Show #40 - Nora Gedgaudas Interview: Beyond Paleo - Primal Ice Age Diet

Loved the show! I was totally captivated by the process and info of neurofeedback. Nora was so well spoken and had connected together so many pieces of the puzzle that I felt very fortunate to have had the chance to listen to her. I was surprised and very glad to hear that parents with sociopathic children could find some relief and support with Neurofeedback and more importantly, that children actually improved without having to have drugs administered!!

Those of us on the forum are so lucky to have multiple ways in approaching the cleaning of our organisms: EE, the forum, info from Knowledge and Being videos and awesome sott radio with experts such as Nora and Dr. Elita. Each of us is so much better equipped to tailor our healing to our own needs this way.

Big thanks from me for putting it all out there!
 
Nienna said:
Laura said:
Turgon said:
I'm having the chance to listen to the interview over again and I'm not sure if it would make them better at manipulating people. Neurofeedback is kind of like looking in the mirror from a brain functionality standpoint and if essential psychopaths have limbic systems or certain parts of the brain that do not function like that of people who have the potential to express genuine emotions, doing this type of therapy might reflect back that there's little to no activity in those areas (if they are the areas being monitored) rather than give them another tool to manipulate people. It's one thing to pretend to have empathy and real emotions but another to fake it on a screen that's monitoring your brain activity, osit.

Yes, this is most likely correct. I think I read something about the most usual brain waves of psychopaths once and if I recall (someone may need to look this up) they actually spent a lot of time in fairly peaceful brain waves because they don't experience stress. So brain waves probably would not be the way to "fix" psychopaths. For all we know, their brains would reflect peace whilst committing atrocities.

Yep. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for pointing that out.

Good points.

Here's a bit on psychopath's brain function.

The subjects were asked to perform a simple task: hit a button as soon as they recognized a word flashed on a computer screen. While monitoring the subjects' brain waves, the researchers alternated nonsensical strings of letters with neutral words such as "table," and emotionally evocative words like "maggot" and "cancer." What they found was that normal subjects spent more time processing emotion-laden words than the psychopaths. "When you see a word like 'cancer,' you have all sorts of associations - fear, or you think of someone who's had cancer," says Hare. "But for psychopaths, the word 'cancer' and the word 'table' had the same emotional connotations - which is to say, not very many. It's as if they're emotionally color-blind."

Even more staggering were the findings of a study conducted by New York City psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, with Hare's collaboration, at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital in 1993. The investigators employed the same language test, this time injecting the subjects with a radioactive tracer and scanning color images of their brains. As normal subjects processed the emotion-laden words, their brains lit up with activity, particularly in the areas around the ventromedial frontal cortex and amygdala. The former plays a crucial role in controlling impulses and long-term planning, while the amygdala is often described as "the seat of emotion." But in the psychopaths, those parts of the brain appeared to remain inactive while processing the emotion-laden words. That, says Hare, helps explain why a psychopath's conscience is only half-formed. "I showed the scans to several neurologists," recalls Hare. "They said that it did not even look like a human brain. One of them asked, 'Is this person from Mars?' "

Hare's next experiment will be even more sophisticated. Slated to begin at the University of British Columbia in May, it will be run by graduate students Andra Smith and Kent Kiehl. (The latter happened to grow up three blocks from serial killer Ted Bundy's home in Tacoma, Wash., which prompted Kiehl to take up his line of study.) The researchers plan to apply the same linguistic test to 32 subjects, half of whom are psychopaths housed in a maximum-security federal prison near Vancouver. Most of those volunteers, who will be transported in shackles under armed guard, have committed violent crimes, including rapes and murders.

Hare says that the study - which was turned down for funding by the federal Medical Research Council last year, and is now privately supported by the B.C. Medical Services Foundation - will provide a better picture of what is going on inside a psychopath's brain. The reason: it will take advantage of the university's 18-month-old, state-of-the-art General Electric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facility - and the expertise of its scientists, radiologist Bruce Forster and physicist Alex MacKay. The unit itself, visible through a window from a control room, is a small white room equipped with a gurney that slides along a horizontal track into a short tunnel. That is where subjects lie as the machine probes their brains with magnetic torque. When Hare and his colleagues tested the procedure on a psychopathic subject last fall, the convict viewed the computer prompts through mirrors aimed at a rear-projected screen. And because the MRI is thrown off by any metal in its vicinity, the subject had to respond by pressing a touch-pad connected to a computer by fibre optics instead of a keyboard or joy stick wired with metallic cable. Capturing brain images at the rate of one every 40 milliseconds or so, the experiment effectively creates a video of the psychopath's brain as it processes emotional information.

_http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/macleans/distinctive-brains-of-psychopaths
 
A step by step explanation on the neurofeedback process: _http://www.aboutneurofeedback.com/neurofeedback-info-center/faq/how-does-neurofeedback-work/setup-and-connections/
 
Nienna said:
Odyssey said:
Great show. I really appreciated how the SOTT crew really picked Nora's brain on neurofeedback, really trying to nail down the nuts and bolts of it.

There's a neurofeedback practitioner in my area who uses the NeurOptimal Zengar method: _http://www.zengar.com/
I'm curious to give it a shot.

LQB said:
I have significant doubt that an essential psychopath would ever seek treatment of any kind for what they do not see as anything but a personal advantage over most people. Those that would seek treatment would likely suffer from a spectrum of issues that originated in early life. So I would think that NG is primarily seeing patients from the latter group - not essential psychopaths.

I agree. True psychopaths don't think that there's anything wrong with them and would be unlikely to seek treatment unless they were forced under court order. Any treatment they would undergo would likely just make them better at manipulating people.

That part that I put in bold has been on my mind, too. It seems that this neurofeedback could help them to be more convincing at having emotions and empathy. Better than looking in a mirror and seeing if you have the right face for the right emotion.
Also, something that concerns me. For one solitary moment my emotions overwhelmed my reason and thought, 'goody, there's hope.' A quick review of those emotions indicates they are based within the realm of wishful thinking and my own reactive adaptive need from childhood to "save" others in order to save myself.

Also, not to be paranoid, but it just came into my head that maybe this would possibly have something to do with a leap to AI and computers or machines taking over? Metaphorically speaking, however, I can't imagine hooking up a crocodile to one of these things and expecting it to come out a white dove. Now, a white dove that has been chewed up a bit by the crocodiles that's another matter entirely.
 
Odyssey said:
Even more staggering were the findings of a study conducted by New York City psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, with Hare's collaboration, at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital in 1993. The investigators employed the same language test, this time injecting the subjects with a radioactive tracer and scanning color images of their brains.

Here is more about Hare's research that deals with theta waves, that are associated with deep relaxation and meditation:

_http://www.yorku.ca/rweisman/courses/sosc6890/pdf/meloypaper-psychopathy.pdf
The second corner of the foundation is the psychopath’s autonomic underarousal, particularly to punishment. Hare (1970) conducted the early work on this phenomenon, which demonstrated peripheral autonomic hyporeactivity to aversive events. The direct measure utilized in these experiments was skin conductance, or galvanic skin response. His work has been replicated by other researchers throughout the world (Raine, 1993), and has stimulated a most intriguing body of work which has found that habitual criminals are “chronically cortically underaroused” (Raine, 1993). The combined measures of cortical underarousal include three variables–slow wave (theta) EEG activity, low resting heart rate, and poor skin conductance–and appear to have a predictive power for habitually violent criminality hat can override the influence of the environment, especially when the latter is considered normal or “good enough” (Winnicott, 1965). Subsequent research also suggests a link between corpus callosum abnormalities and associated behavioral symptoms, such as lack of remorse and social closeness, and neurological responses, including reduced heart rate and skin conductance (Raine et al., 2003).

The idea of psychopaths being in a meditative state is also mentioned in this thread about the infamous "Wisdom of Psychopaths" book by Kevin Dutton.

Here's an excerpt from the book:
_http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wisdom-of-psychopaths-kevin-dutton/1111306292

Morrison’s talk that day of lights and tectonic shifts reminded me of a rumor I once heard about Robert Hare, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s leading authorities on psychopaths. Back in the 1990s, Hare submitted a research paper to an academic journal that included the EEG responses of both psychopaths and non-psychopaths as they performed what’s known as a lexical decision task. Hare and his team of coauthors showed volunteers a series of letter strings, and then got them to decide as quickly as possible whether or not those strings comprised a word.

What they found was astonishing. Whereas normal participants identified emotionally charged words like “c-a-n-c-e-r” or “r-a-p-e” more quickly than neutral words like “t-r-e-e” or “p-l-a-t-e,” this wasn’t the case with psychopaths. To the psychopaths, emotion was irrelevant. The journal rejected the paper. Not it turned out, for its conclusions, but for something even more extraordinary. Some of the EEG patterns, reviewers alleged, were so abnormal they couldn’t possibly have come from real people. But of course they had.

Intrigued by my talk with Morrison in Chicago about the mysteries and enigmas of the psychopathic mind—indeed, about neural recalcitrance in general—I visited Hare in Vancouver. Was the rumor true? I asked him. Had the paper really been rejected? If so, what was going on?

“There are four different kinds of brain waves,” he told me, “ranging from beta waves during periods of high alertness, through alpha and theta waves, to delta waves, which accompany deep sleep. These waves reflect the fluctuating levels of electrical activity in the brain at various times. In normal members of the population, theta waves are associated with drowsy, meditative, or sleeping states. Yet in psychopaths they occur during normal waking states—even sometimes during states of increased arousal …
 
Neurofeedback sounds very interesting.
It seems like it is a way to work around "bugs" in our hardware (imprints).

It reminds me of how sometimes there is a bug in a program that shouldn't be there, but a certain odd condition (hardware bug) induces erroneous calculations, causing problems.


Also very interesting that psychopaths have a waking theta state. I think that popular music nowadays tries to induce this state via rhythmic beats and repetitive verses that put people in that state and probably entrain them to stay in that state.
When the dance hall bursts into flames, they stand around like nothing is wrong.... much like psychopaths don't realize (or care) that what he/she is doing is harmful to others, as long as it benefits them.
 
I concur with the feedback that this was another great show. It turns out there is a therapist 3 km from where I live who trained with the same clinician as NG. She doesn't have any openings until December and am looking forward to having some sessions. She recommended a book by a journalist Jim Robbins called A Symphony in the Brain, if anyone is interested in reading it. I've only read the first couple of chapters, which is so far the history of the development of neurofeedback, hopefully it will get more into nuts and bolts aspects. Thanks again for so many great shows!
 
Thank you for the show. I listened to it a couple of days ago, and the information on neurofeedback is really very interesting. I looked at the articles on Nora Gedgaudas website _http://www.northwest-neurofeedback.com/ and read some of them, it's truly amazing. It can help with so many health and mental issues: cravings for unhealthy foods, autism, PTSD, ADD and even somewhat diminish symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. She is such a great guest and speaker!

From what I've read in replies here, and from what Nora Gedgaudas said on the show, I gathered that to apply this therapeutic modality one has to be really knowledgeable, otherwise it can cause harm. I looked at recommended sites to find a practitioner of EEG and got the list of several in LA area. I still can't choose a practitioner because I don't know from the short description that is available how to look for a good practitioner? Several of them use Cygnet, there are nurses, psychologists. They use different techniques for initial evaluation and their work. Some of them work far away. If someone had a direct experience using EEG practitioner, can he/she describe the process what to look for?

Thank you all again and thank you to Nora Gedgaudas. Great show!
 
Thanks for the website link Olesya. This is such a fascinating area I'm looking forward to a good read.
 
I have done a little technical research into this topic, as it seems to be attached to the science of Neural Networks ( Computer version) which is very dear to my heart, and which I did quite a bit of work on in the 1990's.

Phrases like: programs, program control, training and feedback take on a whole new meaning!

The technical post I placed at: _http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,33124.0.html as it is quite lengthy.
 
I had my first neurofeedback session on Friday morning. Truly amazing. I am still feeling residual effects, calmness and a bit of clarity of thinking. The chronic anxiety has lessoned considerably after just one session. The first thing I experienced was body warmth and then various muscle twitches in my legs, neck and shoulders. I think some deep stress and holding patterns already started releasing. It felt deeper than the rolfing sessions I went through, without any pain. By the end my body was in an incredibly deep state of relaxation like what I experience by the end of an EE session. The therapist put an electrode on the right side of my head, my forehead and the back of my head. My right brain is being re-trained out of hyperactivity and perhaps the prefrontal cortex and amygdalla are being reprogrammed to work the way they were designed? I'll post more after I have experienced more sessions.
 
Thanks for sharing your experience, bluefyre. Wow, it's like rolfing sessions without the pain? Having been through a lot of rolfing, that sounds just great. It's something I'm hoping to give a try in the new year. Your description makes me even more interested. I'll be looking forward to your future posts.
 
Not sure that I'd agree that the paleolithic diet was the healthy ideal for human kind. I believe that analyses of bone and teeth from that time often reveal various types of malnutrition. I'd say we are adapted to utilize a wide variety of food sources to be able to survive on whatever is available, but I wouldn't expect that our diet was at most times in the stone age, ideal. According to Malthus, natural populations are governed by the availability of food resources which are often scarce, as part of the population dynamic.

Many nutritionists believe that the Mediterranean diet is nearest the ideal, which consists of a balance of fruits, vegetables, moderate amounts of red and white meats, and foods made from cereal grains. This evolved after the agricultural revolution, which gave us a greater degree of choice in our foods. Since that time, we have learned much about our own dietary requirements and have augmented our diets with many types of supplements, such as foods with vitamin C to eliminate scurvy.
 
GregP507 said:
Not sure that I'd agree that the paleolithic diet was the healthy ideal for human kind. I believe that analyses of bone and teeth from that time often reveal various types of malnutrition. I'd say we are adapted to utilize a wide variety of food sources to be able to survive on whatever is available, but I wouldn't expect that our diet was at most times in the stone age, ideal. According to Malthus, natural populations are governed by the availability of food resources which are often scarce, as part of the population dynamic.

Many nutritionists believe that the Mediterranean diet is nearest the ideal, which consists of a balance of fruits, vegetables, moderate amounts of red and white meats, and foods made from cereal grains. This evolved after the agricultural revolution, which gave us a greater degree of choice in our foods. Since that time, we have learned much about our own dietary requirements and have augmented our diets with many types of supplements, such as foods with vitamin C to eliminate scurvy.

You may want to read the Life Without Bread and Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation? threads. Also do a search on SOTT for the problems with grains and dairy and carbohydrates in general. You'll see just how much REAL data there is for grain and dairy free, low carb, high animal fat diet being the best. Even those hunter-gatherer societies that survived (not too many left now, as they've been systematically eliminated for thousands of years by the agricultural, hierarchical societies) have been studied extensively, and all the non-corrupted science (not influenced by Big Agra, Big Pharma, and food industry corporations) shows the same thing. Check out the story of Weston A. Price, too. And you should look into the fossil record of hunter-gathers from the Paleolithic period compared to the settled agriculturalists of the Neolithic and see what happened to bones, teeth, general health, stature, brain size, "the diseases of civilization," etc., in just a few generations. And that's not even controversial. Any good "bone specialist" will tell you from looking at the teeth first and bones generally if the remains are from hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists.

Since the government recommendations of high carb, high grain, low fat diets with vegetable and seed oils encouraged and animal fat discouraged, every "disease of civilization" skyrocketed and so did the "obesity epidemic." There are also very good books recommended in the two threads (including Nora Gedgaudas' Primal Body, Primal Mind) and elsewhere on the forum. It is a huge amount of material to read, but if you really want to understand the real science and not the corrupt mass media promulgated propaganda, it's really worth it.
 
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