#biofeedback

are you a [dissociative] system?

does neuroscience, bio-feedback, memoryloss, childhood trauma, the placebo effect, or quantum science interest you?

wanna hear about actual recorded unsolvable medical cases and LSD experiments by scientists as far back as the 60s go?

willing participants, the most curiousity-inducing theories being openly explored, and questions that have plagued humans for centuries.

is religion a sham? is reality a sham? what IS Reality?

do you like questions sometimes more than answers?

give this a go!

if you can't access spotify, here's 3 months free from my premium (remember to cancel the subscription becore the free 3 months ks up so you don't get charged!!) https://open.spotify.com/show/46cbqAcQNhiLjv9DOk4pHj?si=EmkTcIkdTce4YtJEpd7X2A

idk if the link will work, spotify just gave it to me lol but if you can't use spotify (recommended to find the book physically or audiobook in library apps in your country)

I’m just gonna move biofeedback to once a month? Because it seems like 2 wks is usually a little soon for ppl, and also bc I’m just super busy rn

🗣️ Pronunciation

nerv-ous /ˈnərvəs/ \nihr-vihss\

💭Feeling Family

😱Fear

📖Definition

adjective

Merriam-Webster’s: 

timid, apprehensive

easily excited or irritated; jumpy

of or relating to the nerves

tending to produce nervousness or agitation; uneasy

appearing or acting unsteady, erratic, or irregular → use of inanimate things

of, relating to, or composed of neurons

marked by strength of thought, feeling, or style; spirited

(archaic) sinewy, strong

Oxford Languages:

easily agitated or alarmed; tending to be anxious or high-strung

anxious or apprehensive

(of a feeling or reaction) resulting from anxiety or anticipation.

Relating to or affecting the nerves.

Cambridge:

worried or anxious

relating to the nerves

[intermediate english] worried or slightly frightened; relating to or controlled by the nervous system in the body

📐Semantic Drift

Merriam-Webster’s:

[archaic] sinewy, strong

Oxford English Dictionary:

†Of the sinew

[a1400-75] affecting sinews or tendons

[a1400-1747] full of sinews

[1483-1834] prominent sinews

[1601-1763] of the nature of sinew; tough, strong

[1616-1844] of a person: strong, muscular, energetic

[1616-1870] of possession of sinew; corporeal, physical

[1638-1735] of a bow: strung with sinew

[1663-1896] of prose: powerful, forceful

[1775-1987] applied to speakers and writers (rare)

Senses relating to nerves

[a1400-] full of nervous, innervated (rare)

[a1425-] affecting the nervous or nervous system

[c1475-] relating to nerve tissue

[1718-] of a medicine: alleviating nerve disorders (rare)

[1740-] of temperament: excitable, anxious, timid

†[1775-1846] stimulating to the nerves

[1804-] involving the nerves of the mind

[1827-] of feelings: resulting from or accompanied by mental agitation

[1844-] of physical appearance: manifesting or betraying; trembling, restless

[1848-] of animals: easily agitated, wary

[1933-] stock market: invested cautiously

†In botanical use

[1688-1776] botany = nervose

⬜Experience

NERVOUS is most often framed as a physiological reaction or a behavior descriptor. She’s a nervous speaker; he gets nervous before tests. It’s treated as adjacent to anxiety, a sign of weakness, or a lack of self-control.

But NERVOUS can be experienced as an emotion. It’s transient, anticipatory, and relational, arising in moments of vulnerability and emotional risk. It’s our way of preparing for the impact of rejection, revelation, or even something as simple as recognition.

While it does live in the fear family, unlike fear, which is a response to imminent danger, NERVOUS is a signal flare of possibility. It’s felt in the little flutter before truthtelling, or the pause before a confession. It’s capable of coexisting with emotions that may be considered contradictory, such as hope or desire, particularly when the stakes are high or deeply significant.

As an emotion, it’s not inherently negative. Instead, it should be your sign that whatever is happening around you is important. It will lead to a moment of choice, in which courage, attunement, or emotional investment is necessary. Internally, the body signals: This matters; I care.

With this in mind, NERVOUS, as an emotion, is complex and misunderstood, requiring emotional literacy to recognize it amongst the litany of similar emotions and states, and to discern the meaning beneath the discomfort.

🫀Biofeedback

Shallow breath

Tension in the throat

Elevated heart rate

Cool extremities

Restless movements

Frequently scanning the environment, jumpy

🛠️Facta Non Verba

Body Language:

Gestures: movements that are clipped or jerky, pacing, fingers tugging at sleeves or rubbing the back of the neck, fidgeting

Posture: rounded or slouched shoulders, weight shifting, arms held close to the body or crossed over the chest

Expression:

Eyes: rapid blinking, narrowed eyes, fleeting eye contact

Mouth: biting at lips/cheek, lips pressed, jaw tense or flexing

Brow: furrowed or lifted unevenly, twitches,

Dialogue Tags:

Admitted: reluctantly honest and exposed

Blurted: words spilling forth

Murmured: uncertain and hushed

Stammered: raw and staggered

Whispered: cautious explanation

📃Microprompts

These prompts are to help get the juices flowing, now that you are armed with a definition, experience, biofeedback, and nonverbal cues. You are free and welcome to share them with us—but there is never any pressure to do so.

✒️Writer

Someone rehearses a confession in their head for days. Finally, when they get the moment to follow through, their voice trembles as the words spill out all wrong, while they forget half of what they meant to say.

🎨Artist

A single figure stands in front of a closed door. In one hand, they have something small, such as a letter or a gift. They’re tense, and their hand is raised to knock, but they never get the courage.

📓Journal

Has there ever been a moment when you were nervous, not out of fear, but because something mattered deeply? What was at stake? What did you notice in your body? What did it protect you from—and what did it cost?

Dorelle Markley Heisel called Cincinnati her home for several decades, but her mind was in another dimension. She was known as “Cincinnati’s Brain Lady” and held college faculty positions in literature, psychology and fine art. She pioneered biofeedback techniques to control mental and bodily functions while introducing Cincinnati’s strait-laced society to the psychedelic subculture of the Sixties.

Virginia Dorelle Markley was born in 1917 in Danville, Illinois but spent her childhood shuttling between her father’s Palm Beach restaurant and her mother’s St. Louis hotel. At DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, she was student royalty – literally – voted May Queen in her senior year.

It was at DePauw that she met and became engaged to W. Donald Heisel, a Cincinnati native and Western Hills High School alumnus. At the time of his 1940 marriage to Dorelle, Heisel was assistant secretary to Cincinnati’s Civil Service Commission and was, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer [21 May 1940] “one of the city’s youngest executives.” The Heisels built a new house on a quiet cul de sac in Westwood, where they raised two daughters.

Don Heisel earned a reputation as the “godfather of public administration in the Tristate” [Cincinnati Enquirer 6 March 1988] because of the many governmental officials he mentored at the University of Cincinnati and at Xavier University. Dorelle, who had earned a degree in English from DePauw, added a bachelor’s (1952) and master’s (1965) in education from UC while also taking classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy.

Dorelle taught English for several years in Cincinnati high schools and at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. During the summers she was a fixture at Pogue’s Department Store. Hundreds of Queen City baby boomers likely display pastel portraits of themselves, sketched by Dorelle at her stand in the Pogue’s children’s department. She hated the drab institutional brown walls in her husband’s office, so one day she hauled her pastels over to City Hall and executed a large mural of the Cincinnati skyline, drawn from memory.

UC’s University College recruited Dorelle in the mid-1960s and she flourished there, teaching literature, art appreciation and psychology. With assistance from the Procter & Gamble company, she brought innovative technology into her classrooms with a push-button feedback device that allowed students to register immediate opinions regarding class content. She told the Cincinnati Post [14 March 1968]:

“When students become frustrated with a lecture or feel lost or just plain bored, they can indicate their anxiety by signaling me on the monitor.”

Dorelle’s interest in media and their effects on human communication led her to Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, known for his books “Understanding Media” and “The Medium Is The Massage.” Among the earliest mentions of McLuhan in Cincinnati newspapers is a reference to a 1966 Evening College class taught by Dorelle to introduce the Canadian theorist’s ideas to Cincinnati.

Simultaneously with her investigations of media and biofeedback, Dorelle dove into what was then known as the human potential movement. She presided over a multi-week UC Evening College class titled “Actualizing Your Potential: A Group Happening.” Enquirer reporter Jo Thomas sat in on the course and reported [21 August 1969] a most unusual classroom experience.

“I will not lecture,” Heisel said. “You will live out experiences, and I will ask you questions. Answer them in your head without verbalizing them. Writing is so slow and the mind works at such speed.”

Dorelle invited the students to form themselves into trains of about nine “cars,” kindergarten-style and take turns being the “engine” or the “caboose.”

“Elderly women hung on to 20-year-olds. Bald men chugged in front of bearded men. Around and around the room the trains went, gathering momentum and enthusiasm. One train burst out of the classroom door into the bright hall, chugging with gusto.”

The explosion of new ideas generated by the psychedelic Sixties energized Dorelle and she launched a series of public lectures to share her excitement. One wonders how her Cincinnati audiences, among such mainline organizations such as the Federation of Jewish Organizations and the Kiwanis Club, reacted to her exposition titled “Turn On, Tune In, Find Out!”

An early adopter of technology, Dorelle acquired a variety of devices to assist her research into altering thought patterns via biofeedback. Among these contraptions were the electromyograph and the alphaphone that made brainwaves audible or visual. She claimed that biofeedback, in addition to curing a variety of conditions from depression to migraines, transported users into a new state of being that she called the Kairos Dimension.

"The Kairos Dimension is nature taking its electronic course through you by providing strategies for amplifying your sensory range,” she announced in her 1974 book, “The Kairos Dimension.”

The titles of Dorelle’s non-credit classes and community lectures indicate the paths her biofeedback research led her down: “Brainfun: Steering Minds In New Directions,” “The Holographic Mind,” “How Biofeedback Opens Social Spaces,” and “How Biofeedback Supports Excitement And Growth.” Here is the course catalog description for one of these classes:

“Feelings of stress, tension and pressure take place only in muscles, never in the chemical-electrical brain that sends out orders. New research gives us a more accurate model of how we guide and control our range of ‘body sculptures.’ Small group exploration of the latest technologies.”

As the Human Potential movement evolved into various New Age philosophies, Dorelle’s biofeedback strategies caught on among that crowd. When the Montreal Star compiled a list of 50 important New Age books in 1975, Dorelle’s “Biofeedback Exercise Book” was featured along with books on transcendental meditation, herbal remedies, gestalt therapy and “The Joy of Sex.”

The nationally syndicated television show, P.M. Magazine, hosted Dorelle in November 1983 as “Cincinnati’s Brain Lady who enables you to see your brain on a television screen.” For a brief period, UC’s radio station WGUC aired a show devoted to Dorelle’s “Kairos Dimension.”

The Heisels divorced in 1977 and throughout the 1980s Dorelle’s public appearances waned. A Body/Mind/Spirit Festival at Avondale’s Unitarian Church in 1988 found her discussing biofeedback along with proponents of shamanism, tarot cards, crystals, chelation therapy and psychic powers.

Dorelle retired from UC and relocated to Plano, Texas where one of her daughters lived. In retirement, she played bridge and painted portraits. She died, aged 79, in November 1996.

me: *focused on changing my hr through vibes*

the pulse ox within literal seconds: 89.......86. 82

me: woah wait

the pulse ox: 78. 77. 75

me: i--

the pulse ox: 72...68. 66