Selected Papers On Hemi-Sync And Binaural Phasing 49.pdf

SELECTED PAPERS ON USING HEMI-SYNC AND BINAURAL

PHASING TO FACILITATE LEARNING, INDIVIDUALLY AND IN

CLASSROOMS

Table of Contents

Page

A PALLIATIVE FOR WANDERING ATTENTION

I. The Ailment

II. The Palliatives

III. Resonance: The Generic Palliative

IV. Applications of the Generic Palliative

V. Types of Attention

VI. Music Plus Hemi-Sync

VII. Imagery

VIII. Classroom Use of Hemi-Sync

References and notes:

BINAURALLY PHASED SOUND IN THE CLASSROOM

The Principle

The Effects

The "Acid" Test

Cost of Equipping a Classroom [circa 1985]

Teacher Training

INITIAL PRCIS OF 1984-85 EEG EXPERIMENTS WITH BINAURALLY PHASED

AUDIO STIMULI

COMMENTS ABOUT USING HEMI-SYNC IN CLASS

Instructor comments

Student comments

THE FACILITATION OF LEARNING

Neurological Organization and Learning

Suggestion and Learning

Facilitation of Motor Learning Through Touch and Movement

Facilitation of Learning Through the Auditory System

Facilitation of Learning in the Child with a Developmental Disability

Summary

References

BINAURAL PHASER IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAM

References

Selected papers on using hemi-sync and binaural phasing to facilitate learning, individually & in

classrooms - 1

A PALLIATIVE FOR WANDERING ATTENTION

Devon Edrington [deceased]

Tacoma Community College

5900 S. 12th St.

Tacoma, WA 98465

I. The Ailment

Experienced teachers know that the chief impediment to learning is inattention. The most

influential thinker in American Psychology, William James, put it succinctly:

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root

of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should

improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. 1

Wandering attention afflicts young and old, rich and poor, bright and dull. It is the bane of

education. Acknowledging the gravity of the problem, educators have proposed many solutions,

most of them being either humane variations on the farmer-club-mule theme or thinly disguised

bribes. But not all efforts to help people focus attention are crude. Now that the blatant smugness

with which we brushed aside ancient wisdom has become obvious to all but the most myopic, we

are beginning to see that some ancient techniques (both Eastern and Western) for training attention

do work. However, they require a large measure of patience, persistence, dedication, and above all,

humility. Thus they are quite unsuitable for the well-adjusted Westerner who virtuously panders to

an insatiable ego. The classic cures are simply too demanding for people who are so important that

they claim an inalienable right to an instant fix.

Research into the nature of human consciousness during the last half-century has yielded

remarkable insights which both confirm and amplify much traditional wisdom. 2 That educators

have largely ignored the pedagogical significance of these recent advances in consciousness and

brain research is scandalous. 3 Brendan O'Regan, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, puts it less

bluntly in an article entitled "The Puzzle of Untapped Potentials":

How often do we read that we are using only some small fraction of our potential? In texts from the

various disciplines studying some aspect or another of the human mind, we find virtually complete

agreement with the notion that we all sell ourselves short by using only a minute portion of our

capacities.

Many would admit that perhaps someday we will know how to educate people more completely,

but for the present we must "make do" with what we have and are sure of as "tried and true." Most

people tend to assume that the Information required for this more complete and effective kind of

education doesn't exist, and that is why we are not seeing it applied. Well, we couldn't agree less!

Over the past couple of decades, in a wide variety of fields, numerous techniques and methods have

been quietly devised, applied, and tested -- techniques that at the very least promise to give the

population at large significantly increased access to their own potentials and capacities. The puzzle

remains: Why are we not applying these techniques more extensively, and how does it happen that

Selected papers on using hemi-sync and binaural phasing to facilitate learning, individually & in

classrooms - 2

mainstream educational institutions have largely ignored even the most conservative pieces of

information regarding these matters? 4

Why indeed? We ignore things not only because they seem valueless; we also ignore things because

we see them as a threat.

We fear our possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which

we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions

of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such

peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very

same possibilities. 5

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar, and we are not over-endowed with courage.

Educators are no less prone than others to cling tenaciously to the safe, the established, the

accepted. After all, if I innovate, I draw attention to my actions and will be held responsible for

them. But if I stick to the tried and true, it is not I who bears responsibility -- responsibility falls

upon the established method, so no one is responsible. How comforting! How easy! How

irresponsible!

Sages from all of humanity's major traditions have for millennia agreed that the typical, well-

adjusted, sane member of any society lives in a trance:

So habitual is the trance of ordinary life that one could say that human beings are a race that sleeps

and awakens, but does not awaken fully. Because half-awake is sufficient for the tasks we

customarily do, few of us are aware of the dysfunction of our conditions. 6

People seem to awaken fully only as the result of some great trauma 7 . Many thinkers have viewed

birth as a trauma which awakens us from the trance of intrauterine life, followed by years of

accommodating (adjusting, maturing, developing, growing up) to a new trance state, consensus

reality. Those who are successful at accommodating -- the well-adjusted -- do not suffer another

trauma until death, whereupon they are faced with accommodating to yet another reality, etc. From

whatever reality we happen to occupy, the previous one seems dreamlike 8 , if we can recall it at all.

A long-range view of the history of humanity reveals that every major tradition has included the

view that the quality of human life is a function of the kind of consciousness which characterizes

the individual. In most traditions the notion that I am responsible for the quality of my

consciousness has been a minority view -- it is far more comforting to blame my condition on the

Devil, or the Republicans, or the Jews, or the Blacks, or Human Nature, or ... We are fortunate to

live in an era when the state religion of Western culture (popular science, or Scientism) is

beginning to acknowledge individual responsibility for the quality of consciousness. Our best

scientific minds now agree with the sages of antiquity that voluntary control of consciousness is

possible -- that we are not simply innocent victims of Fate. Roger Walsh, a noted psychiatrist, has

summarized this ancient view which is now re-emerging in the West:

(1). The source of all pleasure and suffering is the mind.

Selected papers on using hemi-sync and binaural phasing to facilitate learning, individually & in

classrooms - 3

(2). The untrained mind is vastly less under our voluntary control than we imagine. In fact,

it is so out of control that we do not recognize that it is out of control.

(3). Because the mind is out of control, our awareness is constricted and distorted to the

extent that we are unaware of our true nature, identity, and potential, and are

unaware that we are unaware. From this ignorance comes all the ultimately self-

defeating behaviors that result in suffering.

(4). It is possible to bring the mind under greater voluntary control, and thereby to reduce

suffering, and discover our true nature and identity.

(5). The consciousness disciplines provide guidelines for training the mind and bringing it

under greater voluntary control.

(6). Bringing the mind under greater voluntary control may be the optimal means for

enhancing our well-being and for enabling us to contribute effectively to the well-

being of others. 9

In retrospect it is easy to see that the type of consciousness appropriate in feudal Europe was

dysfunctional after the industrial revolution. No great insight is needed to see that the type of

consciousness befitting industrialized society will not work in the post-industrial era into which we

are rapidly moving. The industrial pedagogical paradigm emphasizing content, the acquisition of a

body of correct information, learning as a product, learning as lockstep progress in a rigidly

established structure, conformity, acquiescence to a fixed body of truths, convergent thinking, etc.,

must yield to a post-industrial paradigm (yet in the making) emphasizing creativity (rather than

mere invention), how to learn, learning as a process, dissent, candor, autonomy, seeing oneself as an

instrument of change (rather than as a victim), divergent thinking, holistic thinking, greater reliance

upon intuition, and the recognition that education is a lifelong process, to mention a few of its more

important characteristics. 10

Voluntary control of attention is fundamental to the free (uncoerced) development of the types of

consciousness best suited to a rapidly (and often unpredictably) changing milieu. Attentional

spasticity (the antithesis of voluntary control) is an ailment which has survived changing social

structures for millennia; it either paralyzes attention, yielding the rigidly narrow focus of bigotry, or

results in desultory spasms. The classic cure has always been within the reach of only a minuscule

proportion of any populace. It seems highly unlikely that there will be a dramatic change in this

regard within the foreseeable future. When a malady resists cure, we resort to palliatives.

II. The Palliatives

How does one set about altering students' consciousness? 11 Surely no argument is needed to

establish that it is rarely accomplished by fiat, divine or otherwise. Demanding that humans develop

a different sort of consciousness is like ordering them to love. They may comply overtly, but only

the superficial among us would confuse loving behavior with love. To believe that there is a one-to-

one correspondence between a human's performance and his/her state of consciousness requires an

Selected papers on using hemi-sync and binaural phasing to facilitate learning, individually & in

classrooms - 4

extreme degree of naivet. That such naivet is not unusual is painfully evident in educational

circles, where training is so often identified with education.

Socrates is revered as one of the world's great teachers not because he had each day's activities

carefully set forth in lesson plans, nor because he followed prescriptions learned in a teaching

methods course, nor because he had answers. Scavengers, intent upon finding the secret ingredient

responsible for the successes of great teachers, poke around in the didactic effluvium until they find

likely morsel, subject it to statistical analysis, then triumphantly announce a high correlation

between the "secret" characteristic and successful teaching. Their disciples, swooping in for the kill,

hastily confuse statistical correlation with causation and declare that use of the secret ingredient will

cure education's ills. If circumstances contrive to produce a wave of enthusiasm for the new recipe,

then good results ensue -- for a while. But note that as enthusiasm wanes, positive results wane!

After a few years the recipe is consigned to archives.

Is it not time that we learned something from this pattern? Perhaps we are looking in the wrong

place for the key to pedagogical success. Looking where the light happens to be best may be an

approach worthy of the drunken man in the famous Sufi tale 12 , but sober educators ought to have

learned from half a century of simplistic errors by behaviorists. The presupposition that technique

can solve all of our problems involves a posture most unbecoming to anyone posing as an educator,

and is, furthermore, pass, being a crude form of materialistic mechanism, out of favor now for

almost a century in physics and for two decades in psychology (but the schools are nearly as slow to

reflect such changes as is the general public).

Perhaps the most enduring and pervasive principle in education is that students learn by emulation.

Socrates induced a fundamental alteration of consciousness in his students by serving as a model of

enquiry unfettered by the popular prejudices of his time. Children, confronted with teachers who

know all of the answers (i.e., who are not themselves learners), who insist that there is only one

correct way, who are unimaginative, whose sole criterion of worth is performance, etc., can learn to

be creative, open, self-reliant, responsible learners only by default, that is, by not being "good"

students in their teachers' eyes. But encouraging students to defy their teachers would be throwing

out the baby with the bath water. If the bath water needs changing, then change it while exercising

care to preserve the baby. It is the teachers' consciousness which needs "cleansing" so that students

come forth from the educational bath with that fresh set of principles, insights, skills, and

knowledge necessary for the kind of world which the students will inhabit.

But setting out to change teachers' consciousness is a perilous venture, so the prudent persist in

devising recipes directed to students (which makes good sense to school boards and the public, and

they control funding). Of the recent palliatives for fragmented attention, that of Georgi Lozanov l3

is best known. The Lozanov method utilizes the metrical pattern of adagio movements

(approximately one Hertz) in Baroque music to induce bodily relaxation while maintaining mental

alertness. The effectiveness of Lozanov's method is clearly dependent upon the teacher's skill, and

the careful attention to rhythm, intonation, drama, appropriate suggestions, rapport, etc. required

would strain the talents of most professional actors.

The Lozanov method, Sophrology, the Tomatis method, Optimalearning, Superlearning, and

numerous other methods which have appeared in the past two decades have merit. One of the

Selected papers on using hemi-sync and binaural phasing to facilitate learning, individually & in

classrooms - 5

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: