Anterior Cingulate Since the anterior cingulate is active in controlling the flow of emotional material to the prefrontal–like a mixing valve for intellectual and emotional elements in the decision-making process–when it is stressed by trying to block lots of material, it can get “hot” (Daniel Amen’s term), and this is often a period of anxiety […]

Identifying Progress I’ve also seen lots of people who got so wound up in the tracking and judging of their “progress” that they got frustrated when they “weren’t making any.” Not all progress is graphable. And it’s not, in my experience, necessary to cognitively interact with a process to have it be beneficial. Meditation, for […]

Peak Performance There is a valid point about “peak performance” training that says that ALL neurofeedback is just that.  Unless you happen upon a perfect brain, whatever that might look like, everyone, even high performers, have issues of anxiety or low energy or obsessiveness or lapses of attention of impulsive behavior or whatever.  If you […]

Cingulate Daniel Amen’s term “hot cingulate” relates to a cingulate where there is a lot of very fast activity (generally beta and/or high-beta which are significantly stronger at Fz than at F3 and F4 (or Cz than C3 and C4). Again, theta would not be included. In the TQ, we use an approach developed by […]

Pete’s first rule of NF is, “When you see something strange or unusual in the brain, first assume it is something you did or the client did before you assume it is the brain.” A corollary could be, “If you see something strange in the signal that you can’t fix, assume it is something the […]

What the EEG Captures The EEG is a summation of positive and negative signals at one point subtracted from the summation of positive and negative signals at another point–NOT just the number at a single point.  What’s more, Tom Collura and Val Brown did an excellent presentation at WinterBrain several years ago, demonstrating that the […]

Central Strip If you look at a picture of the brain, you’ll note that the central sulcus, which divides the front from the back runs in a chevron shape across the center of the head. It veers toward the rear in the middle. The sensory motor cortex runs about an inch on either side of […]

More Thoughts on Measuring Progress Two women start jogging together. One keeps track of miles run, average speed, calories burned, graphing the results from day to day. The other just goes out and runs alongside her friend. Which one gets in shape faster? Which one better? It is perfectly possible and valid for someone to […]

Reversal I don’t necessarily have a single protocol for limbic calming, because I think the brain establishes various strategies to deal with limbic over-drive situations. If the drive is related to later stress issues, then I am more likely to find the most common pattern in adults, which I call Reversal. The parietal and/or occipital […]

Coherence Coherence is a measure of how effectively two sites are able to link and unlink, to share information. Whether coherence is a good thing or a bad thing depends to some extent on what frequency we are talking about and what sites and what task. Slower frequencies, alpha and lower, are generally produced by […]