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 vacation, etc. So, if you see changes, are they the result of training–or a big mac with fries half an hour before the data gathering.

I don’t do reassessment with any of my clients, except in cases where the first assessment was of someone who was heavily medicated and they have stopped the meds. In such cases it’s not unusual to see an EEG that appears to have nothing to do with the symptoms the client wants to change. Taking away the meds allows the “real” brain patterns to appear.

It may help to think of an assessment as a snapshot of someone jumping on a trampoline. If you take two pictures a month apart, can you say with any confidence that the client is jumping higher? Of course not. She may have been on the way down in the first photo and near the top of the jump in the next. Surely you’ve looked at enough EEG’s on a power spectrum to recognize that the fantasy of those who don’t deal with the EEG regularly–i.e. that the brain can be “in” alpha or “in” beta–is just a fantasy. Every brain is in alpha and beta and theta and delta all the time, with different emphases depending on the site, the task in process and, yes, environmental factors like Big Macs.

The TQ8, unlike a standard QEEG, does not compare the brain against a normative database. If we assume that a poet and an accountant are likely to have very different brain activation patterns, which one is normal? Instead, the TQ8 takes advantage of excellent work that has been done by many QEEG researchers–yes, including Sterman, Lubar, Gurnee, and others–who have studied groups of people who share the same difficulties in mood/behavior/performance and noted that there is a greater tendency on their part to have a specific variation from what is found in the “normal” databases.

The TQ8 focuses on comparing the brain against itself: Does it produce and block alpha and where and when? How is beta over the left hemisphere related to beta over the right, etc? The assessment allows me to look at a brain and say (always allowing for the fact that there may be artifact if I didn’t actually gather the samples myself) that frontal coherences in fast waves appear quite high, and that would be expected to result in a kind of mental rigidity, perhaps obsessiveness and often anxiety. Without an assessment I’d have no way of knowing that pattern existed. And I can be pretty confident that, if the bouncing trampolinist has long hair and skinny legs in one photo, he’ll probably have them in others taken around the same time. The brain changes, speeds up, slows down, etc. over a day and depending on food, sleep, etc. But these energy relationships tend to remain pretty stable. That said, however, I know from years of experience that some percentage of people complaining of anxiety who show high fast wave coherence in the frontal lobes will be successful in training it down, and when they do, they will experience a positive change. I also know that some percentage won’t be able to budge it much–and some who do still won’t “feel” much having done so.

So, the TQ8 is oriented not toward providing the one magical protocol which will transform the client. I’m not aware of anything that can do that given the blessed individuality of brains. Instead. it gives me blocks of protocols/placements I can test that could be expected to move that client in a positive direction.

Tricky Results from Reassessment

In my experience (before using QEEG’s) when we tracked Theta/Beta ratios over time, there were several categories of response:

• The ratios changed in the “right” direction, and the client changed.
• The ratios changed in the “right” direction and the client didn’t.
• The ratios didn’t change–or went the wrong way–and the client did.

In the 1st case it was great, and everyone was happy.

In the 2nd case, the client didn’t care that the ratio had changed. That wasn’t what he was paying for.

In the 3rd case, unfortunately, some clients ended up being convinced that the changes they had seen were just placebos and were disappointed.

In working with the TQ8, I’d say there have been some clients where a change in the EEG could be seen and others where, if it was visible, I couldn’t find it.

Say you do a QEEG of a kid’s brain before the first time he rides a bike and again after he has learned to do it.  Something has changed.  Does it show up in the QEEG?  Do you NEED the QEEG to tell that it has changed?  Does the fact that a brain becomes ABLE to produce and/or maintain a new state indicate that it WILL use it all the time?  Since most Q’s are primarily done with EC and EO readings–both resting states–isn’t it quite likely that there could be many changes in non-resting capacity that will never show up in a Q?

Personally, I would ask anyone who felt all this assessment was important:

1.  Have you done multiple Q’s on the same client over a period of several days?  Are they all the same, or do the values tend to change?  Most people I know who use Q’s would admit that, since the Q is nothing more than a snapshot of a highly variable system, it’s highly likely that it will change from recording to recording.

2.  If that’s the case, then what assurance do you have that the changes you “find” are anything more than random variability based on when you recorded it?

3. When you look at the Q’s dozens of measures and you “find” one that looks like it changed the way you thought it might, do you ever find things that changed in the “wrong” direction?  Do you mention those to the client?  Do you decide those prove your training is NOT working?

My position has been that, if the human brain, with its billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, is indeed the most complex system in the universe, it strikes me as being a bit naive to assume that you’ll press x button and x will change.  Brain training would be a lot less interesting to me, if that were the case.

An assessment, in my view, is a snapshot that gives us some clues as to brain energy patterns that are likely to be related to patterns of mood, thought, performance, control. Whole-Brain training is based on the idea that, by training a batch of the most significant indicators we find in an individual brain we allow the brain to shift its homeostasis.  That results in stable changes in the client’s life.  That’s what the client seeks when he comes to train his brain.  That’s what I choose to assess as a way of determining how successful our work has been.