What's New in Neurofeedback

• Whole-brain Radiotherapy After Surgery Or Radiosurgery Not Recommended For Brain Metastases
• Brain Researchers Discover Molecule Responsible For Axonal Branching
• Radiologists Use Light To Scan The Inner Workings Of The Brain
• AIDS vaccine protects people, shocks researchers
• Lack of sleep may play role in Alzheimer's: study

Links at http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain

 

The study of neuroelectromagnetism is part Cosmology, part Psychology, closer to studying Creation than anything physicists have buried underground. We are investigating how Thought creates Light, or vice versa; how currents of electromagnetism emerge orderly out of matter and control infinitely more matter, the body. Matter is only sluggish light, making the sequence less mysterious, but still the ability to condition the regulation of energy in one’s brain is akin to physicists trying to create alternate universes in the lab; but in our case each person who walks through the door represents an alternate universe, a unique way to create light and organize matter, and given their appearance at a neurotherapy clinic, probably in an inefficient or unregulated manner.

I equate EEG analysis to Cosmology in contrast to our legal system, which generally equates EEG analysis to Neurology. Recently I testified in a court case where a psychologist relied on quantitative EEG evidence of frontal lobe immaturity to mitigate the intention of an individual convicted of first degree murder. It was the DA’s job to undermine the credibility of the analysis but I explained to the judge and lawyers who were present how individuals trained in psychology interpret neuroelectromagnetism differently from those trained in neurology, that EEG may reveal structural deficits (neurology) as well as functional ones (psychology) like the ones my friend revealed with his analysis. In fact when Hans Berger developed the first amplifiers sensitive enough to detect neuroelectromagnetism in humans in 1924, he studied his son’s thought processes and behavior first, and only later did he find other uses for this technology such as identifying seizure activity and brain disease.

My psychologist friend examined the man-child with a number of test instruments but the QEEG results were by far the clearest, revealing extensive immaturity of the frontal lobes missed by conventional neuropsych testing. Anyone trained in functional EEG analysis would come to the same conclusion as my colleague, that the convict’s frontal lobes were significantly underconnected in nearly every index of shared EEG information (connectivity). Energy was not being shared across his brain as it should and its regulation resembled that of a teenager than a man of his age. .

The practice of law is the practice of science, an ideal slowly actualized through iteration. In both realms progress is slowed by ambition and error, but such is always the case when people are involved. It was instantly clear to me that law was struggling to incorporate a scientific understanding of human behavior in order to remain relevant, and functional neuroimaging in particular was a unique challenge to its authority, arbitrator of intention in behavior and its consequences. Law and science both rely on precedents, though we have an advantage in that we can repeat experiments as many times as necessary to understand human behavior and judges must try to understand the intention that produced a single instance or sequence of behaviors performed only once, in most cases. We can replicate an action and change participants, setting, lighting, anything of interest, but law is forced to play the cards it was dealt, no re-dealing, no replacement cards.

EEG is a tool and like any tool it may be used in multiple ways by different people. Consider a hammer. Judges use hammers to maintain order and carpenters use them to build houses but we wouldn’t require all hammers to be round at both ends or add a metal claw to a gavel. Same tool, different uses. During most of my examination and cross, I showed a Vend diagram of two overlapping circles, one labeled Psychology, the other Neurology, with their intersection labeled “EEG.” That alone should convey the distinction. Psychology is a science based on inferential statistics and repetition: a phenomenon is best understand when it occurs similarly and repeatedly across individuals and groups and we use EEG technology in a likewise inferential fashion, relying on statistical tests such as M/ANOVAs, t-tests, Bonferroni, and Huynh-Feldt corrections for nonsphericity, to name a few. Neurology is primarily a descriptive science, focused on qualitative techniques of identification such as “eye-balling” a signal to a mental template in one’s head. If a behavioral science depends on cross-individual repeatability, behavioral neurology is more of an art, a clinical practice that emerged from case studies, singular examples of brain dysfunction where inferential statistics necessarily fail due to lack of examples. Behavioral neurology began in America with Phineas Gage in 1848 and in Europe with Paul Broca’s observations of aphasic patients, notably “Tan” in 1861. Today many of its greatest insights still derive from single cases, uniquely brain-injured patients known only by initials such as the late H.M.

My friend asked me to undermine the credibility of the opposing expert, a well-known neurologist and a distant friend of mine. I told my friend to ask him questions relevant to psychological investigations of EEG. I didn't provide examples, as there are so many. For instance, what would we expect to see in an EEG chart of an individual during a lexical decision task, with or without lateralized presentations... that’s easy enough. And what happens at posterior sites when a Blackjack player considers himself ahead of the house? Most of my undergraduates can answer these questions, and these are just two of the many psychological applications associated with EEG analysis, the latter being an application being studied in Monaco and Vegas. More than 120,000 EEG papers have been published to date, and the majority rely on spectral analysis of the EEG signal. In fact in the last decade three times more EEG data was generated under the aegis of psychology -- attention, sleep, consciousness, animal behavior -- than under the patronage of neurology. Identifying and studying organic disorders with EEG has been a minority application my entire life.

The DA asked whether I knew the standard for sampling rates was 200 Hz and I laughed when he told me, disbelief to the point of mockery. Who told you that? Why would any science using frequency analysis rely on a base-10 number? I asked aloud. The defense loved my response and I continued to explain to the unhappy DA how this was 40 years out of date at least!, a relic from the hey-day of Grass and Gibbs in the late 30s, or put in place by Molly Brazier and her crew in the 1950s. Base-10 was like using horse-and-buggy rules to control highway traffic. No serious field would rely on base-10 after the fast fourier transform was invented in 1965, as it sacrifices accuracy, speed, and communication, the trifecta of scientific investigation. We are a power of 2 since 1965, baby, with signal digitization set at 128, 256, 512 samples per second for a reason. The FFT is the perfect way for quantifying frequency information within a time series, light years ahead of any spectral technique in vogue prior to 1965. Approaches to discrete fourier transform (DFT) have been available since the 19th century, but they require endless iterations of trigonometry and floating-point operations, a dicey and memory-intensive operation, whereas the FFT is an N log N algorithm, which is geek-speak for “Hello, Gorgeous!” It was superior in every way, a major algorithmic breakthrough when it hit the world in the late 1960s and all serious sciences that employed frequency analysis – seismology, acoustics, physical oceanography --responded to this change… except neurology, apparently. The fast fourier transform does not multiply the changing raw signal with any function (cosine, sine) but rearranges the numbers to determine the frequency spectrum. It is perfect, no need for anything but summing it all up.

Some say Tukey and Cooley reinvented the FFT and Gauss deserves credit for his 1805 publication of it. But TC made is popular, Gauss’ version went unnoticed and only later did this clever idea come to life. Science and mathematics are often this way, where the originator of new material fails to popularize it and not until the next generation or later does the idea come into focus.

My testimony was being evaluated under the Daubert decision (1994), which produced guidelines for evaluating scientific evidence and testimony in court trials. A technique or theory must be accepted by the relevant scientific community and governed by explicit rules to be viewed as credible evidence in a court of law. Aware of this decision, I explained how science, like law, is not homogeneous nor uniform but an assemblage of independent disparate interest groups, each its own school of thought, largely inert to the successes and failure of adjacent fields. Each science makes its own rules and only rarely do rules of one field extend or cascade into another. Unlike law, science has remarkably few rules shared across disciplines; but they are the following: a measurement must be repeatable, a theory falsifiable, an inference logical, all tools are considered imperfect, and communication between practitioners and the public are honest and transparent, and if you make a mistake, clean it up yourself. Those are our standards, by the way, as we are an applied science. The other day I noticed one of our “practitioners” breaking Rule #4, using the phrase “zero error” on his website to describe his analysis. We should remind ourselves that making a claim of zero error is propaganda, not science.

My take-home message from this experience was two-fold: there will be a continual evolution of standards as we adapt to more uses of the technology, and regulation of neurofeedback devices needs to be done by educated individuals, not bureaucrats. Neurofeedback is playing with light, playing with spontaneous energy regulation. This is why so many different groups are part of neurotherapy, about 25 professions and counting including general practitioner, neurologist, clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist and other behavior science specialists such as myself, along with neuroscientists, counseling psychologists, occupational therapists, marriage and family counselors, educational psychologists, registered nurses, and others. We specifically need to explain to those entering the field how to use normative EEG accurately and reliably and how to understand multi-channel and source derivation neurofeedback and co-registration with peripheral physiology.

-DK

Reviews NEW &/OR USEFUL BOOKS - Focus on History of Knowledge

The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain
Terrence W. Deacon
How human thought differs from animals.

A History of Knowledge: Past, Present and Future
Charles Van Doren
The history of ideas.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Edward O. Wilson, Edmund O. Wilson
The biologist Wilson attempts to unify all of science, starting with his specialties of population genetics, evolutionary biology, and ethology.

A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Sylvia Nasar
Nobel Laureaute John Nash formulated a theorem of game theory used in many fields, and suffered from schizophrenia.

Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning

Reviews a new field of inquiry relevant to mental health.

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

How the mind evolves in the savannah and before.

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould
Essays taken from Natural History magazine by the late author.

Functional Neuroanatomy and the Rationale for Using EEG Biofeedback for Asperger's Syndrome.
Abnormal activity was most often found for the anterior cingulate in Asperger's.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19568927

Delta-alpha ratio correlates with level of recovery after neurorehabilitation in TBI
Delta-alpha ratio may help predict and monitor functional rehabilitation outcome.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19398371

QEEG guided neurofeedback therapy in personality disorders: 13 case studies.
Twelve out of 13 personality disorder subjects who underwent 80-120 sessions of neurofeedback showed significant improvement on personality and attention measures.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19278127

Value of quantitative EEG in differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Alpha/delta power ratio differentiated those with moderate dementia
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268969

Traumatic brain injury rehabilitation: QEEG biofeedback treatment protocols.
Reviews QEEG patterns under both rest and tasks conditions for TBI assessment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19199027

Learning phases are as such: acquisition, retention, retrieval, and consolidation. The more an item from memory is retrieved, the stronger the memory trace, the more consolidated its footprint in the mind. Most learning theorists fail to strap electrodes on their subject so they miss one of the critical stages of learning, momentary consolidations, what neuroscientists call "post-reward synchronization or PRS" in the EEG. This momentarily quiescent rhythm allows successfully mastered or learned material to be consolidated into memory.

EEG rhythm learning began informally with Lord Adrian, who in 1934 watched his EEG in front of oscillograph and created alpha bursts at will. A quarter century later, Joe Kamiya at U Chicago developed alpha biofeedback or deep states training (1958). His first subject was remarkable, learning to discriminate his internal psychophysiological states. He began by hearing a tone and at that time he had to say whether the alpha activity was prominant in his EEG. He was correct half of the time, guessing. After a second block of trial he was accurate 65% of the time, and after another block of trials, 85%. During his 4th block, after initial mistakes, he correctly labelled his EEG stae 400 times in a row! Had the first subject of Kamiya's experment been insensitive to his internal states, who knows what would have happened, but instead the work along with other psychophysiological researcher's work lead to the 1st congress in Aspen Colorado on this topic in 1968. Here the field was called "Biofeedback", as the competing term "autoregulation" might have made the teamster union angry, or so a single person put it back then.

Now we have the Mattel Force Trainer which trains the back of the head to increase its theta activity, from what I hear. Children will learn to slow down their visual centers by floating a pingpong ball in a transparent tube or fan chamber. What happens when children try to experiment and extend their new telekinetic power. Will they be able to move their parents by just thinking?