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[Jenae LaTorque]

Originally Posted by Tread

What was it then with the Mars Climate Orbiter 98? Ok, it was a NASA subcontractor from Lockheed Martin.

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It went boom! But at least they learned a valuable lesson there. NASA has had quite a few "expensive" lessons; both in wasted time and money, and in human life.

"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." Alan Shepherd

[sesame]

All of us work out to develop and tone up our muscles. But purportedly, there is a way to tone up the brain and understand it's working even better. Its called EEG...

Electro-EncephaloGraph. Its also known as the Neurofeedback or Biofeedback machine. It moniters the brain waves (like alpha, beta, theta, delta) and lets us know using a sonic or visual signal... we in turn focus our minds and try to generate the waves of the highest order. In so doing we learn to control the brain and be more relaxed, conscious and creative. Ofcourse its available in the hospitals, but I'm talking about the smaller ones for household use. Is it effective as a neuro-development device? How much does it cost?

[Jenae LaTorque]

Originally Posted by sesame

All of us work out to develop and tone up our muscles. But purportedly, there is a way to tone up the brain and understand it's working even better. Its called EEG...

I'm talking about the smaller ones for household use. Is it effective as a neuro-development device? How much does it cost?

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Is it effective?

Yes, to a small extent. Let me draw an analagy here. Suppose you had a thousand piece orchestra which you place in a large building. Then you place a rockband in there with them. Then you add the Morman Tabernacle Choir, a country western band, some soloist instrumentalists, a few solo singers, and a German polka band. And they all begin to play and sing. You, on the outside, are monitoring the data you are getting from your fifty contact microphones which you have applied to 3 of the 4 outside walls of the building. Now, you wish to affect what your michrophones are reading. You can not hear what it sounds like inside the building; all you know is what your data reports. The only ways you have to affect the inside enviroment is by raising or lowering the temperature inside, changing the rate at which fresh air is pumped into the building, dimming or raising the lights, and shouting instructions to the musicians via a loudspeaker. However, the only language you speak is Pashtan, which none of them understand. Can you affect the data that your instruments are picking up? Oh yes! You notice that when you flash the lights off and on; there is a change. When you scream via the loudspeaker, you see that the data change. When you turn off the air exchange, the data gradually tends toward a flatline as more and more members inside fall unconscious, and then begins to peak more after you restore the air and people revive. And so on. Then if you really want to change your data, you introduce some hallucinogenic drug into the air system, or give them only whiskey to drink.

The point here is that the brain is a wonderously complex computer and we are trying to decipher it's workings and affect them from a relatively small number of data pickups which are located outside the walls of it's container.
This area of human exploration is still in it's infancy and it is debatable what much of the data signifies.

Cost. You can buy bio-feedback devices for under $100 for very simple ones, or more complex ones that cost multi-thousands. An EEG machine that is up to scientific standards falls into the tens of thousands of dollars range and requires a great deal of expertise to interpret the data. The cheaper machines that you might buy for home use will have limited data pick up and readout, depending on what you pay for. Yes they do work in the sense that with practice you can affect what the data is reading. However, there are many false claims and misrepresentations out there by quacks and frauds. If you really want to try this, I suggest you start small and go from there. Get a small bio-feedback device and find out if it works for you.