The researchers also present a visual atlas of brain activity during sleep in healthy individuals, highlighting new features of the sleep EEG - including a predictor of REM sleep - that could be of important use to clinicians and researchers.
They were also able to identify novel features of the sleep EEG, including a trend in which bursting in the low-frequency alpha range, which is not currently used in clinical sleep scoring, predicts the onset of REM sleep by several minutes.
Phil: This low-frequency alpha range patterns are called āsleep spindlesā and were ignored in scoring most likely due to the noise of the old machine and tough to get a consistent, accurate reading. The following excerpt is based on the current technology at that time but might open some new doors as to what is possible.
1975.11.10 (760: Unpublished)
[Note: The following excerpt is from UR2, Appendix 17. Seth speaking about brain waves.]
The beta waves quicken. They seem to be the official pulses of your civilization, giving precedence to official reality. But, you have little idea that the psyche is inherently able to seek its conscious experience from all of the known ranges, according to the kind of experience chosen at any given ātimeā.
Beta was not meant to carry the full weight of conscious activity, however. Although, its accelerating qualities can lead to initiations into āhigherā realms of consciousness, where, indeed, the brain waves quicken. The other patterns [delta, theta, and alpha] are highly important to physical and mental stability, being very inter-wound with cellular consciousness.
In cases usually called schizophrenic, the beta acceleration is not supported by the stabilizing attributes of the other known frequencies. It is possible, then, for a brain to register all of the known patterns at once, though your machines would note only the predominating rhythm.
A kind of inverted beta pattern, difficult to describe, often appears suddenly in the midst of the other ranges, driving through them, accelerating consciousness to a high degree of creativity. The brain waves, as they are known, are separately registered segments of a greater āwholeā kind of consciousness. And, your machines are just as segmented, perceiving only those patterns they were designed to recognize. Other activity escapes them. They can not note the rapidity with which you move through all of the known patterns constantly. This behavior can be learned by anyone willing to take the time and effort. Some courage would also help.
I told you that you flashed in and out of the reality that you {have} known between one moment and the next of the waking day. There are, in your terms, long delta and theta waves that you can not recognize. They are not recorded by your machines because, quite literally, they go in a different, āunofficialā direction. Each official waking brain wave is a peak in your world of a far deeper āwaveā of other experience and represents your points of continuity.
Each beta wave rides atop the other patterns. In normal sleep, the āconsciousā wave rides beneath the others, with the face of consciousness turned inward, so to speak. All the recognized characteristics of consciousness are āinvertedā, probing other realities than the one you know. They are quite effective and lightning fast. In sleep the beta waves are not turned off ā the āconsciousā part of you, with its beta rhythms, is elsewhere.
In these sessions, the full range of brain waves is utilized as you understand them. Here, in a highly creative, disciplined, and yet spontaneous performance, a situation is set up in which knowledge is obtained from the known frequencies, combined so that consciousness can use itself more fully, reaching into many areas closed to one range of consciousness alone. The various diverse, unique characteristics of each level of awareness are given play. In a way this is like an accelerated, chosen, well-organized āconsciousā dream venture, in which Ruburt travels through mediums of consciousness until finally he, still being himself, is nevertheless no longer himself but me.
He is combining and alternating frequencies so that he literally brings forth a different creature of consciousness, one that in your terms is not alive, yet one whose very reality straddles the life that you know. The most elemental portions of my reality begin at the furthest reaches of your own.
In sleep your ordinary brain waves as you understand them register a chaotic jungle of experience not normally processed. Biologically or psychically, there is little need for such disorientation. The normal waking consciousness, with its characteristic patterns, can, indeed, follow [into sleep]. A mixture of brain waves would result. Consciousness as you think of it expands tremendously under such conditions. You would follow your own pattern of continuity and understanding, weaving this into the sleep and dream states, forming a ānewā pattern that triumphantly combines all, as to some extent this occurs in our sessions.
In an ideal society, each brain wave would be utilized purposefully. You would go to sleep to solve certain problems. [ā¦] There is an overall general difference, nationally speaking ā that is, people of various nations do differ to some extent in their prevalent brain frequencies. [ā¦] All in all, however, the beta has predominated and been expected to solve many problems unsuited to its own characteristics.
Despite your reliance upon one range only, your world of consciousness draws heavily upon all of the known wave patterns and from others of which you are unaware.