Origins of the Protocol

In 1976, Maxwell Cade, a British biophysicist and a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Royal Society of Medicine, along with the electronics engineer Geoffrey Blundell, built an EEG to study the brainwaves of consciousness, specifically to see how the patterns of exceptional states of awareness differed from ordinary states. Cade's instrument, the Mind Mirror, displayed the whole brain across four frequency bands, beta, alpha, theta, and delta, both hemispheres at once, so you could watch the relationship between frequency bands rather than isolating one.

He calibrated it against people who could reliably produce those states: Zen masters, yogis, advanced meditators. Over two decades he mapped and trained more than four thousand people. What he found was a specific configuration, and he named it the Awakened Mind.

Anna Wise studied with Cade for eight years. She brought a Mind Mirror to the United States in 1981 and spent the next thirty years extending the research, roughly six thousand hours of measurement. She took the work beyond contemplatives to people performing at the top of their fields: composers, inventors, artists, athletes, dancers, scientists, mathematicians, executives. She found the same signature pattern in them that Cade had seen in the Zen masters and lifelong meditators.

She went on to map out a protocol to train people to access, and ultimately master, the Awakened Mind state as well as other peak state signatures, using carefully designed guided meditations. These meditations help clients become familiar with the characteristics of each frequency band and develop a felt sense for how each one manifests. Guided by the practitioner's read of the EEG and Anna's assessment materials, they develop unique internal landmarks (senses, scenes, words) that let them produce the optimal brainwave pattern at will.

She taught this protocol regularly at Esalen Institute and all over the world until her death in 2010.

New insights

Anna found that alpha functions as a critical bridge between the conscious mind (beta) and the slower frequency bands beneath it. Without sufficient alpha amplitude, subconscious material held in theta and unconscious material stored in delta stays inaccessible. It may be stirred, but it can't reach conscious awareness, where it can be worked with. That's why the ability to consistently generate alpha is pivotal to this work.

A common misconception

You'll see a lot of claims about "getting into alpha" or "reaching a theta state," as though consciousness worked one frequency at a time. It doesn't. Every state of consciousness we have is an interaction of all the bands at once. The one exception is deep dreamless sleep, which often presents as only delta waves.

What distinguishes one state from another is the relationship between them: which frequency bands have the greatest strength, measured in amplitude, relative to the others. That interaction between the frequency bands is constantly shifting depending on what you're doing and thinking about at any moment.

Likewise, the Awakened Mind, or peak performance pattern, is not about one frequency. It's a particular configuration of all of them, alpha, theta, and beta, with or without waking delta, all in a specific proportion, at the same time, and held long enough for the cognitive and emotional benefits to impact real life. The signature pattern can fluctuate to some extent, but the relative proportions between beta, alpha, theta, and delta remain.

A note on gamma

The original Mind Mirror displayed four categories, beta, alpha, theta, and delta, and the Awakened Mind pattern was defined within them. Gamma, the fastest band, sits above beta. It's present to greater and lesser degrees at every moment, just as the other frequencies are, and was visible at the low end on the original EEG, but its activity isn't considered part of the peak performance pattern. Anna did note that activity in that range could suggest the potential for transcendent experience. But one would need to rule out muscle tension in the neck, as it often shows up as gamma.

That's not to say gamma isn't important. It's involved in higher-order integration, pulling activity from different regions together so that we experience it as a whole. But how it relates to peak performance is not established in controlled research yet. The presence or absence of gamma doesn't change whether someone has achieved an Awakened Mind state.

The newest instrument, the Mind Mirror 6, reads much higher frequencies and was co-designed with Vistalus by my colleague Judith Pennington after Anna's death. Her work explores the significance of gamma in peak states.

For clients who acquire the EEG, we can look at gamma too. But it isn't a requirement for accessing the peak performance pattern, or attaining cognitive and emotional mastery.

See how the practice puts this protocol to work ->