Visible and Invisible Structures in the EEG Signal It probably would be useful to talk about visible and invisible structures. The cortex, the hippocampus (inside each temporal lobe) and the cingulate are all composed with pyramidal neurons, so they produce a signal that appears in the EEG.   Most of the primary sub-cortical players (thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, basal ganglia, etc.) are composed primarily of stellate neurons, which don’t produce a visible EEG signal. Obviously most of what we see in […]

Basal Ganglia The best connections to the Basal Ganglia would be at Cz. You won’t “see” the Basal Ganglia in EEG, since it is not made of the pyramidal cells that show up in EEG (only the cortex, hippocampus and cingulate are), so you have to go where it’s connected and train there.

Measuring Progress with So-Called Objective Tests Speaking of “objective” measures like the TOVA or IVA: I tried both, meaning that I bought them and charged my clients for my use of them for several months one time and a bit less than a month the second time. I’ve thrown the TOVA away twice. The first time occurred when, after spending 22 minutes in a darkened room with a kid who did everything but climb up on the table and was […]

First Steps The rule I use in looking at the TQ is very simple: look at the brain through the window of what the client wants to change. If you look at the Analyze page, beginning with the section entitled Heads (the Heads page), there is a series of categories we look for (Disconnect, Hot Temporals, Reversals, etc…) Each of these categories is briefly defined (in terms of EEG markers) on the Analyze page. So first understand what THIS brain […]

Neurofeedback: Exercise or Operant Conditioning? I believe neurofeedback is like exercise. In most exercise we have some form of mirror: you might be watching yourself trying to achieve and stay in a pose in yoga, or have a pulse-meter that informs you when you are in or out of the training range in aerobics. There’s nothing innately reinforcing about the pulse meter or even looking at yourself in a mirror or noticing how many pounds you are lifting and how many times. They are ways […]

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 rhythm generators in the middle of the brain, below the cortex. When the cortex, the thinking part of the brain, is working, we expect to […]

Rewards Rewards in neurofeedback are the alerts the brain receives to let it know that it has done something worth repeating. Rewards are set in the computer’s protocol and usually come in the form of tones, or a video playing, or points accumulating in a game. When I trained with Joel Lubar in the early 1990s, he used 30-40% rewards, set the threshold once in the first session and left it in the same place for up to 30 sessions. […]

Deep Brain EEG Measurement The cortex is the “bark” on the outside of the brain–about a quarter-inch thick. There is no “deep-brain cortical structure.” There are a number of structures in the mid-brain which are heavily involved in how the brain works, but there’s a problem. EEG is produced by one (of many) type of neuron called pyramidal. The cortex has a high concentration of pyramidal neurons, and it is on the surface of the brain, so we can record […]

Temporals T5 and T6 are on the equator that runs around the circumference of the head from the middle of the valley that crosses the forehead above the supra-orbital ridge, just touching the top of the left and right ears and running through Oz (about 1.5 inches above the inion). They are 70% of the total distance from Fpz to Oz on that line back from Fpz. T3 and T4 are 50% of the distance and Oz is 100% of […]

Reassessing at the End of Training If you need an assessment to tell you if the training is working…it’s not. If you are hoping to prove that the training worked with the EEG, you’ll probably be disappointed. The assessment or the QEEG could be done several times over a period of a couple days and come up looking quite different depending on whether it was done early in the morning, after lunch, late afternoon, during the school/work year, during summer […]