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 lobes show greater activation (higher beta levels and lower alpha) than the frontal areas. Instead of the back of the brain simply integrating sensory inputs into a unified picture to be sent forward for processing (an alpha task), they attempt to process the individual bits of information (can’t wait for the bad news!). The frontal lobes seem to “let go” in response to this usurpation of their processing function. These clients often show with a driven character, very productive, demanding of themselves and others, working long hours and then occasionally crashing, sometimes showing explosions of anger–sometimes after controlling it for a long time–and often have a sleep pattern of falling asleep easily but awakening after an hour or a few and not being able to sleep again. These folks often show anxiety–or at least experience it. They may also be reversed in terms of left vs right prefrontal beta/alpha activation–too active on the right–which is more likely to be depressive and may not show some of the other elements of this pattern. I find that training alpha/theta ratio up toward 1.5 at P4 or training alpha coherence up at P3 and P4 works well as a start, and then finishing with a bit of beta up/theta or alpha down at F3.

If you work with adults, you can pretty much expect to see a lot of reversals. When I first identified the pattern and began training with it, I was sure I must have made a mistake, because the first 10-12 people we assessed had one or the other or both. I looked at my brain, and I didn’t have them, so I knew at least it was possible, and I’d say probably 20-30% of the adults I see as clients or as trainees don’t have reversals, but they are a common strategy the brains in our culture adopt to respond the stresses and demands they face.

Left/right reversals essentially damp down the expectations of a positive universe, so there is less of a mismatch between what the brain expects and the generally negative view a highly stressed brain has of the world; front/back reversals shift the process of evaluating the “meaning” of sensory inputs to the back of the brain, which gets them faster but is not really equipped to evaluate them.

The approach I recommend is to start with problems like hot temporals, reversals, etc. which are more related to the source of the emotional drive before changing the defense against it (hot cingulate). Better to fix the broken leg before training away the crutch. But the dictum is, if it works, go ahead and do it.

Beta Reversals

Beta reversals mean that beta is higher on homologous right hemisphere sites than left or in the posterior sites than the frontal. Of course, this depends on what the beta relative values are. When I see a beta reversal, my first question is always whether the problem is too much beta on the right or too little on the left.

If the reversal relates to excessive fast activity on the right, train it down (and alpha up) on the right. If it relates to low beta levels on the left, train down whatever is high on the left. If the betas are in the 14-17% range, use the symmetry/balance designs.

If the beta values on the right are above 16% and higher than the left sites, then you’ll probably train it down on the right. If they are below 14% on the left, then I’d train down whatever is high (delta, theta, alpha) on the left to increase the relative beta–with or without a beta reward. Ditto front/back reversals.

Front-to-Back Reversal

You can have a front/back alpha reversal with low levels of alpha in both areas (e.g. Alpha/Theta ratios well below 1 with eyes closed). Or you could have reversal with high ratios (above 1.5 in the front). The former would probably show us a person with anxiety, perhaps depression, perhaps sleep issues; the latter probably low motivation and drive. Of course, how fast the alpha is could also have an effect as well as relationships in beta, etc.

With front/back beta reversals, I always teach that you can train down beta in the back IF there is enough alpha! If the alpha theta ratios are lower than, say, 1.3 or so, I would train up alpha. Especially get the 10-12 Hz alpha going.

Fast wave coherence, if it is really there (not an artifact of muscle tension or electromagnetic field radiation), suggests that the neuron pools are locked together. Neurons producing beta should act like commodities traders with cell phones: take a quick order from a client, ring off, call in the order, ring off, get another call, ring off, make a call, ring off–very efficiently sharing information among sites, like the pivot-man in a double-play in baseball: catch the ball, tag the base, throw the ball, all so fast that you can’t really be sure he touched it. But when fast wave coherence is high, that suggests something more like two adolescent girls on their cellphones together: hours at a time, sharing very little information, but locking up the communication capability so neither can take other calls or make other calls. You might expect to see cognitive inefficiency, rigidity, difficulty with switching appropriately.

With Multiband coherence training (up or down or combined or rocking) now easily do-able with Brain-Trainer designs, and with connectivity being a critical issue in many brains, it’s not uncommon to see 4 site pairs trained for synchrony or gamma in a training plan, making up 25-50% of the segments depending on the state of the brain. For trainers using 4C amps like the Optima 4 or the Q-wiz, 4C synchrony and coherence can halve the time required for this.

All coherence training should be done with linked ear reference and alpha coherence should be done eyes closed.