- 6 mins
Neurofeedback (EEG Biofeedback) is in good company: researchers look at how to teach the brain to perform, from introducing key microbes, to training to use precise emotional language.
You may have noticed in recent articles, such as these in The New York Times pieces published the same day: Educate your Immune System and The Benefits of Despair, that there is a new trend in how to improve health: teach the brain how to function differently.
These two articles discuss new discoveries in interventions for improving immune system functioning and decreasing the anxious brain response (stress response.) These approaches are departures from a forced intervention meant to create change and are instead about training the brain by exposing it to new information that it can use to optimize itself.
Does that remind you of anything? It will if you have been following the history of neurofeedback technology from its origins beginning with the forced state-change characterizing protocol-based technology to the latest real-time dynamical feedback technologies such as NeurOptimal® or the f-MRI training.
We use the NeurOptimal Neurofeedback System for our office training and neurofeedback home unit rentals in Boulder, L.A. and New York. This kind of neurofeedback therapy is based on the premise that the brain will re-organize and re-wire itself if it receives accurate, real-time information about its maladaptive patterns, such as with anxiety, or brain damage, such as with concussions and traumatic brain injuries. And we have seen proof of the educate-the-brain model in the fact that the clients who train the most consistently see the most improvement. Just like learning a new language: the more consistently you practice the faster you acquire the language skill.
Educate Your Brain - Reduce Your Stress Levels
In The Benefits of Despair Dr Feldman, Dr Feldman remarks that when people are trained to use precise language to describe their emotional experiences (called "emotional granularity") rather than general, global language, they have lower stress hormone levels. Why? The language we use is real-time information and if we are saying, "Things are horrible" the brain will respond more extremely than if we were able to describe our experience more accurately. "I had a hard day at work and felt sad and scared. Then I came home and felt a bit less anxious..."
Good quality, accurate, real-time information is key for the brain to optimize itself. It seems that's also true for the second brain: the gut!
Learn how you can educate your brain with neurofeedback therapy and which conditions neurofeedback can help with.
Learn more about Brain Training and what Neurofeedback can do for you.
Educate Your Immune System
In Educate Your Immune System author Mosises Valasquez-Manoff describes a puzzling trend in recent decades: an unexplained increase in auto-immune disease. To find answers researchers are comparing the environments of countries that have higher rates of autoimmune diseases, such as Type-1 diabetes than neighbouring ones. The answers are more specifically being explored in the microbiomes (gut bacteria) of these communities. Preliminary findings are pointing to a hypothesis that if you expose children's guts to a rich array of microbes early in life that it "educates" the body about how best to protect itself going forward. In other words, it gets real-time information about the bacteria out in the
world and it uses that information to build its immune defences going forward. Preventing children from receiving this 'education' seems to create disadvantages for the brain in building a healthy and varied immune system.
In these three examples of information:
- the brain's electrical patterning, (neurofeedback)
- the microbes of the world, (eating varied bacteria)
- and using specific emotional language (emotional granularity training)
though varied in their language--electrical, bacterial, and verbal--all serve as valuable ways to educate the brain.
Want to try a neurofeedback session or rent a Neurofeedback home unit?
We offer discounted neurofeedback sessions at our locations in NYC, LA or Boulder. We also provide home unit rentals which are the cheapest alternative to do. Pick it up for free at our locations or have it shipped directly to your home for a small fee!
What is the cost of Neurofeedback and what are my training options?
