Word: controls
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Through the cerebrospinal nervous system, the mind is able to dominate much of the body: how a man walks, talks, or wiggles his fingers is controllable by reason and will. But the body's glandular and visceral processes-run with sovereign independence by what scientists call the autonomic nervous system-have long been considered beyond the reach of conscious control. The only exceptions, it was thought, were bizarre and inexplicable cases, such as the Indian yogis, who can regulate their heart beat and their breathing. Now, though, experimental psychologists have proved that the body's autonomic system...
Engel's work in "autonomic shaping" has enabled him to alter heart rates and rhythms to alleviate irregular heart beats and high blood pressure in cer tain patients. Other researchers are proving-contrary to expert opinion of the past-that man can learn to control even such functions as sweating, blood pressure, intestinal contractions and brain waves...
Though the exploration of autonomic control is still in its infancy, the vistas it opens are staggering. Dr. Joe Kamiya of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, who has experimented with conscious regulation of brain waves, looks for ward to the day when man will have "an internal vocabulary, a language he can use to explain more effectively and completely how he feels inside. In time, we should be able to talk fluently about feelings such as brain-wave production, blood pressure...
Kamiya then sets the monitor to sound when the subject's brain waves are in the alpha range of eight to twelve cycles per second. In one test, eight of ten subjects were able to control the tone, emitting or suppressing brain waves as requested. They Were unable to say exactly how they gained such control; they simply wanted to keep receiving the proper feedback from the tone...
Learned Response. Dr. Peter Lang, research professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, has applied autonomic learning to control the human heart rate. Attached to a monitor, a subject is told to watch a TV-like screen and to make the moving lines on it shorter, corresponding to a slower heart rate. Without any conscious effort or muscle tensing, the lines shorten, the rate slows, the subject becomes able, as Lang puts it, "to drive his own heart." Lang has not probed for an explanation beyond showing that the changing heart rate is indeed a learned response. The unconscious...