How to use SynBrain, the mindmachine program for the Amiga? Introduction: What is a mindmachine? A mindmachine is an electronic device, used for the stimulation of your brain. You can alter your brainwaves with the use of light and sound effects. But there is nothing better to do after a hard days work, as to take yourself half an hour of time and run a session on your mindmachine. You will reach a deep and relaxing state in a few minutes. You will be able to receive pictures and patterns in front of your closed eyes. Sounds unbelievable, but it is true! Those pictures and patterns can be varied and altered by yourself, according to your desire and your wishes. Different programs allow you to either relax completely and get new energy, or others which let you travel through your own thoughts. You can induce a state of trance, with suggestions like: "You feel totally relaxed and comfortable". These suggestions are mixed into the sound you are going to hear. Or you run a creativity mode, to get new ideas and increase your creativity. Another way to use this mindmachine is for inducing self hypnosis or hypnosis. It is also used for meditation and related fields. How do you use SynBrain? Start SynBrain with a double click on its Icon. You will see a requester, which asks you to enter a pattern. A pattern is the way, to tell the computer how the light and sound effects are to be generated. The easiest way would be to follow the instructions for this example. You will get a little feeling for the program, and learn how to use it: Enter the following pattern: 5678 and confirm it with the enter key. As soon as you press enter, the input requester will dissappear and you will see the main screen of SynBrain. In this demo version, the blinking lights of the necessary glasses are simulated with the blinking eyes on both sides of the screen. They are a very weak substitute for the real glasses. But you do not need much of imagination, to get the feeling of what it will look like. (You get the glasses with the built in lights, when you buy the main version of the program) If you have connected a pair of headphones to your computer, now you will hear some pleasant noise, switching between the left and the right ear. Take the joystick and push it a little to the right. When you wear the glasses, you will see, how the pattern is changing in front of your closed eyes. The sounds in the headphones will alter, too. Just to play around a little, move the joystick in every direction, to see what will happen. If you have found a postion you like, just enjoy it a little while. The pattern is increasing its speed, if you move the joystick to the left or to the top. Pushing it to the right or down, will slow the pattern down. If you want to stop the running pattern, just push any key on the keyboard, for example the space-bar. Now, when the pattern is stopped, you can save it to disk. If you found a very pleasing position, you can reload it next time. For saving the pattern, click on the "Save"-button in the bottom row. A requester with the headline "Saving a..." will appear. Give your new pattern a name, Test.pat for example. The suffix .pat at the end is necessary. Only files with this ending will be shown here! But back to our "Test.pat". Confirm the name by pressing the enter key. Your pattern will be saved to disk now and can be reloaded. This is what we want to do right now. To do this, click on the "Load"-button in the bottom row. Another requester appears, with the headline "Load ..." If you cannot find your previously saved pattern, click on the "Get Dir" button with the left mousebutton on the right side of the requester. The display will be actualised. Choose your pattern, and it will be loaded. Just one tip here: If you want to leave the requester, without having anything done or changed, click on the "cancel"- button or press the escape-key on the keyboard. In both cases you can leave without any changes. If you did not make any mistakes, your previously saved pattern will appear somewhere in the list. In our case it would be "Test.pat". Move the mouse pointer over it. Now it will be highlighted. Click it with the left mousebutton. As you will notice, the filename is repeated in the input line of the requester. To confirm, press the enter key. Another way to accomplish the same effect, is to double click on the desired file. The requester dissapears and we are back on our input window. The pattern is shown in the window. In our case it is 5678. To start this pattern, just confirm it with the enter key. You will notify, that it is the same, previously saved pattern. But now back to our input window. Stop the running pattern by pressing the space-bar, for example. The input window will appear ("Please enter pattern...") We want to alter the pattern now, but before we do this, let us sneek into the Help function If you get stuck in your work, there is an online help available. Just click the help button. A help text for SynBrain will show up. If you want an explanation on any of the listed definitions, just pull the mouse pointer over it and click the left mousebutton. In this example the definition "pattern". You will get a short explanation, how a pattern is build and what it consists of. Words in the text with a black background can be clicked and you immediately get an extra explanation for this word. In this example the word "letters". The two signs "<" and ">" let you switch one page forward or backward. With clicking those two signs, you can browse through the whole help text like reading in a book. By clicking the "menue" button in the bottom left position, you return to the first (menue) page. Look for another definition or quit the help text by clicking the quit button on the right side of the window. Doing this lets you return to the input window. But now back to our pattern. We wanted to alter it. To alter the pattern, you can use the cursor keys, the backspace key and the delete key, like usual. Please delete the whole input field by using the before mentioned keys, until the field is empty. Then enter the following: 56sm Confirm it with the enter key. When you put up the headphones and the glasses, after a while you will find out, that the pattern is slowing down its speed automatically. This means, that the distance between the signals is getting longer. The automatic slow-down of the pattern is done by the letter "s" in the pattern. Additionally you will hear a message being repeated regularly. You may have already guessed, that the letter "m" is responsible for that. More information will be found in the chapter "pattern". If you are not already totally relaxed by now, stop the running pattern by pressing the space-bar for example. We want to change the pattern once more. The well known input window appears. Delete the last letter of the pattern with the backspace key (the one just above the enter key with the left pointing arrow), to make the display look like this: 56s Add the letter "r" to the pattern, so it says: 56sr Confirm with the enter key and enjoy the new pattern. You will notify, that the message which was spoken on a regularly basis before, now is released in a random time order. The letter "r" in the pattern made this possible. You can use the joystick to change the patterns frequency. You will notify, if you look at the screen, that the little dot in the middle of the screen has wandered down to the right down corner. The X-values and the Y-values have increased, too. To change things to a more impetuous style, we now switch from joystick to mouse mode. To do this, press the F2 key (to be found in the top row of the keyboard). Move the mouse slightly up and down. You will notice, that the frequency is changing, according to the position of the mouse. There is something different in this mode, maybe you have already found out: in mouse mode, the pattern is not getting slower automatically, although the letter "s" is listed in the pattern. An automatic slow down is only possible in joystick mode. This is the only restriction, the mouse mode has. While the pattern is still running, we want to change the sound now. To get this done, push one of the cursor-up or cursor-down keys. As soon as you do this, the sound is changing. The rhythm stays the same. You have just learned another important function of the program. You can change the sounds with the cursor-up and the cursor-down keys. Choose a sound you like or pleases you most. On the main screen you get the name and the number of the sound displayed. More on sounds in the appropriate chapter. Pattern Pattern consist of a combination of numbers and optionally letters. The numbers indicate the consistancy of the pattern. The individual numbers have the following meaning: 1= left eye 2= right eye 3= left ear 4= right ear 5= left eye + right eye 6= right ear + left ear 7= left eye + left ear 8= right eye + right ear 9= left ear + right eye 0= right ear + left eye The pattern is continously repeated. If you would just type in a "1" for a pattern, only the left eye would blink. If your pattern consists of "12", this means, that first the left eye and then the right eye would blink in alternation. You can create your own patterns individually. Or you load one of those patterns who come with the program. Pattern are stored in the drawer pattern. Pattern have to have the ending .pat. If you create your own pattern, make sure you save them with this ending, because this is not done automatically! If you want to save your own pattern, don't forget, that you can only save it, after it has been running at least once! To do this, stop your running pattern by pressing any key (not the cursor-up or the cursor-down key, those will change the sound). In the appearing input window, click on the "save"-button. Find a suitable name for your pattern. A valid example would be Trance.pat or Creative1.pat or similar. Click on "Ok" and your pattern will be saved to disk. With the pattern the adjusted sound and speed are saved. Letters in a pattern If a pattern contains letters, they can be put anywhere in the pattern. But it is recommended to put them at the end of it. The individual letters have the following meaning: s= automatic slow-down of the pattern m= message is spoken in a regular order r= message is spoken in a random order To explain this more detailed: If there is the letter "r" in the pattern (Upper and lower case are ignored. Internally everything gets switched to upper case), the messages appear by random order. The letter "m" tells the computer to let the message appear in a regular order. The distance between the messages depends on the speed of the pattern. All the letters can be combined. The letter "s" makes the pattern slow down automatically in joystick mode. Automatic slow down won't work in mouse mode, even if you have an "s" in the pattern. This feature is mostly used for inducing trance states or relaxation purposes, to really pull you down deeply. To acchieve the desired results, you need the special glasses with the built in lights. You get them, when you buy the main version of the program. The main version can be ordered at the price of US$ 119 plus postage and packing at the following address: Leonore Klie Konrad-Adenauer-Str. 23b D-91126 Schwabach Germany Phone: +49 9122/5238 internet e-mail: salomon@sokrates.franken.de Messages With the spoken messages, you can mix suggestions into the audio sounds. They increase the results of relaxation programs, or programs for learning. In the demoversion you will hear a text, that asks you to buy the main version. In the main version you can choose between different messages. Problems: I can't find my previously saved pattern. Help: You just have to click on the "Get Dir" button on the right side of the file requester, to refresh the display. Your precious pattern should appear now. Always remember, that a pattern must end with .pat! Only files with this suffix will be shown here. In case you gave it a different ending, or omitted it, nothing will show up.