The Biocybernaut Institute offers perhaps the world's most elite and exclusive neurofeedback training. According to their website, a one-week intensive can boost IQ and creativity, create beneficial personality changes, and “expand your awareness more than 20 years of zen meditation.” The cost? $15,000 or more.

An acoustically isolated neurofeedback training chamber at the Biocybernaut Institute

My initial view of Biocybernaut was sceptical. I couldn't find much research-grade evidence of such extraordinary results. There are plenty of cheaper ways to improve your state of mind, I thought. Who would bother with a $15k program that might or might not work?

It turns out, quite a few people. One of them is a Swedish friend of mine, who also happens to be the Scandinavian memory sports champion and an avid proponent of anything that will expand his already expansive mental capacities. He took the training and reported interesting results. Other celebrity personal optimizers also have good things to say about Biocybernaut, such as Tony Robbins, MindValley's Vishen Lakhiani, and the meditation mogul Bill Harris. I decided to look into it further.

I contacted Biocybernaut’s founder, Dr. James Hardt. He kindly agreed to an interview, and offered that one of his staff trainers could give me a tour of the Victoria training centre.

This post is the result of my interview, tour, and online research. Whatever your views on the Biocybernaut training or business model, there is no doubt that James and the Biocybernaut team have pioneered some very interesting approaches to in-depth neurofeedback. For anyone interested in this field, it's worth a look.

Allergy Warning: May Contain Fringe Content If you suffer from woophobia, parts of this post may cause rolled eyeballs, snorts of derision, or — in extreme cases — gastrointestinal distress. We sympathize, but bear with us. If you, like us, are interested in exploring the potential of neurofeedback to promote improved states and traits of consciousness, then the perspective of one of its most well-established practitioners is worth some attention (even if you do have to pop a few antacids along the way).

The Biocybernaut Protocol

Biocybernaut’s Victoria training centre is outside the city on a winding country road. On arrival I met Linda, a senior trainer at the centre.

Linda gave me the tour. First stop was the meeting room, with a large monitor for reviewing EEG recordings embedded in a conference table. Next was the debriefing room, with four individually-curtained couches for trainees to relax in during post-session debriefings. We passed through the control room, where Biocybernaut’s technicians monitor real-time video, audio, and EEG signals from the training chambers on a massive bank of monitors, which looked as though it might be equipped to manage a small space expedition. Then, we headed for the chambers. Each feedback chamber is a small, acoustically-treated room with purple velvet covering all four walls and the ceiling. The rooms each include a chair, a desk with a computer monitor and peripherals, an infra-red video camera, a wall-mounted EEG amplifier and electrode leads, and four small speakers, each mounted on an extendible bracket attached to a corner of the room.

Biocybernaut staff and publicity materials make it clear that the company’s training is not only neurofeedback. Each neurofeedback session is accompanied by an automated mood scale assessment and followed by coaching on forgiveness and other techniques for overcoming the emotional obstacles that — according to James Hardt — invariably impede a trainee’s progress to the desired brain conditions if not addressed during the training.

Biocybernaut uses custom-built 4, 8, or 12 channel EEG amplifiers. There are several levels of training available, but every trainee has to start with the basic offering: Alpha One, a one-week course targeting enhanced alpha amplitude across four electrode sites at right and left occipital and right and left central locations. More advanced courses include additional electrode sites and slightly different training protocols. For this post, we'll focus on the Alpha One training, which includes two feedback sessions per day, interspersed with debriefings, mood scale measurements, resting, and coaching from trainers.

Each session is broken into 2-minute segments. During the segment, the alpha amplitude at a given cortical site controls the volume of an organ tone from the speaker in the corresponding quadrant of the chamber. An increase in alpha amplitude at the front right electrode leads to an increase in the feedback tone from the front right speaker, etc. The protocol uses an “integrated alpha” measure of amplitude: the band pass filtered EEG signal is squared and then integrated over a short time window to give the alpha power measurement used for feedback.

The control room. When training, monitors show brainwaves and infrared camera feeds from the neurofeedback chambers. Desk mics and speakers also provide a two-way audio link between technicians and trainees.

After each 2-minute segment the screen lights up with six large, coloured numerals. Four numbers show the alpha score for each quadrant. A green number indicates the score is the highest of that session so far. Blue means the score has increased, but not broken the session record, and white indicates the score has diminished. Two other numbers indicate the level of “hemi-coherence” between the hemispheres. According to James Hardt, hemi-coherence measures overall the synchrony of alpha amplitude changes in the two hemispheres, rather than the more familiar measure of coherence as the phase synchrony at different electrode sites.

Interview with Dr. James Hardt

Dr. James Hardt

James Hardt received an undergraduate degree in physics from the Carnegie Institute, and a masters and PhD in psychology from Carnegie Mellon. He owns several patents for neurofeedback hardware, software, and training methods, and has a fair number of academic publication credits. His bio and full CV are on the Biocybernaut website, though only five of the thirty patents mentioned there are listed in Google's patent search.

I spoke on the phone with James Hardt last spring. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.

Biocybernaut training is unique in that it’s done in a relatively short, intense time period rather than spreading it out over months or years. Why is that?

In learning theory there are two different approaches. One is massed practice, and the other is distributed practice. Some things are not amenable to distributed practice. We’re wanting to produce transformation, and if trainees came one day a week for seven weeks there is no way they would get anything like the results that they get. And a comparable example of transformation would be an aeroplane. If it’s sitting on the runway, it is a ground vehicle. If it does certain things, it can have a transformation into an aerial vehicle. So what does it do? It applies power; it applies power continuously. Now, let’s say you taxi for a hundred feet and then stop. And then sometime later, you taxi under full power for another hundred feet, and stop. And then a little while later, you taxi for another hundred feet under full power, and stop. You would get to the end of the runway and this transformation we call flight would not have happened.

How would you describe the transformation that you’re aiming for in the training?

In Buddhism, there are over 150 levels of consciousness, called attainment levels. These go from an egoic, selfish, angry, self-centred sort of consciousness into a more expanded consciousness where one can take the perspectives of others. In the course of the training, my goal is to help people become more conscious. I learned early on in my work that most people have emotional traumas; that some are conscious and some are unconscious, and these create glass ceilings where they cannot rise in consciousness because of the unaddressed trauma. So I’ve developed a computerized mood scale system that allows the detection of unconscious negative emotions, and unconscious positive emotions, which, when brought to the surface, in interviews with a skilled trainer, can provide focal points for a forgiveness process. Trainees can go in and deal with these traumas through forgiveness, which then frees them, and frees their conscious and their unconscious minds, so that they are then available for growth of consciousness.

I was going to ask you about the psychological or emotional component and how that works with what you’re doing as EEG neurofeedback. It’s interesting that you mention a scale of mood or emotion.

We use three different mood scales. I started with existing ones, but then I’ve modified them, changed the words, and added things, so they are unique to Biocybernaut. In the regular trainings, people take this at the beginning and end of the day. The mood scales are scored so we can know whether anxiety, depression, hostility or whatever went up or down. It covers a range from energetic to not so energetic and from positive emotions to negative emotions. There are 21 different moods that get measured, but each one of them is the result of how people responded to scores of different emotional words. A word pops up on the screen and you push a button — zero, not at all; one, a little; two, moderately; three, quite a bit; four, extremely — indicating how much you feel that. The next mood scale’s done right after the enhancement training — theta enhancement, alpha enhancement, whatever — and there you reply how did you feel at your moments of highest Alpha, or highest Theta, or highest Delta. Since your brainwaves are being measured as you’re doing the mood scales the computer is able to give an assessment of the accuracy of each one of your answers.

You’re recording answers in tandem with the brainwaves of the trainee while they are answering the questions?

Exactly. If the computer doubts the accuracy of an answer — let’s say the word is “angry” and the person puts zero — if there’s at least a 68% chance that answer is wrong then the person gets one standard deviation or one sigma. If there’s a 95% chance that answer is wrong the person will be given two sigmas. If there’s a 99.7% chance the answer is wrong the person gets three sigmas and these are reported to the people in an interview at the end of the day.

Let’s say the person said no to “angry” — in fact I remember one time I had a CEO of a billion dollar company in training and on the word “angry” he put “no”, but he got five sigma. That would be a 99.999999% chance that his answer was wrong. So I asked him, “is there anything you’re angry about?” He yelled at me, “no!”, and I realized this is a very angry guy. He’s married so I’m thinking: well, maybe I could work around this and ask what his wife would say if I asked her if he was angry about anything. Well, the guy figures out where I'm going and even before I asked the question about his wife he again loudly and angrily yelled “no.” He was in total denial, and we went through his mood scales very quickly.

There were three other people in the training and as we went through their mood scales we might come to a word which they had denied and I’d ask them about it and they’d stop and they sniff a little and a tear would come out and run down their cheek, and I’d say “Okay, well what’s going on there?” Then they would tell the story. It would be some trauma and there would be a perpetrator and I’d say “Okay, now that person needs to go on your forgiveness list.” There would be a bit of a relief, just from getting it out. This happened with three other people. I didn’t say anything, and the next morning he comes in, and he’s still in this too-tight-with-the-collar white shirt, three-piece suit — he’s the CEO of a billion dollar company — and he whips out of his pocket and unfolds a long list, which is all the things and all the people he’s angry about. He had done the work overnight. It was detected by the mood scale. He said “no” to angry, and the computer went “uhh, I don’t think so; five sigmas”.

So you have a method of correlating what you’re reading as EEG to a scale of emotion?

Well, what I’ve found is that it is wisest to say nothing about how this works.

Biocybernaut's debriefing room

Okay. Have you tried using GSR or heart rate variability coherence measures as an augmentation of EEG-based metrics for emotional state?

The first time I went to India I went with brainwave technology, of course, but I also took a whole bunch of other measures including GSR and respiratory and muscle tension and temperature. I would put all these sensors on these yogis and they would start to meditate and usually within three or four minutes the GSR would be completely flat, providing zero information. And muscle tension would be flat, respiration would be shallow and stable, but then for hours the brain waves would keep deepening, deepening, deepening.

I know that Scientology uses a primitive GSR device to detect emotionality — the auditor asks people questions and then looks at the GSR readings. To my sense that is incomplete feedback because your signals go, not to you, but to the auditor who chooses whether or not to report to you what you just did. Of course there would be a time delay. We know that feedback is effective to the extent that is three things: one, accurate; two, immediate; and three, reasonably aesthetic. If your signal goes into the brain of an auditor who then thinks about it, and maybe asks you a question, you’re going to have a delay of more than a quarter of a second which is about the maximum that you can have in order to have accurate feedback.

So you’re using just the EEG for making those correlations with the subject’s emotion, or at least determining whether what they’re reporting is accurate?

In my university work I also recorded abdominal and thoracic respiration, heartbeat, galvanic skin response, frontalis muscle tension, photoplethysmogram at the finger (the time delay between the pulse arrival at the finger and the heartbeat correlates with blood pressure, so we could have real-time measures of blood pressure), and we also had alveolar CO2, which was assessed on a breath-by-breath basis.

At one point, with the help of an undergraduate assistant provided by the Fetzer foundation, I took my polygraph records and spread them out and we measured four parameters of the breath: the duration of the inspiration phase; the duration of the expiration phase; the duration of the post-expiratory pause, if there was one; and the amplitude. With these four respiratory parameters, and knowing the person’s personality type — which of course we did because we gave personality tests to everyone before they got in the chamber — I could very accurately describe what drugs the person had used in the last twenty-four hours.

When I published this work I got a beautiful embossed letter of invitation from the National Security Agency to come and set up one of their polygraph labs. At the time I was running two companies, and I had a big university research project, and I would have had to dishonour pledges to investors and granting agencies, so I most respectfully and most appreciatively declined that invitation. But, yes, there are other parameters and a lot of information can be derived from them.

But it’s not essential to the work that you’re doing with the training?

It is not. And in fact at one point in May of 2007 Drunvalo Melchizedek, a world-famous spiritual teacher, came and did the training with his wife, Claudette. And at the end of that he said, “Jim, you know of all the people around the world who do my teachings, 95% do not get the fullness of my teachings, and it’s always for the same reason: emotional traumas.” And he added, “I’ve never found anything as good as the Biocybernaut training for getting rid of emotional traumas.”

I’ve had psychiatrists whose patients I had trained come to me and do the training because they said: I cannot understand how you can produce better results in seven days than I’ve been able to working with this patient for twenty years.

There’s some magic combination of the neurofeedback plus the emotional trauma work that allows people to move forward?

Yes. You know the work of Dr. David Hawkins?

No.

You must become familiar with him. I think his first book was Power Versus Force, and he has a number of books. He had the biggest psychiatry practice in the country, in New York City I believe, and then he started to become enlightened. He went into a cabin in the woods and then came back as a spiritual teacher. He wrote a book called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. He says that the goals of psychotherapy and of letting go are quite different. If you do psychotherapy and you end up with some jealousy and some greed and some ego and some anger and some bitterness, it’s okay as long as they’re sort of moderate and they don’t get on other people too often. But the goal of letting go is complete liberation of the soul. The goals are different, the methods are different, and the work that we do with the forgiveness process is much closer to the work of David Hawkins. It’s unlike psychology or psychiatry. Our intention is not to heal, our intention is not to do therapy; our intention is to liberate the soul. On the way we discover negative emotions, traumas, and so on, and we teach the trainees how to do forgiveness. They do the work. It doesn’t require any drugs.

A bank of vintage continuous-feed printers next to the control room prints trainees' EEGs in hard copy during training.

And through that process your trainees can change their consciousness, or experience altered states of various kinds?

Yes. In my work in the university — University of California San Francisco and before that Carnegie Mellon University where I took my PhD — I would give personality tests to the people, initially students, before the training and then on the seventh day or the eighth day after the start. One test that I would give routinely is the MMPI, or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. There’s 566 true/false questions — maybe a little dated now, but the accuracy of it is profound. If you give the MMPI profile to a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist they can look at it and know the pathology of the person, and talk to him like they’ve known him for years. I’ve seen this happen with people I've trained. I took the profiles to a clinical psychologist and they read the person very accurately.

In before and after tests, the person might be in the 98th or 99th percentile of schizophrenia or paranoia or depression or anxiety in the before test, and seven days later they’re smack dab in the middle of the normal zone. This is astonishing to psychiatrists who have never seen this kind of movement even over the course of twenty-year therapies. In fact psychiatry has — I don’t know about now, but it used to believe — that personality dimensions were stable over the adult lifespan, and let’s not talk about changing core dimensions of personality. If you’re willing to do twenty years of psychotherapy you might be able to tinker at the margins a little bit with some of these issues or characteristics, but they weren’t even willing to discuss changing core dimensions of personality. Then other people came along, studying brainwaves on multiple personalities like in the books Sybil or Three Faces of Eve, and there would be really interesting things. Sarah would be allergic to orange juice but if Alice or Bill — different personalities in the same body — were active, the body could drink all the orange juice it wanted, with no adverse effects. A biologist would have trouble with this, but a psycho-biologist of course would be “yeah, that’s cool.”

I’ve worked with multiple personalities. One woman had twelve alters and she was so disturbed that the only way she could do the training was if her psychologist was in the training with her. As she did the forgiveness work the various alters that were circling would come in and rejoin the core personality, to the utter jaw dropping astonishment of her psychologist who was sitting in the chair next to her. At the end of the week this twelve-person-alter multiple personality was one integrated human being, and for years afterwards she would call me on Mother’s Day to thank me for having given birth to the integrated person that she now was.

When you’re watching somebody go through the training, how much can you tell about what they’re subjectively experiencing by seeing their EEG?

That’s not a question that I would want to answer for the record. I can say one thing, though. When people come in on day one, the first time in the chamber after they do their morning mood scales they do an eyes open, an eyes closed, and a white noise baseline. If in those first eyes closed and white noise baselines, their Alpha does not exceed a certain level, I know that that person has attempted suicide or seriously contemplated it. We then double the gain on that person, so the signal is big enough to be meaningfully detected and processed by the computer. As it is, we have to amplify the brainwave signals about a hundred thousand times in order for them to be intelligently processed by the computers.

In one of your case studies you mention that you did feedback with two people simultaneously, with feedback from one hemisphere of one person being received by the second person and vice versa, between two family members.

The story that you probably want to reference was when I trained two Army intelligence officers in 1983. Lieutenant Colonel James McLaughlin who was interesting because he had had a near death experience in Vietnam and he was being studied by the Institute of Noetic Sciences; and another army intelligence officer named Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander. With the funding provided by Army intelligence these two officers came and did the regular Alpha One training for a week, and then they did the Alpha one shared, where they both went into the chamber at the same time and they each had feedback on their own and each other’s brain activity.

Now, I cautioned them, I said you are likely to have telepathic experiences with each other when you’re doing shared feedback. Now, because they had high security clearances and I had none they would not allow me to do shared feedback with them but they did a week of the alpha one shared feedback, and they did in fact have telepathic experiences. John Alexander wrote a book which is a cult classic called the Warrior's Edge. In there he dedicated an entire chapter to describing their two weeks at Biocybernaut, and he confirmed that they did have secrets slip between them. So, we have it on the authority of US Army intelligence that the Biocybernaut Alpha training does produce telepathic exchanges.

It’s very common in shared feedback, and it’s a marvellous tool for relationship therapy as well as getting scientific or sports teams to be on the same wavelength.

Is shared feedback something that you regularly offer?

Oh yes, we do. As a precondition to do shared feedback of the Alpha One level you have to have done Alpha feedback solo so you know what you’re doing.

Plus, it’s expected before you get into the community swimming pool that you take a shower. Before you link minds with somebody else it’s probably a good idea to do some cleansing of the anger and the fear and the sadness.

The soundproof door to training chamber #2

What’s your perspective on binaural beats or other entrainment techniques for changing brainwaves?

Are you familiar with the problem that ecologists face of invasive species? You’ll get a little clam picked up in a ship in the Hong Kong harbour and when it pumps its bilge tanks in the Great Lakes the clam goes out. There are no natural enemies, and pretty soon it’s destroying ecosystems, clogging intakes for city water and power plants and things like that. Or, you get a big African toad on an island and pretty soon all the ground-dwelling birds are gone because it’s eaten all the eggs. Invasive species are a huge problem in ecology. Well, in the same way I look at entrainment as producing invasive frequencies. Your brain has a whole lot of frequencies and they are multiply co-evolved and they’re stable. If you, from the outside, introduce some foreign invasive frequency you can devastate the ecosystem and it may not be apparent for a while.

I am strongly opposed to entrainment, unless it is a very very very special form of entrainment which is described in a patent that I had issued on Christmas Day several years ago, where you do a fast Fourier transform on the brain activity and determine what frequency was the dominant frequency in the last half second. And since it’s not an invasive frequency — it was the dominant frequency in the last half a second — I would then be comfortable training with entrainment at that frequency. Then of course you would sample, and if the frequency shifted in the next half second you would have to shift your entrainment frequency so as not to be introducing invasive frequencies into this marvellous soup of frequencies that is in your brain.

Are you experimenting with that in your training, or in your development of the training?

We have a new technology coming out that’s called the Dream System which will enable this.

From what you’ve said, it sounds like transformation is not really on the map that is used by psychotherapy. Is there a map that you’ve found actually encompasses the range of consciousness and experience that your trainees go through?

Well one — I don’t know if you’d call it a map — one list of emotions that we find very helpful has apathy at the bottom; sadness and depression above that; anger above that; fear above that, and joy at the top. Let’s say somebody has anger that they’re not acknowledging, that they’re trying to suppress, or are not even conscious of. What will express in that person is sadness or depression. On the other hand, if a person has fear they’re not willing to acknowledge or deal with, what shows up is anger. So there’s a ladder, a work up. I tell people in the training, when you get in touch with something you’re really really afraid of, we celebrate that because when in the safety of the chamber you explore into the face of your greatest fears it will always be your fastest growth path, and it will take you inexorably to the step above, which is joy.

Once you get to joy, then there’s a whole range of states of consciousness that become available. For example, we know the brain waves of people who can see angels, and they’re trainable. One time I had a San Francisco Forty Niner in training who did not have that pattern, and on day five he developed that pattern. When he came out of the chamber he was so frightened that it took half an hour of coaxing to get him to talk about it, because three angels had appeared in the chamber and said to him, “You’re not living a very good life…” and he’s like, “aaaghh!” Which he wasn’t — he was living a pretty naughty life. Out of this encounter he stopped doing all drugs, and he even stopped drinking coffee.

And then, we know the brain wave patterns of kundalini, and that also is trainable. We have had a number of people who have had their first ever kundalini experience in my chambers, including Bill Harris who runs Centerpointe Technology, headquartered in Portland. His training was March 23rd of 2005, at my then California centre, and he had his first ever kundalini awakening. He subsequently wrote about us and encouraged people to come. He sent probably 150 people to our training.

That’s quite a few.

At fifteen thousand dollars each.

That takes me to another question I was going to ask. There’s a lot of interest in neurofeedback and meditation. From what we’ve done with the NeuroBB forum and our blog and people we’ve talked to, it seems like many people are struggling to find a combination of hardware and software and a training protocol that has more capacity than the off-the-shelf consumer devices like the Muse headset. What would you recommend to people who don’t have the time or resources to come to your training programs but are looking for something heading in that direction?

Well, in my Victoria centre I met with a couple that is interested in funding the development of a Biocybernaut-approved portable unit. Alice just finish training with people in Germany yesterday and one of them is wealthy and interested in funding development of a portable unit. So, one of these will be coming along at some point.

Before I ever designed a training system I got all of the papers that had ever been written on alpha brainwaves going back to the original founding paper by Hans Berger in 1918. I read his original papers in German, and I was fully aware of the physiology, the natural reactivity of alpha and what would make it come and go.

So, when I designed equipment, I patented the qualities which would be needed to make an effective brainwave feedback system. If those characteristics are not incorporated then the system is going to be suboptimal and in some cases people say “well, this doesn’t work.” I’ve always striven for how to optimize, so I don’t have anything other than meditation to recommend. We have meditation, and we have the Biocybernaut training and I would not be comfortable recommending anything in between.

But at some point it’s likely that a home training unit will be available?

Absolutely, and it could be pretty quickly depending on the funding. You know, money shortens time.

To move forward, what’s needed? What would be needed to expand what you’re doing to make it more available or to broaden the impact?

Well it’s interesting, because it’s the three M's: money, management, and marketing.

Have you ever considered any kind of an Open Source model for your program?

No.

Would that undermine its effectiveness?

Well, one of the things it would do is it would invite protocol drift. The protocol has been optimized. I’ve done millions of dollars worth of funded research to support the effectiveness of the protocols, and even the most minor modifications can undermine the effectiveness. If it’s open source and somebody says “Oh well let’s change this, oh well let’s try that or you know let’s play music during the time that the people are doing their feedback or….” No. No thank you.

So you’d like to preserve the quality of what you’ve developed.

Absolutely. That’s the purpose of patents — so that other people can license the technology but then they can use it only in the prescribed ways.

Right. And have you seen … I’m just thinking, is there some way to bring this out into the world a little bit more rapidly?

Money, management, and marketing. I know how to create training centres where a thousand people could train at one time. Now, it wouldn’t be as powerful or as effective as the training that we do now because you wouldn’t have the third pillar which is the transformational perspective of the trainer. You can have the ergonomic technology, you could have the optimized training protocols but absent a trainer the productivity, the effectiveness is going to be massively reduced. But, on the other hand, there would be some benefit, and many of the people who did it in a forum like that would go “Wow! This is great. I’d like to do it right. Now let me get to a centre where they have a skilled trainer.”

I’ll give you an example: one of my engineers who helps with hardware and software development had a complete system set up in his laboratory. Unbeknownst to me he gave someone — who was pretty messed up — one hundred sessions of the training with my technology. He didn’t have the mood scales; he didn’t have the debriefings by the skilled trainer; he didn’t have any input from any kind of trainer at all. The result was that absolutely nothing happened. The guy didn’t change at all. One hundred sessions with my technology! But not my protocols, and not one of my trainers.

So, when we release a portable unit we will certainly tell this story and we will caution people that the results will vary from person to person, and in fact there may not be much result because you’re doing this without a trainer. Now, hopefully, we can have some videos made and there can be maybe an extra program people can sign up for so after a session their data could be uploaded, and then a skilled person could look at it and they could have a telephone consultation, but none of this would be like real time. Right now when people come out of the chambers they go immediately to the debriefing room and begin debriefing. If an astronaut comes back from a mission and four days later you debrief him, there’s going to be a lot of detail lost.

I can make the training very cheap, but — guess what — it’s not going to be as effective.

I imagine there’s a certain benefit in terms of the motivation and determination of your trainees, that they have paid a certain amount for the opportunity.

Oh, absolutely. I can remember one time back when I was actually paying people to do the training — a dollar a day because I had a small grant from the university and it covered bus fare and things like that. In those days the wires were showing, and the racks of equipment were right by where the person would be sitting to get their electrodes put on, and this college student looked at the all the wires and all the technology and his eyes got big and his jaw dropped and he was very impressed. Then he went in the chamber, folded his arms, jutted out his jaw and said: OK, do it to me. And of course nothing happened. Because this is not a “do it to you” technology. It’s not like entrainment. It’s like a mirror for your mind, and you can stand in front of a mirror all day and the mirror is not going to make you smile, it’s not going to make you frown. But if you are an actor in a play and you need to practice your smile your frown, a mirror is a perfect feedback device to use for that.

Feedback requires the trainee to actively participate and pay attention to the results. At the same time that you’re hearing feedback tones increase or decrease, you have to simultaneously be tracking the ever-changing content of your consciousness. When there’s a change in the feedback tone you have to notice what change you just made in your consciousness. Maybe you went from thinking about the concept of love to having a little bit of a feeling of love; huge difference in terms of the brainwaves involved.

That introspective aspect is important, it sounds like.

It’s essential. That’s one of the roles of the trainer, to coach the person in how to listen to the tones and how to pay attention to the ever-flowing changes of their awareness.

Comfy chairs line the hallway outside the Biocybernaut Institute's training chambers

Assuming that you get the necessary funding, and the three Ms move forward, how quickly do you think you will be building out your capacity? Will we be seeing this as sort of a basic service available to everyone and in a few decades, do you think?

With a hundred and forty million dollars I can open sixty centres around the world in three years, and if we increase that a little bit — to maybe two hundred million dollars — we could probably double that, a hundred and twenty centres around the world in three years. Money speeds things up, and with money you can buy the management and you can buy the marketing, so the first M is money. When that is available in some quantity then we’re going to see an amazing acceleration of the distribution of this technology for the awakening of humanity.

And does that seem to be moving forward? Sounds like you’re getting interest in investing.

Well, we’ve had two enquiries in the last ten days. Somebody wants to sponsor a portable unit. The invitation to go on Shark Tank is also a way to interest people in coming aboard, providing funding.

It will be exciting to see what results from that.

Absolutely. And other sources — you know, the Business Insider has hugely increased the number of people contacting us for training and it led to the invitation on Shark Tank. Tomorrow I’m speaking to someone from Business Insider, it looks like they’re going to do a second report on Biocybernaut.

It sounds like the press is building.

It seems to be. The time is now. And when it skyrockets and explodes everybody will go, “Wow! That was like an overnight wonder!” and I’ll go, “yeah, it was a forty-year overnight wonder!”

Most of them are, I think.

Yes.

To go back to a technical question that I missed, are you using completely custom hardware and software?

Yes

You’re building your own amplifiers?

Absolutely. We buy our gold electrodes from Grass Instruments, and at some point when somebody has a dry electrode system that is sufficiently accurate (which none of them are to date, because none of them are willing to publish examples of their raw EEG), then we’ll license that from them but that’s really a minor thing; no, we make our own amplifiers, and the software has been under continuous development since 1977.

That’s a while

It’s many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

I’m guessing it’s in a low-level language like C, if it started in the seventies?

It was originally written in assembly.

Okay, even more low-level

Yeah, exactly, and then translated it’s now running in C++.

Here is a bigger picture question: I think many people see that human culture or Western society is in difficulty in one way or another, or in many ways. And a lot of that can be traced back, one way or another, to personalities of individuals and their traits, behaviours, etc. What is the potential, do you think, for the type of training that you’re doing — or other types of feedback training — to have a beneficial impact on society?

I think it’s the way through to salvation. The corporate goal of Biocybernaut is to usher in an enduring golden age for all humanity.

That’s a big mission.

Yeah. That’s why I get up every morning.

Sounds like a good reason to get up in the morning! Alright, well thank you so much for taking the time to answer all of these questions.