Brainwaves 101 – Whatchamaccalit?

Electroencephalography. This is a term you might want to familiarize yourself with for the moment. If you are thinking of someone’s head being attached to a multitude of wires and the readings on a machine, then you have the right idea. What it is in actuality is the recording and annotation of electrical or electromagnetic activity that is produced in the brain and can be actually read as activity along the top of the scalp. If you did not already know, the brain produces what many would call spontaneous activity within the cortical and lobes of the brain, produced actually by the billions of neurons within the brain as they try to communicate with each other.

A length of time typical to this sort of activity would normally range from something as short as ten minutes of something as long as 1 hour. Now, this article will get a little technical so bear with it. What happens is that the brain produces these electrical activities in what is called spatial scales that emanate from a current that is single to the dendritic spine within the natural areas of the brain. These currents that are recorded are often post synaptic, which means that they are not done in real time and occur in a time after the initial burst of electrical energy.

Understanding this, we can look into the cause of the wavelength burst, which come from the neurons within the brain. What happens is that within the brain there are billions of neurons, of which contain dendrites. These are where the electrical activity comes from. Now, the reading from the EEG machines that are connected to the scalp are actually the activity from maybe just a few hundred or maybe a few million of these neurons, but the action potential of the electromagnetic activity is strong enough for the machine to actually read these readings post synaptic. Ok, so there is plenty of literature to actually go around when talking about brainwaves and how they affect you but the simple fact of the matter is that brainwaves are keys to your success.

They actually define how well your brain performs at a particular act. Want to learn something new, then you need to activate a different set of brainwaves. Want to be more creative, have more mental acuity and agility – then you need to be able to know which brainwaves to activate. The brain actually has about 5 ranges from which you can choose from and this can mainly be from the alpha, theta, delta, gamma and beta ranges. Each of these brainwaves has a super state that you need to know about so I suggest that you go and do some heavy reading on the matter – you would be surprised just how much literature there is on the subject. There is not enough space on this article to actually list down just how much you need. In the end of the day, brainwaves are man’s next evolutionary step, maximizing the power of the mind to benefit one and all.