Technology / Computers

On my computer screen, a jewel-encrusted bow points skyward, with an arrow pulled back and ready to fire. In the distance, I can see a bull’s-eye planted in front of a Himalayan landscape. Slowly I lower the bow until the arrow is fixed on the target. For a second, I overcompensate and the arrow points toward the ground. I catch my breath, pull the bow up, and then release. The arrow sails across the virtual terrain and lands with a small flash at the center of the bull’s-eye.

Here’s the catch: I’m not aiming that arrow with a joystick, or a keyboard, or a mouse. I’m aiming it with my mood.

Technically, I’m directing the arrow by altering my physical state—the electrical resistance at the tips of my fingers and my heart rate. I’m hooked up to a biofeedback system: three sensors worn like rings around my fingers and wired into an ordinary personal computer. The sensors read the galvanic skin response of my fingertips and my pulse. Increased galvanic skin response and heart rate usually accompany active states of awareness, as in the sweaty palms of the fight-or-flight instinct. Lower levels suggest relaxation.

My virtual archery session is part of The Journey to Wild Divine, a new interactive CD-ROM that turns your PC into a device for focusing your energy and reducing stress. Wild Divine is technology designed to help you find an inner calm—a way to unwind in front of the computer, not away from it.

Playing Wild Divine involves exploring a lush 3-D world with waterfalls, elaborate gardens, spiritual guides, and a menagerie of grazing llamas and white wolves. The pace is reminiscent of the pioneering game Myst: slow and entirely free of violence. Solving puzzles or passing special tests allows you to enter new areas. A narrative begins to develop, although following the plot generally takes a backseat to exploration.

The real fun comes from those biofeedback sensors. Most important, the tests in the game require you to alter your physical state in a specific fashion—to slow your breathing and heart rate or to push yourself to become more alert. If you succeed in changing your state, you pass the test and can advance. Wild Divine uses the spiritual language of “energy flows” and “heart breath” to describe those changes, but underneath that vocabulary are real physiological events tracked by the sensors. The more you play the game, the easier it becomes to lower the electrical resistance of your fingertips on command. Once you’ve mastered that kind of self-regulation, you can translate it into the real world.

Of course, no one needs a computer linked to galvanic skin response sensors to ameliorate stress: Meditation and yoga can generate the same results. But biofeedback tools add external information to the mix. “You have this ancient technology in yoga and meditation that dates back thousands of years,” says Wild Divine creative director Corwin Bell, “but being in the scientific paradigm that we’re in, we want proof. I felt that yoga and mediation were really important tools, but I still wanted that printout at the end of the session to show me what was happening to my body.”