Going Beyond: Software and the Mind

Imagine a future in which your personal computer becomes a doorway into a world of enhanced intelligence and creativity, emotional stability and previously unrealized personal success. In this world, the computer has become more than just a word processor or a web browser; it has become both an instantaneous communication tool for contacting seminar leaders or personal therapists and an interactive councilor that uses artificial intelligence to provide personal coaching and wise guidance. Or even further in the future, computer aided methods of transformation of human consciousness.

Could that colorful screen upon which you may be reading this become that door? This is a question that has intrigued those who have studies the potential of the PC, and the answer may be that this reality is closer than we realize. Before we look ahead and examine the possibilities, let's take a brief glimpse backward at the history if the mind/computer connection.

A Brief History of Software "Mind Tools"

The notion that computers could be tools for mental development and transformation goes back further than the personal computer. Joseph Weisenbaum, a professor at MIT in the 1960's developed a program on a mainframe that he called Eliza, which imitated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school by rephrasing what the user said or sometimes posing a oddball question about his or her mother - from out of the blue.?Although meant to be a kind of joke, a comment on artificial intelligence, he was astounded to find people having real conversations with his newly created program, and some found that they liked talking to it better than their flesh- and-blood "shrink."

The earliest company to harness the earliest PCs, Macs, Commodores and Apples in the early `Eighties was Human Edge -- founded by Dr. James Johnson, a former psychology professor from the University of Minnesota and a salesman for IBM. Johnson's company developed a program called Mind Prober, still the most successful mind-related software ever sold with an amazing one-quarter million sold in the world of 1985, when there were only perhaps only four million PC's in the entire world. This would be the equivalent of selling five million programs in today.

Mind Prober was and is simply a computerized personality profile. It's the descendent of tests like those you probably took in school but never got to see the results - or the MMPI test that is used to classify people with mental disorders. What is so remarkable about Mind Prober and its descendents is that with the answering of a short questionnaire, they reveal so much about your own personality of the personality of someone you've known for only a short while. This is because they are based on one of the most solid parts of the mostly unsystematic study called psychology - psychometrics.

Psychometrics is the basis of personality testing, and can measure and describe personality by comparing answers to the test on paper or, in this case, in the computer program with groups of people with known personality attributes. The unique way that specific personality type answers certain questions gives the personality test program uncanny insight into what seem to be hidden dimensions of an individual.

These early psychological programs were text-based CGA graphic programs. But both programs proved fascinating to many people with psychological curiosity including a graduate student named Bruce Ehrlich, who was just about to complete a Ph.D. in psychology and who had collected a series of programs he called Mindware.

Ehrlich published his first collection of mind software in the Spring 1988 Mindware catalog. It probably is no accident that two of the most popular programs in that catalog were a modern version of Eliza for the PC (the first ones only ran on mainframes), and Mindviewer, an upgrade to Mind Prober. Another popular program was Calmpute! manufactured by Thought Technology of Toronto, Canada - a biofeedback program that measured galvanic skin response. A special mouse measured your GSR?and displayed the results on a computer screen. By discovering what kind of things you did to make the display graph change, you could learn to control your levels of stress and relaxation.

The Mindware catalog continued in its print version from 1988 until 1993 when it reached a circulation of a half million catalogs. Programs became increasingly sophisticated and diverse. Among the most noteworthy of the new offerings in the catalog were:

* Overcoming Depression -- A program by computer-assisted therapy expert Professor Thomas Colby, based on his research at Stanford and UCLA.

* IQ Builder --A program developed by Russian-born programmer Vladimer Asinovsky which measures 53 components of human intelligence and trains people in developing these abilities in incremental levels (Note: Mind Media now publishes this program!)

* Insight -- a psychometric testing program that was the first to take advantage of increases in computer graphics. The program used the Kahler Process Model first developed by Dr. Tabi Kahler for NASA to provide deep psychological insight. Unfortunately, the company that developed the program over a four-year period - Three-Sixty, Inc. of San Jose -- was forced to take the program off the market when Dr.Kahler's wife, who had won control of the test in divorce, blocked continued sales.

* Dream Analyzer - a test which allowed people to analyze the contents of their dreams developed by Dr. James Johnson (Note: Mind Media publishes this program and it is included in Mind Prober 3.0)

* PC Therapist - a program by Joseph Weintraub which did Eliza one better, winning the Loebner award by beating the famous Touring Test, in which a British cybernetics expert in the 'Fifties suggested a test for machine intelligence which consisted of the ability to fool people into believing they were talking to a real human over a teletype devise.

* Idea Generator Plus - a program developed by Roy Nierenberg, founder of Experience-In-Software (http://www.experienceware.com). The Program is based on Gerard Nierenberg's (the founder's father), book The Art of Creative Thinking and presents an interactive process based on exercises from the book, for developing new ideas on the user project of choice.

Mind Software Today In 1994, Ehrlich moved the Mindware catalog to the World Wide Web and began to focus on publishing some of his best sellers from the Mindware catalog as the Mental Edge software series and creating a web site which has evolved into the Mind Media Life- Enhancement Network (http://www.mindmedia.com). Ehrlich plans to develop this site into the central source for products and information about the mind software technology on the Web.

Ehrlich's Mindware catalog was the first direct mail catalog to offer CD-ROM players and CD-ROMs to the public by direct mail. Ehrlich understood that the greater amounts of multimedia information held by CD-ROMs would contribute to mind software that was both more effective and that would provide users a richer, friendlier experience.

On his Mind Media Life-Enhancement Network site, he launched an electronic version of his print catalog -- Mindware Interactive Online Catalog (http://www.mindmedia.com/products.html) --, which lists many of these new CD-ROMs. Mind Media's Complete Guide to Self-Improvement and Mental Development on the Web (http://www.mindmedia.com/linkspace/pages/). The latter a "Yahoo-like" directory and search engine for the entire scope of self-help, self-improvement and mental development sites on the Web, features some of the products we mention below at http://www.mindmedia.com/linkspace/pages/mindsoft.shtml.

About a year ago, David Marshall's Journeyware New Media published a CD-ROM, Your Mythic Journey. The software presented a seminar-on-a-disk by best-selling psychology author Sam Keen. The program used a multimedia authoring system called Macromind Director, which allows the disk to be used by both Windows and Macintosh systems.

It works by combining video visits with Sam Keen, (who beams down like a Startrek officer using the "transporter" into a series of beautiful graphic environments) with interactive exercises designed to explore the past, present and future of your personal mythic journey through life. What makes the program especially enjoyable is the graphical environments created by David Marshall's brother, a highly creative computer artist. .

With the introduction of this CD-ROM, mind software had taken a giant step forward, with the user finding that they can continue to gain value through exploring their lives. A series of other CD- ROM titles began to be released including one by John Gray, Ph.D. based on his best-selling book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, a relationship seminar-on-a-disk and many others. In addition to these new CD-ROM based interactive multimedia presentations, a number of new software programs with increased features have been released. One program, from BrainTainment (http://www.brain.com), called ThinkFast, measures and coaches users on increasing a variety of mental abilities including memory, cognitive abilities and reflexes. Using a high quality graphical interface running in the Windows environment, programs like these and those that follow may become "mind gyms", a term that Bruce Ehrlich of Mind Media began using around 1990 to describe the potential of this type of mind software (http://newciv.org/GIB/BOV/BV-488.HTML)

Another area that has taken great leaps forward since the early Mindware catalog days is the area of computers and biofeedback. Biofeedback first became popular in the `Sixties. Biofeedback was invented by Professor Joe Kamiya, who first discovered that the brain could actually control processes in the body and brain previously thought only to be under control of the autonomic nervous system, which was considered to be completely unavailable to consciousness. By feeding back signals from various body and brain processes, people could learn to control how they felt and thought!

The earliest devices were simple ones that measured GSR or EEG and gave a simple noise like a tone so that the user could learn to control these body and brain functions. Because they were rather boring to use and because they looked at only one modality of the particular process they monitored, these biofeedback systems quickly lost their popularity.

However biofeedback clinics continued to operate and help people with a variety of tasks including stress reduction and control of migraine headaches and even blood pressure control. With the invention and increasing sophistication of the PC however, these tools have made remarkable progress.

A number of biofeedback systems that interact with the personal computer have been developed. These include such sophisticated new products as the IBVA system, which includes a biofeedback system that will read EEG or brainwaves, rather than the more simple GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) systems which simply measured the skin's ability to conduct electricity and allows for comparisons between the brain's left and right hemisphere. The screen shows a three-dimensional graph while speakers let you hear the sound of your brain waves rise and fall. There are even a number of CD-ROM programs that allow you to use the IBVA system in new and more useful ways.

There are several other computer based biofeedback systems including the Neuolink developed by NLP expert Robert Dilts, the Stress Saver Systems biofeedback system with mind games, and the WaveRider Pro Biofeedback System with WaveWare 2.0 software. As you can see, we have come a long way since the first Mindware catalog offered Calmpute!.

The Near Future

Bruce Ehrlich of Mind Media has plans for his Mind Media Life Enhancement Network which give us an idea about where the field of mind software may be heading in the next few years.

Ehrlich plans to begin broadcasting seminars with popular self- improvement leaders and self-help writers using streaming audio and video technology. This technology is already being successfully used by companies like NetSeminar (http://www.netseminar.com) to successfully broadcast educational seminars on a variety of topics. You can actually interact with the seminar leaders online, making it more than the passive experience presented by audio or video tapes or reading a self-help book.

Ehrlich is also developing a new kind of CD-ROM seminar that uses "hybrid" CD-ROM technology. This would allow for continuous updates of content on CD-ROMS from the Mind Media web site -- allowing the user for example to get additional sessions and information from seminar leaders whose CD-ROM they had purchased.

The use of on-line programs written in Java will make available on-line pay-per-use versions of popular mind software. This pay- per-use model is already being done on the BrainTainment Center Web site at http://www.brain.com. The whole genre of mind software for creativity, problem solving, psychotherapy etc. will. be available on-line anytime.

The Far Realms of Computers and the Mind

In 1990, Simon and Shuster published Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman? by Judith Hooper and Dick Terisi, both editors at Omni magazine at the time and co-authors of the best selling book, The Three-Pound Universe.

In the chapter, "Using Your Computer to Expand Your Mind", they say:
The computer is more than a number crunching word processing,
artificial brain. In the right hands it's also a mind-expanding,
creativity-boosting, even mind-altering tool. We have already
accepted the microcomputer as a machine that can assume some of
our tedious menial chores. But it has a potential as a mind-
enhancing device as well. And the key is the software.

We have divided the field into five categories: smartware (which
makes you smarter, more organized, a better writer, a better
negotiator), psychological software (such as Eliza), stressware
(aimed at reducing anxiety), games/head trips (trips into alternative
realities) and spiritual software (intended to make you deeper).
Thus far we have looked at some of the kinds of software programs the authors predicted. But as the technology of the compute leaps forward and our understanding of the mind become increasingly better, some of these other more far-out mind/computer software programs will become possible.

Ehrlich, in the above-mentioned book, is written about as "The Mindware Man: Bruce Ehrlich and Digital Psychology." In this section, they write:
Ehrlich predicts that such software [mind software] will eventually
transform computer-human interactions. "The computer," he says,"
will become a friend." He foresees a dramatic growth in future
years in what he calls "electronic Buddhas." This is a program
designed to enhance the users spirituality. Another growth area is
"psychoactive software

How can a computer become a wise Buddha or guide? Or become psychoactive. Here are some of my wild-eyed guesses.

One of the most important theoretical areas in computer science concerns artificial intelligence. One area of AI is expert systems.

For example, a computer is trained to emulate a medical doctor in diagnosing a disease. These programs already exist, and have shown to be superior to human doctors in many cases in pinpointing illnesses.

Imagine then the computer developing an expert system model of a Zen master or psychotherapist. Expert systems that go far beyond Eliza's simple trickery to programs that teach real wisdom.

Now combine this with biofeedback, the technology we have talked about below. The most recent biofeedback breakthroughs have involved the recording and training of actual altered states of consciousness experiences. There actually has been recording flesh-and-blood Zen Masters as they enter Samadhi, the highest state of being in the Zen school.

Already, computers are giving us multimedia biofeedback rather than the primitive tones of three decades ago. Certainly at the current rate of technological progress, virtual reality will becomes available as an interface on the home PC. Already there is a graphical VRML (virtual reality markup language). Soon, goggles and gloves will supplement screen and mouse.

Consider the power of a virtual reality computerized biofeedback system. A system augmented by an artificially intelligent computer coach. Or perhaps a real human guiding a group of people over the Web.?Still another possibility, a group of humans supporting each other in their exploration consciousness linked up through a computer network. Shades of virtual group therapy!

As we look to the future of software for enlarging the capacity of the human mind and consciousness, we see

* The power of computers doubling every two years, * The creation of a global community"-linking everyone's ?homes by PC through interactive video and the World Wide Web

* New technologies such as biofeedback and virtually-reality ?ready for primetime.

* The rapid and dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding of ?the brain, consciousness and behavior.

Computers and software as an expander of human intellect, creativity and consciousness has a glorious future that we only begin to imagine.