/THETA Neurofeedback, skillfully managed is one of the most valuable educational tools ever developed.

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