Winter Brain conference

We spent the weekend at the FutureHealth Winterbrain conference in Palm Springs, CA, and just got back Monday evening.

While the primary reason for attending was to see Tina’s presentation, we also had a chance to view some of the speakers and talk to some of the presenters. I spent some time talking shop with Chuck Davis of the Roshi Corporation, and did a session on his new unit. It was pleasant, and we got to try out his “Mag Stims” or electro-magnetic stimulation which he places on the SMR strip. This is in addition to the LED glasses we normally use.

It is an altogether different experience, doing a BWE session in the middle of a room full of people. Yet, in a conference like this it is almost required that you attach something to your head at some point, and zone out. Within 5 minutes I felt invisible, like a fly on the wall, simply listening to the bustle of the room, relaxing. The atmosphere was almost calming, maybe because the dozens of conversations surrounding me easily replaced my own internal mental chatter. Perhaps this is why many people (including myself) find the sounds of people relaxing. In NP1 we included a number of sessions that used chatter from a crowd, a restaurant or the sounds of a city, and you can still find many of those sound files in our member’s area.

I also got a chance to try the new “Healing Rhythms” software from Wild Divine. Again, an interesting experience trying to perform biofeedback in a room full of people, but I surprised myself at how easily I was able to go through the exercises.

The night before Tina’s presentation we had some technical difficulties. My laptop’s mouse became completely unusable, and the powerpoint installation on Cynthia’s laptop suddenly started giving us problems. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones. The laptop provided for speakers by FutureHealth was also on the fritz. There is something about Palm Springs that destroys computers, I’ve decided

Despite that, we were able to figure it out and Tina’s presentation went off without a hitch. She did a fantastic job with it. The speech was crammed with useful information – so much that I could tell there was probably a lot more she could have put into it, given a larger time frame. The study itself, when released, will be a great asset to the field and will hopefully draw a lot of interest to BWE.

After the presentation, Tina got some very positive feedback from the audience, and we were approached by a number of people asking for more information about our products. We brought a dozen NP2 trial CDs with us and ended up giving away all of them.

Here are a few pictures I was able to snap:

Tina near the end of her presentation. You probably can’t see her well here because of the lighting (I didn’t want to be rude and use a flash), but she’s in front of the plant off on the right.

Winterbrain exhibitor’s room.

We had a great time, and are considering exhibiting in the future, based on the positive response we got from the presentation.

Well, I’m exhausted still from all the traveling, so that’s all I can write for now. I apologize to anyone who emailed us over the weekend and on Monday – as I said, my laptop died. I spent most of Monday evening trying to catch up.

Adam

From Tina: My research so far, a critical overview of the BWE field and thoughts on future developments

Happy New Year to the members of the Transparent Community!

Adam asked me to say a few words about what I’ve been doing since I’ve been hired to work with Transparent Corp, and to fill you in on our plans.

I joined Transparent Corporation primarily because I’d been touched by the effects of brain entrainment, and saw in it an enormous potential to transform the world of mental health due to its simplicity of use, ease of administration, cost and safety profile.  I was tremendously impressed by the software, its cost, and Adam and Cynthia’s commitment to make mental health solutions available to all!  Thus I came on board with the intention to work towards mainstreaming brain entrainment provided that my personal findings (and those of yours) could be confirmed with scientific research.

Luckily for me, only 2 weeks after I started, the first Brain Entrainment conference in the US was about to be held at Stanford University.  It was a wonderful starting point for me to gage where the field was and what needed to be done first.  It is important that every research project begin with a review of the literature, and my searches in the formal literature (those found in scientific journals) suggested that the few review articles that were published were very limited in their scope.  My findings were confirmed at the conference, as most researchers in the field appeared to be quite limited in their understanding of the history of brain entrainment or the work of their predecessors.  So with the help of a colleague I met at the conference, Christine Charyton, Ph.D., a visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ohio State, I decided to begin my work at Transparent Corp with a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the literature on the effects of brain entrainment on psychological outcomes.  Our aim is to publish it in a high impact journal that will catch the eye of those in the more traditional mental health fields, such a clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and neuroscience and psychology researchers.

One of the reasons why information has been so limited in the field is that the terms used to describe brain entrainment have varied widely within the literature.  In fact, the term “brain entrainment” is not used in the scientific literature.  Instead, terms such as “photic stimulation”, “auditory stimulation”, “frequency following response” have been used, and these search terms return thousands of articles that have nothing to do with brain entrainment!   To make sure we’ve found all the articles, we’ve had to search through all possible databases that can access, and examine all the references of the papers that we’ve found.  So, we’ve been busy.  We’ve found 18 articles so far that met our criteria and we are currently analyzing them to address some basic questions to satisfy the general scientific community.  Although many of the individual studies are preliminary, all of them show positive effects, and we hope that the collective effect of presenting and analyzing them simultaneously will generate some excitement among within the scientific community and beyond.

We envision and hope that this study will be a launching pad for future research for those within the field, and those we hope will be inspired to join us.   Because of the cost of research, with regards to finances, the importance of being associated with a major University or research institute (for resources), and the need for expertise within a wide variety of fields, my future goals are dependent upon opportunities to collaborate with others.  My aim is to continue to work to address questions to determine if brain entrainment is effective for specific outcomes, which I believe is the most effective way for the brain entrainment field to gain recognition of the greater scientific community.  Also, importantly, I am interested in addressing questions with regards to how to improve the effectiveness of the brain entrainment response as determined by psychological tests.  So, I hope to be able to further compare photic vs. auditory stimulation, and the various modes of auditory stimulation (binaural, monaural and isochronic) on specific outcomes. 

I will be presenting our preliminary findings at the Winter Brain conference in January, and hope to present it again at this year’s Brain Entrainment conference at Stanford as well.  We plan to submit the paper to a journal in the Spring.  We will notify you once the paper has been peer reviewed and accepted into a journal, and Adam will then post it to the member’s area.  Please note that publication of an article is highly subject to its reviewers and editors, and can take months to years.  Given it is such a new field to mainstream clinicians and scientists, it may be met with much resistance.  Please keep your fingers crossed!

My other work with Transparent Corp involves the development of ideas for new products, and their testing.  I am also working with Adam to help expand use of our software by making it more intuitive.  And importantly, we want to expand awareness of brain entrainment and our products and plan to develop workshops to address these goals. 

We will keep you updated as things unfold in 2007!

Happy New Year!

Tina L. Huang, Ph.D.