Whole-Brain Training

Since I’ve been in Brazil, I’ve been doing workshops in Portuguese and establishing 6-month-long supervision arrangements with individual (or, ideally, pairs of) trainers. It has been a great improvement in being able to stay connected through their development, and it has been great for me, since it allows me to learn from them as they develop.

One woman in particular has a practice where she trains brains for (originally) a neurologist and (more recently, based on results) a couple psychiatrists. She’s very busy and an excellent trainer, but she hasn’t been interested in learning to do her own training plans, so she meets with me online for 1-2 hours to go over her new clients and get a training plan. That’s been going on for more than two years, and it’s been great for me because I’ve gotten to hear the feedback on the clients we’ve previously worked up.

I was speaking with her on Monday past and she mentioned that we had just passed 100 clients where she’d implemented training plans. She mentioned that there had been 2 of that group who had not been successful in their outcomes, and I was astonished! She doesn’t judge this herself. These are the reports from the clients and their families to their physicians and the physicians’ evaluations as well!

I told her I needed to come visit her and have her teach ME a course in how to train! Anyone who’s been around NF any length of time has heard the ubiquitous stories of trainers who fix everyone and everything, though there is rarely any data or corroboration for these claims. I’ve always felt that if I got close to 80% in resolving the issues a client brought to training, that was pretty good. But 98% confirmed by tough evaluators is nearly impossible.

She is a very simple woman, and she wouldn’t accept that her training had been responsible for her results–it was all my plans. But I know that I and others who use the plans produced from the TQ don’t get those results, so I finally got her talking about what she did. Fortunately, after all the times I’ve told her how to implement a brain-trainer training plan, she did it her own way, and I learned some very interesting things from her that are changing the way I work with clients–and hopefully will work as well for me as they do for her.

First: I usually told people to test the options in the training plan one time through, then pick the best one(s) and focus on those. She doesn’t do that. She trains through the whole set of 5-6 sessions…then she does it again and again. I’ve heard from others who have done this because they couldn’t get good information from their clients to decide which protocols were best, but I don’t know of anyone else who was doing this as a regular approach. It made sense to me when I thought of it, though. Each recommendation in the plan is specifically designed to move something that appears related to the client’s issues. The brain may not respond it a training the first time, but may catch it the 2nd or 3rd time around. It struck me that this was like a brain training version of circuit training or doing various types of aerobic exercise instead of always doing the same one.

Second: I told trainers, if the brain doesn’t like a particular training, stop doing it. She doesn’t do that. Instead of dropping a session if the client finds it irritating, etc., she talks with the client about it: what is there about this training that bothers you? How did you feel when you were doing it, and why is that unpleasant for you. She skips the next session and does just HEG and breathing work for a session, then she returns to the rotation. She reports that often the next time around, the client will find the session he/she resisted to have an especially positive effect. It reminded me of arguments I used to have with Paul Swingle when we were finishing up the FutureHealth Foundations of Neurofeedback course over several years. Paul would train to increase slow activity in the back of traumatized clients’ brains and when they found it scary or unpleasant, he’d basically tell them to “suck it up”; no gain without pain, etc. I’ve always taught that the brain may not be ready for that training, so let it guide the training, but I realized that by doing what I’ve been doing I may very well have been cutting off the most powerful change-oriented protocols in the plan. By focusing the client on why he or she didn’t like the training instead of blaming the training itself, we give the brain a different message.

Third: She starts each client off with a couple sessions of just HEG and RSA breathing before starting the EEG.

Fourth: She bugs me throughout the training planning sessions asking “what is this protocol for?”, “what should this help with?”, etc. I tease her about that, but she told me in our conversation that she uses this with the client. She explains why they are doing this and what should happen as a result. I don’t do that, because I don’t want to set up expectations or tell the client what they SHOULD feel. But I’m going to start trying it.

If any of this helps any of you, great! It has helped me, and I started seeing even better results with those clients I train as well!

She’s doing 30 minutes of EEG training and 10-20 of HEG per session. Sessions depend on client response and the initial problem. She’s worked with a number of young head injury clients, and they run beyond 40 sessions generally. The majority of children are 35-40 sessions and most adults are 25-30. The plan might include 3 trainings of 10 minutes each, for example F4 with F7 2-channel, then C4 with T4 2-channel, then P4 with T6 two channels, all inhibiting 19-38 and rewarding 6-13. In other words the 2-3 trainings in each session generally train the same thing in several areas or train the same are with several challenges (e.g. increasing coherence between Fz and Pz, training down slow alpha at both sites and perhaps training down 2-11 and increasing 13-21 at Fz and Cz, all 2-channel.

I don’t know that it’s changed the speed of training, since those are about the numbers of sessions I’d expect.