Nexus - 0203 - New Times Magazine-pages

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THE NEXUS GUIDE T0- THE NEXUS Build Your Own Recession-Fighting "Guerilla Goggles" SOUND. What results is the "“freauencv following Your Own "Guerilla Recession-Fighting SOUND. What results is the "frequency following response", also termed "entrainment". Depending on the speed of stimulation introduced, the mind will translate it into a corresponding level of subjec- tive awareness. Commercial mind machines generate a syn- chronous audio/visual output, variable in rate from about | to 30 cycles per second. Within this "ELF" range lie the biological triggering mechanisms for nearly all our moods and inner resources. There is some evidence that repeated use actually opens up NEW neural pathways, or those not turned on by ordinary influences in the environment. Those of us who have been tempted by the glittering alchemy of Light and Sound "Mind Machines" could be a little confused by now. Only one thing seems consistent. Each purveyor of electronic good times promotes their newly imported product as "THE best". Well, the one you can build from this article definitely isn't the best ... but it is the CHEAPEST! For about $5-, if you have an old pair of sunnies and a soda can. Meanwhile, back at the lab, we are dissecting a represen- tative sampling of this year's high-tech gadgetry, and putting their common features into separate smoldering piles. We'll leave it to you to correlate this raw data with your actual needs, and specific brand names. Here's what their basic differences look like to the informed researcher. SEEING THE LIGHT Some unbridled "futants" spend over 200 times as much for extra sound effects, frequency readouts or automation. If you're REALLY serious, it is worth the expense ... and in all fairness, this complexity is costly to manufacture. But it's icing on the cake, not the underlying principle. To help with your decision, we will list the performance options available, using our home-made optical stimulator as a point of departure. After all, the one thing they all have in common is flashing lights, fitted to anything from ski gog- gles to wrap-around safety glasses. But first our cybernetic psychologist, Dr. Anne Droid, wants to say that the brain's electrical activity can be tuned to any rhythm you want by applying pulsed energy through the senses. This is most easily done with LIGHTS and OPTICAL y STIMULATION F al Source: miniature incandescent or solid state Light Emitting Diodes (LED's). The former boasts "full spec- trum", but red, typically the colour chosen for the latter, is NEXUS - 21 CONSUMER REPORT MAY/JUNE 1991 - YEAR BOOK