Brain-Trainer Approach The Brain-Trainer approach is more than just a full-brain workout. It is a unique and important way of understanding the brain’s electrical habits of being and how to shift those for optimal performance.

Tone Tone, as used in the TQ Assessment, refers to autonomic tone and relates to emotional stress building over a significant period of time, resulting in disruptions of the autonomically-mediated functions of the body, as well as relatively ongoing levels of anxiety or depression. It’s important not to confuse the Tone category, which does include the over-wound autonomic response, with the specific brain activation patterns that make it up. Tone is a meta-category, which takes in folks whose brains are […]

Filtering and Processing In the Brain-Trainer system we split attention into two groups that are ends of a continuum: Filtering and Processing. Processing and Filtering are the two categories we use to cover what is commonly called ADHD. Filtering people can’t manage the interface between the outside world and their inside world. They are easily distracted by things around them because they cannot control what stimulation is coming in. They act and speak impulsively because they cannot control what’s going […]

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 Tom Brownback, which looks at the subjective issues (are there obsessive, compulsive, addictive or phobic problems) which would suggest frontal midline disruptions. If those are […]

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 […]

Variance/Variability On the variability page of the TQ assessment, the coefficient of variability is the Variance (standard deviation squared) divided by the mean. It shows the number of times that variance is greater than the average, so a higher number means a much more spread-out distribution–less effective control of brain activity in that area and in that frequency. Variability in one frequency doesn’t necessarily have any relationship to variability at others, so if beta for example is surging, that doesn’t […]