Mind Modifications

A hypnotist from Great Britain underwent a surgery without anaesthetic, opting instead to hypnotise himself to not feel the pain.
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Wired brings you: Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them.
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In order to make coloured noise (white, brown, pink) you do not have to spend even $35 to get a specialized commercial product. You can just download Audacity, an open source audio editor, and generate the noise files with that.
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The activity happening within the brain is electrochemical by its nature. When this activity is measured, it can be broken down into five major frequency bands: delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma. Roughly speaking, these bands correspond to certain biological states.

For example, delta waves are prominent in slow wave sleep (SWS, stage 4 of NREM). Beta waves are seen in normal waking state as well as intense thinking or concentration. Theta waves are seen with meditation, hypnosis, trances and other altered states of consciousness.

In other words, with a suitable measuring device, it is possible to get objective feedback about what your state of consciousness is.
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Coming soon: cheap and productized consumer-grade brain-computer interfaces (BCI). These “everyman’s EEG devices” are primarily sold as game controllers, but surely they could also be made into a tool for research and experimentation at home.
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Here is an interesting BBC Horizon document about sensory deprivation:

For the first time in 40 years Horizon re-creates a controversial sensory deprivation experiment. Six ordinary people are taken to a nuclear bunker and left alone for 48 hours. Three subjects are left alone in dark, sound-proofed rooms, while the other three are given goggles and foam cuffs, while white noise is piped into their ears.

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To experiment with the Ganzfeld effect, you need to create a suitable Ganzfeld (or more if you aim for multi-modal Ganzfeld). One way to make a visual Ganzfeld are so-called “Ganzfeld goggles” and a bright light.

To build Ganzfeld goggles, you need ping-pong balls, some sandpaper, a sharp knife (for example those which are used to cut mats), a pencil, and about half an hour of time.
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Sometimes you might see a claim like “you only use 10% of your mental potential/brain capacity/brain power/etc.”, and usually that sentence is followed by description like “…and now we show how to tap into the other 90%”, followed with an imaginative, quick, effortless way how you “tap into” that untamed reservoir of turbo-charged neurons.

So what’s wrong with that?

The 10% brainpower claim is a myth - there is no evidence supporting such a claim. Snopes has a good article about it, it’s worth a read.

If you think you have a bad memory, it might be that you’re just using your memory inefficiently. The root of the problem might actually not be a built-in genetic inability to memorize things, but rather problems in the recall phase when you are frantically digging your memory to find the thing(s) you stored earlier. Therefore improving recall should do wonders to remembering things.

You can make a normal memorizing task become an assisted recall task by linking the memorizeable information with something you already know well. One such technique is the Loci system. It is an old mnemonic link technique dating back all the way to around the year 500 BC (yes, that’s more than 2500 years old!). It uses well-known locations as cues to aid memory recall. It can be used when trying to remember lists (e.g. shopping lists, lists of foreign words) or other linked information (e.g. presentation speeches, food recipes).
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What is a Ganzfeld effect? The Ganzfeld (German for “complete/full field”) effect happens when the sensory system is steadily overloaded with a uniform signal. For example, a uniform, steady and all-encompassing soft light to the eyes will cause a “loss of vision”. This happens because, essentially, there is no change in the signal going to the brain, so the brain stops processing the signal.

The Ganzfeld is interesting because it is a simple, yet effective tool which provides a mild form of sensory deprivation. And sensory deprivation is interesting because the effects include hallucinations, relaxation and time distortion - it’s like turning on the screen saver in your brains.
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