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Rewiring Your Brain: Neurofeedback Goes Mainstream (Newsweek.org)

 

One of my favorite books Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma. Few write about development trauma as beautifully as this author. Sebern Fisher describes how and developmental trauma has such deep and lasting impact on children and adults. And how neurofeedback helps.

She's even tried it herself as well.

I recommend her book just to better understand complex PTSD. But if you are interested in learning more about neurofeedback, in general, this article by Winston Ross is great.

A few excepts:

"Clients suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, anger or depression can simply sit in a comfortable chair for half-hour sessions with a few wires protruding from their scalp and get a mental tune-up, if not a complete rewiring of an off-kilter brain."

"It sounds like quackery, but it isn’t. Neurofeedback, which uses real-time displays of brain activity to teach the brain to self-regulate, is a technique neurologists have wielded since the 1960s. Back then, NASA was concerned about astronauts having rocket fuel–induced seizures. They approached Barry Sterman, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, for help. Sterman soon discovered that he could minimize the damaging effects of rocket fuel on cats with an early form of neurofeedback he developed.

The way neurofeedback works is fairly simple: Electrodes are attached to various parts of the skull and hooked up to a computer or tablet of some kind with installed software that reads activity in those regions and computes an appropriate response delivered back to the brain. The brain then uses that data to adjust itself, in the same way that you might be inspired to fix an-out-of place lock of hair while looking in the mirror. As the brain changes, the feedback changes. “Think of neurofeedback as a kind of learning for the brain,” says Kirk Little, a Cincinnati psychologist and president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research. “If you tell a dog to sit, push its butt down and give it a cookie 100 times, the dog is going to learn how to sit on its own [when] you just shake the [cookie] box. You’re doing the same thing with the brain’s electrical discharges—rewarding people for modifying their brain waves.”

Full article.

Has anyone here tried it?

Anyone know, love or work with children or adults who have?

 

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