What's New in Neurofeedback

• Scanners 'improve brain surgery'
• Stroke victim robbed of her dreams
• 'Dream centre' of the brain found
• Brain scans show hypnosis at work
• New theory on cause of dyslexia
• Single gene removes sex differences in mice brains
• Brain may produce its own antipsychotic drug
• Brain Study Shows Why Revenge is Sweet
• Mental ping-pong could aid paraplegics

  All links at: http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=science&cat=brain_research

Last month in Fort Lauderdale, Mario Beauregard presented preliminary gold-standard findings: fMRI changes as a result of 40 neurofeedback sessions in ADHD children. He found no comparable changes in controls. So far the subject pool is small (20) but it's the trickle before the dam bursts open.

Roger deBeus and J.D. Ball presented the latest findings on their double-blind placebo-controlled study for ADHD. Training reduced hyperactivity and improved attention, reduced aggressive behaviors, and improved performance on a computerized attention task.

Jeffrey Carmen and Robert Coben showed the promise of infrared imaging (thermographic) for assessing brain function, especially, frontal lobe functioning, in a variety of diagnostic groups. The data is robust but complex.

John Gruzelier provided a history of the alpha/theta protocol, which was very illuminating -- one of the only talks I wrote down the various citations being discussed. Historical reviews are so necessary for science: they lets us understand how we got here and whether we are building on stone or sand.

David Kaiser (myself) presented more on comodulation. Coherence measures the stationarity of the phase difference between two signals at each frequency and comodulation measures stationarity of amplitude difference between two signals at a frequency, so it covers the synchrony problem-space equally but orthogonally to coherence. Unlike coherence which identifies shared frequencies, due to a single generator or intense coupling of multiple generators, comodulation reveals shared timing, that is, functional association between cortical sites. Site comodulation and rogue site analysis, an index of moment-to-moment decoupling, were discussed but it was global comodulation that captured most people's interest. Global comodulation is the average of all site-pair comodulations, a quick and dirty index of brain maturity, as it correlated with age in ADHD children (r=.93), and separated ADHD from age-matched controls, as well as children from adults. It quantify how much dominant frequency activity penetrates regional activity, which I believe tells us how well the frontal lobe is orchestrating cognition. A brain-unity quotient (BQ), perhaps.

John Kounios presented another study of orchestration: how our brain attempts to solve problems, those that require insight and those that do not. Using fMRI he found that non-insightful, plodding to solution problems activated the left temporal lobe but those problems requiring insight were only solved when the right anterior superior temporal gyrus was activated.

Richard Silberstein used coherence to identify decoupling and coupling during information processing. He argued that cognitive ability (i.e., IQ) was correlated with the capacity to dynamically couple and de-couple specific neural systems.

Roberto Pascual-Marqui describes the basics of LORETA, which was extremely helpful to most, given the rise of LORETA (low resolution EEG tomography) neurofeedback. This conference marks the rise of LORETA Neurofeedback. Also, there were numerous talks dedicated to ADHD, autism, tourettes, autism, youth offenders, eating disorders, migraine, peak performance, and others. As I tell my students, conferences are where it's at -- where the new ideas emerge and gain acceptance. The ideas in textbooks are fossils, many strata deep. Sure, these ancient ideas (say, 10 years old) are the foundation of our thinking, the raw source from which new ideas evolve, but they are dinosaurs and only the few that can take wing survive the nimble ideas of the present.

The 12th Annual conference for ISNR was held in Fort Lauderdale in late August.

-DK

News & Reviews NEW BOOKS

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
by Steven Johnson
Layperson view of 21st century brain sciences which includes neurofeedback. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743241657/top100

Handbook of Emotions, 2nd Edition
Michael Lewis
From the philosophy of emotions to emotions in art and the humanities to emotions in the mammalian brain and facial expressions. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572305290/top100

Cognitive Electrophysiology of Mind and Brain
by Alberto Zani, Alice Proverbio
Reviews developments in recording of bioelectric and magnetic responses of the brain. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0127754210/top100

Neurotransmitters, Drugs and Brain Function
by Roy Webster
Textbook for students of pharmacology, psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471978191/top100

Handbook of Disruptive Behavior Disorders
by Herbert C. Quay, Anne E. Hogan
Three quarters of all psychopathological disorders of childhood and adolescence are disruptive behaviors (ADHD, ODD, CD). Reviews various issues of this disorders including assessment. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306459744/top100

Sleep Disorders Medicine: Basic Science, Technical Considerations, and Clinical Aspects
by Sudhansu Chokroverty, Robert B. Daroff
Comprehensive tome on basic aspects of sleep, sleep technology, and clinical science of sleep. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/075069954X/top100

Mind, Stress, and Emotions: The New Science of Mood
by Gene Wallenstein
Genetic, biological, psychological, and environmental bases of emotions, with novel treatment strategies for mood and anxiety disorders. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0972060731/top100

The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
by Christof Koch
The last great unsolved mystery of science. Biological basis of the subjective mind in animals and people is described. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974707708/top100

Neuropsychological progress severe traumatic brain injury in childhood : Eight severe TBI teen patients were assessed neuropsychologically 1, 7 and 14 years after injury. Performance of verbal IQ declined over assessments. Verbal learning was most impaired. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15223744

EEG alpha and level of response to alcohol in young adults with family alcoholism. : Alcohol was found to produce significant effects on EEG power in the slow alpha frequencies. Hispanic participants had decreases in fast alpha activity whereas non-Hispanics had increases. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15222586

Gender differences in cortical complexity. : Greater gyrification was found in women than men in frontal and parietal regions, perhaps offseting gender differences in brain volume and the basis for behavioral gender differences. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15235605

Neuropsychological correlates of cannabis, stimulant, and opioid abuse. : Reviews executive functioning impairment due to abuse and the mediating role of neuropsychological status on treatment outcomes. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15260137

Effects of normal aging on ERD during a memory task : Normal aging affects oscillatory theta, alpha and beta responses during retrieval from working memory. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15265582

A few years ago a NASA-derived company, or so they called themselves, had a similar set up, and they went belly up pretty quickly. Why? For whatever reasons they told their shareholders, but I suspect any system that simply alters gameplay of videogames cannot train the brain, at least not efficiently. Why? Because it isn't operant conditioning (OC), at least it mightily avoids the primary goal of OC which is discrimination.

Operant conditioning increases the tendency of one and only one response in favor of all others to a stimulus. This is done by rewarding one behavior above all others, to the detriment of those near-neighbors. When a pigeon is trained to peck a light, pecking the wall nearby, or flapping a wing, or nuzzling the food magazine -- none of these behaviors are rewarded with a pellet drop. If they were, the bird brain would continue his or her non-goal behavior. In neurofeedback, we want, say, increases in SMR, and need to reward only that. But with an elaborate videogame going on -- essentially whatever brainwaves that occur in response to any visual stimulation is being conditioned. It's jumping on the videogame addiction bandwagon to get clients into the office. We routinize poor children's brains into these inflexible states by allow such immersion into these video games. How can math and reading compete, with their slower, less frequent reward schedules. Skinner realized all of this decades ago, using rats and pigeons, but a quick primer on Operant Conditioning might help for those who missed it.

Operant conditioning works by associating reward with desired behaviors. Optimally we should place electrodes into the pleasure center of the hypothalamus and turn on the juice whenever a targeted behavior is performed and turn it off when it isn't. This on/off dichotomy is reflected in discrete exercises (not so much in continuous reward games like the ones often featured by magazines). Animation, or any visual excitement prior to or after the criterion behavior is performed, undermines conditioning as it rewards non-criterion behavior, whatever the brain is doing at that moment. Continuous reward information is only useful during shaping, when a person has difficulty eliciting or maintaining a desired behavior, and then only to successive approximations to the goal behavior. But once this obstacle is overcome, once a person can reliably perform the behavior requested of him or her, continuous reward will weaken the association between stimulus and response. As I said already, the goal of operant conditioning is discrimination. Discrimination emerges out of generalization by the means of FOCAL association, strong linkages between response and reward.

BF Skinner figured this all out 50 years ago: punishment and reinforcement, both positive and negative, reinforcement schedules, contingencies, informative signals, noninformative ones, primary reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, spontaneous recovery, shaping, extinction curves. Positive reinforcement is when an appetitive stimulus (a rewarding one like food) is provided. Negative reinforcement, despite the oxymoronic name, is also a good thing -- an aversive stimulus is removed (and thus rewarded). We drop a coin into a vending machine and receive an item: that's positive reinforcement. We fasten our seat belts when we get into the car to stop an annoying buzzer: that's negative reinforcement. I know the wording is perverse, but it's Skinnerian. There is also negative punishment (withholding a positive reward) and positive punishment (providing an aversive one) although I don't think, of all the aspects of learning theory we have, that scientists have fully understand all the components and aftermath of punishment. I tell my students how the environment includes the punisher for punishment but not for reinforcement, so that the behavioral tendency is increased universally with reward but only diminished in the presence of the punisher or ones like him or her for punishment. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have yet to read a convincing case for the converse equality of reinforcement and punishment.

The most effective reinforcement schedule for task acquisition is to reward every instance. Unfortunately this is also the schedule which is most easy to snuff out once the reward is withheld. So if you reward your kids every time they clean their rooms, for instamce, once you stop paying them, they will stop cleaning. But if you work on a partial reinforcement schedule, and reward them after every third or fourth cleaning, they will continue to work much longer after the reward has stopped. This is called resistance to extinction and it's one goal of neurofeedback because the bells and blips will not be available forever to the client.

There are four partial reinforcement schedules: variable ratio and variable interval, and fixed ratio and fixed interval. The variable ratio schedule (VR) is the best. More than any reinforcement schedule, VR speeds task acquisition and tasks acquired with it resist extinction. VR built Las Vegas out there in the desert, and it is quite visible in slot machines. For VR, the individual is rewarded on average after some amount of behavior. In slot machines VR may be set to every 50 or 100 pulls. As long as the payoff is appropriate for the schedule rate, an individual will repeat the behavior indefinitely. Slot machines layer multiple VR schedules on top of each other to produce behavior quickly acquired and extremely resistant to extinction. Large payoffs occur infrequently (but predictably in a statistical sense) and smaller payoffs occur frequently (and predictably again, in a statistical sense). Predictably in the sense that a $1 million payoff occurs on average after every 100 million pulls or so. All games should incorporate multiple reinforcement schedules by the use of multiple layers of reward, be it screen completion, bonus scores, or sudden completion of task. More important than the schedule is reward delivery, which should be discrete like the hypothalamic shocks to rats I mentioned above. Those rats literally died from starvation because they stimulated their brain rather than sought food. That is the best advertisement and evidence of the power of discrete rewards. Had the shocks come about regardless of their actions, with peaks and valleys of activity perhaps as they came near the bar they were suppose to press, then food consumption would have been option. But they all died, because the rewards were discrete and focal.

Finally, one last aspect of operant conditioning is the stage of immediate consolidation, the sensory pause after a reinforcement has been given in order to strengthen the linkages between behavior and response, and presumably to weaken the linkages with other behaviors in this context). Thirty years ago, Sterman, Clemente, Marczynski (a decade later) and colleagues quite clearly revealed the presence of a consolidation period immediately after response and rewards. Few if any learning theorists seemed to be aware of their discovery, however. I reviewed the operant conditioning literature and except for those mentioned above, I find nothing about immediate consolidation, probably because outside of this field few scientists investigate EEG during operant conditioning . In 1981 Ted Marczynski and colleagues identified how blocked consolidation led to slower learning in cats. Kaiser (1994) documented this process in humans, perhaps for the first time. Learning is a two-step discrete process that involves sampling of the environment followed by consolidation of associations. This consolidation period is evident in one's EEG as a post-response synchronization, i.e., a dominant frequency burst after response and reinforcement. The beep and visual reward signals to the client that the desired behavior was performed, now it is time to consolidate. The next couple of seconds are spent strengthening the internal linkages, an unconscious process that can be derailed when the environment prods the client for more behaviors. When there is no break in training, either the client makes one him or herself, or a client continues to sample the environment even after the behavioral criteria is met, which is essentially informing them that the goal behavior was not the goal. In my study, subjects who failed to alpha burst, missed the material they needed to process as shown by missing the items on later recognition tests. It's strange that so little is understand about this part of learning, despite Skinner's work.

But of course Skinner didn't use electrodes.