How Much Does Your Head Weigh?

A nice article  on what we are calling ‘text neck’, the position that everyone’s head is in reading their smartphones.  And I would say that I see folks in a degree of this in the car behind the wheel.

Our head and neck segment at only a 15 degree angle will weigh about 27 pounds (see the drawing in the article to see all the permutations).  One way to counter this is to remember that your spine should be long and relaxed, not short and compressed.  Bringing the smartphone or book wo your head is there way to shift this bad habit that could lead to some deterioration of the spinal structure.

 

Washington Post article link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/20/text-neck-is-becoming-an-epidemic-and-could-wreck-your-spine/

ADHD: is it really a disease?

LINK to New York Times article

Recent neuroscience research shows that people with A.D.H.D. are hard-wired for novelty-seeking. This is a trait that had, until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared with everyone else, they have underfed brain reward circuits, so much of everyday life feels boring and under stimulating.  It may be that these people are the problem solvers of the future.  But medicating them may actually stop that process.  Who knows?

And we see a general calming of the Central Nervous System and all it partner systems with NeurOPTIMAL training, and the person, that once could not sit still, is able to focus, concentrate better, gets the homework accomplished.  So with training, we can help this personality function better overall.  No medications, no side effects.  Simply providing their brain with moment to moment information about his it is spending energy (in microvolts).  The persons brain is able to re-organize itself with this new information about itself.  It is after all an energy conserving system and can learn to improve its effective in life.

 

Neurofeedback podcast interview with Upgraded Ape organization

If you want to hear what NeurOPTMAL neurofeedback does from the developer himself, this is a wonderful interview.  He gives his background and how he got into this field.  He also provides a simple explanation about how NeurOPTIMAL can improve resilience in life.  When your brain sees what is has been doing electrically, it improves itself because this is its design. This is the neuroplasticity.

After 8 years of using MeurOPTIMAL with clients as well as using it myself, I am still learning new things each time I hear Val Brown be interviewed.  He is a great teacher and able to synthesize very complex information into simple ways of grasping how NeurOPTIMAL can do what it does across so many symptoms and presentations.

Stimulant medications ‘sabotaging’ your kids?

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An often difficult question for parents is whether to put their child with ADHD on stimulant medications like Ritalin or Adderall, the most common drug treatments for hyper and impulsive behaviors. Increasingly, the answer has been a resilient yes. In 2011, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 6 percent of American children ages 4 to 17 were taking ADHD drugs.

The article and study  links (below) indicate that Adderall or Ritalin are not the panacea that many report them to be.  Research is actually demonstrating that they can hinder development in some children.  The study found evidence that the children using stimulants fared slightly worse  and that children experience more anxiety and depression on stimulants. And there is actually little evidence of any benefits for the children’s schooling.

NeurOPTIMAL neurofeedback is quite effective at rehabilitating there acquired, dysfunctional patterns in the brain and reducing ADHD symptoms and improving school performance with children.  And there are zero side-effects because the brain improves its efficiency, all based on second nature.  We don’t push the brain to change; it changes itself based on its inherent capabilities.  We just provide the brain with complete information about its own activity and it changes itself for the better. This is its inherent design.  And there are no downline side-effects either.  With drugs, no-one can say if they will cause neurological problems in children as they get into adulthood.

 

Link to rest of article in Bloomburg News:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-03/ritalin-may-be-sabotaging-your-kids

 

Link to the recents study on Ritalin effects on children mentioned in above article:

 http://www.uh.edu/~achin/workshop/stabile.pdf

 

 

Results sometimes show up a down the road with neurofeedback training.

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A woman called us some time back to get some neurofeedback traiining.  She was really going through a difficult time, unable to work and experiencing an inability to generally function in her life.  She had even turned down a good job because she was afraid that she could not deal with it. And her husband was not being empathetic with her state of condition; he thought she was faking.

So she did a handful of neurofeedback sessions and thought that she was getting worse because of them.  I explained that since we do not drive change, there is no way way that she was getting worse.  But she was in a healing curve.  Since our brain is capable to rewiring itself for the better, called neuroplasticity, what was happening is that her brain was recognizing its own ineffective and dysfunctional behavior through the feedback that we provide it.  We simply show it moment to moment what it is doing and its inherent design is to improve itself, or learn to conserve energy, its main task toward survival.

We were kind to here, and she appreciated it.

Then a few weeks later, we heard from her that she was suddenly doing better.  This is not uncommon by the way. I have seen this happen before.  People walk away believing that nothing changed or that things got more intense.  But then later, they begin to understand that the brain has its own timing and pace for self-healing.  And so life is better after a time for some people, especially the ones who are on multiple medications.  And because we are client centered, she could continue to communicate with us since we are good at not interfering in someones process; we support, we contextualize, but we do not push.

I consider this process as normal for her, and I have learned not to compare any two individuals.  Our brains do not work in the linear way that we have been trained.  They have a healthy chaos to them and this allows us to be able to adapt to what life throws our way.  And so we are improving the brains health chaos and by doing so, the brain becomes more capable to dealing with situations that it once felt overwhelmed by, just like this woman did.  But she is better and that is the point.  Not how we get there!

Neurofeedback Book Review by Alan Bachers, Ph.D.

Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma by Sebern F. Fisher, reviewed by Alan Bachers, Ph.D.This is a review of a book we usually put in the category of traditional, protocol based neurofeedback approaches. That being said, this is an extremely valuable body of work for anyone interested in watching a pioneer evolve training protocols and clinical expertise in working with the extraordinarily difficult populations of developmentally traumatized individuals. I predict the book will launch innumerable neurofeedback careers, dissertation topics, research studies, and demand for access. To those unfamiliar with the field, her book is a clear and startling delineation of her work with children even into adulthood termed by experts to be irredeemably damaged; “unadoptable,” “untreatable,” “unsalvageable.” As any journey begins from where we are, hers began as the director of a residential treatment facility for children and adolescents. Absent, ambivalent, ruptured, or disorganized attachment to a mother figure in the extreme typifies the early incapacitating experience in those she encountered, resulting in a life of not existing as a self, and having a central nervous system frozen in fear and sometimes bizarre outbursts of self- or other directed lethality. For those tasked with dealing with such people, neurofeedback represents a truly new paradigm with profound benefits for both those who treat and are treated. From her earliest statements Sebern issues challenges to the status quo: “…we can exercise more influence on the mind by addressing the brain than we can have on the brain by addressing the mind.” (p.68)

Through the neurofeedback procedures she describes in great detail, she directly engages the individual brain in its own reparative and ultimately transformational capacities. These results heretofore unexpected, or never seen, by either patients or their therapists, demonstrate the revolutionary nature of this technology and its application. To those already familiar with neurofeedback’s benefits from their individual training, the elegantly described transitions in the many “impossible” cases will sharpen their tool set and enlarge the scope of their capacities to bring neurofeedback to ever widening groups.

The field of developmental trauma as a brain event is distinguished from traditional DSM diagnostic rubrics, providing a framework for dealing with the brain on its own terms and not as an accumulation of arbitrarily categorized symptoms. The framework for intervention is created by relating the existential realities of developmental trauma sufferers to actions and interactions among brain regions. The “wiring and firing” of the disordered brain is translated into regional patterns of brainwave frequencies and amplitudes that become accessible to training protocols derived from decades of clinical experience. Finding the “sweet spot” between too much upregulation or too much downregulation of each region or presenting symptom constitutes the art of this particular neurofeedback treatment. Fisher describes with clarity and clinical detail the evolution of the theory and practice of neurofeedback as a protocol based treatment, all of which is focused on discovery or regulation of affect in the individual. Technical descriptions are always anchored in clinical examples – including failures – of such interventional adjustments. Part two of the book is a comprehensive introduction to the practice of neurofeedback – assessment, protocol development, and subtle aspects of training. Its important integration with psychotherapy are covered in ways that will be welcomed by someone new to the field as well as old hands. Fisher emphasizes the role of clinical acumen always requiring constant innovation to help patients who don’t even experience a self, to adapt to sudden awakenings for which they are completely unprepared, and to integrate such changes, however haltingly, into being human in a suddenly changing landscape. She concludes with three extensive case histories that give a sense of the range of treatment options and outcomes. Anyone dealing with dysregulation of this magnitude will benefit from her painstaking experiences and their descriptions.

In her afterword, Sebern describes the work of mathematician Stephen Wolfram and his class 4 space that gives the math for where neurofeedback is taking us. The relief of human suffering, quantum leaps across the entire range of human experience, attainment of escape velocity beyond the event horizon that assures our never being pulled back into the black holes of our histories, all are being evoked in this new paradigm. Her work with the most damaged of brains demonstrates the evocation of human evolution in action, inherent in every nervous system. What we will see when many similarly participate will change everything we know about everything.

To add context here – as with any set of complementarities, e.g. black/white, yin/yang, left hemisphere/right hemisphere, cold/hot, each is comprised of the other extensively but decreasingly as the extremes are approached. In a similar vein, this book captures a position I’ll arbitrarily term the “left” side of the neurofeedback complementarity typified at the extremes by terms such as: professional in charge, top down, reductionist, linear, reward/inhibit, narrow frequency ranges, specific, operant conditioning, qEEG dependent, mechanism based, treatment oriented, specific focus, class 1,2,3 (Wolfram), explicate (Bohm). These are typified in the neurofeedback systems of EEGer, BrainMaster, Cygnet, etc.

The “right” side of this complementarity – a reflection of one’s general orientation, starting point, or entry portal to neurofeedback – might be typified by terms such as: trainee’s brain in charge, bottom up, wholistic, non-linear, all frequencies in play throughout, diagnostically agnostic, training oriented, class 4 (Wolfram), implicate (Bohm). This approach is found in Zengar’s NeurOptimal Dynamical Neurofeedback Training system, and includes many aspects of Len Ochs’ LENS system.

Fortunately, the results for both, or the overlapping center of the Venn diagram, map very much the same large set of robust results. While adherents to each end of the complementarities will bring objection as to positioning of their particular view, all together they comprise an enlarged set of possibilities for transforming human suffering. One’s particular light will be lit pretty much right HERE within the entire complementarity, with subsidiary glimmers spread throughout the context. Sebern gives good examples of the overlap. She goes to great lengths to describe the non-linear dynamical results of her work – that the Newtonian measures used belie results that are quantum in the brain and non-linear in effect. It will emerge over time which approaches are the most effective and/or efficient. To date, in the hands of those with skillful means, all approaches bring unheard of results compared to other interventions.

Sebern Fisher is a friend and respected colleague whose book I have been pleased to review. For those who would appreciate a companion book that makes brain anatomy accessible, Rita Carter’s also just published The Human Brain Book is an excellent choice.

” The Rise of Superman” book review

— Reviewed by Alan Bachers, Ph.D.

Steven Kotler’s just published book will be of interest to anyone providing or receiving neurofeedback, especially in areas of peak performance. Framed largely through the stories of exceptional athletes’ attainment of world record shattering results, Kotler makes the state of Flow the centerpiece of his explanation for their accomplishments. Flow, from the 1990 book of that title by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (me-high Chick-sent-me-high) is characterized by: extreme focus to the exclusion of anything else, effortless transcendence of already well-learned skills, time distortion, vanishing of “self” into seamless action, high-speed problem-solving, and often a sense of merging with a transpersonal, universal force. These states are accompanied by “transient hypofrontality” (lessening of inputs from the frontal lobes) – the disappearance of cognitive “second-guessing” into boundary melting fluidity of creative, automatic, altered-state awareness of exceptional performances beyond previous limits.

Anyone familiar with neurofeedback will quickly find the descriptions of Flow, and its consequences, to be quite identical to what trainees report over time. That makes the writing an excellent way to language neurofeedback to those arriving for peak performance work. It was striking to me the extraordinary effort athletes need to expend to accomplish Flow and exceptional performance when neurofeedback might provide experiences of Flow as the default state of everyday life, rather than the relatively rare occurrence in the expenditure of superhuman effort. We already see training translate into unordinary and exceptional accomplishments across the entire range of human experience. How such basic training in neurofeedback might translate into more common or more easily obtained personal bests throughout one’s life would make a fascinating study.

Kotler uses many examples of athletes’ trials, successes, and failures to expand the notion of peak performance attainment. Among these is the skill/challenge ratio in which the challenge should be only about 4% beyond the individual’s skill level for incremental progress to occur, accumulations of which set the stage for occasional exceptional leaps in competitive situations. The “born with” vs. grown into talent issue favors the latter, in that even with demonstrable gifts, most high performance winners require training to attain or keep their edge.

Many criteria of addiction are fulfilled in the compulsion in sensation-seeking, impulsive, otherwise poorly regulated individuals to attain the one-pointed consciousness in extreme, often life-threatening trials, bringing mastery, accomplishment, physiologic and psychologic ecstasy – and their sometimes heroic status within their circumscribed worlds. Similar to modern addictionology, these performances provide, in some, the only access to states of ecstasy, release from the ordinary, and momentarily transhuman experience. Csikszentmihalyi favors Flow as an “escape forward” from current reality and sees drugs as an “escape backward.” Audiences of individuals less proficient, yet attuned to the rigors of the particular discipline by their own efforts or interest, participate mirror neuron style and are carried toward their own ecstatic states in the presence of such performances. Crowd effects potentiate the transcendent experience, to which we are all attracted in many ways, seeking union in performances of every kind.

Late in the book he describes the dark side of peak performance in those who die trying for its attainment. The Flow experience that (sometimes) accompanies pushing beyond one’s limits, Kotler notes, can become unnecessarily attached to the activity that seemingly produced the Flow, rather than Flow being actually a much more universally attainable experience. The answer to whether Flow occurs as a natural consequence of popping beyond one’s boundaries, or is sought in itself as a side-effect of only pushing spirals of more, farther, faster, etc., is really a both/and reply. The final chapters deal with attainment of Flow and its benefits in ordinary circumstances and endeavors.

The Rise of Superman is well written, full of modern science, and will bring any neurofeedback adherent farther along in their appreciation of the Flow state which is an inherent aspect of most training. Also, it provides language and context that will enrich any peak performance work for which people arrive.

A quote from Sigfried Othmer is pertinent here: “All neurofeedback is peak performance training.”

Chronic Pain & The Central Nervous System…

At the NeurOPTIMAL Research Conference In Palm Springs (February 2014), there was a presentation about working with clients who have chronic pain.  I have had direct experience of clients benefitting this way, though interestingly, that was not our main objective in their training experience, not what they were expecting and so it was a happy surprise.  Often, a person coming in for a particular issue will see other things shift toward the better because we are training the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the CNS has a broad effect on all our internal systems.

Our Central Nervous System (or CNS) includes the brain and spinal chord which are essentially ‘command central’ for all survival and problem solving activity for our organism.  Our CNS as well can generate the experience of feeling in harmony with your life and world. Our CNS is actually a unity with the Cardio-Vascular System (heart, lungs, kidneys), the digestive system (all digestive organs including liver, pancreas, gall bladder, stomach, spleen, large and small intestine), the endocrine system (all hormones that produce moods and survival motivation, prior to thought), and the immune system. The immune system is a system of biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease and is very complex and highly sophisticated.

So our CNS is a unity with these other major systems that function mostly below our conscious control.  When the brain begins to receive comprehensive feedback on its own imbalanced behavior, all these systems will be affected as the CNS begins to find more resilience and balance, begins to re-organize itself for more efficient energy usage essentially.  I had a woman who came in for improving concentration issues and she discovered happily that her inflammatory condition with chronic pain was helped considerably.  Makes sense; if the CNS improves its function, its partner systems will improve as well.

I have to share that my wife has had Lyme disease for many years and has suffered greatly over that time.  Not only depression and cognitive fog, but chronic pain.  I have been training her CNS neurofeeedback since 2007 and what we notice is that there is a significant reduction in depression and anxiety issues and chronic pain as well. It essentially allowed her to be functional where nothing else helped.  I also did Cranio-Sacral Therapy with her and because it works the the CNS as well, these two interventions have been significant in her daily life.

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Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne illness in North America and Europe. Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia Burgdorferi. Deer ticks, which feed on the blood of animals and humans, can harbor the bacteria and spread it when feeding.  You’re more likely to get Lyme disease if you live or spend time in grassy and heavily wooded areas where ticks carrying the disease thrive. 

NeurOPTIMAL is highly effective at helping those with Lyme Disease become more functional in their daily lives. I know first hand, as I have lived with someone with Lyme Disease for many years.  During difficult periods in their process, brain training helped bring her system back to balance and helped calm her brain and nervous system so that she could function in her life.   Depression and anxiety are not uncommon symptoms for Lyme and NeurOPTIMAL has proven to assist the nervous system to bring balance and calm.  I recall times when this woman was agitated considerably and after a session of brain training, it as as though a switch had been turned off and she was back to peaceful place.

 

By the way, Loraine Masterton, Certified NeurOPTIMAL Trainer and Practice Manager of Boulder Neurofeedback and Denver Tech Center Neurofeedback offers consultation to those with Lyme Disease.  She has years of direct experience at managing the symptoms and can save you time and money as you don’t not have to start from the ground up in your search for help.  Please contact her to set up a Lyme Disease care- consult.

Research Conference

I am attending the NeurOPTIMAL Neurofeedback Research Conference this week in California.  These are research presentations about significant benefits that clients have received from this approach to biofeedback brain training, and it is inspiring.  I have seen research data on clients improving rapidly from traumatic brain injury, chemo-brain patients clearing brain fog and cognitive dysfunction,  severely impaired children transcending professional expectations and functioning at higher levels than ever anticipated and assisting folks with significant sleep disorders.  Many of these clients who had not received significance assistance from previous interventions, have seen significant jumps in their physical, emotional and cognitive function via NeurOPTIMAL.  This is a powerful technology that very few people have ever heard of.

So what is significant about NeurOPTIMAL neurofeedback you say?

This form of brain biofeedback is unique to say the least.  I guess that I will say what is traditional brain biofeedback and then how NeurOPTIMAL does what it does.

I want to first state that traditional neurofeedback can help for sure; and an seasoned professional is key here as it is an expert driven approach where decisions are made about your brain based on what I consider unnecessary diagnostic analysis.  This field has a long history that goes back to the turn-of-the-century when a German Doctor named Berger began measuring body energy changes.  From there, the field of biofeedback has a significant history of helping people learn modulate their body energy.  Then in the 1960s, research was done for NASA that dealt with epileptic seizures that opened up the work of brain biofeedback.  From this point forward, the field was ‘entrainment’ oriented and has stayed that way to the present.  (Entrainment: you push or inhibit certain areas of the brainwave spectrum to get change.)

NeurOPTIMAL changes all this.  We are not diagnosis driven; we feel that this is obsolete given that we now understand about the super sophistication of our Central Nervous System/brain and its intrinsic ability to self-regulate; dare I say that it has regenerative capabilities.  We are using the same technology called the EEG (electroencephalogram) which measures changes in the brains energy expenditure; we are using it is completely different way.

Rather than manipulating brainwaves by performing strategies (pushing/inhibiting certain frequencies), we provide real- time, comprehensive information to the brain about what it is doing moment to moment.  There is nothing ‘entraining’ about what we do. But our brains are capable of sorting themselves out and improving their own functionality if we simply mirror back to it what it is doing.  Since it is an energy saving system, and way more sophisticated than we ever expected, we can help it improve its own behavior.  When we mirror its patterns back to it in its own language, our brains reorganize their own energy expenditure and this has broad benefits across our organism; physical, emotional, mental, and at the level of our identity and relations with others.

I am passionate about this work because it is cutting edge and I see what it can do with the clients that I have worked with these last 8 years!  Amazing…