Neurofeedback, the newer version of biofeedback, involves trying to change ______________.

Summary Points

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Relaxation is essential for normal functioning of all living beings. Relaxation techniques are the core of all stress management programs.

The natural process of relaxation is sleep. Sleep conserves and restores energy.

Sleep has two phases: REM and non-REM. During the non-REM phase, the mind reaches subtler frequencies as recorded on an electroencephalograph (EEG).

Some techniques for relaxation are yoga; meditation; yogic breathing, or pranayama; PMR; AT; and visual imagery.

Yoga is a systematic application of the mind and body to achieve overall harmony and peace.

Some systems of yoga popular in the West include transcendental meditation (TM), kriya yoga, and simplified kundalini yoga (SKY).

Biofeedback utilizes instruments to provide awareness about bodily functions that may then be brought under voluntary control.

PMR was first described by Edmund Jacobson. It is an effective means of achieving relaxation. PMR involves tensing and relaxing of muscles.

AT was first described by J.H. Schultz and utilizes the self-regulation and self-healing processes of the mind to achieve relaxation.

Visual imagery, or mental visualization with the help of imagination, is an important component of all relaxation procedures.

Self-hypnosis is a variant of visual imagery that includes suggestive affirmations.

Humor is a moderator or buffer for stress.

Important Terms Defined

Biofeedback: A method or set of methods that utilizes instruments to gauge physiological body functions that an individual is normally not conscious about and giving input from these measurements to the conscious mind in order to enhance greater volitional control over these functions.

Meditation: A process of inner travel aimed at inducing peace by quieting the activity in the mind and fostering an experience of “being” rather than “doing.”

Pranayama: A method or set of techniques based on ancient yoga for increasing awareness and control on the unconscious activity of breathing, enhancing diaphragmatic activity, and enhancing inner energy levels. See also yoga.

Progressive muscle relaxation: A relaxation method used to contract and then relax muscles of the arms, legs, face, neck, shoulders, and trunk.

Relaxation technique: A method or a set of methods aimed at relieving bodily muscular strains and mental stress.

Yoga: A Sanskrit word meaning “union.” An ancient set of techniques aimed at inducing harmony between human and nature.

Systematic Desensitization

This is a term applied to a class of methods used for gradually weakening maladaptive anxiety response habits through the use of responses that compete with anxiety. As an example, a physiological state inhibitory of anxiety is produced in the patient by means of muscle relaxation; the patient is then exposed for a few seconds at a time to a stimulus arousing weak anxiety. With repetition of the exposure, the stimulus progressively loses its ability to evoke anxiety. In a progressive way, stronger stimuli are presented.

The standard procedure in systematic desensitization consists of several sets of operations: (1) introduction to the subjective anxiety scale, (2) training in deep muscle relaxation, (3) construction of anxiety hierarchies, and (4) counterposing relaxation and anxiety-evoking stimuli from the hierarchies.

Counterconditioning is the basis of the change that follows systematic desensitization, according to Wolpe (1958), other researchers and clinicians.

Biofeedback

This term refers to a number of clinical techniques, which provide feedback to patients concerning changes in a particular physiological response, so that they can learn to modify the physiological response. Two methods of providing information feedback to the patient have been developed: binary feedback (yes/no information) and analogue feedback (proportional). A number of physiological responses have been shown to be modifiable using biofeedback. The most common physiological responses to be used clinically are electromyogram activity, skin temperature, blood pressure, electro-encephalogram, vasomotor, and heart rate.

Biofeedback is used in lowering the blood pressure of essential hypertensives, for achieving relaxation, for epilepsy, migraine headaches, and many other clinical problems.

Punishment

Punishment is an operant conditioning procedure in which the future probability of occurrence of a response is reduced as a result of response-dependent delivery (positive punishment) or removal (negative punishment) of a stimulus (punisher). An example of positive punishment is spraying water mist in the face of a self-injurious child each time an instance of self-injurious behavior is observed. An example of negative punishment is taking an earned token from a person each time he or she curses. In the first case the aim is to reduce the occurrence of self-injury; in the second case it is to reduce the rate of cursing.

Punishment may weaken, strengthen, or have no effect on other response classes. Its effects are controversial and subject to discussion. In the early stages of ABA, punishment procedures were used more frequently than now. Alternatives to punishment are usually preferred.

Escape Training

In this training procedure an individual learns to perform a response in order to terminate a punishing stimulus.

Avoidance Training

This is a training procedure in which an individual learns to keep away from a designated stimulus in order to prevent punishment. The first step consists in pairing the designated stimulus with a punisher. Then the individual is negatively reinforced by performing a response that terminates the punishing stimulus. The individual subsequently learns to prevent punishment from occurring by either responding with an alternative behavior (active avoidance) or not responding at all (passive avoidance) prior to coming in contact with the designated stimulus.

Extinction

Extinction is a response-weakening procedure, which can involve consistent failure to deliver a reinforcer following an operant response, which had previously produced that reinforcement (operant extinction). It eventually results in nearly complete elimination of the operant response, although a transient rate increase is frequently observed soon after operant extinction is arranged.

This technique is widely used in behavior modification and is preferred to punishment, avoidance training, escape training, and similar aversive procedures.

Shaping

This technique consists of reinforcing successive approximations to the desired response. Usually a simple response is required initially, and criteria for reinforcement are gradually made more stringent so as to produce more complex or refined response. Initially a simple response (in the direction of the desired goal) would be sufficient to receive reinforcement. After this behavior is performed reliably, reinforcement is given only for a more complex or difficult response. The next step consists of giving reinforcement for the slightly more complex response. The pattern continues until the final desired behavior is achieved regularly.

Contingency Management

Contingency management involves the analysis and change of the functional contingencies in the environment that determine a person's behavior. As a result, the behavior changes from its initial rate to a different rate of occurrence. In clinical work, this involves the development of new or alternative forms of adaptative behavior. Within a certain environmental context, a contingency describes a functional relationship among stimuli antecedent to a particular behavior (the target) and the consequences that follow the occurrence of the behavior.

The functional environment for a particular person is often different from the functional environment of another person. Many stimuli or events that occur in a person's environment do not have any effect on the person's behavior. In those cases we can say that the particular part of the environment is not functional, it is just present.

Contingency management involves the analysis and modification of contingencies involving discriminative stimuli, reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. It focuses on public and observable behaviors and controlling environments. The environment of interest is primarily that part which functions to increase, decrease, or control the occurrence of certain behaviors. Contingency management in clinical practice typically is concerned with appropriate discrimination and generalization of adaptative behavior changes.

After a comprehensive functional analysis of environmental contingencies, the therapist plans a program of intervention to modify contingencies to change the rate of the target behavior. Contingency management involves a thorough functional analysis of controlling contingencies, the rearranging of the functional analysis of controlling contingencies, the rearranging of the functional environment, and a careful monitoring of outcome.

Environmental Design

This consists of the application of empirically derived principles of behavior for the modification and design of the environment. It involves the planning of a coherent program and set of procedures to affect the total human and nonhuman environment in ways that increase the probability that certain goals will be achieved.

The goal of environmental design relates to social behavior, for instance, planning a therapeutic or educational system. It includes linking ABA and environmental psychology. It involves training people to conceptualize the environment so that they can apply the general principles of behavior analysis to design planning. Social design and physical design should be considered. The larger context is the planning of a whole society, such as Walden Two (Skinner, 1948), or Walden Three (Ardila, 1990).

Token Economy

In the token economy intervention, reinforcers are delivered for specific target behaviors. Reinforcers are tokens (tickets, coins, points, stars) that can be exchanged for a variety of other rewards. Tokens help bridge the delay between the person's performance of a desired behavior and delivery of a reward.

As an example of the use of token economies in complex settings we can mention the University of Kansas Experimental Living Project, a behaviorally managed experimental community of 30 college students (Johnson et al., 1991). Token economies have also been used in prisons, in nursing homes, on psychiatric wards, in normal classroom settings from preschool to university classes, on wards for the treatment of drug addicts and alcoholics, in various work settings to increase safety behavior, in community settings to increase recycling of waste and improve energy conservation, and in many other contexts.

Premack Principle

This principle says: for any pair of responses the more probable one will reinforce the less probable one. The technique derived from the Premack Principle consists of a special class of reinforcing operations in which access to high probability behaviors is made contingent upon clinically targeted activities. For instance, children may be allowed to eat candy after (contingent upon) doing their homework.

Modeling

This consists of the presentation of a live demonstration, a filmed or pictorial presentation, or an imagined one. Based on the presentation, the viewer learns a method of responding or the contingencies under which the target response will fall.

Observational learning, imitation, and modeling are terms frequently used with respect to this phenomenon. These techniques are useful in the treatment of phobias, and in forming social skills and many other desired behaviors.

Cognitive Procedures

Cognitive therapy or cognitive ABA refers to a wide range of approaches, based on two explicit hypotheses: (1) cognitive factors such as thoughts, images, and memories, are intimately related to dysfunctional behavior, and (2) modification of such factors is an important mechanism for producing behavior change.

Behavioral Self-Control

This set of techniques involves training patients to control their own behavior through the systematic use of behavior principles. The therapist educates patients regarding the technical aspects of various behavior change procedures. In a self-reinforcement program, patients are taught to administer consequences to themselves that are contingent upon the performance of the target behavior.

In the majority of cases behavioral self-control involves self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-delivered rewards. There are many potential benefits to teaching patients self-control rather than treatment through external agents. Self-control therapy allocates a great responsibility to patients. It is clear that teaching individuals to be their own therapists will contribute to generalization of treatment effects because patients will be able to continue to administer the program or develop new treatment following the termination of therapy.

7.4.1.1 Evolution

As Norbert Weiner described in The Human Use of Human Beings, the Earth, like all living organisms, has a life cycle. Some stars are suns that have died billions of years ago and yet are still visible to humans. Perhaps we take for granted that the earth is not eternal, although within our lifetime and since the dawn of humanity our experience of planet earth is a very short segment of earth's life cycle. What Weiner speculates, however, is that earth may have already reached its peak and is now in a downhill stage of existence. In systems science, it is identified as entropy when the system finally corrupts because of imbalances and irregularities. As in human aging, finally the human body breaks down and death occurs.

Weiner explains that all living systems can potentially slow this inevitability, through the application of resistance; resistance being the ability to slow, regulate, or limit the degradation of the system. In nature, this is accomplished through biofeedback mechanisms that self-regulate the system. Organisms tend toward stability and homeostasis—they become resilient and antifragile—rather than adding to the entropy of the system, so they are part of a complex ecology. Biodiversity is better for the stability of populations to contribute to homeostasis of the ecology.

As explained in Chapter 1, cities are an amalgamation of diverse layers or dimensions including the physical environment, human population and governance and technology which has over the past centuries had an increasing impact on the state of equilibrium through the industrial revolution and its extreme levels of resource extraction and consumption. This pushes the system to the brink of collapse, but the upside is our ability to address it also increases. As postmaterial values have become more prominent, environmentalism can become a more common cause for people to unite behind. As technology and the Internet enhance our understanding of the world, we get a clearer picture as to the environmental entropy and the necessity to improve conditions through the potential to interact and contribute to the collective operating system.

7.4.1.2 Challenges

Organizing toward a smarter environment often challenges or competes with imperatives of business and politics. As a result, business and politics co-opts environmental movements, thereby softening their impact. This can be viewed as a “dumbing down,” which is antithetical to smart environment. Another challenge is incentivizing people, businesses and industry to consume less and have a smaller ecological footprint. Hunger and poverty are persistent problems that need to be solved to qualify as a smart environment in smart cities. Smart cities must prepare for climate change, which will pose a unique threat to each city based on their individual city DNA and other factors, such as coastal cities at risk of flooding. Preparedness, real-time action alert, and resilience measures will become integrated into all smart environment policies.

7.4.1.3 Directions

The future requires us to take command of our global scale systems. Terraforming traditionally refers to making other planets like Earth, but in the case of the Strelka Institute it refers to how we have accidently already terraformed Earth through global scale processes of extraction and construction, and now we must consciously terraform it to be sustainable. Benjamin Bratton (2019) advocates terraforming the planet as a way to cope and take conscious control of our accidental transforming of the planet because of expansion and pollution. Bratton calls for an urbanism that is “proplanning, proartificial, anticollapse, prouniversalist, anti–antitotality, promaterialist, anti–anti-Leviathan, antimythology and proegalitarian distribution.” Russia's expansive territory is both the challenge and opportunity to put these visions into practice.

A carbon tax is a necessary policy instrument to help wean states and smart cities off fossil fuel dependence. It works by taxing the carbon content of burnt fuels, incentivizing reducing greenhouse gas emissions and creating funds to direct to renewable energy. Carbon offsets are a method of offsetting carbon emissions elsewhere, by purchasing “offsets” that are equivalent to offsetting a certain amount of greenhouse gases, but they are a weak form of intervention. Forbes (2019) magazine reports that many organizations are developing blockchain for carbon markets, although still in the early stages. The promise is that it brings more trust and scale to carbon markets, while expediting our transition to a postcarbon future.

Sensors will be embedded in the environment to provide real-time feedback about weather and ecology patterns and levels to be monitored through the smart city interface. Each city will be linked to global barometers regulating ecosystems. Management of environmental processes will be enhanced through data visualization and planetary simulations. With a combination of generative design and machine learning, continual modeling can be produced to find optimal states of human, nature and technology convergence to support balanced and sustainable ecosystems.