Patricia Cowings and the Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise

In Frank Herbert’s sci-fi _Dune_ series, the Bene Gesserit are amazing space-witches who have developed such mental control over their unconscious physiology that their powers seem superhuman. But Herbert’s ideas weren’t merely fiction: the person you see here is not a space witch, but she did figure out a technique of controlling elements of human physiology normally limited to the human subconsious and automatic responses. And, she works for NASA.

Patricia Cowings (b. 1948) is a “psychophysiologist,” whose doctoral work came out of UC Davis and focused on how people could use their conscious minds to shape their unconscious behaviors. She developed a method called the AFTE, which means the Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise, that has tons of applications — improving pilot performance under stress, preventing nausea from motion sickness, enhancing cardiovascular training, controlling peripheral blood flow in the skull to ease migraine or tension headaches – even helping seniors experiencing incontinence to control their sphincter muscles and teaching cancer patients to get less nauseated from their chemotherapy.

Astronauts get trained with AFTE because motion-sickness is a real problem for them. Patricia Cowings (who was the first African American woman scientist trained as an astronaut by NASA, btw, even though she herself didn’t go into space) showed in her research that her Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise worked better than Promethazine for controlling motion sickness, and the effects of AFTE, unlike the injected medicine, are persistent.