Our mental state is involved with processing the world. That is to say our mental state plays a role in the conversion of perception to conception, to understanding, to action and reaction. The brain is involved at each step through processes of which we are only vaguely aware. These intermediary processes can range from being well regulated to being poorly regulated.

Here is an example of filtering and reinterpretation from the field of statistical data analysis. The first of following two images is a photograph of a car's license plate blurred by motion. The second image is the same photograph after it's been digitally analyzed.

The process of digital analysis uses assumptions of how noise and distortion appear in photographic images, but has no information about this particular image or the subject in the image. The clarity of the plate number is impressive, but notice the emergence of details of which there was no hint in the original. Our minds work in a similar manner to interpret what we perceive, only our mind has more layers, and applies more assumptions.

1. Bayesian analysis and resolution of a blurred photographic image.¹⁰

When we let the brain "watch" itself, rather than watch things outside of itself, the brain gains a new level of control. Lacking feedback is like trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on a dark, moonless night: you can't because you don't know where you are or the effects of your actions. Neurofeedback turns on a light so that your mind can see what it's doing. 30 years of research has shown that it is quite easy for us to consciously change our brainwaves as well as increase our brain's activity by being more aware of our own thinking processes.¹¹

Consider these examples of normal changes in states of mind. Most people require some trigger to make these changes of state.

• You awake from a restful sleep and in your foggy consciousness you are relaxed with the world. You are not concerned with the day's schedule. You feel neither anxious nor worried. This is a low arousal state of mind.
• After work on Friday you go to the beach. You take off your shoes to walk through the cool sand. The crisp air is rafted with broken clouds. Your mind is empty, clear, and at peace. You have an attentive and balanced state of mind.
• On a late drive home you glance at the speedometer, close your eyes for a moment, and lurch awake just before driving onto the shoulder. Attentive and fearful thoughts of what might have happened rush in and then drift away. You are left in a hyper-aroused state.
• Listening to live music you're flooded with a warm memory of childhood and your parents. In a receptive emotional state you feel a little sad, a little vulnerable. You are in an emotionally receptive state of mind.
• Recall being a teenager and seeing the girl or boy with whom you were interested talking and laughing with another: feelings of entitlement and jealousy, or maybe anger and sadness.

We engage in predominant ways of thinking that limit our insight and flexibility. Some therapies, such as those based on Jung's psychology of types, attempt to enlarge a person's habitual response in order to provide greater insight into the world.¹² We all experience moments of alternate consciousness, but they rarely provide vantage points from which we can see a new world wholly formed.

The existence of different viewpoints is no mystery. These viewpoints precede and guide our consciousness, though we are marginally conscious of them. With practice we can control these modes of thought and control how we react to unexpected forces, rather than the other way around. This kind of control is primarily preconscious and intuitive.

Our mind builds its mental state like a circus family crossing a tightrope riding a pyramid of bicycles. We cannot swap one underlying thought form for another without upsetting the family of mind. And it's because the mind only presents itself as a family that talk therapy has such difficulty in fully exploring alternative points of view. In contrast, there are methods that disassemble this pyramid and enable the mind to explore itself freely, one bicycle at a time, as it were. Two such methods are trance and neurofeedback.

The passive process of neurofeedback encourages you to develop new brainwave patterns without resorting to discussion; you create these new patterns with little conscious reflection. You are simply taught to reset your brainwave patterns and explore the states that arise.¹³

The skill of a neurofeedback therapist lies in guessing which states of mind are the most therapeutic, and bringing them forth. It takes experience to succeed in coaching a client to manifest their mental landscape.

The goal is to develop a set of states that exclude "that part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality." These develop out of the client's own repertoire of states, but involve unfamiliar readjustments, the adjustment to states that they previously had not fully experienced, or which they denied themselves access to because of anxious or traumatic associations. The point is that one can do an end-run around trauma because neurofeedback deals with raw brainwave patterns, and not the thoughts or memories with which they're habitually associated.

For example, if a client is obsessed with guilt or anger, then they will have little success in accommodating a stable, comfortable mental state at the same time they are guilty or angry. And because they cannot explore these comfortable states they cannot become habituated to them. Neurofeedback can lead them around their "issues" into a comfort zone. And once they have learned that they can access this zone without first resolving these issues they gain a new vantage point from which to consider these issues. More likely, the issues become irrelevant.

Neurofeedback enables you to relax, release, become sensitive to, and explore alternative states without engaging disturbing mental states. You might say that neurofeedback enables a person to change horses mid-stream because, for many people, there is no way out of the stream.

The Alpha-Theta Protocol

"The active ingredients in (Alpha-Theta) neurofeedback (include): " the new experience of physiological/psychological self-control in a situation where the client had previously felt helpless; (and) the apparent experience of " significant spiritual insight."¹⁴
-- Matthew Kelley

The Alpha-Theta neurofeedback protocol used for the remediation of addiction was developed by E. Peniston and P.J. Kulkosky in 1989.¹⁵ Six weeks of daily sessions of neurofeedback training involving inpatient "problem drinkers" has repeatedly been shown to result in approximately 85% full or sustained partial remission after three years.¹⁶ This compares with what we might project to be 40% of the participants achieving the same outcome through conventional treatment.¹⁷ I will briefly describe what this therapy entails.

Alpha-Theta, like other neurofeedback protocols, is a form of EEG biofeedback. It's called "EEG" because the client interacts with their own electroencephalograph. It's called biofeedback because the client creates, perceives, interacts with, and learns to readjust what they're simultaneously creating and perceiving.

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