First Experience With Brainwave Stimulation Procyon

I got my Procyon! I decided I would use a couple of the pre-set sessions for fun.

It figures, given this is me we are talking about, that I skipped the first 45 useful, targeted, therapeutic options and started with the 'experimental' section. First I chose #48, "Kaleidascopic Mind", a 20 minute 'Mind-Art' session. The description reads: Complex imagery, with an emphasis on Mandalas, vortexes, and spin-spaces.

The first thing I realized is something I knew already but the experience brought home: the only audio that the Procyon does on its own is a simple 'tone' that can be programmed for its Hz level. This level can change, will automatically ramp, can be synchronized with the lights, can be simply set to be controlled by one of the light channels for synchronization and ease. But it's just a single simple tone.

If you want rich complex audio, music, noise, etc. you need to either feed your audio file into the your computer and using what they call SynchroMuse, combine this with Procyon visual settings, then download to your hand-held unit. That's a little complicated and I'll cover it in a separate post. Or, run the include patch-cord from your MP3 player to your Procyon.

The second thing, which took about 10 seconds if that, was realizing what an odd effect the video had on my mind. This continued through the whole session although it was constantly changing with the lights.

It's like the visual part of my brain was creating "a real-time half-memory-in-the-present not-visual visual-impression," Not a real memory and not a real visual image but some bizarre place between them.

For example, even though visually, through my eyelids I could 'see' that it was just flashing color X or something, in my brain, I perceived a variety of pictures drawn that moved a bit -- like rotoscoping.

That's the name of a tech that is sketch-over-video animation. It was featured famously in that 80's video 'Take On Me' by Aha, but way more infamously by a satire-spoof in 2008 by Dustin McLean, which I wish I could link to but the bitchy record company forced it off youtube for copyright. (He'd replaced the vocals with a very literal description of what was going on in the kind of abstract video, which is so "mad stupid" in the words of one reviewer it was just can't-breathe-funny.)

The initial visuals and once-in-awhile visuals reminded me of some kind of mental rotoscoping. Entire settings and landscapes and visual situations, things that I couldn't figure out any memory related to or any reason for not-seeing, not-remembering, but something-halfway-between-those. For example, a man and woman are taking something like groceries out of the back of a car in the driveway in a suburban neighborhood. My perspective is about 10' above them to their left from about 10 feet away. Shift to some completely different scene which may or may not involve one or more of the first conceptual or visual elements. Shift again.

Some of them may move dynamically (fluidly), or move with visual slow staccato like a low-frame time-lapse-video effect, or are just like comic book 'stills', multiple related squared pictures where some movement/change has occurred between them, or they get larger or more focused as one element in them changes. When I first got it, it was the comic book fashion, that yielded to the slow visual staccato effect, finally into dynamic, but all with the sort of 'sketch-effect', which is what made me associate the experience to that video which is very much the same thing in the same sequence.

Except, just to make this really confusing, I really didn't see anything like that at all; I didn't "see" anything except some color flashing. And none of it was 'clear'. It was a lot like a lot of remote viewing (psychic) data, especially when I've not viewed in eons and am rather disconnected: some kind of super-intangible internal-impression that 'translates to' a visual impression inside me if I had to use words or categorize it, except not-quite. Humans don't even have a word anywhere near describing this, it's not a shared-experience we talk about.

That was just one initial and occasional form. More often through the session I got something I suspect was related to that but a bit different in effect. Imagine there is some sketch over photo (animated in some cases, like the above variations) and you've run it through some graphics filters so the only thing you actually 'see' of it are these teeeeeeeeny tiny 'sparks' of color (all the same color), like a barely-there short-stroke crosshatching effect on a high contrast mostly white image, except each of the tiny strokes is brighter at one side than the other, that creates a sort of "impressionist-almost-outline" which is set against something so 'subtle' you could call it not-white-on-not-white, which has an ineffable sense of slight-variable-depth, so that this combined with the limited micro-sparky color visuals, almost make sense, and seem to reveal (or barely not quite reveal, depending on how you look at it) the visual detail.

The reason I find this fascinating is because I thought I was going to see colors that then turned themselves into mandalas and geometry.

I haven't got a freaking clue why 3 LEDs would instead create--no matter how subtly, abstractedly, ineffably--quite detailed pictures, video-style scenes, and more. Well they didn't create that. It's more like something inside me "almost" created that but not quite -- almost like a "tip of the tongue can't quite remember" experience but just slightly more.

Philosophically just a little as I experienced it, it felt a tad like "I" as a larger entity, had this entire kaleidascope of combined lives/realities/etc., and the photic flashing was... almost-illuminating something inside-me, from that huge conglomerate of geometric physics-energy potential, and I was seeing just the traces of it with 'hints of context', reflected outside me, like the shadows on Plato's cave walls.

OK, and the rest of it was just neat-o colors and shapes and stuff. Heh.

I did work to relax first, and drink some water first, but when I was done I was kind of tired. Of course I was really sleep deprived so that made sense. But it felt like the tech had something to do with that too though. I wondered if it could cause eye strain. Or if changes in neural blood flow could matter. But I thought I should choose a session that was brief and would leave me feeling more mentally attentive.

So I chose preset #8, 'Attention Booster', a 20 minute session with the description: Alternates between 12 and 18 Hz, with pauses between each. Good for mental activation applications.

I would like to tell you what that experience was like, but apparently about 20 seconds into it I passed out. I woke up hours later. My impression is that I had some "tolerance threshold" that is not so much a gradual thing and I blew past it way too hard and fast. That combined with serious need for sleep, anyway.

I'll try another couple tonight when I'm off work.

PJ

Photic Stimulation in Color: RGB Absorption Through Eyelids

This seems like a big deal. You can't get a white blend if your R of the RGB is massively stronger without affecting its intensity for example. I wonder why our eyes pass through red light and not the others? I mean what evolutionary thing could cause that? In any case I think this has real significance for people using photic stimulation (flashing lights particularly LEDs). It's too bad they didn't cover other colors and not just RGB.

Although it has been reported that light treatment during sleep can modify biological rhythms, the amount of light that is transmitted through the human eyelid has not been established. We evaluated eyelid transmission with a visual threshold response. Estimated light transmission through the eyelids was 0.3% for blue, 0.3% for green, and 5.6% for red light. The eyelid was an effective attenuator and acted as a red-pass filter. Illumination intensity and color balance after passing through the eyelid should be considered in evaluating the effects of light treatments during sleep.

from: Light attenuation by the human eyelid.
ANDO K, KRIPKE DF.
Biological Psychiatry 1996;39(1):22-5.
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, USA

PJ

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