How frequent should the training sessions be?

In the initial stages of learning, the sessions should be regular and frequent—2, 3, or even up to 5 sessions per week at 45 minutes each. After learning begins to consolidate, the pace can be reduced.

Expect two session running 45min each a week.

What are the results?

The results include improvement in academics, decreased irritability, anxiety and impulsivity, increased attention, I.Q., and enhanced self-esteem. Handwriting may improve, as may secondary symptoms, such as tics, bedwetting, and headaches may be improved.  We suggest it be used as part of a comprehensive treatment program that may include family and/or individual counseling, tutoring, school interventions and possible medication.

Are there benefits to using EEG biofeedback as compared to using other therapeutic approaches like medication?

Several. The main one being that medication, even when it works well, is essentially state dependent. When you take somebody off of medication, they tend to revert to their original state and behavior. We’ve done studies that have shown that, even after 10 years, the neurofeedback changes endure and the behavior that patients have learned endure just as much and can even improve. EEG biofeedback has a definite permanence that we have not seen with any other therapy. It is much more effective than behavior modification approaches, for instance, because those techniques, in a sense, make the parents “prisoners” of the child. Because parents have to be there to administer complex ritualistic schedules of reinforcement, rewards and time outs, some parents might end-up resenting the whole procedure and, by extension, resenting the child for doing that to them.

Neurofeedback frees them up considerably because it puts the burden of the learning on the children. They are doing this for themselves! And once they internalize what it is like to change the EEG patterns, the transfer to the real world is much better than with such mechanical procedures as token economies and other approaches of that kind.

Is there is a difference between neurofeedback and biofeedback?
If so, what is that difference?

On the one hand, neurofeedback is simply one form of biofeedback because, in its most general sense, biofeedback involves monitoring and feeding back information about a client’s psychophysiological state. Traditional biofeedback uses peripheral based measures like EDR, TEMP, EMG, BVP, and Respiratory Waveform to monitor and feed back information about the status of these peripheral measures of sympathetic nervous system activity. Clients are trained to become familiar with eliciting these states, which they must consciously remember to do in their day to day lives.

Neurofeedback, on the other hand, monitors and feeds back information about the electrical activity in the central nervous system (CNS), which is at the center of virtually every self-regulatory loop and process in humans.

The central nervous system is called the central system because it is quite literally at the core of all other processes. Monitoring and feeding back information about CNS status results in faster and more robust changes because you are influencing the client’s psychophysiology at its core. The effects from training the central nervous system proliferate outwards on their own, whereas peripheral training may or may not generalize its effect, and takes a long time to influence the more central processes.

Why do we use a bilateral spectral display?

In Neurofeedback, it is very important to be able to track the moment-to-moment changes in EEG across the entire range of electrical activity that is continuously occurring. Without this kind of display, it is very difficult to really observe the important markers of dysfunction in the EEG. Instead of having to infer the impact of our neurofeedback training, we can see it, in real-time as the training effects are occurring. Moreover, clients can easily understand some of the basic patterns that appear in the frequency mirror. This gives them a readily accessible means of assessing their own progress. Recognizing that regional elevations have decreased, or that other anomalies have shifted (as in the return map graph), can be very empowering for clients. They see the changes in their EEG processes and understand that the changes they experience in their sense of self are directly connected to the visible shifts in the frequency mirror.

What has limited the application of neurofeedback to these disorders in the past?

The biggest problems have been conceptual and political. Many practitioners simply have been unable to comprehend the kind of transformative potential available through neurofeedback, whereas others have been terrified of that potential. Using neurofeedback effectively involves a paradigm shift for most practitioners. In addition, it is important to have personal experience with the equipment: you can not help others to re-establish healthy, self-regulation unless you can demonstrate and integrate those abilities in your own life. But the real issue has concerned the paradigm of the practitioner.

Neurofeedback is both too simple and too profound in its implications for many clinicians to be comfortable with it. The idea that trauma can be resolved without having to feel and process the original trauma event is, for example, a very challenging concept for many clinicians. If you have been taught that “you must feel it to heal it” that idea will seem preposterous and absurd at best. And yet, the simple truth is that frequently to “feel the pain deeply” is the best way to keep a client traumatized and in need of further treatment.

Neurofeedback can be effective across an enormous range of clinical conditions. This also surprises and concerns clinicians as we are taught to believe that there are discrete disorders requiring separate and discrete treatments. Neurofeedback challenges that dominant paradigm, especially when done according to our approach. We use a comprehensive approach to all clients that is particularized moment-to-moment by emergent conditions in the client’s real-time EEG. All we do is give information to our clients, and all they have to do is watch their lives transform!