Most people who come in for neurofeedback training achieve at least some of their goals. On the extremes, a few report that brain training has transformed their lives, while others report only a modest impact.  Usually, lifestyle factors play a role in which end of the spectrum any one person falls—it’s unreasonable to expect dramatic changes for a person who burns the candle at both ends and refuses to examine what all those excessive pulls on one’s time do to well-being. To make matters worse, our definition of excessive here in Northern Virginia tends to be skewed a bit. Similarly, if one has a “stuck” brain that goes along with difficult physical or mental conditions (think autism), it can take many, many sessions to achieve small gains. However, for those who are willing to pull on the thread of at least one pressure point in life, neurofeedback can be a worthwhile use of time and resources.

Clients almost always want to know what can change for them, and beyond broad outlines, that is often difficult to predict. Sometimes, the results are downright surprising.  One reason for this is that the philosophy I use in my practice involves training the entire brain and not just one or two locations, and this means that additional benefits sometimes accrue that go well beyond what most people come to training to achieve.  Think of it as deciding to get in shape, then having your gym practice result in your skin glowing and your sleep improving.  I call these results spillover effects.  Here are a few examples of what I have seen:

• I once worked with a teenager whose mother brought her to me for calming because she was constantly stressing out about school and overreacting to many things in her life. The teen wanted a higher GPA than she had and was staying up until 2 am, then arising at 5 am in order to fit in more study time.  After about eight sessions, she came in for a session and was furious with me. She seethed, “This isn’t working. I fell asleep at 11 pm and didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at 5 am. We are going to have stop training.”  I was shocked and responded with something along the lines of, “You slept all night for the first time in close to five years, and you think this is a problem?”  She was too busy thinking that she’d missed out on prime study hours to think about the fact that she had slept well. With a shift in perspective, we continued training, and she was increasingly better rested, despite the fact that her goal had been to become calmer about her homework. (And yes, she started feeling more relaxed about schoolwork, too.)

• Another individual had an aversion to bananas that was so bad he even avoided walking near them in the produce section of the grocery store. He, too, had been brought in by his mother for calming, and nothing about bananas was ever raised as a training goal. After about 25 sessions, though, the mother reported that the teen had been in a public area near a trash can that reeked of overripe and rotten bananas. The son seemed not to notice, and when the mother asked whether he needed to move away from the bananas, he looked at her as if she were the one with the aversion. (And yes, when he finished training, he was calmer—still overall a wound-up person, but much, much calmer.)

• A senior citizen who was doing neurofeedback with me in order to get her husband to come, too, really expected no results at all. Her sole purpose was to get her spouse to agree to do training. She thought her brain was functioning well, and for the most part, it was. However, after about 20 sessions, she reported to me that she was able to sit still long enough to focus and read. She hadn’t been able to read more than 5-10 pages at a time for years, and suddenly, she could manage 100 or more pages. Each week, she’d show me the book she was reading and how far she’d read without a problem. She was thrilled.

Please be clear that not everyone has spillover effects, and there is no predicting what will happen or for whom—each of the examples above was a happy surprise. In addition, for those who do experience spillover effects, they usually aren’t this dramatic. But, it’s still nice to know that when brain training focuses on shifting overall energy patterns, good things can happen.

Recently during a consultation, someone asked me whether I use the latest and best technology on the market. The short answer to that is yes, my current equipment is only a few years old, and it has all the bells and whistles I need to provide good training. The longer answer to that question is a bit more complicated.

I’m not sure why a person would be inspired to ask a question about how fancy the technology is unless he was inspired by some of the marketing material for neurofeedback devices and advertising by practitioners who have been sold that same advertising line. Several manufacturing companies like to position themselves as the most technologically advanced, but a phrase like that distracts from the fact that the goal is to work with stable and reliable equipment that promotes good results. Companies with flashy products to market to us practitioners come and go, and often have products that disappoint. Most neurofeedback professionals know this and look to the stable, high-performance platforms for their work.

Neurofeedback relies on EEG devices to receive and amplify the very faint electrical signals that make it through the skull to be detected on the scalp. It’s important for those amplifiers to be accurate and fast. Almost all newer models tend to have both. But, it’s important to remember that amplifiers from the late 1990s and early 2000s also got good results for the people who used them back then.

When I was first learning about neurofeedback, I once studied briefly with a psychologist who was using an EEG device from the 1970s. He and his then-30-year-old device got truly remarkable results with the disabled population who worked with him. He probably didn’t intend to convey this to me, but one of the key lessons I learned from him was that the practitioner him or herself is truly important. Skills, attention, and care matter far more when doing neurofeedback than the fanciness of one’s gear. Even though I would never have wanted to use something that old, his dinosaur of a system worked.

So, no matter where in the world you reside, if you’re out shopping for a neurofeedback practitioner to do brain training with you, I encourage you to worry less about marketing language regarding cutting-edge technology (though cutting-edge is admittedly cool, and I love my system) and more about your sense of the practitioner’s skill and inclination to pay attention and listen to you as you do your training. If you trust yourself to choose the right person, then that person is going to be sensible and have effective tools to do their job.

Electricity is present throughout our bodies.  Using an EEG signal to measure and train the brain’s electrical energy patterns can improve our functioning in life, which can be a pretty amazing, and we are forever indebted to the neuroscientists at UCLA who figured out back in the late 1960s that biofeedback for the brain using electrical signals really works.

However, it is also a challenge to train certain parts of the brain, because to be effective, it is important to narrow the EEG signal so that what is trained really is the brain’s electricity and not electricity seeping in from someplace else in the body.  This is especially challenging when one wants to train the part of the brain underneath the forehead, called the pre-frontal cortex, because the electrical activity that comes from blinking one’s eyes is powerful and interferes with trying to train the brain’s electrical patterns.

Two different neurofeedback practitioners independently figured out a solution to the problem of training at the front of the head, where eyeblink interference is such a problem.  One, the late Hershel Toomim, PhD, along with his wife Marjorie, found that using near-infrared light (nIR) in a headband and providing biofeedback that rewards oxygenation levels in the pre-frontal cortex resulted in shifts in brain function that allowed the pre-frontal cortex to self-regulate, resulting in increased ability to do all the things the pre-frontal cortex does, such as focus and emotional control.

Another, Jeffrey Carmen, PhD, experimented with passive-infrared light (pIR) and developed a similar process of looking at metabolic activity.  Dr. Carmen found that his system was especially good for working with migraines.

Both devices are referred to as hemoencephalography, or HEG for short.  Although there is only a small amount of peer-reviewed literature on the effectiveness of either type of HEG, users around the world have found that both HEG devices are effective at getting around the problem of training the front of the brain and produce good results.  Moreover, use of pIR suggests that HEG may affect complex energy systems throughout the brain and not just in the pre-frontal cortex.

I have worked with both nIR and pIR biofeedback for the brain devices for over a decade.  Despite the intimidating-sounding name, HEG devices are straightforward and simple to use.  In addition, they are non-invasive; infrared light is simply a type of light that the human eye is unable to see.  And, most practitioners who know about HEG like the results they get by using them with their clients.  I especially like pIR HEG for calming and relaxing brains that over-respond to the world around them.

I don’t always take the time to pull out my HEG devices and show them to potential trainees during initial consultations, so if you’re interested in seeing how they work, be sure to ask.

*If you are interested in reading more about HEG, check out the book New Developments in Blood Flow Hemoencephalography, by Tim Tinius, PhD.

People often are surprised that brain training takes time.  It is, after all, a shifting of the brain’s energy systems, and just like modifying the body via exercise, results involve sustained effort.  Typically, a full round of 40 sessions of neurofeedback requires about five to six months to complete.  Trainees come twice or even three times a week, then taper off to once a week or even once every other week before finishing altogether.   This approach works for most people’s schedules, and so it is the most common.

Sometimes, though, a person has reasons for wanting to be done sooner than the usual five to six month schedule.  Often, this is out of a sense of urgency or a looming deadline like a move or heading off to school.  Fortunately for those motivated to complete their training quickly, it can be done.

All it takes is a plan, time in your calendar, and a commitment to doing what you want to do to achieve your goals.  From there, the schedule can be customized to meet your timeframe and your needs.  I have worked with clients as often as twice a day, six days a week, to help them meet a deadline.  More common, though, is to train four days a week, which gets a person finished in about 10-12 weeks.

If you’re interested in intensive training, let’s talk.  We can discuss your goals and whether they are feasible and realistic.