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Improve mental health with neurofeedback
How you can train your brain to help reduce stress, enhance creativity and improve mental health.
Gruzelier attributes such results to the technology's ability to allow slow waves to travel farther, uninterrupted, across the brain. That facilitates interaction between areas of the brain that don't typically connect, he says. Normally, such a process is disrupted by the fast waves that characterize our waking life–a kind of mental static. "It's been known for centuries that the hypnagogic experience, the border between waking and sleeping, is the source of remarkable insights," Gruzelier says.
Neurofeedback's apparent ability to bring those insights into the light, however, is what seems remarkable, especially since we still don't understand key factors about how it works—how, for example, people control their own brain waves. "It's very much a black box," explains John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Pennsylvania.
Kounios conducted a double-blind study of elderly subjects that showed neurofeedback may help improve cognitive processing speed and "executive function," the mental operations that help us plan and organize our lives, but he admits the cognitive process underlying neurofeedback is still something of a mystery. "Although neurofeedback has been around for 40 years, we still don't have the slightest clue as to how people do this," Kounios says. "It's not as if there aren't any good theories. There are just no theories, not even bad ones–just the observation that this is something animals and humans can do."
That sometimes makes for surprising results, as in the case of Kounios' study, which increased the production of alpha waves in the frontal lobes of elderly people. The frontal lobe often deteriorates as people age, which makes problem-solving, abstract reasoning and all kinds of planning more difficult. And so, as Kounios' subjects boosted their alpha activity in this region of the brain, they demonstrated an improved ability to respond when presented with new information and to make quick decisions in cognitive tests. Such results are preliminary but exciting. Kounios emphasizes that the field needs funding for large-scale studies that can establish the basic science of neurofeedback and determine which training protocols are most effective, "but there's no question in my mind that this has significant potential and the phenomena are real."
This is a common refrain among researchers and practitioners. "It works," agrees Evans. "Almost anybody can get the equipment and get 60 percent good results. The question is, what are those people doing who get 90 percent? Some people give vitamins along with their treatment; others pray with clients or use counseling. In many respects, these people fire a shotgun and we don't know which pellets hit."
That's why Wuttke is creating an institution that will train a core group of people who can replicate his results and methods. His mission is to establish a network of neurofeedback clinics and training facilities in Europe through his work with the LifeWorks Foundation.
"One of the biggest risks right now is that this becomes a novelty, where people can buy some software and hook into it at home and play a game," says Wuttke. "That's going to happen, but it takes away from the profound clinical applications, which have to be part of a more comprehensive approach."
Wyatt agrees. "For most patients, whether they're suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress syndrome, I don't believe that neurofeedback offers a complete solution any more than I believe a doctor can give you a drug that offers a complete solution. Neurofeedback can calm the brain down, but then you still often have to deal with underlying issues."
The desire to get at those underlying issues is why Wuttke, an ordained non-denominational minister, keeps coming back to the notion of spiritual growth. "When you incorporate all these things and straighten out the brain, the ultimate goal is for people's spiritual awareness to start manifesting itself," he says. Indeed, recent studies of Tibetan Buddhist monks by Richard Davidson, director of the Lab for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have shown links between spirituality and the processes encouraged by neurofeedback. In particular, monks who are experts in meditation seem capable of generating extraordinary levels of gamma waves as they achieve a state typically associated with "transcendence."
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Is there a good resource for acquiring a biofeedback machine for ones-self? A practitioner may not be readily available for some of us, or affordable.
posted by odysseus on 2/23/2009 12:35 pm