The Delpasse-Effect

- 21 - The sense of undertaking such exercises naturally exhausts itself with the sense of achievement, namely to control a vaudeville like feat. A lot of illnesses can be traced back to a misdemeanour of an involuntary nervous system. If one could make this system accessible to voluntary influences, it would be akin to the discovery of a medicine that no only attacks the symptoms, but also the root of the problem. 2. 3 Setback and new starting points Biofeedback as a medical therapy is utilised these days to overcome insomnia, alleviate migraines, heal nervous tics, relax muscle spasms, fight heart disease and lower pathologically high blood pressure, ergo hypertonia. A heightened blood pressure damages blood vessels and later in life is often responsible for strokes. It can therefore only be imperfectively influenced with medication, because quite often, not the slightest organic cause for this affliction can be found. - It is therefore quite understandable that a lot of doctors, Professor van Amsynck amongst them, eagerly employ these new feedback techniques, hoping to finally find an effective healing method therein. To begin with, Van Amsynck constructed gadgets in the form of arm cuffs for his patients that measured their blood pressure. Every change of pressure triggered an acoustic signal. A drop in pressure triggered a melodious bell signal, whilst a raise in pressure produced a shrill tone. Some of his patients were soon able to keep their blood pressure under control for lengthy periods of time and this because they wanted to hear the bell signal and not the shrill tone. The next things van Amsynck attempted was to test an indirect biofeedback training next to the direct training. • Direct biofeedback-training meant controlling the blood pressure through measuring it with the help of an arm cuff device. • Indirect biofeedback-training can mean different things. For instance, that the patients learns to influence his heart frequency or learns to relax certain muscles thereby finding out whether this can have a simultaneous effect on the blood pressure. Because biofeedback training can take place in various ways, there are accordingly also various apparatuses for this. Some of them control the musculature, others the body temperature whilst others in turn control brainwaves, respectively brainwaves according to the principle of the already mentioned EEC device. Electrodes are attached to various locations on the skin of the scull and they stream the brainwaves to the EEC device. It records a number of wavy lines, one for each electrode. • One of the most sensational discoveries of biofeedback research is undoubtedly the fact that human beings are able to influence the frequency of their own brainwaves. The brainwaves frequency is certainly not always the same. It subdivides itself into various types of rhythms and they can be clearly separated from each other on hand of the printout of the EEC device. These types of rhythms are given the names of letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Delta and Theta. • Human beings are in a state of Alpha-Rhythm when they are relaxed and contently doze off. • When human beings open their eyes, the frequency of their brainwaves immediately changes; the Alpha-Rhythm is superseded by faster Beta-Waves.

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