Customer Reviews

The High-Performance Mind

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I'm not sure why Anna Wise gave this book its rather inappropriate title but it is very misleading. The books sounds like some sort of low-grade improvement guide meant for high-power executives searching for ways to increase their ability to outwit dumb consumers and investors; nothing could be further from the truth.

There was a lot of interest in biofeedback in the 1960's and then interest turned to more "scientific" endeavors such as genetics; we're only just beginning to realize our folly. Luckily a few researchers continued what was begun and their hard work and determination can now be seen to have a lot of value.

Wise owes a lot of her background to her mentor, Max Cade, and some rather personal problems she outlines in the book. She combines experience and theory from Eastern meditation with EEG biofeedback work, something Pelletier and others have alluded to for a while. However, Wise really puts a lot of valuable tips and information together and that is the beauty of this book.

The book outlines some basic information about brainwaves and then gets into a great overview of some typical patterns and their apparent link to various personal states. Of course there is no purely theoretical link between what EEG measures and what is happening in your head but there can be no doubt that there is a connection. And this book details some of the important connections.

There is an excellent overview of meditative "states" and their subjective "landmarks". Wise offers some great insight for people who are starting on the path to meditation and are getting stuck at certain points. This material has been available through other sources, notably from the Zen tradition, but these days it can be difficult to make sense of the multitude of books and so-called "masters". Wise's suggestions are straight-forward, simple and clear which is great.

There are guided meditations, again taken from EEG studies, that allow anyone to make his/her own tapes. The visualization exercises have been used successfully in beta-theta biofeedback studies and anyone who has participated in Qigong or Zen will recognize many common elements. But the best part of this book is the clarity and the way information is presented in a manner better suited to those of us from the scientific framework.

That's the funny thing, the information has been available for thousands of years but science is only just beginning to acknowledge it. In the book's final pages Wise details her own struggles with healing blindness and Kundalini rising; something that most Western readers would scoff at without the preceeding pages "explaining" the link to something we can relate to.

Definitely worth buying and, more importantly, using.

This is a book about biofeedback, but from a different perspective. Just about every other book ever published on biofeedback has a clinical, reductionist medical approach (except for Elmer Green''s books, Beyond Biofeedback and Ozawkie Book of The Dead.) Anna Wise, a regular trainer at Esalen, takes a more holistic approach based on her 25+ years of experience observing the brain wave patterns of people with awakened mind-- yogis, top executives, artists, etc.

Rather than talking about treating illness, she talks about optimizing brain function and mental states, about enhancing the contents and quality of consciousness.

She discusses how she uses the Mind Mirror, a technology originally developed by her Mentor Max Cade and engineer Geoff Blundell, to assess how our brains are operating and then, she devises strategies to get our brains working more like a person with an awakened mind.

She offers exercises and a strategies which help you learn to put your brain in better places.

If you want to see the whole picture of the biofeedback world, Anna is definitely not a part of the medical pathology mainstream and that's the way she likes it.

When she is a speaker at the EEG biofeedback conference I run, she speaks a different language, which addresses spirit and the whole person. There have been some academic researchers who were really turned off by her, at first. But after discussing her approach, in detail and not just reacting to her "soft" approach to brain technology, many have turned around, and found common ground with her.

Jim Robbins book, Symphony in the brain, is a good history of the more recent developments in higher frequency brain biofeedback, mostly focused on treatment. Evan's and Abarbanel's Quantitative EEG and EEG Biofeedback is a strictly professional text, with about 15 contributed chapters. Anna Wise's contribution to the writing on brain biofeedback provides a very nice feminine ying to the masculine yang that has predominated in the field.

In this superbly written book, Anna Wise explains how anyone can use meditation (i.e. brainwave mastery) to reduce emotional stress, sharpen thinking skills and increase psychic sensitivity and awareness. She is an authority on this subject, having worked directly and hands-on with hundreds of clients over a 20-year period, in which she used a specially designed biofeedback machine to teach mental mastery through meditation. Her experience with these clients and her intimate knowledge of people and their patterns make this book a real mind-opener. It is a powerful, convincing study of the unlimited brain-mind and how its aspects of ordinary thinking, visual images, subconscious thoughts and memories, and dreaming/healing/psychic unconscious can link up to animate the "awakened" mind and the genius of fully expanded human consciousness. Graphics in the book enable readers to grasp these concepts easily and to see how their own mental states relate to these brainwave frequencies. The book is easy going and gives its best when read carefully and with a studious, open mind. If you want to move into higher consciousness--that is, higher mental productivity--you can't do any better than to learn about and follow the pathways so clearly outlined in this brilliant book.

Anna Wise gives clear guidance on how to gain meaningful control over brain wave states. Her techniques work. I highly recommend that you buy the accompanying cassettes - worth the extra outlay as the two compliment each other and aid quicker learning. Wise is regarded as an expert in her field and has helped design healing tapes for Andrew Weil and others. The tone is clear, insightful, and accomplished. Relatively jargon free and able to make sense of brainwave states -beta, alpha, theta and delta in the context of the type of human experiences they are associated with. In that sense it is where EEG science of the brain meets the human. Highly reccommended.

The author has a very good experience with the "esoteric and philosophical" biofeedback, as developed by the late C. Maxwell Cade and Geoffrey Blundell (England). The original method and way of using biofeedback machines in the ascension of self consciousness and higher states of mind is very well adapted by the author to the need of modern man for accuracy, dependability and clarity. If you like to learn in a professional way what is really behind the brainwaves, "alpha training" etc..., this book is highly recommended.

I work as a hypnotherapist and studied with Max Cade in England 20 years ago during 6 years (only a few years after Anna Wise did). I assisted in the Dutch translation of "The Awakened Mind" by Cade and Coxhead. The reading of "The High Performance Mind" was a welcome refreshment to the old knowledge of 20 years ago. Many thanks for the effort and clarity

Contradictory,brainwave training without E.E.G. equipment is just meditation where you have no way to access to data showing actual states of counsciousness hence info could be wrong & misleading.No equipment & software reviews are given.She just says (Trust me)i'm right.Not very scientific.It seems this book has to do more with EGO and less to do with science.Also in the book there is a contact page that says if interested in the (mind mirror):the only reference to equipment: to e-mail or call but when you do a rude person called Meg would belittle your intelligence as if this is the only book in the world on brainwaves right before she announces that mind mirror cost a whopping $4000 & would go on to say you get what you pay for.Don't fall for this type of shoddy salesmanship techniques shop around there are plenty of resources on the web that are more cost effective.With the money saved from this purchase you could purchase another book called Megabrain by Micheal Hutchison that would be more helpful

This book refers extensively to the awakened mind pattern developed by Max Cade, and he was Anna's mentor.

The AMP is based on Cade's research on EEG patterns of yogis, swamis, and healers and the discovery of common patterns for people engaged in creating, problem solving, learning, healing, memorizing and meditating.

People in that state of consciousness are using a specific combination of beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta brainwaves. If you spent decades modeling the EEG patterns of yogis, swamis, and healers, you might find common patterns for people engaged in creating, problem solving, learning, healing, memorizing and meditating.

If you were to use entrainment to create sound pulses and music to recreate those exact same EEG patterns in normal individuals, a feeling of lucid awareness, you would create something wonderful.

Dr Jeffrey Thompson has done this. For the price of an ordinary CD you can get the pioneering benefit of all this amazing technology.

According to the sleeve notes with the CD there are fifteen different layers of brainwave entrainment sounds used to create the awakened mind pattern.

This CD is very mentally stimulating, creating all sorts of mental imagery and very relaxing.

This type of CD also uses subaudible binaural beats in the soundtrack. How this works is that if a frequency of say 100 Hz goes in your left ear, and 105 Hz goes in your right ear, then both sides of your brain reconcile this by creating a third 5 Hz brainwave, which would be in the Theta range associated with creativity and a trance state. This also creates new neural pathways in the brain enabling you to access this desired state more easily in the future, and also induces synchronicity between both sides of your brain. With fifteen different levels of entrainment on this CD, you can imagine how beneficial this could be.

So, I recommend you get the CD first. In one session you can immediately reattune to the awakened mind pattern. With practice you can reach this state automatically.

Then if you find that helpful, go ahead and buy this book which has many insights on this interesting subject, and some interesting meditation techniques to use with the pattern.

I hope you find this review helpful.

This is a great book for anyone who wants to master his/her brain power in any situation of everyday life. It is so clear about how our brain works, explaining about beta states, alpha, theta and delta. It becomes so clear. Anna Wise gives you exercises to master your brainwaves, to boost your creativity, to heal, to concentrate, to get the best out of yourself and it is easy if you follow what she says and if you give some daily time to them. I practice meditation, visualisation since some time and this book is really simple and clear to apply. It is not about spirituality only it is a scientific point of view from someone who applicates what she explains. She gives tips I had never read in any book before. She gives you the key to be what you've always been without knowing it, to become an awakened mind as anybody should be.

Anna Wise has produced a groundbreaking book on the topic of brainwaves and consciousness. This book examines the relationship between brainwave patterns (frequencies and amplitudes) and states of consciousness and activity. The author discusses neurofeedback techniques and various meditative exercises that can be used to develop desired brainwave patterns. Wise focuses on developing patterns she calls the "high performance mind," which include a mix of the 4 major brain wave frequency ranges. Developing the combined brainwave patterns also helps improve brain hemisphere synchronization. Wise briefly covers topics that relate more directly to metaphysics, such as kundalini, and she seems to be unclear about the full nature of the relationship between brain electrical activity and consciousness, as the brain is merely a tool for consciousness to use in interacting with physical sensory reality. Wise acknowledges that during OBEs brainwave patterns can be weak and non-informative, which shows how consciousness can be very active and dynamic without being filtered through a brain. Thus, there can never be a perfect correlation between brainwaves and consciousness, even though brainwaves usually reflect focii of consciousness and can be entrained for development of consciousness and self-regulation. If that is your interest, then this is an excellent book to gain ideas and insight from.

Bearing in mind Anna Wise supposedly has many years of experience researching eeg feedback she writes a complete load of rubbish. I have never seen so many inaccuracies when it comes to talking about brainwaves and eeg. Technical inaccuracies I mean, almost as though she doesn't know what she's talking about. I run a neurofeedback centre and have a doctorate in his area and it saddens me that so much nonsense is written about brainwaves.
For a start we talk about delta, theta and so on as though they are real things when in fact they are just arbitrary ways of describing the content of the eeg waveform. Using Fourier analysis we break down the complex eeg brainwave into sinusoidal waves of certain frequencies and these frequencies we call delta, theta etc. It is therefore completely untrue to say that the brainwave 'is' theta or 'is' beta or whatever. Every brainwave can be broken down into proportionate amounts of each group, so what we should be talking about is the relative amplitude of the groups.
Now, there are numerous howlers in this book and she goes so far to say that normal waking eeg 'is' mainly beta and some people may have delta. The fact is that in any normal waking brainwave there is probably 5 times more delta amplitude than beta, so where the notion of waking eeg 'being' beta is complete nonesense and simplifies the eeg enormously. She also never even mentions gamma rhythms which are looking increasingly interesting.
Another howler says delta is associated with the unconscious. Pardon ? Show me the evidence ? Does that mean that in normal waking consciousness which is composed of 5 times the amount of delta than any other rhythm, we are actually unconscious ?
It's about time a sensible book is written about neurofeedback and brain rhythms. They are indeed important and our understanding of what is going on in the brain electric will lead to new ways of our controlling behaviour but please don't buy this book and think you are going to get anything other a load of tosh when it comes to eeg technicalities.
P.S. This goes for all Ms Wise's books relating to brainwaves or eeg or neurofeedback.