NeuroFeedback, NeurOptimal and Electroencephalography

Flashing lights at specific frequencies has been shown to influence oscillations in some parts of the brain, so the researchers turned to strobe lights. They started by exposing young mice with a propensity for amyloid build-up to flickering LED lights for one hour. This created a drop in free-floating amyloid, but it was temporary, lasting less than 24 hours, and restricted to the visual cortex.

To achieve a longer-lasting effect on animals with amyloid plaques, they repeated the experiment for an hour a day over the course of a week, this time using older mice in which plaques had begun to form. Twenty-four hours after the end of the experiment, these animals showed a 67% reduction in plaque in the visual cortex compared with controls. The team also found that the technique reduced tau protein, another hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s plaques tend to have their earliest negative impacts on the hippocampus, however, not the visual cortex. To elicit oscillations where they are needed, Tsai and her colleagues are investigating other techniques. Playing rodents a 40-hertz noise, for example, seems to cause a decrease in amyloid in the hippocampus — perhaps because the hippo-campus sits closer to the auditory cortex than to the visual cortex.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02391-6

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Bobo08 said:

Overall, the result has been positive. I no longer feel the familiar knot in my solar plexus when attempting to pay attention to my body. My social anxiety has also decreased a lot, to the point that I can hold a relatively long conversation in a small group at work, something that I had particular difficulties with before.

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truth seeker said:

I've now done 7 and 8 sessions. The 7th was with the 'auto nav' function mentioned here. I thought it was a deeper and more intensive session. As if more 'work' was being done or that it was being done 'faster'. There were more body and brain sensations. This was after a day at work where I was having trouble focusing and being present.

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Bobo08 said:

On the negative side, I find it more difficult to sleep through the night, frequently waking up around 2 - 3 am. I also feel a mild headache from day 2 until yesterday. It seems like my brain was working very hard to adapt to the new pathways.

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Bobo08 said:

PS: I always sit and watch the brainwave on the screen while doing the sessions. What Persej posted above reminds me of the strobing effect of computer screens. So I think it might be better to listen to the music only. Not sure what others think about it.

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Approaching Infinity said:

truth seeker said:

I've now done 7 and 8 sessions. The 7th was with the 'auto nav' function mentioned here. I thought it was a deeper and more intensive session. As if more 'work' was being done or that it was being done 'faster'. There were more body and brain sensations. This was after a day at work where I was having trouble focusing and being present.

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Just want to add that I learned a bit more about the system, and that autonav wasn't actually autonav. Autonav is the default feature. What we ended up doing was setting it at a default difficulty level (which can be adjusted). So for that session, the "difficulty" (i.e. number of brain 'errors' it detects and tries to correct) was at a constant level, whereas during ordinary functioning, the system dynamically adjusts the difficulty level based on the data it's getting from the brain.

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Bobo08 said:

So I have done 6 NO sessions. The first 4 sessions are done 36 hours apart. The last two 24 hours apart in light of recent discussion in this thread.

Overall, the result has been positive. I no longer feel the familiar knot in my solar plexus when attempting to pay attention to my body. My social anxiety has also decreased a lot, to the point that I can hold a relatively long conversation in a small group at work, something that I had particular difficulties with before.

Click to expand...

The brainwave spectrum on the NO program shows that my left braine hemisphere is much more active than the right one, and that the lower frequencies (representing dissociation) have much higher amplitudes than any other region. Those findings are not surprising, and it is hopeful that they are trending towards a more balanced state.

The results so far give me a lot of hope as this is one of the very few things that helped with my crippling anxiety and dissociation (the other thing that helped was the EE program). It also seems to fit well with findings and recommendations from the HDT book about preverbal trauma for Connection type people. So I will continue to do one session per day for one full month to see what will happen.

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Frequencies and Amplitudes

If you’re anything like me, you have tried to avoid words like these and the particular rigors and arrogance of hard science. (This was much more true for me before my own neurofeedback training than it is now.) These terms and concepts are, however, key to the venture we are undertaking, even if we don’t know exactly how. Fortunately, they don’t end up being particularly daunting. Whenever we talk about circuitry, we are talking about frequency and amplitude. The frequencies at which the brain fires underwrite every feeling, thought, and deed, so frequency is important. Frequency, in our context, is the number of times a brain wave rises and falls in the period of 1 second. It is measured in Hertz (Hz), also called cycles per second (CPS). The brain operates in frequencies from 0 to 100 Hz and perhaps even higher. There are names attached to these frequencies, noted below, that are useful to know because they are so widely used, but in keeping records and talking to colleagues, you will always want to specify the actual numerical frequency range and not the name given to it. With that caveat, here are the names.

0–3 Hz Delta
4–7 Hz Theta
8–11 Hz Alpha
12–15 Hz SMR, also low beta
15–18 Hz Beta
18–36 Hz High beta
36–45 Hz Gamma

These frequencies, as we will see, relate directly to arousal and to state.

Delta Frequency (0–3 Hz)

Delta brain waves are most often seen in sleep. It is a slow wave, rising and falling three or less times in a second. These wave forms happen when the brain is disengaged from external input and is in relationship primarily to itself. But delta is also seen in the waking brains of the vast majority of those who have experienced head injury and in most people who have suffered early childhood abuse and neglect. There is a good deal of speculation about what this means in people with developmental trauma. Some speculate that it demonstrates the brain’s tendency toward instability, because seizures tend to propagate subcortically in these slow rhythms. Others have suggested that it is a manifestation of a developmental or maturational lag; that these brains return to their earliest wave forms as a default position. The brains of babies cycle slowly, predominately in delta, until age 2 or so.

This frequency factoid becomes increasingly important, particularly when we discuss alpha–theta training in Chapters 7 and 8. Seeing delta frequencies in patients with developmental trauma suggests to me the likely presence of developmental brain injury. At the very least this frequency in a patient is an indicator that this brain at this sensor location is not appropriately interactive with the external environment and perhaps lost in its own repetitive internal brain dialogue. A system meant to be “open” to its environment is closed and necessarily self-referential. In most cases, we want our patients with developmental trauma to reduce the prominence of delta overtime, which is the purpose of inhibits. As we will see, we train the brain not only to produce more of certain frequencies (i.e., what we reward), we also ask it to make less of other frequencies, such as delta or theta (i.e., what we inhibit).

This need to reduce delta waves is particularly important when we are dealing with dissociative phenomenon. A young patient with DID decided to focus one session entirely on reducing her slow wave activity (in this case, 0–6 Hz). Her slow wave amplitude was high (we’ll get to amplitude in a moment), often over 70 microvolts (μV). Ideally, the amplitude of these waves is less than 10 μV. I actively coached her in her efforts, and she brought her amplitude down to 12 μV. She said, “It is as if
sparklers are going off in my brain. I don’t think I have ever seen this room or you so clearly.” And later she told me that her friends remarked on her clarity and her mental quickness. She diminished the influence of slow wave activity by, in this case, being rewarded to make less of it. She arrived in a subsequent session in one of her male alters and said that she didn’t want to do that slow wave down-training. As would always be the case, I agreed to her request and asked her why. Her answer stunned me. “I think it will make me [the alter] disappear.” She was not being theoretical. Her concern suggests that she had a sense or had somehow known that her fragmented others resided in these slow waves. I don’t know how she knew, but she was probably right. In Freud’s hierarchy, delta is the brain state that correlates to the unconscious.

Theta Frequency (4–7 Hz)

We pass through theta as we fall asleep, when we are drowsy and filled with hypnogogic images. Theta is considered a highly creative state, unlinked from the constraints of logic and daily demand. With practice its images are retrievable by the more conscious mind. It is reported that when Einstein felt stumped—when he had been wracking his brain without a breakthrough—he would take a nap, most likely to induce this theta state. He could then solve the problem that had perplexed his fully awake mind. Theta is the state induced by most hypnosis, and it also relates to some of the deepest states of meditation.

The patient with DID just mentioned had excess low theta at about 4 and 5 Hz as well as excess delta as part of the slow wave dysfunction. This profile is typical in developmental trauma, at least at the temporal lobes. Children are predominately in theta from ages 2 to 5, a time of magical thinking and normative hallucination, or perhaps daylight hypnogogic events. This can be seen in such common phenomena as imaginary friends. My 3-year-old daughter insisted that she saw an elephant in the woods . . . in Massachusetts. She was unshakable in her finding.

There is an approach to training called alpha–theta that rewards the brain to visit these deeper theta reaches while maintaining intermittent access to alpha, ideally allowing the trainee to remember what she experienced and bring it into conscious awareness. Alpha–theta training is done in a reclining position with eyes closed. Body position affects brain wave production. We naturally make more slow waves as we recline, which is why most of us need to lie down to go to sleep. As we will see in Chapters 7 and 8, alpha–theta training can be very helpful in working with developmental trauma as well as with addiction, a sadly common comorbidity in adolescents and adults. Clinical experience has demonstrated that alpha–theta training facilitates access to traumatic memories otherwise unknown to the patient.

One of my patients, a woman who had been diagnosed with BPD and who was at perpetual risk of suicide, was a textbook example of the best alpha–theta outcome, and her results convinced me of its efficacy. She described being on the ceiling looking down at her father molesting her as a baby, confirming her worst suspicions. This alone would have impressed me some, but not all that much, as she had been speculating about this for a long time, without any prior source of validation. It could have been autosuggestion. I became convinced when she also reported seeing clearly that her father had not done other things that she feared he had. She became free of these haunts within 20 alpha–theta sessions, stabilized emotionally, and became newly compassionate and capable with her father.

Not every case of alpha–theta training goes like this; in fact, there are always individual differences, but it is instructive nonetheless. (An important side note here. I can easily be criticized for making too much out of a single case, and it is a healthy caution. However, it must be remembered that a good deal of what we know about the brain comes from single-case studies of injured brains.) The question that we explore more fully in Chapter 7 is whether early childhood trauma, and perhaps even later-occurring shocks, are encoded in theta and even delta frequencies and therefore not easily accessible to a brain–mind operating in higher frequencies most of the time. In Freud’s system, theta might correlate to the subconscious. Theta frequencies are in overproduction at the very time in life when we are learning the social rules and may, in this light, also relate to the concept of superego, which is either overwhelming or absent in developmental trauma.

Alpha Frequency (8–11 Hz)

In normative terms, by the time a child reaches age 6, the dominant frequency in the brain is closest to alpha and by age 10 it will be around 10 Hz. Alpha is resplendent in the relaxation literature and associated with calm, perhaps even being “laid back” (note the postural reference). It may be difficult to put these two images together: that of a 6-year-old and that of relaxation—the very last thing that most 6-year-olds have in mind. Clearly the predominance of alpha frequencies (and for that matter, any frequency) can be experienced differently by different people, and there are very different environmental imperatives for children and adults. In children the frequency of alpha establishes what will become the dominant frequency for the adult. The dominant frequency is the background rhythm of the brain, or the sampling rate the brain uses in its interface with the outside world. It is also used to modulate activation. It is typically measured at PZ. In adults, a reading lower than 9 Hz or above 12 Hz usually signals problems. Ideally the adult dominant frequency is between 9 and 11 Hz.

Interestingly, alpha frequencies are not necessarily relaxing for adults either. For some, training to produce alpha can lead to heaviness and lethargy, and in others, to increased levels of reactivity and anxiety. The latter pattern is the most common in those with developmental trauma. Even alpha reinforcement (reward) can be too arousing for their overly aroused nervous systems. This is yet another conundrum for the field and a question yet to be answered about how the brain works. As mentioned above, alpha is also considered a bridging frequency between delta and theta, up into beta wakefulness. When people have trouble remembering their dreams, they are not spending enough time in alpha as they transition out of sleep. If you are awakened by an alarm, you are likely to bolt from delta right into beta, and dreams, theta-stuff, disappear. Increased alpha may correspond to lighter states in meditation. Alpha and all higher frequencies would relate to Freud’s conscious mind. We are awake in alpha but usually not all that active.

SMR (12–15 Hz)

The term SMR has been in use since Sterman’s naming of it in the late 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, unlike the other categories, it is not presently used by neurologists. In the Greek classification, it is considered to be high alpha or low beta. The SMR state is characterized as calm and alert, like Sterman’s cats. In neurofeedback, it can be used mistakenly to refer to any eyes-open training aimed at lowering arousal at C4. This is a case in point about why it is important to use the numerical frequencies. When the field was young, there were three placements: C3, C4, and CZ (you’ll understand more about placement in the next section, “Applying the Sensors”) and two frequencies to train, 12–15 (SMR) to lower arousal, usually on the right (C4), and 15–18 Hz (beta) to raise arousal, usually on the left (C3). I mentioned that alpha is not always calming and the same can be said of SMR, even more so, particularly with people who are dealing with trauma. It is rarely quieting for people who have endured this primary insult. In fact, this is a pretty safe beginning assumption until an individual’s brain teaches you otherwise.

My chronically suicidal “borderline” patient reported feeling a sense of dread after training at 12–15 Hz. By then the neurofeedback system had evolved, and we had a full range of frequency filters —which meant that we could train at any frequency from 1 to 45 Hz. At 13–16 Hz the dread dissolved and she reported, “My whole brain is smiling.” SMR was too low for her, but this is not a typical reaction. In cases of developmental trauma, 12–15 Hz is usually too high.

I met with a colleague, a trauma survivor in a country of trauma survivors. He was chain-smoking, speaking rapidly, jumpy and anxious. When I asked him if he was training himself, he said he that he’d given up, that it didn’t work for him. He had done over 100 sessions at 12–15 Hz. The frequency was much too high for him and actually drove his nervous system into higher arousal and more dysfunction, rather than less of both. He had been a believer in SMR, and he’d made a classic mistake by pinning his training on theory rather than on observation of his own experience. When he trained at a much lower frequency, he was able to relax deeply. His assistants told me they had never seen him so at ease. This is just a cautionary tale. Although the RH normatively cycles at 12–15 Hz, or there about, it does not mean that it will necessarily benefit from training at that frequency. We find that out from an individual’s response. We’ll look into this issue more in Chapter 7 when we discuss protocols.

Beta Frequency (15–18 Hz)

Beta is the presumed cycling speed of the LH; it cycles faster than the RH primarily to support speech. Our brains are making primarily beta waves while we are reading, writing, or doing math. If you are not cycling in beta, you will have trouble with demanding cognitive tasks, and if you produce too much beta, it will be difficult to access the lower frequencies implicated in creative problem solving. In working with developmental trauma the problem generally is one of very high arousal. It is very easy to tip these nervous systems into overarousal with an outpouring of reactive shame, anger, and terror—the last thing you want to do. So when working with these patients it is the general rule to tread lightly on the LH and when LH training is indicated, a frequency band lower than 15–18 may feel better. In neurofeedback training what feels good is good. (Interestingly, the unnamed bandwidth of 18–22 Hz is elevated in almost everyone taking benzodiazepines [Tan, Uchida, Matsuura, Nishihara, & Kojima, 2003; van Lier, Drinkenburg, van Eeten, & Coenen, 2004]. It is called the benzo bump. This finding is a little counterintuitive, considering that these drugs are prescribed for anxiety.)

High Beta Frequency (22–36 Hz)

We have seen that as we raise frequencies, we raise arousal, all with mental state correlations. High beta has less of a mental signature. It is usually regarded as reflecting muscle tension and is almost always inhibited in standard neurofeedback setups. The goal for the trainee is to lower the amplitude of these wave forms both by relaxing their muscles and by watching the screen. A young Russian adoptee showed me her prowess during my visit to her residential center. She was able to reduce her amplitudes of fast wave, in the 30s, to 6 in the course of a few minutes without my being able to discern any effort on her part to relax her body. After the training she looked more relaxed and reported feeling so. She was on her way to becoming one of their success stories, and she was delighted with her ability to control frequencies in her brain. This is not a trivial ability when you have lived believing that you had no control over anything— yourself or anyone else. All trauma survivors appear to carry memory in their bodies. One would surmise that we would commonly see excessive high beta in their EEGs, but we don’t. This young girl showed high amplitudes of high beta, and not that much excess slow wave, at least by the time I met her. Frank Putnam reports that most of his patients with developmental trauma show excess high beta (personal communication, June 6, 2008). Although it makes sense that this should be true, I don’t see it all that often. When I do, I will focus on it, as this girl did, and also teach breathing and relaxation exercises specifically aimed at relaxing the body.

I haven’t yet been able to parse out profiles of patients with developmental trauma who show excess slow wave, except in the case of dissociation, from those who show excess high beta or fast wave. Perhaps this high beta–low slow wave profile suggests less vulnerability to seizure. These patients may complain of clenched jaws and fists. They may arch and hyperextend their backs and hold their shoulders high. Survivors of developmental trauma often have very high arches (a neurologist told me that high arches correlate with neurological instability), and posture is always an issue. It may just be how developmental trauma history has “taught” this patient to carry the reality of inescapable abuse and even more inescapable neglect. Most of my patients have little trouble with high beta, but every one of them has had excessive slow wave and some have high amplitudes of both.

Gamma Frequency (36–45 Hz)

When I began neurofeedback in 1996, there was little if any mention of the gamma band, but in the last few years interest in it has increased. It seems to be implicated in the full body nature of the “aha moment” that makes us almost shiver with delight. This may be a frequency implicit in the moment of deep insight, so important to the therapeutic process. It seems to be in this instance a frequency of mind–body communication.

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seek10 said:

I had the Sebern F. Fisher's book " Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma Calming the Fear-Driven Brain". She writes

Frequencies and Amplitudes

Alpha Frequency (8–11 Hz)

In normative terms, by the time a child reaches age 6, the dominant frequency in the brain is closest to alpha and by age 10 it will be around 10 Hz. Alpha is resplendent in the relaxation literature and associated with calm, perhaps even being “laid back” (note the postural reference). It may be difficult to put these two images together: that of a 6-year-old and that of relaxation—the very last thing that most 6-year-olds have in mind. Clearly the predominance of alpha frequencies (and for that matter, any frequency) can be experienced differently by different people, and there are very different environmental imperatives for children and adults. In children the frequency of alpha establishes what will become the dominant frequency for the adult. The dominant frequency is the background rhythm of the brain, or the sampling rate the brain uses in its interface with the outside world. It is also used to modulate activation. It is typically measured at PZ. In adults, a reading lower than 9 Hz or above 12 Hz usually signals problems. Ideally the adult dominant frequency is between 9 and 11 Hz.

Interestingly, alpha frequencies are not necessarily relaxing for adults either. For some, training to produce alpha can lead to heaviness and lethargy, and in others, to increased levels of reactivity and anxiety. The latter pattern is the most common in those with developmental trauma. Even alpha reinforcement (reward) can be too arousing for their overly aroused nervous systems. This is yet another conundrum for the field and a question yet to be answered about how the brain works. As mentioned above, alpha is also considered a bridging frequency between delta and theta, up into beta wakefulness. When people have trouble remembering their dreams, they are not spending enough time in alpha as they transition out of sleep. If you are awakened by an alarm, you are likely to bolt from delta right into beta, and dreams, theta-stuff, disappear. Increased alpha may correspond to lighter states in meditation. Alpha and all higher frequencies would relate to Freud’s conscious mind. We are awake in alpha but usually not all that active.

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seek10 said:

Bobo08 said:

So I have done 6 NO sessions. The first 4 sessions are done 36 hours apart. The last two 24 hours apart in light of recent discussion in this thread.

Overall, the result has been positive. I no longer feel the familiar knot in my solar plexus when attempting to pay attention to my body. My social anxiety has also decreased a lot, to the point that I can hold a relatively long conversation in a small group at work, something that I had particular difficulties with before.

Click to expand...

I did 4 as of now. After the first one, I was feeling very good. As I observed before with other modalities, first session i tend to see dramatic difference, later things tend to calm down and fade away for not following up or other habits. In this case, I can see marked reduction in arousal but i still struggle with "some thing wrong with you" anxiety program particularly waking up, though the arousal is markedly reduced.

The brainwave spectrum on the NO program shows that my left braine hemisphere is much more active than the right one, and that the lower frequencies (representing dissociation) have much higher amplitudes than any other region. Those findings are not surprising, and it is hopeful that they are trending towards a more balanced state.

The results so far give me a lot of hope as this is one of the very few things that helped with my crippling anxiety and dissociation (the other thing that helped was the EE program). It also seems to fit well with findings and recommendations from the HDT book about preverbal trauma for Connection type people. So I will continue to do one session per day for one full month to see what will happen.

Click to expand...

I was trying to understand the "analysis" spectrograms, frequencies etc. based Information on the User manual on the tablet, information from other video's on the forum. It was not clear and talked to the Therapist who rented the unit. Again she says, don't bother, they are going to remove the feature in future software versions. Just do the "training" program. Well, I was curious as the nueroptimal is advancement from EEG studies etc, which are manually set and how it is reflected on the developmental trauma.

I had the Sebern F. Fisher's book " Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma Calming the Fear-Driven Brain". She writes

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Chu said:

Our NF lady told us to space the sessions at least by 48hs, since the training is supposed to keep working during that time. So doing one a day, for example, is (allegedly) counterproductive, as you stop the training mid-way instead of letting your brain assimilate things.

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Gaby said:

Regardless of how frequent or the ideal number of sessions for each person, or how many trainings people can accommodate in their lives, we will have to aim for the Work and trust this aim because it is the right thing to do. Then, any help we might receive will have better results.

Just some thoughts.

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