Neurofeedback Training Experience
Neurofeedback Training assists the brain and central nervous system in finding balance and optimizing self-regulation.
This training has been an essential part of my clinical practice and personal life by supporting my healing through chronic pain, PTSD, and anxiety.
Neurofeedback Training has been shown to help with ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety, seizures, PTSD, headaches, Traumatic Brain Injury, chronic pain, mental clarity, and performance optimization.
I am pleased to share the experience of one of my patients who as graciously and eloquently put his personal journey into words. This is experience is, of course, shared with permission.
I share this in hopes of helping bring a better understanding of Neurofeedback Training. This training is offered in my clinic. Please call 509-663-5048 to learn more.
In Health,
My Neurofeedback Experience
by Jessie Watson
Spirituality & The Brain
Some of us are born into this world with certain advantages and disadvantages. Be it biological or environmental – we only have one shot at entering this world and leaving it with some dignity and grace. While our direct experience of the world is subject to change from moment to moment, how we decide to proceed into the future is ultimately our choice.
As human beings, we have come to recognize ourselves as such. We are aware of our own mortality, limitations, and impact on the broader society. More importantly, we discovered how to form a relationship with the future.
The evolution of the rational mind has given us the tools of science to observe the mysteries of nature while the evolution of the spirit guides our actions in the direction of a better future – however, we may define that for ourselves.
In recent history, scientists, scholars, and academics have become increasingly intimate with the physical substrate of the mental landscape – the brain. To understand the brain from a 21st-century perspective, we must accept the proposition that the brain is fundamental in generating the emergent properties of our day to day experiences, including perhaps consciousness itself. This comes with a bitter pill to swallow; we must also accept that there is no place for something like an ethereal “soul” or “spirit” to be hiding.
Rene Descartes, a prominent 16th-century French philosopher/mathematician, was one of the first to make a popular case for the presence of a soul in which he intuited to exist separately from the body. This dualistic perspective has since been discarded by modern scientific paradigms. It is now generally accepted that our being is largely at the mercy of a deterministic set of physical laws.
Even with such dismal evidence at hand, there is still much to be discovered about the human brain. Descartes would argue that the inescapable presence of consciousness and free-will (real or imagined) were the decisive factors between what he regarded as an intrinsic divinity among human beings apart from mere stimulus response organisms (plants/animals). As it happens, consciousness has yet to be explained in any tangible scientific terms.
Imagine for a moment that you, everything that makes you you, apart from your arms and legs, rests just behind your eyes. By removing the teleological aspects of the body, you are merely a floating brain in a jar looking back at itself. Typically, this isn’t how we view ourselves or others. Allow me to make the counter-proposition that consciousness would be rendered incomplete or fragmentary under such conditions. We need a body to fully apprehend the physical landscape, manipulate objects and nurture the potential reality that surrounds us. We need a tongue to articulate our experiences, transmit information, or convey meaning to others. The combination of both allows us to creatively represent how to navigate reality in the form of theatre and drama. This is the basis for the reality in which we exist – completely and fully embodied in the world.
If this is the case, then why should we place an emphasis on the brain at all? Unfortunately, the brain remains an integral part of generating mental states that inform our behaviour which can be observed at the level of atoms, molecules, and cellular activity. However, these seemingly deterministic casual relationships at the micro-level cannot tell us what to do in light of such information.
The best we can hope for is to rely on our inborn capacity for recognizing patterns and mapping them onto our ethical frameworks. Our focus then shifts on this innate ability to transcend the phenomena that we observe and modify our behaviour in relation to them. This is ultimately what separates us from self-check-out machines at the grocery store.
The “spirit” of mankind in modern terms may then be defined as the recognizable pattern of actions and behaviour across time. Using the brain as a reference point, we can better understand what role physical components play in the spiritual nature of human beings.
My Story
Since around the age of fifteen, I’ve struggled with varying degrees of neuroticism and behavioural pathology. What started out as a typical adolescent rebellion ended up becoming something of a permanent feature of my personality. I never stopped marinating in a pool of testosterone and struggled, even more, to curb my impulses as I grew older. This carried on throughout my early 20’s buttressed with an insatiable compulsion to drown myself in alcohol.
In the year 2010, after I returned from my tour in Afghanistan, I developed a taste for cocaine and the fast-lane. This would inevitably result in a failed drug test and a less than honourable egress from my military career. Looking back, it was the only way I could recreate the “rush” of being in combat while drinking continued to be a reliable way of “cooling down”. Beyond the physical trap of addiction, drugs allowed me to manipulate my consciousness in a way that people or surroundings could no longer. I was in control. At least I thought I was…
As fate would have it, anti-social tendencies and attitudes amount to just that. In the year 2012, I was arrested for assault/robbery in an Atlantic City casino. This is where I had my first extended stay in a county jail. It was there I came to realize that I was haplessly careening into a life of crime and squalor. The five months spent in isolation was enough to finally reach a signal among all the noise in my head – the bullshit stories I told myself throughout the years. It was probably the longest period of sobriety that I had experienced since the age of 16.
I remember watching inmates come and go while others would go and come back as an obituary in the local newspaper. While this was naturally unsettling to see, on more than one occasion, it was most unsettling to realize how similar those poor people were to me. For the first time in my life, I had developed a sense of empathy for complete strangers. I could no longer draw a line between them and I. Experiences such as this would ultimately sow the seeds of compassion in my life. A dingy and remote county jail in the state of New Jersey is the last place anyone thinks to look for their own humanity.
During my time in the correctional system, I made use of the drug/alcohol recovery resources that were made available – namely 12 step programs. I have since cultivated a new and better life as a result. But the most profound experiences came in the form self-actualization: the process by which one comes to know oneself as they are, their strengths, their weaknesses and the person they are to become in the future.
Let’s reel the clock back to the summer of 1998. I lived in downtown Tacoma, Washington with my mother after having fled a series of abusive trials with my step-father. I was ten years old at the time. One day I decided to make my way down to a soup-line for the homeless in the middle of the city. Looking back, I realized at that point in my life that my innocence had left me and I was just shell of a boy. Suddenly a man approached me, a Greek Orthodox minister. He told me that he noticed how I had furtively observed the landscape as I stood there in the soup-line. He recognized a deep curiosity within me and explicitly expressed how special this was. Later the minister would come to know me and mother. He gifted me one of the original Macintosh computers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was his way of stimulating the dormant intelligence that I would later put to poor use.
As I’ve continued to develop and mature into adulthood, that innate curiosity burns brighter with each passing day. Over the last 5 years, I’ve investigated any and all means of personal enhancement starting with simple dietary and lifestyle changes all the way up to the finer virtues of Buddhism, Taoism, and Judeo-Christianity. It is here that I learned that my past experiences, emotions, and impulses are merely impermanent artefacts of consciousness.
I came to understand that every choice I make creates a ripple across time and space, ultimately affecting the world around me. I came to understand that every time I make a choice that interferes with my own well-being and the well-being of others, the world becomes a worse place to live. Lastly, I came to understand that I am not a victim of my genetics or invisible processes at the cellular level.
The power to shape one’s destiny comes with the responsibility of refining one’s character on the world’s stage, even under the worst circumstances. When all is taken away from us, what remains is the perennial decision to either be a contributor of chaos or a force for good.
It would be disingenuous to claim that any of these virtues comes easily to us. It requires rigorous honesty and years of practice. In the beginning, I described various human achievements including our ability to transcend what we tend to hold onto the most. This has become a major area of focus for a better life.
Out of the various techniques and methods for mindful discipline, one, in particular, continues to hold my interest….
What is NeurOptimal?
NeurOptimal is a computer-generated neurofeedback program that uses information about the brain’s electrical activity enabling it to operate from what you might call “inefficient” patterns to more efficient patterns. Efficiency, in this case, refers to moving away from signatures in the brain that reflects undesirable mental states such as fear, anger, anxiety, and depression.
Traditional neurofeedback technology analyzes patterns of brain activity called “brain mapping” to identify which electrical patterns need correcting. From there, various stimulation is fed back to the brain, rewarding it for moving away from these inefficient patterns. This concept is quite similar to classic Skinnerian methods of positive reinforcement. However, instead of reinforcing specific behaviours, neurofeedback aims to rewire the connections in the brain associated with particular mental states. A common trope in modern psychology and neuroscience is “neurons that fire together, wire together”.
While this approach is generally effective, especially when administered by a seasoned healthcare provider, there are a few drawbacks. The first being that brain mapping generally requires a continual update which can quickly spike the cost of treatment. Second, as treatment continues, subjects may experience a cessation of symptoms but soon realize that their symptoms are supplanted by new ones. This creates a long, drawn-out process of chasing down newly established or anomalous inefficient patterns of brain activity.
NeurOptimal is a program that has taken the fundamentals of traditional neurofeedback and integrated a more dynamic system for better positive results. Instead of the “state-oriented” process of training the brain to move away from undesirable mental states, Neuroptimal tracks exactly how the brain changes between states. This discovery arose out the realization that some negative mental states are fundamental to human psychology and should not be dispensed with entirely. NeurOptimal simply focuses on training the brain to move more fluidly between states, preventing subjects from falling into extremes such as worry turning into anxiety or sadness moving into depression.
In short, NeurOptimal is designed to maximize the brains plasticity and guide it gracefully from one state to another. In addition to that, it helps strengthen the brain’s ability to return to more appropriate mental states under any given circumstances. This is important to understand because the longer a particular mental state remains in motion, the higher the probability that an individual will begin to organize their outward behaviour in kind. If we can reduce the half-life of states like anxiety or anger, we effectively reduce the likelihood that we will make a decision that we will regret for the rest of our lives.
A typical session lasts around 30 minutes. Once complete, you will be asked to fill out another assessment so the practitioner can monitor exactly how you respond after each session. After about 8 weeks of this training, you will be asked again to reflect on how this training has affected your day to day life. Subjects may not immediately notice large changes but changes often occur more subtly as the brain is the most subtle and complex organ in the universe. The assessment tools are an objective measure to highlight these subtle changes that can be identified and strengthened over time.
NeurOptimal Imagery
The images above are just two examples of what you might see on the screen as you submerge into the music.
My Experience
Several months ago, as I initially became aware of the NeurOptimal program, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between that and traditional methods of meditation with which I had considerable experience prior to. Meditation may be many things to many people, but its most basic attributes include sitting alone with oneself for any length of time without distraction. This frees up the mind to wander and explore all contents of memory, emotion and thought. The most common misconception, however, is that mediation is meant to inhibit uncomfortable or inefficient modes of being. Perhaps it is this type of assumption that has removed traditional neurofeedback from the purview of modern therapies.
The first lesson in my experience with NeurOptimal was not to cast unnecessary judgment on what I was to experience moving forward. My first session (1st of 10) consisted of subjectively analyzing everything I could about the technology that was wired up to my skull. I could not seem to immerse myself in what was happening in front of me, i.e. the music and fractal images. It wasn’t until later that I realized that this inattentiveness was brought about by my anxiety about this new experience, and, had invariably been detected by the very object of my anxiety. This was the first evidence of a baseline of feedback at work.
After several weeks, I grew more comfortable with the training and found that my anxiety tapered the more I focused and controlled my breathing. The pre-session assessments each week varied depending on what was happening in my life at the time (which is to be expected) but the post-assessments began to look more and more the same. After the sessions, I often felt a deep feeling of muscular relaxation and clarity of thought. This was monumental for two reasons: the first being that I could reach such states of clarity and relaxation and the second being that it could become a regular occurrence in my life if I stuck with it.
Toward the latter end of my trial, every visit to the program seemed like a still-shot of time. It was as if I had never left as if nothing had transpired, no time had passed, and nothing outside of that experience was real. Everything in my life during the 10-week stretch boiled down to those intense 30-minute sessions. I was able to transcend the cacophony of life’s chaos in those moments. Some might characterize this as a significant spiritual experience and I would admit that there were points that left a very psychedelic impression on me. To this day, I wonder if I had achieved in 10-weeks what some people strive to achieve through years of yoga and mindfulness.
My final lesson in all of this was that these warm and fuzzy moments were as transient in nature as any other state like anxiety or sadness. The real miracle was not that I could cultivate a more proportionate degree of calmness in my life but the recognition that such states are impermanent and that I had the power to let them pass. More importantly, I discovered that I did not have to flinch at the sight of them. I could remain static even if there happens to be a roiling uneasiness churning inside of me.
Conclusion
To finally wrap up this seemingly long-winded expository essay, I would just like to highlight a for key points made throughout the reading.
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Even though the brain is a material entity that obeys the laws of physics, it does not imply that we are devoid of free-will nor does what it produce equate to who we are as individuals. What this does imply, is that we have an evolutionary tool that has enabled us to survive over the centuries. By examining the brain, we can better understand which forces drive or repel us and use the information to our advantage.
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As a person who spent the first 25 years of his life making mistakes, I was still able to discover a benevolent side of myself that the world had never seen. No matter where you are or what you’ve experienced, there is always an opportunity to become aware of your own actions and chart a course to a better future.
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Modern science and human intuition have created tools at our disposal like NeurOptimal that can help us reach more desirable modes of existing in the world. Perhaps even beyond that, there is a clear path forward to recovery whether you suffer from chronic depression, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any other disease or imbalance of the brain.
Where
I received my training through Dr. Allegra Hart, ND at…
Naturae Naturopathic Clinic
1417 Maiden Lane
Wenatchee, Washington 98801
509-663-5048
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