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 […]

Below are some concepts in understanding montages. For more information in understanding how to ready the montages in your Whole-Brain Training plan, please see our videos. Just to repeat one of the conventions we use, when a montage is listed, it should be listed as Active/Reference. If we follow that convention, then if someone writes C4/P4, it means that C4 is active and P4 is reference. A two-channel montage would be C4/A2/g/P4/A2. References There are three kinds of 2-channel (or […]

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 […]

Synchrony Synchrony indicates that two waveforms are coherent (consistent relationship between their peaks and valleys) and in phase (peak and valleys happening at the same time in both waveforms). If that is true when you add the waves together, the peaks are added to the peaks, giving the largest possible positive number, and the valleys are added to the valleys, giving the largest possible negative number. Thus the sum of the two, when we look at the absolute values, removing […]

See Tech Support for information on how to do brain maps. This section is to provide tips for gathering better data. In the TQ guide we recommend that assessments be recorded before 11am. The assessment gives the trainer a starting place. I know what NOT to aim at, and have some ideas as to where and what seems to be a “bad energy habit” that might be resulting in states and behaviors that the client would like to change. But […]

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 […]