Article: Musing, Speculations on Delta Frequencies in the EEG

For Groddeck "the assertion 'I live' only expresses a small and superficial part of the total experience of 'I am lived by the It". However he does not see "It" as a thing but rather that it may be identified, for example, in the process of setting aside the ego for a moment to work a little with the unknown. In all humility he says: "I am not inviting you to follow me, but to follow yourself." Perhaps the low frequency EEG can illuminate some of the dark recesses of our mind until finally in Groddecks words - we are able to grasp the full majesty and terror of the "It".

Future Research.
If alpha blocking or beta increase could be used as a time marker for the low frequencies then we should see it followed by the same kinds of change which have been found in the study of ERPs. This would mean that whole armoury of responses - the P300, N400 etc - could be applied directly to the way the brain processes self-initiated events.

It is likely that when learning a new skill, learning to drive a car for example, fairly high levels of LFs will be seen but once one has learnt to drive without thinking about it, these will vanish.

Where filters have been used to display ERPs as spectral responses, for example in research on visually evoked potentials, then spectral frequencies have of course be found in the low frequency bands but they are also found in higher frequency bands as well. (Ref 8) Does this mean some of the responses we see in, for example, the alpha and theta bands are contributed by potentials evoked by internal events? Would this offer some explanation of the difficulty in finding an agreed meaning for alpha? Could these LFs be the source of so called "bad theta" often found in ADD clients?

When I began this chapter, I was of course very confident that we had not been mistaken in considering that the LFs were mirroring the way people explore their unconscious to find new meaning as though they represent a kind of internal scanning of the internal environment. But, until I explored the literature more thoroughly, I had not realised that our observations related so closely to conventional ERP studies. So, it has been very illuminating to write this section which has also acted for the basis of a presentation "Low Frequencies on the Mind Mirror" at an EEG conference in Key West Florida in February 1996. It has also been encouraging to note that in similar contexts others have noted that LFs were giving useful information,

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Views	Comments
Mailed	Ratings