Sounder Sleep System

Mindball is a remarkable tabletop game based on the principles of neurofeedback. Two players sit at opposite ends of a six-foot-long, Swedish Modern-style table wearing plush, Velcro-cinched headbands studded with EEG sensors. The object is to move a small, magnetic metal ball away from you, into your opponent’s goal. It’s not unlike the old game of knock-hockey we used to play at summer camp, except that instead of whacking a puck with a stick, you move a ball with your mind. The headbands, coupled to an onboard computer, monitor brainwaves in real time and the player who produces the slowest waves, ideally those in the lower reaches of the theta band (4-8 cycles per second) that are associated with deep relaxation and the onset of sleep, advances the ball and ultimately wins.

I had the opportunity to experience Mindball recently at Wired Magazine’s ultrahip gadget store in New York City. I watched while a rangy, nervous guy in his late twenties was trounced again and again by his best bud, a dark, wavy-haired, phlegmatic—the kind of guy who just smiles enigmatically when a passing truck splashes him from head to toe with muddy water.

From its starting point at mid-table, the ball would roll slowly toward the goal, gradually picking up speed as the inevitability of defeat eventually caused the loser’s brainwaves to jack even higher. I asked both guys what their technique was, and not surprisingly the loser told me he was “trying to relax” while the winner was just thinking of “nothing in particular.” Of course, “trying” to relax is mental effort in itself; the more you try, the more your your EEG accelerates. “Nothing in particular,” on the other hand, is a phrase that turns up again and again in psychological studies recording the thought patterns of sound sleepers and other stress-resistant individuals.

Okay, now it’s my turn. I challenge the winner to best of five, and we go, quite literally, head to head. But before I tell you my stats, I’ve got to say that it’s quite an eerie sensation, moving a ball with your mind! My first thought is that I am channeling telekinetics guru Uri Geller, the TV psychic who bends spoons with his mind. Also, competing over who is more relaxed is a conundrum—like hurrying to fall asleep or trying to observe your breath without changing it.

So how did the Sleep Meister do? In my first two games, I got nailed. I was new to the game, and I had just ridden a crowded, clattering subway and threaded my way through the Friday afternoon throngs in NYC’s hottest shopping district. By the third game I was fully in the zone, and my opponent and I dragged the ball back and forth several times like the knot in and evenly matched tug of war.

We played several more games, and a small crowd of spectators began to gather. My performance improved even further, especially once I realized that I could hack the game by using DayTamers™ during play. DayTamers, in case you’re not aware, are deep relaxation techniques that are a component of the Sounder Sleep System™. In one DayTamer called “Main Squeeze” we join our hands in a special way called the “Secret Handshake,” gently grasping one thumb with the opposite hand, and one index finger with the other. (Click here to learn the Secret Handshake and hear a slightly different variant of the technique in MP3 format.) You breathe easily, and on alternate out-breaths you squeeze first the thumb, then the index.

As I closed my eyes and did the Main Squeeze, a bystander gasped, “Oooh! He’s moving it back and forth!” I peeked to see what was going on, and sure enough, the ball was moving two steps forward each time I exhaled, and one step back each time I inhaled. That didn’t surprise me, since it is known that each time we inhale, cerebral processing speeds up, and each time we exhale, it slows down. It stands to reason, then, that if your exhalation is longer than your inhalation, as is often the case when one is deeply relaxed, the ball should forward, assuming that your opponent doesn’t use the same technique. Curiously enough, I noticed that the ball advanced further and faster when I was squeezing my index finger than when I was squeezing my thumb. I soon was squeezing my index only, with ever better results.

Eventually my young friend got tired of being shredded both lengthwise and and crosswise, and got up to leave. “What are you, some kind of mind-control guru?” he asked, with evident frustration, and even though that’s not really an accurate description of what I am, I said yes just to let him know that I was indeed playing with a stacked deck. Fair’s fair, after all. He seemed happy with my admission, and slapped my palm affably as he departed.

I hung arond another half hour, locking brainwaves with a geeky graphic artist, a jet-lagged Danish fashion model, and a few nondescripts, dispatching each of them in turn. For the moment I was the king of the Mindball hill—until Mom showed up, that is. Who was Mom? Nobody special, just a pleasant, mild-mannered, graying lady of a certain age. Nobody special except to her thirteenish son, with whom she had scored major points by chauffering him in from Connecticut so he could scope out all the cool techno-toys at the Wired Store—exotic game consoles, 60 mph Vectrix electric mega-scooters, laser smoke-ring guns, mil-spec nightscopes, and such. While the son gear-gawked, Mom had wandered off on her own. Despite her apparent curiosity about Mindball, she insisted she really didn’t want to play, wasn’t good at games of any sort, too old for that sort of thing, and so on. Even so, she blew me away repeatedly—three games in a row, to be exact. The ball kept coming, and coming, and coming, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Finally, in desperation, I reverted to the very first DayTamer I ever created, a crossed-thumbs thingy which I used to call “The Healer.” (By a curious coincidence, a nearly identical technique is mentioned in the Talmud for averting demonic posession.) That, combined with some thought-squelching, upward-rolling eye movements, drew Mom and me even, with the Mindball crown shifting back and forth over the course of several games.

Then, Mom did a funny, Mom-like thing: she gave me some advice. She said, “I think it works better if your hands are apart.” Okay, I was willing to try. In the next game, I simply let my hands lie still in my lap, but Mom rolled right over me like a Wermacht tank column. But I had one more Mindball hack up my sleeve, a DayTamer called the “Downshift.” Resting my elbows on the table, hands raised with palms facing my eyes, I slowly inhaled, gently raising my head and doing a barely perceptible exanding movement of my fingers, sort of like a flower opening. Then as I slowly exhaled, I tipped my head forward, and let my fingers relax. It was the ultimate Mindball hack. When I did that, Mom didn’t have a chance against me, and neither did anyone else. “You see,” she graciously conceded, “I’m no good at games!”

More from the New Yorker article on Descartes. It seems Descartes, like many creative thinkers through the ages, had a special relationship with sleep and dreams. Three quotes:

"Descartes’s mother died when he was fourteen months old, and his father entrusted his upbringing to relatives. At the age of ten, René was sent to the recently established Jesuit College of La Flèche. His health was weak, and a kinsman, Father Charlet, who was the rector of the school, managed to secure him special treatment. He had his own room and was allowed to laze in bed in the mornings, which became a lifelong habit. The other boys had to rise at 5 A.M.; Descartes apparently did not rouse himself until Mass at ten."

"It is unclear whether or not [physician, engineer, and candlemaker Isaac] Beeckman was one of the catalysts for the revelation that Descartes claims to have had at the age of twenty-three, a year to the day after his first meeting with him. That was when he went to bed after a day’s excited contemplation in which he discovered the “foundations of a marvellous science,” and had a series of vivid dreams that changed his life. Possibly, it was a nervous breakdown rather than the intellectual breakthrough that Descartes later made it out to be. Either way, within a few years he seems to have been set on a life of learning, focussing on the natural sciences and mathematics."

"Descartes died, of pneumonia, in Stockholm in 1650, at the age of fifty-three, having unwisely procured an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden, and then even more unwisely accepted it. In the coldest Swedish winter in sixty years, he found himself obliged to stand bare-headed at five in the morning in Christina’s library to give her philosophy lessons. It was a cruel change for a man who was not exactly a morning person. Four years later, the Queen abdicated and converted to Catholicism, prompted, she wrote, by Descartes’s teachings."

Not exactly a morning person. Cute, that.

Finally back at my desk (and my mountains!) after a long spell of travelling, I'm catching up on my reading. There's a big stack of New Yorker magazines to plow through, but I noticed that the most recent issue but one (November 20) has a nice piece on Rene Descartes, rather wittily titled "Think Again." The author is Anthony Gottlieb.

Those of you who know Antonio Damasio's writings might consider Descartes something of a philosophical rhinoceros, since Damasio tags his famous epigram, "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am") as the origin of so-called "mind-body dualism," something we all consider very naughty.

Gottlieb, however, gives a very different spin on the story, as summarized in the following paragraph:

"Descartes’s dualism is certainly not quite what it is often taken to be. In the 1994 best-seller “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” the neurologist Antonio Damasio reports that Descartes believed in an “abyssal separation between body and mind . . . the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.” This is actually the opposite of what Descartes believed. He held that we “experience within ourselves certain . . . things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone,” and that these arise “from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.” In his best-known writings, Descartes stressed the differences between matter (which occupies space) and thought (which does not). But he also maintained that, in human beings, mind and body are mysteriously and inextricably combined, as he tried to spell out in letters to Princess Elizabeth [of Bohemia--MK]. (She kept pressing him on the point.) He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were."

Lots more interesting stuff on Descartes in the full story.