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129  Tiny Muscles Seem to Have
     A Role in Brain Activity
     The Washington Post  December 21, 1968

     To most lay readers, brain waves must be a subject of awe and 
fascination that far outreach the scientific  facts.  It has been known
for years that evidence of electrical signals in the brain can be
obtained from electrodes placed upon the scalp, leaving it unnecessary
to penetrate the skin.  The reader will have heard that these EEG, or
electroencephalographic, signals are useful in the diagnosis of 
epilepsy and of some other diseases of the brain.

     He will have read provocative suggestions that criminally 
aggressive behavior might be associated with abnormal EEG's  (but then 
what do we scan the whole population?). He will know that the EEG is 
being proposed as a more sensible criterion of the "living" state of the
human body than the heart beat, which can be artificially stimulated
for many hours after every other sign of life has decayed.

     It would not be surprising, then, if many readers believed that
the EEG could also be used to spy on the innermost thoughts of the 
subject, to translate what he is thinking into an electrical code or
even in some subtle way to influence his behavior or his sense of free
will.

     These fantasies are founded on an exaggeration of an undoubted
fact: the function of the brain is a composite of the electrical 
activity of all of its neuronal cells and connections.  If we could get
a complete record of the electrical waves from each of a hundred billion
separate elements, and above all could have some hope of understanding
such a staggering record, we might then have some access of personality.
The typical EEG record does not begin to reach this kind of insight,
nor can we foresee any way of approaching this level except for
the simplest forms of animal life with rudimentary nervous systems.

     In fact, it is rather surprising that brain waves can be detected
at all.  What can be detected by an electrode on the scalp is the 
summation of outputs from millions of different cells.  Each of them 
must have its own pattern of activity, and the overall effects should be
mutually canceling over the whole population of contributing cells.

     Nevertheless, it seems that under certain conditions, many cells
are recruited into a giving rhythm of about 11 beats per second, the
so-called alpha wave.  The alpha wave is most characteristic of quiet
wakefulness with eye shut, and again of certain stages of sleep. The
alpha wave is blocked when the subject is alerted to external stimuli,
and is replaced by a desynchronized, independent activity of different
cells that defies simple analysis.

     Recent work suggests that the most crucial factor is the state of
the muscles of the eye.  When the eyeball is directed upward, the
alpha wave is the most prominent; when it is focused on an object to
which the subject's attention is directed, the alpha wave disappears.

     Dr. Joseph Kamiya of the University of California Medical Center
(San Francisco) has reported that subjects can be trained to regulate
their own alpha waves regardless of their overt eye positioning.  An
instrument was arranged to sound a tone during alpha wave activity,
and most subjects learned to maintain the tone on or off at will.

     When questioned later, they described the alpha-on state as one
of calm, unfocused meditation.  Indeed, practiced Zen meditators were
found to be unusually proficient in controlling the alpha state.  Ac-
cording to a report in Psychology Today.

     The subjective reports of the meditative state must be given
equal weight with the effect of eye muscle tension in our effort to 
evaluate these findings.  If nothing else, 20 years work on the EEG
points to extraordinary importance of some of the tiniest muscles in
the body for the general pattern of the electrical activity of the
brain, and, if so, why not also for the characteristics of mood and
arousal associated with meditation? Turning off these muscles is just
the kind of not-seeing that one may associate with introspection.
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