Brainwave biofeedback history

IBVA has been developed over 30 years of research. In the 1980s the system was hardwired and could fit into a briefcase. Now is it a miniature recording interface that can fit in your pockets. The software has always been dependent on CPU speeds, so now its much faster !

There is a lot of confusion out there regarding "IBVA" since the USA company ceased trading - as their website is still online. IBVA UK is not connected to them. IBVA UK provides international sales and training, and aims to develop new associations and projects with people who have a creative vision with technology, to make the future become the now.

The EEG evolved from research among physiologists in the 1800s on the electrical properties of animals. In 1875, Richard Caton of Liverpool, England, published reports on his detection of electrical activity in animal brains. Fifteen years later, a Polish physiologists, Adolf Beck, detected regular electrical patterns in the cerebral cortexes of dogs and rabbits.

By 1908 the Austrian Psychiatrist Hans Berger discovered brainwaves- as we now know EEG, the first ones appropriately were named Alpha waves (8-12hz). He kept his discovery secret for almost 20 years - believing he was unraveling secrets of ESP. In the 1920s Berger obtained his first results in subjects who had skulls with gaps under the skin where bone was missing. He made recordings on moving photographic paper with a wavy spot of light!!
In 1934 Edgar Adrian and B.H.C. Matthews of the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory confirmed Berger's research and published their results in the journal "Brain", where they referenced Berger's work. They used copper gauze electrodes wrapped in saline soaked lint. They wanted to call the Alpha waves the Berger rhythm, but Hans Berger was modest and rejected.
However on September 30, 1938 he was forced by Nazi officials to retire the next day. After a series of further tragedies, Berger committed suicide in 1941. He was twice considered for the Nobel Prize, but the Nazis prevented it from being awarded and accepted. By contrast, in England two EEGs labs before the war had grown to 50 by the end because of the usefulness in diagnosing brain injuries.

In 1962 the american Dr Joe Kamiya's report changed everything - that people could in fact learn voluntary control of their own brain waves. Brain wave feedback training was heralded primarily as promoting relaxation and mental creativity. This was the first case in the Western world of EEG biofeedback training, and it began with control of Alpha waves.

Brain wave studies of meditation established that meditators could exert profound control over their brain waves, and brain wave feedback was thought to make possible an "instant Zen" experience. Speculations became confused with claims, and by the late 1960s rapid and exaggerated media attention ensued. This only disturbed the conservative authorities of the medical, psychiatric, and psychological communities involved. As a result the Alpha brain wave feedback movement went underground by the mid 1970s, and most brain wave training fell into obscurity as just another fad spawned by the Psychedelic 1960s.

Until the late 1990's brainwave biofeedback practitioners had been limited by grossly inadequate equipment, and knowledge of proper brain wave training protocols. Only a few years ago an EEG system was ludicrously expensive, time consuming and only in hospitals or research centers using large MRI brain scanning. Biofeedback was limited to the peripheral modalities.

In the USA in 1989, Peniston and Kulkosky reported a stunning research result in which stage 4 alcoholism (with a long-term history of treatment failure) was essentially fully re mediated in some Vietnam veterans by a treatment program which included alpha training as a primary component. This result was so incredible that initially it was given essentially no credence by the scientific community.

What is most striking is the fact that these early results have held up in follow-up over the subsequent ten years, which takes us almost up to the present. The work has also been replicated in a number of other studies, and has been extended to other drugs of choice. Together, these results are giving rise to a reappraisal of alpha training, now called alpha-theta training because of the inclusion of even lower frequencies in the reward, namely the theta region of frequencies (4-8 Hertz).

EEG is an acronym for Electroencephalograph - This is a recording ("graph") of electrical signals ("electro") from the brain ("encephalo"). They are made on chart paper that moves underneath pens that are connected to galvanometers that read the electrical signals from electrodes on the scalp. These electrodes do not send any electricity to the person. They only receive electrical signals naturally generated by the brain.