Let's Do The Brain Wave Again

April 19, 2011 8:06 AM

Has anyone had success with neurofeedback, or know someone who has?

Bonus: if you're in the New York area, do you have a fantastic practitioner?

I just had an initial treatment of neurofeedback-- it was interesting and pretty relaxing. I'm doing the treatment for its alleged sleep benefits. I did, however, not particularly like the practitioner, but I don't want to discount the entire practice on that basis.

Did the treatment work for you? It seems promising, and I'd like to find out the best way to continue.

The "style" of neurofeedback I had was called "NeurOptimal"-- which bills itself as "non-linear dynamic feedback." Basically, I sat in a chair with electrodes on my scalp and listened to music and watched trippy fractal images on screen. Every time my brain deviated from some "ideal" set of waves, the music went static-y and the image flickered a little. The Neuroptimal website sets off some quackery radar, especially because it's very fuzzy about what exactly it's matching your brainwaves to, but at the same time, there's research showing this stuff can work.

So, in brief:

1. What was your experience with neurofeedback? (Or if you have 2nd hand knowledge, that's good, too.)
2. Can you recommend a practitioner?
3. Any other specific info you'd like to share?

posted by enzymatic to health & fitness (10 answers total)

I have done neurofeedback; I had a good experience and I thought it helped. I did it for PTSD symptoms - mainly hypervigilance and anxiety, but I also had trouble sleeping and I believe that neurofeedback helped with that. Some people I talked with about neurofeedback described it as a way to retrain the patterns of your brain and as a "shortcut to meditation", and that seems like a good description for what I experienced. It took some time to find the protocol that worked the best for me - and even then it didn't work every single session - but when it did work it was amazing. I very quickly (it felt almost like throwing a switch) went into an incredibly deep state of calm and relaxation. I felt very strongly that everything was going to be OK. I don't know that I've ever been so relaxed and calm. My doctor also gave me meditation exercises to practice to get the benefit between sessions, and I think that helped a lot, especially as we started spacing the sessions out more.

For me it was very important that there was some research to back up the effectiveness of the protocols I was using. So I read a bit about the studies of neurofeedback for PTSD and found them promising but not definitive. People in the studies definitely showed a benefit. It's possible that was due to the placebo effect, but I'm OK with that - it's hard to see how sitting in the chair with the electrodes, watching the screen and listening to music could hurt you too badly.

I would recommend that you find a doctor that you like and trust if you decide to continue. I think it's important to have a good working relationship with the person doing this to you. For me, it took some time to find a protocol that worked best for me and it was important that I had an experienced and knowledgeable doctor whom I trusted to experiment with my brain. Also, when it does work and you become very relaxed you want to be comfortable being alone in a room with that person when you're almost in a trance. Many years ago I tried biofeedback for a nerve problem, and I tried to stick with it even though I really didn't like the practitioner - I never go much out of it, mainly because my aversive reaction to him made me tense.

I'm not in your area so I can't recommend a person to see.
posted by medusa at 10:28 AM on April 19, 2011

I participated in a study in Marin County (Northern Californai). I don't know whether to believe or not, as the general acceptance of "woo" within that community seems to be pretty high, and there's even a couple of "so what if it is placebo, at least it works that much" papers in the neurofeedback literature.

If I remember right, I was being trained for higher theta and lower beta (and, yes, there are commonly accepted frequency ranges associated with those names). I had two electrodes at specific places on my very high forehead, and the ear clip. I had a couple of bars on the screen that leaped around a lot, when I managed to get the one high and the other low I got a "bing" and a counter incremented. At the end of each session, I think they were about 40 minutes, I got a little graph that showed me how my numbers per some time period went.

I answered a big long psych test questionnaire at the beginning and at the end (of the many months study). The test at the beginning (and a subsequent session with the skullcap with a gazillion electrodes) were what made my practitioner say "Would you participate in my study?" with a general "you seem like someone who's anxious".

My answers at the end showed a general overall satisfaction with quality of life, there's all sorts of reasons that could be the case, the time spent under the electrodes may be part of it. Only a bunch of better double-blind studies would be sure, and I don't think this particular study was well enough spec'd to be definitive.

As I noted (and you observed too), the woo and quackery factor is very high in that community, and yet there are some suggestions that there is some real science underlying things there. Sorry if my rather vague answer isn't terribly helpful, but that's because despite my participation in the whole thing I still don't know how much of it I trust. I believe that I learned over the period of the study to better control the things the device was measuring. I have reasons to trust that the device was actually measuring something like what it claimed to be measuring. But like most everyone else I'm not convinced that the general psychological changes in my life over that period are due to that process, and if they are that it wasn't placebo.
posted by straw at 10:31 AM on April 19, 2011

I've had it, went into it with a healthy dose of skepticism. A 6 week course didn't do much more than regular meditation combined with aerobic exercise and/or yoga has done for me in the past, only it was a lot more expensive.
posted by availablelight at 11:11 AM on April 19, 2011

P.S. there is a heavy dose of "woo" to the field...my practitioner (a PhD) not only gave me a laundry list of things that it would fix, but told me "it will fix things you don't even know are wrong."
posted by availablelight at 11:12 AM on April 19, 2011

I used a form called LENS for several months.

The arrangement was very black-box, though... and I'm ultimately not sure if I got anything out of it. (The "feedback" was a matter of charts, rather than in real-time.)

A friend used the conventional protocol, involving direct real-time feedback of her bodily states, and apparently got great results.
posted by darth_tedious at 1:01 PM on April 19, 2011

I've been learning how to train people using neurofeedback and I'm in New York City. The learning curve is quite daunting, and there is a lot of "woo" going on, very true. I'm not crazy about practitioners who say they can "cure" anything with it, let alone "things you didn't know you had." I'm a skeptical type and am a psychologist, but the training does seem to be a good way to train your brain into getting into certain states.

It's a complicated field. There are the different frequencies that correspond to different states (theta = deep relaxation, pre-sleep, alpha = relaxation, "good" beta = ability to do tasks, "bad" (i.e. too-high) beta = anxiety, nervousness), but then there are also the different sections of the brain, so you want more alpha in the back and more beta in the front (frontal cortex controls executive functioning, back of brain is more primitive, limbic area) but obviously the brain is VERY complicated, and so there is also a lot of talk in the field about "syncrony" and "coherence" -- aspects of EEG functioning that might correspond to how the different parts and functions of the brain are or aren't communicating with each other properly, or are *too* much in sync.

The more people you read, the more complicated you get, and then it all collapses into a feeling that nobody REALLY knows what they're doing (although so many of them are SO sure they do, both from the "woo" angle and from the opposite angle, the "hard scientists" with their theories they're all sure are right), and so you're left with: why not do the basics? (which is what I'm learning about).

As far as what the o.p. asked: what "normal" states are you being compared to? well I don't know about the software or technique you mentioned (I'm going to look it up now), but there is a whole subset of people who are using what they call the Z-score approach. That is, they accumulated a huge database and calculated the EEGs and correlated them to "normal" vs. "abnormal" functioning, etc. etc., and as you're training, the machine is calculating moment to moment how much your own brainwaves are fluctuating from the dasabase norms and makes the adjustments to the feedback so that you'll be training toward those norms.

Other people aren't interested in Z-scores. They're not valuing "normalcy" as much and so what they'll do is, usually, some sort of pre-assessment (did you get anything like that? there are mini-assessments and then there is this big assessment called a "q" which stands for qEEG, or quantitative EEG. This is also matched with a database to see what's "wrong" with your brainwaves. But they're not training in that moment-to-moment Z-score way. They are, however, still training you to come closer to the norms.

Basically it's operant conditioning: you are rewarded in some way (a tone sounds, or gets louder, or a DVD plays, or stops, or shrinks in size, or the mandalas turn or they stop turning, etc.) when you do what the machine is set up to reward: could be more alpha to relax you, or a variety of other things. (There is an EEG pattern often noted in people who are diagnosed with ADHD: their theta (slow waves) are much too "loud" (that is, their amplitude is greater than they "should" be) relative to their "good" beta (this supports the theory of giving stimulants to people with ADHD -- they SEEM hyper, but really they are hyper (in neurofeedback lingo, they have too much high (bad) beta) because they are compensating for being in a theta fog -- it's the theory of self-stimulation (as per, e.g. video game playing) to keep onesself out of the fog).

Anyway, it seems to be helpful for a lot of people, but it's expensive because of the time involved, and the amount of money people charge for their time.

I've had supervision from a number of really good people, but the only one in New York City is named Larry Lewis, Ph.D. He's a clinical psychologist, NYU-trained, and psychoanalytically trained, who also does neurofeedback (he mostly does psychotherapy). He's a very nice guy who is worth calling, I think, for an initial consultation.

Here's his info:

Larry Lewis
155 E.38th (Third Avenue)
[phone]
posted by DMelanogaster at 2:12 PM on April 19, 2011 [3 favorites]

oh!! I just looked up your approach, NeurOptimal -- it's ZENGAR! ha. One of the more controversial, "Black box" approaches by far. I don't know much about it, only that on most of the lists and online groups I'm in, there's a lot of animosity about them. There's a kind of prejudice about the black box people -- they don't make public what they're doing (which seems anti-scientific, right?), they definitely have more of the "woo" we-cure-everything stuff going on.

I think also people don't like them because they sell their machines and software to anybody. That's one of the other controversies in the field -- there are the people who think you should have to be a licensed health professional with a certain amount of training and probably certification in order to do this stuff, and then there are the people who think anybody should be able to train other people, and then there are the people who say that anybody should be able to buy the equipment and train themselves and their kids.

I personally thought about doing the Zengar "NeurOptimal" approach, but I like to know something about what I'm doing! I am not much of a "put your faith in this, it works" kind of individual.

However, given the struggles I"m having just getting good electrical signals, sometimes I think I made a mistake. I've invested an enormous amount of time and money in this process.

Really, the bottom line is, for me, that mental states ARE correlated with what brainwaves are dominant at the time, and therefore you really CAN train your brainwaves so that you can have more control over your mental states ("mental states" = level of arousal, attention, calm vs. agitation, that kind of thing), and we all know that those states ARE correlated with physical stress, which we DO know affects the body in profound ways.
posted by DMelanogaster at 2:21 PM on April 19, 2011

woops, "synchrony," not "syncrony" , although there is a certain degree of cronyism in the field.
posted by DMelanogaster at 2:23 PM on April 19, 2011

To DMelanogaster's point, the "we need to keep the unwashed masses from doing this!" thing is part of what turns me off about it, especially given the lack of really conclusive studies on negative efficacy. There's a whole lot of "and then we sent your data off to a service which made this pretty charts and graphs, and you can see here from this scribble that the answers you gave us on your questionnaire are validated!"

If I were to dabble again today, I'd either build my own hardware or buy the Emotiv headset. And there are few enough papers out there describing what we actually know about how the EEG stuff relates to brain function that you could pretty easily read a few of them, look at what you get off your hardware, decide to try something for a few weeks, and see if it's working out for you.
posted by straw at 2:40 PM on April 19, 2011

The Emotiv headset doesn't work with any EEG software that does neurofeedback training, that I know of. I would LOVE to get that, eventually.
posted by DMelanogaster at 2:50 PM on April 19, 2011