Based on some research done years ago, we used to use a tape player (to show you how old this was) to play music in the background during our sessions in Atlanta. 60-beat Baroque (e.g. air on a G string, Pachelbel Canon) definitely helped people into the middle frequencies, especially alpha. Mozart, the faster sections of some of his works, especially with higher pitched solo instruments (clarinet, violin) tended to help people produce a beta state. We played these in […]

Binaural Beats Binaural beats are the result of hearing two different signals entering each ear separately but at the same time. This causes harmonics we hear as beats. The brain as a whole responds to them and often moves in the direction of the beat frequency. The beat rate is the difference between two separate tones, one entering one ear and the other the other ear. Sending a 300 Hz signal into one ear and 310 Hz into the other, […]

Brain Exercises Do brain exercises work? I’ve used several of them with clients and myself, and the ones I used pretty much did the same thing. Asking whether they work is like asking whether doing aerobic exercise will improve fitness. The answer is “yes, if you do it consistently over a period of time.” That’s always the problem. Clients get started and do the exercises several times, but then it becomes another chore that starts getting put off or missed […]

EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) EMDR, when it works, is faster than neurofeedback, but it is very specific to an individual traumatic memory, so you have to do it a bunch of times if the client has more than one or two traumatic memories–and some clients are very disturbed by the process of bringing the traumatic experience back into memory, preferring not to do it. Neurofeedback doesn’t seem to work with individual memories. It is more oriented toward changing […]

Entrainment The brain is essentially an organ that receives information from outside (sensory inputs) and inside (memories, emotional responses, associations with previous experience), integrates all this and responds to it with motor outputs (speaking, acting) and changes in its own body’s internal environment. This is a constant cycle with outputs creating inputs (how did the teacher respond to what I said) which create more outputs, which result in more inputs ad infinitum. Holosync and other systems of binaural beats essentially […]

Heart-Rate Variability Training (HRV) There is a fair amount of research suggesting that, when the autonomic nervous system is working properly–not over-stressed–heart rate dances around like a barefoot ballerina on hot concrete. When stress levels are high, it tends to become rigidly locked into certain rates. The more variable the rate, the healthier the heart. Hence, training HRV is reputed to have a positive effect on both the heart and the brain. HRV is an excellent training–like almost all peripheral […]

Games for Slow Brains It can be challenging to work with clients who have very slow brains. The following games may help you enhance your work with such clients, who tend to process information visually rather than with words. The Naming Game The naming game works like this: The player’s job is to name as many things as possible, out loud, that they can see in the area where you are working, in one minute. The coach counts the number […]

RSA Breathing (Respiratory sinus arrhythmia) Since RSA breathing tends to stimulate the vagus nerve, which pushes you into parasympathetic mode–and is the pair of the cranial nerves that connects the brain to the abdomen via the heart, esophagus and lungs, it prepares the body to participate more effectively in these parasympathetic maintenance functions. It also reduces autonomic stress, so doing it multiple times during the day creates points in the stress graph which produce drops, breaking up the steady climb, […]

We are frequently asked about ways to make training sessions better or what tools can be used to improve and extend the results of neurofeedback training. The following is our commentary. It is not meant to be comprehensive. Trainer Improvement Tips Neurofeedback is good Zen practice (at least with brain-trainer designs) for the trainer. The main job is to be aware and NOT ACT any more than necessary. In the early sessions, after letting the client try to find the […]

Meditation Meditation is a process of allowing the brain to enter into the highly-efficient phase-synchrony state and stay there.  Alpha synchrony has long been recognized as the state of still mind/present in the moment–the meditative state, but also a peak performance, zone or flow state used by athletes, performers or others to perform tasks over which they have achieved mastery.  Gamma synchrony has more recently been identified as a state in which intercommunication among areas of the brain happens rapidly […]