Neurofeedback reads these waves, feeds them into a computer and translates them into visual form—in my case, the ladybug's states of lethargy correlate to levels of electrical activity in my brain. The underlying principle is that by seeing your brain waves you can gain control over them, training your brain to produce desired levels of activity, much like you train your voice to produce certain musical notes. And once those brain waves are in play, the desired brain state comes with them. If, for example, you've got too much anxiety-producing beta, try inducing some theta to calm down.
That might sound like trippy science fiction, but it's based on technology that's been around since the German psychiatrist Hans Berger began using electrodes to measure and categorize human brain waves in the 1920s. The recordings of the human brain-wave activity produced by this technology—electroen cephalography, or EEG—are the cornerstone of neurofeedback. By the 1970s, it was possible to feed that information back to patients who heard a rewarding tone when they produced a pre-selected frequency of brain waves. What's new is both the sophistication of the feedback display and the precision with which therapists can target different parts of the brain wave spectrum. On top of that, neurofeedback has become cheaper, more efficient and more readily applicable to a vast array of brain disorders.
"When I was doing quantified EEG back in the 1970s, computers were the
size of filing cabinets, says James R. Evans, a former University of"
South Carolina psychology professor and current clinician at the
Sterlingworth Center in Greenville, South Carolina. Evans, who has written and edited dozens of articles and books on neurofeedback and is a consulting editor to one of the field's flagship publications, The Journal of Neurotherapy, says those technological hurdles limited neurofeedback' s therapeutic reach in the early years: "You had to have a large-scale grant to afford the equipment and electrical engineering people to keep it going."
By the early 1990s, the same technology that brought us personal computers and Xboxes had changed all that, and without huge research investments therapists could focus specifically on brain waves that correlate to mental states. A quantified EEG could show that a patient's brain contained waves outside the normal range, and new software made it easier to create training protocols or use existing ones to boost or reduce activity across a frequency or region of the brain. Neurofeedback began to gain a devoted following of patients and clinicians who swore by its effects. Martin Wuttke is one of those clinicians, a neurofeedback pioneer known for getting remarkable results—starting with himself.
A former heroin addict, Wuttke discovered meditation could help him beat the drugs, and soon he was running meditation and counseling sessions for other addicts. "I found that the key to recovering from addiction was a spiritual experience," Wuttke says. "That's what the Twelve Steps [of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous] are all about, but I felt like that had gotten lost." To facilitate that experience and give it credibility by grounding it in science, Wuttke turned to neurofeedback.
Alcoholics and drug addicts often have too many fast brain waves—which is perhaps why they seek a chemical fix to calm and soothe overactive brains, he says. With the right technology, neurofeedback practitioners believe they can wake up parts of the brain that are too sleepy and calm down regions that are spinning out of control.
For Wuttke, the results were life-changing. As people moved through his program, he says, "Their depressions went away, their pains went away, their anxieties went away." Wuttke believes patients become less likely to backslide once they realize they have access to inner calm without drugs or alcohol, an insight he describes in terms of "awakening."
Neurofeedback' s potential hit home when Wuttke's son, Jacob, was born with brain injuries and major developmental problems. "At age 2, he had no muscle tone and some severe difficulties, " says Wuttke, "but the pediatric neurologist couldn't give us any answer about why or how to treat him." Wuttke and his wife at the time, Amy O'Dell, took matters into their own hands, developing a comprehensive treatment regime incorporating neurofeedback. Facing the difficulties of asking a child so young to control his brain waves, Wuttke and O'Dell observed the feedback screen and stimulated their son when his brain produced the desired patterns. "We would be very quiet when his brain wasn't within parameters, and then when it was, we would squeeze him and say, 'Good work!' and orient his brain to those moments."
At the beginning of the process, Wuttke describes his toddler son as
hypotonic: unable to sit on his own or hold his head upright. But
within 60 days, his brain started to come alive, Wuttke says, and this cognitive awakening was the first step in a process that soon had his son crawling, walking and running. After witnessing the results, Wuttke and O'Dell established Jacob's Ladder, a school for developmentally challenged children in Atlanta, Georgia, run by O'Dell. Although Jacob couldn't retain five letters of the alphabet at age 6, by age 14 he was reading at a 12th grade level, and the school had achieved national recognition.
That experience helped Wuttke formulate his "neurodevelopmental " approach, in which he uses exercise, dietary supplements and neurofeedback in concert to establish and rewire broken pathways in the brain. Since then, Wuttke has trained thousands of neurofeedback practitioners and garnered a cadre of patients who describe neurofeedback in transformative terms.
Beth Black, for example, fairly raves about the way Wuttke's neurofeedback regimen impacted her 7-year-old son. "Ethan's a completely different kid now," she says. When Black adopted Ethan at 5 months old, he'd already endured severe neglect and suspected pre-natal drug use by his mother, so it wasn't entirely surprising that the boy faced challenges. Still, by the time he entered first grade at age 6 it was clear to Black, director of the Family Art Therapy Center in Clayton, Georgia, that Ethan's problems were cause for serious concern. "We first noticed that when you teased him, he wouldn't understand or react normally, but would have these explosive tantrums," she explains.
Failing socially and academically, Ethan hated school despite the efforts of his teachers and his mother to implement a program of special instruction and behavioral therapy. "He said no one liked him and he wanted to die, and when he would get really upset he would have to exhaust himself before he could get control," Black recalls. A child psychologist labeled Ethan with ADHD and prescribed medication, but Black was desperate to avoid drugs and turned to Wuttke instead. Using an evaluative brain-wave scan, Wuttke determined that Ethan lacked normal levels of beta, the relatively fast waves associated with attention and concentrated thought.
They implemented a training program of neurofeedback and listening therapy to boost this band and improve the boy's concentration, and within two weeks Black was a believer. "For the first time ever, he could tell me a story in sequence; within three weeks, he was scoring 100s on his spelling tests and just blowing us and his teachers away." After seven weeks, Ethan was able to calm himself, and the explosive anger was a thing of the past.
Black was so impressed that she applied for a grant to use neurofeedback with the juvenile offenders sent to her clinic regularly for court-assigned behavioral therapy. Counseling these young offenders had been "a waste of money," according to Black, but the seven juvenile offenders who entered the program of intensive neurofeedback therapy flourished.
The judge came to us at the end of this program, Wuttke remembers, "and said, 'What did you do to these kids?'" Within weeks those who'd dropped out were back in school, performing so well on standardized tests that their learning disabilities seemed to have disappeared.
Such stories abound. "Our whole family was in trouble because of my
daughter's depression and discipline problems," says Joann Bullard, whose daughter received treatment at Wuttke's clinic in the Netherlands. "She was going to have to go on medication because there just weren't any other options," Bullard says, but after 60 sessions of neurotherapy, "there was a total turnaround, and we're grateful every day." Another father, Ben Odukwe, says he visited specialists around the world after his son Onura was diagnosed with mild autism, but saw no real results until the boy entered Jacob's Ladder school and began a neurofeedback program under Wuttke's supervision. Onura's father notes that the boy's "communication, his confidence, his handwriting and dexterity all transformed, " and at age 16, he's entering mainstream school for the first time.
Neurofeedback doesn't cure conditions like ADHD, depression or addiction. Instead, it enables people to produce the appropriate brain waves, which helps provide the attention, rest or contemplative awareness needed to deal with underlying issues. You can't manufacture these brain waves by force of will. I quickly discovered that success comes from letting go.
It's not a conscious thing, Wuttke emphasizes. You have to "surrender to the process [and] let your brain take over. You are going to deep parts of the brain and neutralizing disruptive brain waves, and often in this extreme state of quietude, key memories and patterns come up, almost like you're in a half dream state, and there's sort of a rewiring that occurs."
Wuttke likes to say our brain tends to follow certain "scripts," patterns of thought that take us to the same place over and over. Neurofeedback, as it forges new pathways in the brain, helps us devise new scripts.
Even as the technology has advanced and the success stories have grown
into a rich anecdotal lore, however, neurofeedback continues to face
skepticism and resistance from parts of the medical establishment. It has only begun to gain widespread acceptance as a therapeutic tool recently. "It was an up-and-coming treatment modality in the 1970s," says Evans, who has worked with the technology in academic and clinical settings. But he says neurofeedback lost scientific credibility when the early, simple equipment was adopted by and became associated with "hippies" in pursuit of "instant Zen."
Neurofeedback still has its skeptics among consumers too, especially since it remains unregulated; anyone who can afford the equipment can rent an office, hang a shingle and treat patients (see "How to choose a neurofeedback practitioner" box on page 51). Today, however, Evans says, "We've reached a tipping point where there are hardcore science people working in neurofeedback and articles being published in good journals, and it's becoming much more difficult for mainstream medicine to ignore. No one can say any longer that there is no science behind it."
The studies that have generated the most enthusiasm are the ones
suggesting that the treatment offers a drug-free alternative for children with ADHD. A review of the scientific literature in 2005, for example, noted that 75 percent of kids with ADHD treated with neurofeedback improved—compared to about 70 percent treated with drugs—and no study has reported negative effects. A 2007 study from the University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany showed that after a treatment regime lasting several months, children diagnosed with ADHD not only improved their behavior and increased their ability to concentrate "significantly, " but added nearly 10 points to their IQs—a result maintained six months after the study ended.
Skeptics have long argued that the benefits of neurofeedback to children with ADHD could be attributed to the placebo effect—or that the children could achieve similar improvement if they spent the same amount of time working with parents on focused tasks like assembling puzzles. By this logic, it isn't the technology of neurofeedback that helps children with ADHD, but the attention and effort of parents and therapists working in concert to support learning and concentration. To find out the truth, Swiss researchers at the University of Zurich created a controlled study to isolate neurofeedback from other factors. One group of children with ADHD was given neurofeedback, while another entered an intensive behavioral therapy program that used traditional techniques to teach them to focus. The results were dramatic: Children in the neurofeedback trial improved markedly on indices of attention and "metacognition" (the awareness of one's mental processes), whereas children in the behavioral therapy group showed no significant improvement.
But there was just one caveat. The researchers noted that the results
seemed "mediated by unspecific factors, such as parental support or
certain properties of the therapeutic setting and content." So, while
neurofeedback works, it isn't a magic bullet—parental support and the
right clinical setting, which might include other therapies, are key to realizing its potential.
Importantly, however, that potential goes beyond the treatment of
disorders. Indeed, neurofeedback seems remarkably effective at improving mental focus and concentration, even for apparently "normal" individuals.
We've just done a study training eye surgeons, says Gruzelier of
Goldsmiths College in London, "and we found that the rhythm that's very effective in reducing hyperactivity in ADHD children also helped enhance surgical performance by 20 percent." The aim was to do the surgery as quickly and accurately as possible, and neurofeedback training, which enhanced beta waves while relaxing the cerebral cortex to reduce hyperactive movements, seemed to enhance surgeons' ability to modulate their performance. "Instead of just charging at the target," Gruzelier says, "they were actually slightly longer and more methodical in their preparatory time, then faster and more accurate on task."
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Topic: How You Can Train Your Brain to Help Reduce Stress (Read 1687 times)