Re: [buildcheapeeg] Loose ends: Power

From: Jim Peters (jim_at_uazu.net)
Date: 2002-02-12 09:45:11


Jim Meissner wrote:
> Jim Peters is spending a lot of time attempting to build the perfect
> filter to find these elusive brain waves that he believes "must" be
> there. I have read some correspondence between Jim and Joerg on the
> EEGS group where they were running these tests.

I might be insulted (!) if it wasn't that I strongly respect your
experience and approach to all of this. I also realize that it's not
worth defending myself here, even though you seem to be
misunderstanding what I'm trying to do.

> I really wish that Jim Peters would focus his great software talent
> on building the software instead of duplicating Andreas efforts on
> the input stage. We need some good software to show what the EEG
> FFT really looks like. Displaying it as a voice print such as
> Spectra Plus does, would also look great. BTW Jim, I have lots of
> real brain waves already recorded to study.

I'm working on it. I have an idea for a display program which would
look a lot like that voice-print software you found, only better. I
would be using a slightly different technique (i.e. not using the
filters), and you would be able to change 'focus' and 'brightness' and
so on. I would still be using a log-frequency scale because I believe
that is much more natural for this kind of work. As a by-product of
the algorithm, it would also allow accurate measurement of any
frequency you point to on the display.

This wouldn't be so good for real-time monitoring, though.
Unfortunately, you can't really have it both ways.

> Well, I hope someone gets some benefit from this rather long monolog.

It's good stuff. I'm particularly interested in what you wrote about
training to increase ~40Hz waves (some technical detail at last on
your tennis technique!). I'm also interested in training to get into
eyes-open theta states -- Stuart Wilde talks about this, and I've
experienced something like this directly on a course with Ken
Eagle-Feather (he was training us to see 'energy', and also other
similar techniques under the title of 'Toltec gazing').

I know very well the experience of realizing that you've got
somewhere, and then immediately losing it because of the train of
thoughts sparked off from that. Regarding eyes-open theta states,
Stuart Wilde said that he needed several years of daily practice to
get into this state reliably. I'm interested in EEG to get feedback
to train myself in this. I'd also like to see what kind of waves are
generated from states I already know how to get myself into.

Regarding the way forward from here -- I have found a place to get
electrodes at last, so I could pursue that further. But, as Jim says,
it might better for me to concentrate on getting a really nice
analysis app running.

Somehow I knew that if I spent too long working on recorded data, I
would end up focussing on analysis rather than biofeedback, and that's
why I wanted some live data. However, the analysis could be useful in
any case.

Jim

-- 
Jim Peters (_)/=\~/_(_) jim_at_uazu.net
(_) /=\ ~/_ (_)
Uazú (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) http://
B'ham, UK (_) ____ /=\ ____ ~/_ ____ (_) uazu.net


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