As a skilled EEG technician, Thomas placed the electrodes over specific areas of my head at specific locations and distances to capture different brain areas. Electrical activity in the brain is recorded as a ‘wave.’ The EEG records the many types of brain waves. The basic brain waves are alpha, beta, theta, delta and gamma waves. There are other more complex waves. Each type of brain wave has a normal frequency, height, shape, and location and even a person’s age can mean that a certain brain wave is more predominant or not.

I confess I am a “rookie” when it comes to understanding EEGs and I am now determined to get my teeth into studying how the results of an EEG are interpreted. Thomas obviously was the expert yesterday and took me step by step through the process. Firstly, we did a 5 minute eyes closed test and then a 5 minute eyes open test, to determine what my normal brain activity looks like. Instantly, when I was hooked up, there were bands of pink streaking across the reading and Thomas explained this was muscle tension and that I should start to relax. Interestingly, as soon as I did start to relax those pink bands disappeared.

Those first tests showed some indication of my brain in normal state and there were a few things that Thomas noticed, perhaps traces of my “language brain” and maybe even an imprint of emotional trauma and Thomas will look more closely at those in his in-depth report.

After the initial tests, I then went into a 50 minute meditation. Since April, I have been meditating almost every single day and sometimes for 1 or 2 hours per day. Each meditation can differ, but I know that on some occasions I do have expeiences which I would classify as “Gamma spikes” and yesterday at about minute 44 of the meditation I experienced one of these Gamma spikes and I have to say it was stronger than ever experienced before and it felt like a wave of electricity suddenly rippling through my brain.

Afterwards, Thomas and I had a quick talk and overview of the EEG during the meditation and he compared the normal state brain to the “in meditation brain”. What was astonishing for him at first glance was that from normal state brain I managed to totally change my brain state in those first 20 minutes to achieve a perfectly “white clear” reading and utter coherence and then Thomas also clearly witnessed the gamma spike on the EEG. He will now go deeper into the results and really deeply analyse the whole reading and I look forward to hearing his conclusions and results over the next month.

Unfortunately, we did not have time to explore what happens to my brain, when reading different languages, so this will be a reason for me to come back to visit Thomas very soon.

Neurofeedback is becoming the new way of “us” discovering ourselves and discovering the wonderful and awesome “brain” that we all are. I would encourage eveyone to read more about neurofeedback!