Hormones and SMR

There are frequently reports of people responding hormonally to brain-training–often to SMR.  It has appeared to me to be somewhat idiosyncratic–not everyone does it–and I’ve never seen anything studied or published about it.  It would be difficult to study, since the range of potential hormonal responses is pretty vast.

We do know that SMR up-training in the sensory-motor cortex frequently improves a person’s ability to fall asleep (SMR bursts at night are called “sleep-spindles” and are related to the shift from stage one sleep–waiting to fall asleep–and actually sleeping).  However, it’s been shown on several occasions that anxiety-related sleep-onset issues (usually related to excessive right-posterior fast-wave activity) do NOT necessarily respond to SMR.  In short, if you train what’s causing the problem, you can change it.  But the magical protocols that fixes all for everyone still hasn’t been found.

Many kinds of training can have the effect of reducing autonomic tone and shifting people away from the consistent sympathetic mode of fight-or-flight.  That, by itself, would allow the body’s hormonal system to operate more fully.  SMR training can help with that, but again it may not really have anything to do with the pattern that holds the brain in the adrenal pattern.