From Lee Gerdes,
CEO and founder of Brain State Technologies

If you've been keeping up with the news, you know that the issue of women's roles is a hot potato right now on two fronts: political, and religious.

I want to comment on the current furor from a neurological viewpoint. I believe it's crucial for the future of our world that we acknowledge what brain research is showing us—that men's and women's brains are not the same. When we finally wake up to this reality and structure society to take advantage of it, we will all benefit. It may just be the salvation of our species, if not of the entire ecosphere.

On the political front, looming in the U.S. Senate is a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a follow-up to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that represents a major steppingstone in women's march to equality in terms of remuneration. Currently women are paid 77 cents for each male worker's dollar. If the act passes, the pressure is going to be on employers to prove that wage differences between men and women aren't rooted in gender differences.

Given that women consistently turn out to vote in greater numbers than men, where the candidates come down on women's equality in the workplace could prove to be a crucial factor in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. There's little doubt we'll hear a lot about the "war on women" between now and November.

The issue of women in the workplace burst into the headlines of the nation's media when Hilary Rosen told Anderson Cooper on CNN that Mitt Romney's wife "has actually never worked a day in her life." Michelle Obama came back with an assertion that housekeeping and childcare are a lot of work. (Ann Romney manages five children and three or four houses.) The outcry had Rosen apologizing to women who labor in the home.

Meanwhile, there's a fresh furor on the religious front. The Vatican has taken a scolding in a column in the Washington Post in response to the Holy See's chastising of American nuns. The column is entitled, "After Vatican's rebuke of nuns, time to hear Mary's voice."

Writes Lisa Miller, "When I see that a department of the Vatican, in Rome, has rebuked a group of American nuns for 'radical feminism' and for speaking out of turn and has called in a man—a superior—to set things right, I think about Mary. When I see American bishops wanting to make rules about sexuality and contraception for ordinary people, I think about Mary." Miller adds, "A woman is at the very center of the Christian story, yet that story has been told and controlled for millennia by men."

Commenting on how nuns are taking time to think about their collective response, The Chicago Tribune asked, "How should they handle last week's announcement that the Vatican has deployed an archbishop—male, obviously—to correct the doctrinal errors of the largest organization of U.S. Catholic nuns?"

Responded one prominent Chicago nun to the Vatican's actions, "It's just that here is another chapter in a long history of struggle between church leaders and church women."

In recent times we've moved beyond the idea promoted by a number of feminists a few decades ago that women and men are the same. We now know that women and men are different—not just in their physical makeup and hormonal factors, but also in the structure of their brains.

What's at issue in the current debate over women's roles in the public and religious arenas is a failure to recognize the brilliance of the design of the female brain when it's balanced and harmonized.

In some ways a woman's brain gives her an advantage that, if utilized appropriately, can be of tremendous benefit both in the corporate world and in the Church. However, for society to reap the advantages of male-female brain differences, males in positions of power will need to recognize the likely capability and be open to including the potential of female attributes in positions of power.

The occipital lobes of the male brain are 30% larger than those of the female brain, which means that males are visually stimulated far more than women. The male's brain tends to make him a "sprinter" instead of the more long-distance capability of the female brain.

When a man's brain is balanced and harmonized, he doesn't allow his tendency to sprint to cause him to dominate women. Instead he views collaboration for the best possible solution to be most important.

As I comment in my book Limitless You: The Infinite Possibilities of a Balanced Brain, "Men with a balanced brain, in which all the neighborhoods are in harmony, don't tend to exploit the power differential between themselves and females. They don't misuse their physical strength, and they don't manipulate a woman for self-gratification." I might add that a balanced and harmonized brain doesn't fear a woman, either. It enjoys male-female interdependence.

Balance and harmony in the brain reflect in a balance of power in relationships between the sexes. Because the brain is in balance, with all aspects of the neural system functioning harmoniously, there is sharing in mutuality. Males who don't appreciate respectful sharing of power are invariably misguidedly attempting to correct an imbalance in their brain! Think about that the next time you hear a politician or religious figure oppose women's equality.

Let me be clear what I'm saying. The assumed right of males to dominate women that has been perpetuated for thousands of years is a brain imbalance—a deviance cloaked in "patriarchy as a God-given right."

When women's brains are balanced and harmonized, they have certain skills that are more suited to leadership than the male brain. One reason for this is the difference in the corpus callosum, which is more permeable in females than in males, making it easier for women to use both sides of the brain and move from left-to-right hemisphere thinking usually faster than a male.

While the male brain is a powerful analytical tool, able to home in on an issue, the female brain is better at moving back and forth between the context and the detail, which is a vital trait for effective leadership. Quite simply, women's brains give them better perspective because they can go from functioning mainly on the left to functioning on the right, back and forth, much quicker than males.

In Limitless You, I explain that when a man's mind is on cars, it's on cars. When he's focused on football, that's his world for the time being. In hunting season, he's all about hunting. There were advantages to this when a lion attacked or the tribe was under threat, but it's also a reason that five times more autistic children are male: the male brain becomes "locked down" more easily.

In terms of the political and religious systems that are in upheaval over the equalizing of the sexes, I comment in Limitless You: "Today, more women are in positions of leadership in the world than ever in history. This is a good thing for the future of the planet…"

The more women operate from a balanced and harmonized brain, which Brainwave Optimization® is helping women do all around the world, the better our species' chances of turning the self-destructive tide that patriarchy has bequeathed to us.

From Lee Gerdes,
CEO and founder of Brain State Technologies

Two men arrested early Easter Sunday just north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were charged Monday with a shooting spree that left three black males dead and two wounded.

The shooting wasn't a kneejerk reaction to a provocative situation. As a local pastor, Rev Warren Blakney, told CNN, "For a white male to come that deep into that area and to start indiscriminately shooting, that lends itself for many to believe that it probably was a hate crime."

The gunning down of these bystanders is only the latest in a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks in the United States, which now seem to be occurring on a regular basis. Such killings—whether committed in drive-by attacks, in restaurants, or in schools—have become so commonplace of late that they barely make news anymore.

Last week in El Cajon, California—a city that's home to some 30,000 Iraqi refugees—a 32-year-old mother of five from Iraq was killed. This too may have been a hate crime, in this case directed at a woman wearing a headscarf. Or it may have been the result of domestic violence. Between 2,000 and 4,000 women die in the U.S. every year from domestic violence.

We seem to be living in a time when even the most civilized nations on the planet are experiencing an escalation of outright hatred and cruelty.

On Easter Sunday evening, the BBC in Britain broadcast a program that investigated the crime of "badger bating." Killing badgers for sheer pleasure is a barbaric pastime, banned in 1835, that's again occurring in the hundreds today. So much so that the British police have mounted a nationwide campaign against the practice.

The badgers, once rooted out of their burrows by smaller dogs, are then savaged by larger dogs, while the owners of the dogs stand around betting and laughing. Because badgers are powerful animals, the dogs themselves suffer greatly in the attacks and, when found, have to be taken into care by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Those who carry out these acts of cruelty readily admit they do so because it makes them feel good. As one woman commented, they find it "relaxing" to watch such suffering at the end of a working day. It's a form of "entertainment."

What's happening inside a human being when violence is committed wantonly for thrills? What drives such cruelty?

In my book, Limitless You—The Infinite Possibilities of a Balanced Brain, I describe how, when people become violent or are cruel, we are seeing the result of a brain imbalance. The autonomic nervous system is "stuck" as if the person was pressing on the brake pedal, and the "thrill" of killing or committing an act of cruelty is the brain's way of gunning the accelerator so that the person can feel something other than their numb state.

It may seem surprising that emotional numbness is what leads to such cruelty. But when you understand that the normal state of the human brain when it's balanced and in harmony is one of kindness, caring, and compassion, you realize that people who are vicious have simply lost touch with their true being—the state of balance in which the brain functions on an even keel.

Working with people with a tendency to violence, especially in a prison environment, we at Brain State Technologies® have been privileged to watch the calmness, cooperativeness, and concern for others that returns to a person's life once the brain is balanced and harmonized. We've witnessed this in the lives of even seriously violent individuals in the prison system.

If you have any tendency to cruelty—if you feel any kind of thrill at seeing another person or animal suffer—Brainwave Optimization is a powerful antidote, enabling you to feel the full range of feelings that a human is meant to experience.

To feel in a fully integrated manner, after years of being shut down, so enriches your everyday experience of life that you have no need of either sadistic or masochistic behavior in your life any longer.

When you experience the balancing and harmonizing of your brain's hemispheres and lobes, you almost may not be aware of the subtle changes at first, in terms of becoming a more peaceful and loving individual. They can be gradual in many cases as they transform you without your really realizing how different you have become. Ask your friends and family if you have changed, however, and they will not likely view it as subtle at all.

The reason you may not fully experience the shift yourself is that these changes are intrinsic to who you are. You just find yourself automatically handling situations more calmly and wanting to reach out to others in a caring manner. And that is why it's those close to you who notice the differences before you do.

In other words, Brainwave Optimization isn't something extrinsic to you. It's not at all like a behavioral change that's being impressed on you.

Rather, it's quite simply you becoming more truly you, which is a gentle process that occurs in many cases over a period of weeks and even months after you complete Brainwave Optimization™ sessions.

The more "you" that you become as your brain functions in the magnificent manner for which it was designed, the less do you want to harm either yourself or other people—and the more you realize just how many in even the most civilized of our world's societies unnecessarily endure a life that's really quite miserable, the result of an unbalanced brain state either in themselves or in someone close to them.

Article appeared in BrainWorld Magazine - Issue 3 Volume 3 - Spring 2012

Can trauma pass from one generation to the next?

We must return and claim our past in order to move toward the future. It is in understanding who we were that will free us to embrace who we are now.
—The meaning of Sankofa

Tamra Olsen-Harris has her mother’s eyes, her father’s smile, her grandmother’s name and her great-great-great-grandfather’s trauma print. Tamra is 12 and lives in a distressed urban area in southwest Michigan. Along with 10 other young people from her neighborhood, she volunteered to participate in a community-based field study during which her brainwave functioning would be tracked, assessed and improved.

The end goal was to help increase academic achievement and life success for African American children who faced a number of challenges—lack of financial resources, parents who were ill or without jobs, occasional homelessness and neighborhood violence.

According to the analysis of the children’s brainwave functioning, it was found that people can inherit brain patterns from distant generations. Although the children were varied in ages and background, each of them exhibited an important similarity in brainwave function: Their brain patterns indicated that they were sympathetic dominant–based on right-side temporal-lobe brain function. Sympathetic dominance is most likely caused by a trauma of infringement—a situation in which a person is violated or stripped of their freedoms or rights as a human being. Rape, beatings, psychological abuse and slavery certainly qualify as traumas of infringement.

“What we found was that each of these young people exhibited hypertension and a body mass index that would be classified as obese or near-obese,” says primary investigator Lee Gerdes, CEO and founder of Brain State Technologies and developer of Brainwave Optimization, an advanced neurotechnology that detects and assesses brainwave patterns and provides noninvasive audible neuro-oscillatory feedback to balance and harmonize brain function, which led to the study.

In its sympathetic-dominance mode, participants’ brains were directing them to remain vigilant and retain fat. “Above all else, the brain is wired to survive,” says Gerdes. The fight-or-flight dominance does not mean that they are constantly in fight-or-flight mode but that they are prone to that state with little or no outside stimulus. This over-activation is also indicative of accompanying hypertension, poor sleep and lack of focus and concentration.

“A history of abuse may ‘tune’ the nervous system to be cautious and prepared for defensive fight-or-flight behaviors, even when real danger does not exist,” writes Stephen Porges, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the Brain-Body Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011).

“As we worked to achieve balance and harmony in brainwave functioning, hypertension decreased and dietary habits started to improve,” Gerdes says. “Try as you might to exacerbate these issues with diet and exercise, if the brain is working against you, it’s an uphill battle.” Think of people who emanate from a similar geographic, cultural or historical background whose ancestors experienced years of war, conflict, chaos or repression. “Show me chaos,” says Gerdes, “and I will show you how it manifests in people, and how those people pass it along to others.”

For Peter Sterling, PhD, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, “Hypertension seems to be more strongly associated with various sources of social distress than race per se.” Sterling explains that he first began to think about this issue while canvassing door-to-door in a blighted Cleveland neighborhood. “I noticed that many people who answered my knock were partially paralyzed—faces sagging on one side, walking with a limp and a crutch.” He wondered why a stroke—rare in his own neighborhood—was so prevalent in this poor, racially segregated area. He soon discovered the work of biologist Joseph Eyer, who had assembled epidemiological evidence that stroke, heart disease and hypertension have a correlation to forms of social disruption—that “physiology is indeed sensitive to social relations.”

These questions led to Sterling’s core theory that the traditional model of physiological regulation was all wrong. The norm of using homeostasis—accepting a single “normal” set-point for measuring physiological functions like blood pressure for all adults—was not the way to measure health. Instead, he believed that the healthiest people were those whose brains and physiological functions were resilient and adaptive to the demands of their environment. Eventually, this led to his conclusion that the goal is not to set brain functioning to meet a prescribed formula but to achieve variable brain functioning that performs in such a way that the energy expended meets the needs at hand. In other words, someone who is deep in meditation requires a different level of brain functioning than someone who is at a cocktail party.

African Americans experience twice the rate of infant mortality as whites and higher levels of stroke and obesity than the general populace. Native Americans experience higher rates of diabetes and addictions. There are endless and conflicting theories on why these disparities continue to exist, and even more theories about how they can be addressed.

For Gerdes—and a growing legion of scientists—it all begins in the brain. In his view, the disparities are not the result of weakness, recklessness or bad habit. They are caused by a trauma print in the brain that passes from one generation to the next and creates extreme vulnerability to specific human issues and behaviors. “Once you understand that the brain controls everything, you begin to see how illness can afflict groups of people for generations to come.” Gerdes sees how brainwave patterns are altered by trauma, both direct and intergenerational. With a database of more than three million brain patterns collected from people around the world, Gerdes is able to extract data and patterns that lead to new discoveries—as well as to many more questions about the nature of the brain and how it affects our behavior.

When working on Native American reservations, Gerdes was haunted by the question of why this group of people—who had come from a strong lineage of respect for the earth, nature, order and connectedness—were suffering inequitably from diabetes, addictions, lower life expectancy and suicide.

“Native people have a proud history connected to their land,” Gerdes explains, “and they freely communed with nature—with Mother Earth—for generations. This open, natural communion was the road to find their internal peacefulness and well-being. When they were displaced by warring tribes—the last of which mandated that each individual native tribe was relegated to specific lands or reservations—this displacement caused a certain kind of ‘internal anxiety,’ or an uneasiness internally which is seen as an abundance of high frequencies in neural oscillations. This uneasiness is medicated effectively with alcohol and sugar—an internal medication, but one with major side effects of substance abuse and diabetes.”

“Depressive Symptoms in Urban Population Samples in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic,” a 2006 study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, reported an unusually high prevalence of depression those countries. Rates of depression were 34 percent higher in women than men. The study made a connection between depression and binge-drinking.

“Alcoholism is nothing more than the brain seeking balance with an outside substance,” Gerdes says. “Whenever an internal anxiety exists, alcohol is self-medication which can help mitigate it. Alcohol is also the beginning of the slide to substance abuse, as this medication process requires an increasing amount of use to continue to still the anxiety.”

Why do Jewish people contract higher rates of Tay-Sachs, Canavan disease, Bloom syndrome and Crohn’s disease? Why is Celiac disease—a gluten intolerance— more common in the Irish and those of Irish descent? Does that gluten intolerance have any connection to the high rate of alcoholism perceived to affect the Irish? What does this all have to do with brain function?

Sterling’s work concludes that vigilance increases among distressed groups, having a pronounced effect on physiology, and that these related emotions and reactions “can be stored for decades within individual brains, but also transferred across generations.”

In the end, these findings raise powerful questions about how we treat illness. While diet and exercise are noble endeavors, can they truly be a solution to obesity and hypertension when the root cause lies in the brain and our engrained physiological response to the brain?

The brain holds the answers. As new technologies make it more possible to see inside the brain, increasingly accessible and effective solutions are emerging. “Perhaps,” says Gerdes, “by getting to the root of the matter—the brain—we will be able to stop the cycle of inherited trauma and illness and become the limitless individuals we were born to be.”

For more information visit brainstatetech.com

___________________________________________________________________________

Article appeared in BrainWorld Magazine
Issue 3 Volume 3 - Spring 2012

Click here to view article

Download PDF